Some Miscellaneous Musings
I have taken President Obama to task in previous blogs for what I feel is his failure to lead once he got into office (Skating on the Thin Edge of Disillusionment). It seemed that once he arrived in Washington he was overcome with the conventional wisdom of what was politically possible instead of the reason so many supported him, to overcome that conventional wisdom. Well this morning Arianna Huffington wrote a delightful piece in the Huffington Post about David Plouffe’s new book, The Audacity to Win, making the point that he seems to have forgotten all the lessons that got him to the White House (The Audacity to Win vs. The Timidity of Governing).
I hope he reads this because from my seat he is becoming just more of the same without the courage to take really tough positions and push through real change. I am not alone in these feelings as a recent article in the New York Times about how Iowa voters who voted for Obama back in the primary are losing faith (In Iowa, Second Thoughts on Obama). I hope this shakes him out of his slumber and realizes this is not about eight years, but about changing the mindset of America. The eight years is just a byproduct if he can really do this. Right now he and his team seem to want to take victory laps for baby steps.
Today is an off-year election as if you didn’t know and have not been inundated by the media that seems to have nothing better to cover. I won’t pretend to know the local politics of these elections, but the kind of statements we are hearing out of the press is to believe this is a predictor of all future elections. “History tells us….”, “This election will foretell the future for the Democrats in 2010…”, are the common things they are all bloviating. To me it is all nonsense as Republican pundits tell you it is a referendum on the Obama administration, and Democrats tell you it is meaningless. Depending on the outcome of these election they will probably switch positions. They all have their agendas.
What is telling is that Virginia might elect someone who thinks women are second-class citizens, and New Jersey would reject a governor who made some hard decisions about funding government. Meanwhile Maine will attempt to deny rights to gays and lesbians also as second-class citizens. I know it is not that simple, but it does demonstrate that the nation still lacks some kind of vision about where we are headed and are reacting to their fears and selfish interests. Until we get a holistic narrative about what we are about and where we are headed, these elections just reflect the refusal of most voters to make hard decisions about sacrifice for the future or have a shared set of values. So much can happen between now and 2010 that these elections are meaningless for predicting the future.
One last extraneous thought: David Kwak, co-founder of the Baseline Scenario, wrote a really interesting piece titled, Do Smart, Hardworking People Deserve to Make More Money? He was responding to a posting about a story of a family that was down on their luck and struggling with high credit card bills, including plenty of fees. Apparently the story triggered a wave of posts blaming the victim. What was on display was the same thought process that blames a rape victim for their rape. What is really going on is that as a defense mechanism, people like to think that they can control their lives. This control gives them piece of mind and what is really subconsciously going on is “that would never happen to me because I would make better choices.” If you really want to understand why some people are utterly devastated when something bad happens to them, it is because they feel a total loss of power and control. The world doesn’t make sense to them anymore because they didn’t deserve it.
But what Mr. Kwak takes on is a fundamental conservative belief that success and prosperity are the result of discipline and hard work, ignoring the impact of chance. It’s is that being in control thing. Many people work hard and don’t prosper. Some aren’t as smart as others through the chance of DNA combinations or opportunities good parenting brings. So he asks a fundamental question in terms of a philosophy foreign to conservative thought:
“If you are willing to acknowledge that chance determines who you are to begin with, then it becomes obvious (to me at least) that public policy cannot simply seek to level the playing field, because that will just endorse a system that produces good outcomes for the lucky (the smart and hard-working) and bad outcomes for the unlucky. Instead, fairness dictates that policy should attempt to improve outcomes for the unlucky, even if that requires hurting outcomes for the lucky.”
If you understand this reasoning you are a Progressive and if you don’t, you are a conservative. It is the classic insight into why conservatives lack empathy for their fellow Americans and judge self-worth in terms of wealth. It is because they do not believe that chance had anything to do with it. They deserve what they got and do not need to spend any time pondering the fate of others, because they don’t deserve to share in their bounty.