On the Contrary

I listened to the Sunday talk shows and I was getting somewhat bored.  Same old arguments that are irrational, failure to challenge them by the media because they have been repeated so many times, and letting the guest drive the argument, instead of penetrating questions to both sides.  Here is how the conventional wisdom of the timid goes:

“ President Obama is moving too fast on too many issues and the American people are uncomfortable with these big changes.  The real problem is jobs so why try to fix health care or pass climate legislation?  Government is getting involved in too many things”

Note this is just a very mild form of the tea party paranoia that says the government is taking over everything, we are losing our freedoms, and we are being turned into a socialist/communist state.  The people who are pushing this agenda are really anti-democracy forces made up mostly of not very bright white people who are afraid of the future.  I say this because our system of government is well and functioning.  We had an election, they lost, and their idea of democracy is my way or revolution.  They don’t believe in majority rule if it threatens their perceived status quo.  They truly are a fringe group that does not need to be addressed here.

This conventional wisdom has an element of truth in it.  People are very unhappy and afraid because the recession drags on and things for the average American are not getting better.  Where this logic of too much change breaks down is that President Obama really hasn’t changed very much.  In fact, as Frank Rich pointed out in his column Sunday, The Night They Drove the Tea Partiers Down, he has become the protector of the status quo with banks, which may be his real Achilles Heel.  His one big accomplishment was the stimulus package that most economists, if they are not blinded by ideology, will admit helped but wasn’t big enough.

And that in a nutshell, that is the problem and the logical failure of the Republican conventional wisdom.  People are not uncomfortable because he is making big changes.  They are uncomfortable because things are not improving.  Congress dithers (the word of the month) and it is business as usual, and people thought they had voted for change.  Half measures are not changing anything.  Republicans are using fear by claiming that the Obama Administration is gutting the American way of life and you can see it doesn’t work, when the reality is they have offered no alternatives except lower taxes and smaller government, and have had a major hand in preventing any real change.

So, unless things change radically, here is what we have.  President Obama promised change but has been too timid and the result has been to right the ship, but not turn it toward a brighter future.  As Frank Rich pointed out, his protecting of the banks and failure to follow Greenspan and Voickers advise on reforming Wall Street and the Banks while backing Treasury Secretary Geithner, who everyone sees is Wall Street’s boy, makes the average American suffering from the recession see business as usual.  We have Republicans leveraging this as disaffection with change that in reality hasn’t really been enough change, but offering absolutely nothing in policy proposals for solving our problems.  And of course, we have a failed media that doesn’t really challenge the Republicans to offer an alternative and examine whether it really addresses the problem.  Their claim that a public option will destroy America or that their recently proposed alternative to health care reform will address our problems is barely examined except by the opposition.  Their cries sound like Ronald Reagan in the 60’s fighting Medicare.  Media asleep at the wheel once again.

The real issue for all of us is that we are facing some major problems.  There is an element of truth to the conventional wisdom that people don’t care about anything but jobs.  The story that has not been adequately sold is that you cannot solve one problem without the other.  All of these issues are interrelated.  So this idea that we are attacking too many problems is a failure to understand that all of these issues are interconnected.

More important is to asked those who push this, just exactly how would they solve these growing problems.  Then challenge their basic assumptions like the market place will pull us out.  My fear is that the Democrats will be too timid, and the voters will return those whose philosophy has brought to our knees to office as the perceive Democrats as more of the same and punish them by throwing them out of office.  Then we will have a much harder time fixing our problems as the Republicans make them worse until they are thrown out of office again as we fall further behind the rest of the industrialized world.

I listened to the talk shows on Sunday with one ear while I was trying to figure out a construction plan for a project in the heart of Taliban country in Afghanistan.  So you will excuse me if I was somewhat distracted.  But I think the theme this week, at least for the Republicans was making excuses.

My favorite is on the torture memos.  They have tried “it worked and saved lives” but the reality is that is questionable at best, and as the real picture of what was done to these people emerges, well, it is just not justifiable even if it did work.  So understanding that in today’s light this all looks, oh so sordid, they have come up with “you have to understand the mentality at the time”.   They are going to have a hard time with this one too.

The mentality in those days was total panic by our government and knee jerk reactions that trashed what we stood for, destroyed our place in the world as the defenders of human rights, and may have been the most effective motivation of terrorists to kill many of our brave soldiers.  Don’t take my word for it, this is from our Generals in Iraq.  That is not what we look for in leadership.  We expect a cool head who will calm things down and lead us out of our wilderness while firmly holding on to our values.  We get out whole.  What we got was scared little men (and women) who threw away all the things we stand for in one panic attack.  Oh, it wasn’t just the Republicans.  It was the Democrats who looked at the political winds and refused to stand up to them.  So the lesson to be taken from don’t judge them harshly, look at the circumstances we were in, is to simply to say, “They weren’t bad, just weak”.  Great.  Not exactly the kind of people you ever want at the helm any time soon.

This excuse also makes the argument that we need to investigate what happened all that much more important.  We need to understand how far we fell so that the next time we are having a panic attack, maybe, just maybe, we will stand tall and be the country we thought we were.  Those who think it will be too disruptive for our way forward simply fail to understand that unless we expose the whole sorry mess, we will learn nothing and there will be no movement forward.  It was just a PR disaster and next time we will handle it better, keep it covered up better.  I don’t think so.

The times were extreme, the pressure was immense, and that is what greatness rises from.  But in this crisis there was no greatness that surfaced except for a very few, and it has tarnished our souls as a country and a people. It is amazing to me the number of people who knew about it, objected, but did not resign.  What is that all about, career over conscience?  People broke the law and the law must be enforced.  We keep confusing mitigating factors that should be considered when punishment is decided from a reason to not enforce the law.  If we are a people who believes in justice and the law, we can’t pick and choose which to enforce or there is no justice or rule of law

My favorite though was Peggy Noonan on CNN’s GPS.  Fareed Zakaria pointed out that we now have a one and one-half political parties, the half being the Republicans and that we needed an opposition party. Her excuse for the Republicans is that they have not found solutions yet that rings true with the voter.  They won’t if they hold to what made them Republicans.  As I pointed out in an earlier blog, you can’t just put a new paint job on a clunker and expect it to run better.  With people hurting and looking for help in an economy that continues to degrade, people want government to be there and work.  How does that fit into conservative Republican dogma that government is the problem?  Apparently just saying no is not a viable option for most of us.

But the best was yet to come.  With her voice dripping with reverence, she pined on the good old days when Ronald Reagan saved the country by just focusing on one issue, the economy.  In her little mind President Obama is all over the map with some disjointed idea that he can tackle everything.  It’s amazing how she thinks that the economy is somehow disconnected from health care or education, infrastructure or immigration, energy or environmental policy.  These are not separate issues. They are all one package. We have so many problems that have been ignored that we have no choice but to take them all on.

Ronald Reagan was the beginning of our downfall and he save the economy by running up a huge deficit with military spending.  He also grew government and raised taxes, but the faithful just can’t accept this.  Barack wants to save the economy by running up a huge deficit investing in us.  Oh I see the difference.  One is productive and an investment in our future, and the other is just wasteful spending.  I guess which is wasteful spending is in the eye of the beholder.  Well this beholder sees no comeback for the Republican Party.  More likely the Democratic Party will split in two, Democrats and Independents, and what is left is the fringe loonies, better known today as the Republican base.