Thursday, January 26, 2012

The Ghoulish Nightmare of a Gingrich Presidency

It is 4 a.m. as I write this diary. I have been awake for an hour, and have lain in bed, restive, thinking about what, fundamentally, is keeping me up. I can't sleep because I am worried about the future of our country. I am afraid that our democratic republic is in serious trouble, and I feel desperate. I have always been a worrier, only now I feel it is more justifiable than ever. And so I must write, because I am deeply afraid that Newt Gingrich, with a win in South Carolina and potentially one in Florida, could become our next president.


As a liberal, just the thought of a Gingrich presidency keeps me staring into my iPad browser for hours, waiting for the next Republican outrage to counterattack. At his core, Gingrich is an extremist/opportunist at a time of uncertainty, when Americans of all political stripes are adopting or considering extreme positions, including Gingrich's, in response to perceived threats and unmitigated fear.


Whether broached from the right or left, I believe extremism and over-simplified solutions are a cancer on our nation, threatening to spread throughout the body politic and undermining any reasonable dialogue at a time when we are in need of rational debate and cooperation now more than ever.


We are faced, on the one hand, with a Republican Party whose need to command center stage in Washington is so relentless that the party risks self-immolation on a set of distorted governing principles that a majority of Americans disavow. This conclusion is particularly evident in polls on the direction of the country that show more than two-thirds disapprove and even more so in the 80 percent disapproval ratings for the Republican-dominated do-nothing Congress. The most pertinent question facing the electorate in the upcoming general elections will be which party is to be held to accounts.


I blame Republicans, whose efforts, from Nixon onward, to divide our country along partisan, racial, ethnic, geographic, and economic status lines for political gain are unparalleled and of epic proportions in our nation's history. With each passing month, Republican tactics and intentions become more brazen.


Their ability — with the help of 2010 Congress freshmen who won with Tea Party support — to bring progress at the federal level to a grinding halt has cost several million middle class Americans from rejoining the workforce. Their attacks on President Obama for bank bailouts, high unemployment, The national debt, and federal regulatory strangulation of the economy would be laughable, except that so many ill-informed Americans buy into their slick, deceptive media campaigns. Mainstream media twist into pretzels when avoiding calling those campaign attacks what they are: boldfaced lies.


Beyond their unbridled support for the 1% of wealthiest Americans, though, is the G.O.P.'s pernicious intent to tear down the legitimacy of government itself and thereby commandeer an even more abusive grip on authority. Perhaps no one has stated the intentions of the modern Republican Party better than Newt Gingrich in a statement to a conservative audience and recalled by Richard Darman, President George H.W. Bush's Budget Director, who witnessed it. He wrote:
“In his cheerful, confident, radical professorial way, Gingrich explained that to do what he wanted, government first had to be completely discredited — ethically, programmatically, managerially, philosophically…. Once Washington-based government was totally discredited, hard-right conservatives could then sweep to power.” 
Meanwhile, we have those on the far left who, having won some of their cherished goals under a transformational Obama administration, risk aborting the victories inherent in a second term by selfishly denigrating the president when he logically holds back on progressive ideas that have zero chance of passage in today's highly divisive political environment, or calling him weak when he correctly and courageously seeks consensus even in the face of the right's stated aim to make him a one-term president.


Just as the right wants to "take back America" through phony anti-elitist rhetoric, the left too often wants to tilt a windmills, pursuing causes that will never come to pass, unless and until Democrats have obliterated the right's propaganda successes over the past 30 years in tearing down the credibility of government's legitimate role in our lives. If we are going to beat back a nightmare Gingrich or Romney administration, progressives will need every ounce of unity behind President Obama that we can muster in the months ahead.


Our best hope resides in President Obama's ability to tap into a groundswell of pragmatic problem-solving sympathies within the electorate. With his State of the Union address, the president made a good start Tuesday night. He knows that a majority of Americans favor policies with a decidedly liberal consensus (though most don't want to label it as such). That agenda includes:


• a strong middle class with good-paying jobs  
• generous financial support taken from our national wealth to care for our neediest citizens 
• a private sector that respects the rule of law and restraints on its avaricious tendencies
• a government that listens to citizens' concerns whose members work together to comply
• a political system devoid of corporate cronyism, lobbyist corruption, and voter-suppression laws
• programs that prioritize spending for America by America, rebuilding America's neglected infrastructure, supporting scientific research, and promoting cultural enrichment to reach more citizens
• a fairer, simpler, progressive tax system in which those who can afford to pay a higher rate
• a significant reduction in long-term federal spending for our outmoded military-industrial complex
• elected leaders willing to work together to find common ground for the greater good of us all


The ultimate goal in 2012 will be to elect progressive leaders committed to joining President Obama during his second term in rebuilding America's greatness through consensus, cooperation, and common sense. Only then can we awaken from the far-right fright nights of recent years.

Monday, January 16, 2012

A Credible Conservative's Case for Obama's Reelection

Surely, hell has frozen over.

Or so it must be, because today we can read a fact-based, full-throated positive assessment of President Obama's performance in office from (and here comes the other half of the hell freezing over part) a conservative. That would be Andrew Sullivan, writing for The Daily Beast and Newsweek, for which you can find the full text here.

First, let's get the partisan issue out of the way. Andrew Sullivan backed Mr. Obama in 2007 and 2008, as this excerpt from the Beast post reports:

I write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration's record of war, debt, spending, and torture.

Nevertheless, Sullivan argues, his position is based on objective review of the Obama administration's performance delivering on his campaign promises, which, as I have previously written here, are all-the-more remarkable achievements in the context of Republican/Tea Party/Limbaugh pledges almost from Mr. Obama's very first days in office to obstruct his entire legislative and policy initiatives and to work for his defeat in 2012, as well as admonitions from disaffected liberals. Here's Sullivan's assessment in a nutshell:

...given the enormity of what he inherited, and given what he explicitly promised, it remains simply a fact that Obama has delivered in a way that the unhinged right and purist left have yet to understand or absorb. Their short-term outbursts have missed Obama's long-term game — and why his reelection remains, in my view, as essential for this country's future as his original election in 2008.

Here are the key Obama successes Sullivan cites in making his convincing case:
  1. Bringing Osama bin Laden to justice
  2. Ending the war in Iraq
  3. Stopping illegal harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists
  4. Lowering taxes for all Americans
  5. Rescuing the U.S. economy from another Great Depression
  6. Creating 1.9 million jobs — more than G.W. Bush's entire eight years
  7. Saving the American auto industry and, with it, hundreds of thousands of jobs
  8. Winning passage of a billions-of-dollars-saving health care reform measure
  9. Reducing the size of the federal government
  10. Enacting a host of other laws governing cuts in defense spending, support for marriage equality, gay rights, and ecological energy investments

Time and again, Sullivan compares the Obama record with that of Bush 2, and Obama wins handily, in the process saving the U.S. trillions of dollars and avoiding unrelenting warfare, with Libya being a notable example. Take taxes, for instance, a shibboleth of the right if there ever was one. Notes Sullivan:

Under Bush, new policies on taxes and spending cost the taxpayer a total of $5.07 trillion. Under Obama’s budgets both past and projected, he will have added $1.4 trillion in two terms. Under Bush and the GOP, nondefense discretionary spending grew by twice as much as under Obama.

Another typically right-wing attack on Democrats, alleging weakness in foreign policy, also provides Sullivan with ample contrarian evidence of Obama's superior, long-term policy success.

By hanging back a little, by “leading from behind” in Libya and elsewhere, Obama has made other countries actively seek America’s help and reappreciate our role. As an antidote to the bad feelings of the Iraq War, it has worked close to perfectly.

But perhaps Sullivan's greatest triumph in this post is in pointing out how the right and its syncophantic punditocracy has denied Mr. Obama credit even for his most obvious successes. I especially like how Sullivan imagines what the lauditory reaction from the president's naysayers would be if the Obama record had been accomplished by Bush and hailed by the credit-hogging good-old-boy cheerleaders supporting today's right-wing extremism:



If George Bush had taken out bin Laden, wiped out al Qaeda’s leadership, and gathered a treasure trove of real intelligence by a daring raid, he’d be on Mount Rushmore by now. But where Bush talked tough and acted counterproductively, Obama has simply, quietly, relentlessly decimated our real enemies, while winning the broader propaganda war.

Sullivan takes aim at left-leaning Obama critics as well, pointing out how both far left and far right complaints about the administration's activities and intentions often misunderstand the president's moderately liberal, long-term objectives. As Sullivan elucidates, anti-Obama liberals...


...have failed to notice that from the very beginning, Obama was playing a long game. He did this with his own party over health-care reform. He has done it with the Republicans over the debt. He has done it with the Israeli government over stopping the settlements on the West Bank — and with the Iranian regime, by not playing into their hands during the Green Revolution....

Perhaps the best part of Sullivan's latest treatment of the Obama administration's policy successes — for which he argues Mr. Obama deserves overwhelming voter support for a second term — is his refusal to play into the delusional partisanship on the part of both political extremes. In avoiding those dubious viewpoints, Sullivan stands virtually alone among the high-visibility voices in Washington, a refreshingly credible critic from the right who has the courage to weigh the facts and keep an open mind on big issues at a time when the rest of the blogosphere spins crazily out of touch with reality. His conclusion:

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008.

Though I am a liberal, I heartily concur with the conservative Mr. Sullivan when it comes to elucidating the case of President Obama's reelection. Watch out, job-destroying conservatives and purist liberals. I hear bipartisanship and effective government can be catching.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Romney Blames Obama for Class Warfare? How Predictable



The South Carolina primary verdict is still days away, but Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney already is acting like his party's nominee, leveling a fusillade of criticisms at President Obama for the Great Recession, the jobless recovery, the entitlement society, job outsourcing, European socialism, Sharia sympathies, saving the auto industry (you knew that was big bad government, didn't you?), the deficit, and capitalism-strangling government regulations, among his many wild charges since coming into Iowa as the presumed frontrunner. At any moment, I expect him to declare Mr. Obama to blame for the tainted orange juice scare.

Never mind that virtually everything that has ever come out of the mouth of Mitt Romney has later been recanted by the man himself. He wants to make one point perfectly clear: Mr. Obama is declaring class warfare among American voters in order to divide society into the haves and have-nots for political advantage.

It is, without a doubt, the most pernicious attack and vicious accusation ever made by Mr. One Percent. But it is in keeping with longtime Republican scorched earth campaign strategy: Keep leveling charges and spreading lies and innuendos both big and small on Democrats until they are, quite literally, buried in turd.

Almost without exception, Romney's baseless charges against the Obama administration are profoundly more credible if it were Obama leveling them against Romney. But you know that will never happen, because Democrats, ironically, have too much class to engage in such raw voter deceptions.
It remains to be seen whether American voters will again fall for this deceptive, scurrulous, unrepentent and shameless scheming.

But one thing is for certain — to a greater extent than ever, they believe that class warfare has become a factor in politics this year. Here is a commentary based on a public opinion poll by Pew Research Center identifying class warfare as one of the top issues facing voters, from Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein. Also, here is the Washington Post's reporting yesterday on that poll by Annie Gowen.

One thing we know for sure: Republicans will use any issue and any attacks, the facts be damned, to deflect blame for our economy onto the Obama administration, despite facts that, taken objectively, should lead voters to place the blame squarely on the Bush-Cheney eight years that directly led to the Great Recession. It's unbelievable, but true.

Monday, January 9, 2012

WWSJD? Channeling Steve Jobs as Politician




















WWSJD: What would Steve Jobs do?

This is the question I asked myself after reading Walter Isaacson's authorized biography, Steve Jobs. It's no secret that the Apple co-founder and CEO, who died in early October at age 56 from pancreatic cancer, was a brilliant, creative, and tough Apple executive who changed our world with some of the most cherished products to come out of America's nascent computer technology industries of California's Silicon Valley beginning in the 1980s.

Jobs' legacy — the first personal computer with a graphical desktop interface, WYSIWYG typefaces and printers that revolutionized publishing, the streamlined, user-friendly iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and iCloud, and Pixar's groundbreaking digital animation studio — melded performance and style into an ecosystem of inventive genius that resonates in ways even 20th century science fiction hadn't imagined for the millennium.

Judge a book by its cover? For Steve Jobs and his magical Apple inventions, the answer was a resounding "YES!"


What if Jobs had applied his skills to running a city, state, or country? If he had lived long enough to become a public figure with political ambitions, as Ronald Reagan did once his acting career had run its course, what might a Steve Jobs administration accomplish? Are there lessons other politicians might learn from Steve Jobs' life story?

From what little political involvement Isaacson includes in the book, Jobs apparently never had much interest in public service, although at the height of his fame he met with Barach Obama and tried to offer some policy advice — an experience for which Jobs expressed frustration. From a young age, Jobs was a petulant perfectionist, often mean to even his closest family, friends and most productive personnel. Jobs didn't suffer fools or foolish ideas in the least. Not exactly fodder for a political career, it would seem.

While he was a proven success building teams of the smartest technologists and product designers and engineers, Jobs often ended up damaging his personal and professional relationships with them — again, hardly traits one would expect of an astute political operative.

Neverless, Jobs mastered some core attributes that would have been invaluable to whatever elected office he might have pursued. First, he was an astute observer of people, with an ability to quickly size up a personality and analyze the psychological motivations undergirding it, Isaacson writes — a fundamental skill of the political animal.

Second, he was a brilliant thinker with a courageous mind that allowed him to see reality in ways others around him could not (a prime example being his reaction to the computer "mouse" that Xerox had been unable to find marketable). School children around the world would embrace Apple computers and benefit from using them due to the intuitive design of their hardware and software. Because of that vision, Jobs as a political leader would surely have been willing to challenge the status quo in California or Washington, D.C., with new ideas that draw on user involvement and human-scale simplicity.

Third, Jobs was brought up to have a strong appreciation for craftsmanship, which invariably led to his brilliantly executed products appearing to be magical. His personal involvement sweating the details of Apple products until he was satistied caused much consternation among his managers, but even the most inured among them admit to Isaacson that Jobs was usually right, and that he not only pushed them to greater heights of achievement but also to their most satisfying life experiences. How many politicians today can say that?

Finally, Jobs had the salesmanship gene to go with his intellectual heft. Isaacson brings up numerous examples of Steve's ability to literally stare without blinking at someone, almost hypnotizing the person, thereby taking command and control in business negotiations unlike any of his contemporaries. Add to that his well-know stage-presentation wizardry and I feel comfortable predicting that Jobs could have, if he had set his mind to it, brought about fundamental change in America as a history-defining political leader.

As fate would have it, virtually no direct political impact came about via Jobs in his lifetime. Near the end of his 630-page tome, Isaacson reports that President Obama was strongly impressed with Jobs' suggestion, in a February 2010 meeting with Silicon Valley tech titans, that a way be found to train more American engineers. Reports Isaacson:
Two or three times over the next month [Obama] told his aides, "We've got to find ways to train those 30,000 manufacturing engineers that Jobs told us about."


Isaacson also mentions Jobs' desire to help the Obama campaign improve its 2012 political advertising, a wish that would never come to fruition as Jobs became increasingly incapacitated by his disease.

And so it is left to imagine what impact Jobs might have had on progressive politics if he had beaten cancer, left Apple, and lived to engage in political battle. For certain, Jobs would have been driven by the three fundamental marketing principles famously conferred to him by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Mike Markkula:

  • Develop empathy for the customer. 
  • Focus on a few important priorities.
  • Impute desirable qualities in a creative, professional manner. 


Jobs met with President 
                                             Obama and offered some
                                             advice to find a way to train
                                             30,000 industrial engineers.
                                              

Without Jobs available to obsess over each of those points, I'll leave it to President Obama and others on his political team to find whatever advantage they might take from a philosophical shift that treats each voter with care and concern, that puts greater emphasis on the professional execution of the responsibilities of public office, and that trains a laser focus on those practical policies that are at the core of progressive political thought.

To reframe my original question slightly, what would Steve Jobs do if he were running Obama's reelection campaign? He would, I imagine bring his determination, magical enthusiasm, and stagecraft to the advancement of these six goals:

1. Push for state-specific jobs programs that create public-private partnerships, and share the details of such plans with voters in each state.

2. Promote simple, low-tax incentives tied to corporate behavior that creates good-paying jobs and returns profits from offshore tax-avoidance havens.

3. Fight for a nationwide union law giving workers the fundamental rights to organize and negotiate with employers, and for the end to right-to-work state laws that deny those rights. 

4. Threaten the bailed-out banks responsible for mortgage-repackaging abuses with Justice Department investigations unless they modify loans to reduce principal, and allow borrowers to remain in their homes without penalty until the economic picture produces a jobless rate under 6 percent.

5. Bring Justice Department voting rights action immediately to challenge Republican-initiated state laws that threaten to pervert voter access to the polls in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

6. Protect society's most vulnerable citizens by publishing and promoting information — in voter-friendly, plain English in a website easily found — on how the health care reform act, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid must be perfected as essential government programs that provide cost-effective services while saving taxpayers and private businesses from having to deal with these issues on an inefficient, piecemeal basis.


Exhibit empathy, focus, impute greatness. The bottom line on Steve Jobs: a passion to think different, execute beyond expectations and embody courageous leadership — valuable attribute for our next president.


Additional reading
Book: 
http://www.amazon.com/Would-Steve-Inspire-Anyone-Differently/dp/0071792740
Blogs:
http://www.nuvo.net/indianapolis/what-would-steve-jobs-do/Content?oid=2363991
http://www.fair.org/blog/2011/11/01/what-would-steve-jobs-do/
http://www.heliade.net/2011/12/10/1364/

Thursday, January 5, 2012

The Santorum Abomination

I am appalled with Iowa giving Rick Santorum's candidacy a boost. He has got to be the least plausible, dumbest contender of all in the Republican field. It only confirms my contention that voters fall back on superficialities in primaries in which they are asked to consider the qualifications of eight candidates. Still, Santorum? Say it ain't so, Iowa! Iowa voters may be clueless about this Pennsylvania reject and his deplorable record, but one of that state's journalists who covered his two terms in the Senate should be required reading for New Hampshire and North Carolina G.O.P. voters. Will Bunch of Philly.com posts the lowlights here: http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/The-Santorum-that-America-doesnt-know.html It was quite late when Santorum made his sanctimonious "victory" speech after Tuesday's vote count, so most of you probably missed it. Find it here: http://m.youtube.com/?appcache_off=1324271660&reason=1&errmsg=E-SER%3AQUOTA_EXCEEDED_ERR%3A%20DOM%20Exception%2022#/watch?v=
Not since Nixon's Checkers speech has a Republican so shamelessly pandered to a gullible electorate while wearing his sincerity mask. This is a classic example of how Republicans put a phony face on in public while intending to favor policies behind closed doors that would continue leading America further down the path of a plutocracy.
Dont get me wrong - all the G.O.P. candidates are loathsome. Santorum is just the most loathsome of all.

Monday, January 2, 2012

Come On, Iowa! It's Romney's Turn to Mislead

Why is there a Republican primary this year? Don't we know the outcome already? It's Mitt Romney. If for some reason any other person wins, Republicans will surely lose. We all lose if Romney wins it all next November, especially because he has some experience running a government health care program with a public mandate and is the one most motivated to dismantle it, if only to disprove charges of flip-flopping (thereby proving them right, when you think about it). Speaking of Mitt, have you noticed that like his dog, Kim Jong Il was lashed to the top of an American car and taken to a very cold place? I leave it to others to explain the significance of this.

As you can probably gather, I am not actually in favor of Romney, nor the Republican field for president for that matter. The entire season of G.O.P. debates is debasing the electoral process, what with Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum and Paul all vying for what I like to call the "Anybody But a Black President Unless He's Coulter's Better Kind of Black" vote. Whatever happened to statesmenship and honor in the party of Lincoln? Whatever happened to honesty?

Then there is the Iowa Republican electorate itself, who profess to base their choices on such superficial impressions as the sound of a candidate's voice or the way he holds himself, if we can believe a New York Times front-page article titled, "Voters Examining Candidates, Often to a Fault." Times writers Michael Barbaro and Ashley Parker chalk this up to voters falling back on gut reactions in times of uncertainty with ''whimsical judgments and serendipitous connection." I blame it on an electoral system overtaken by too much money, an addiction to political pandering and too little intellectual honesty. Even Jon Huntsman, the party's least attention-crazed offering, is now questioning manmade climate change.

It's a wonder any serious coverage has been afforded to this cabal of Ayn Rand acolytes. What we basically have now in the G.O.P. is a bunch of three card monte players whose success relies on their ability to divert voters' attention with slick, entertaining moves on stage that cover up their behind-the-curtain transfer of wealth to the 1% who need it least. Their best trick of all? They convince you the Democrats are the ones who are tax-and-spenders in favor of income redistribution.

There is sociological a term for this slight-of-hand tactic. Inoculation. Whatever Republicans want to get away with, they accuse Democrats of. Class warfare is a perfect example. They practiced and perfected class warfare from Reagan's trickle-down days through W's two terms, selling tax breaks for the wealthy as job creation policy (during which W created one of the most paltry job expansion records in modern history), then accused progressives who voiced support for the Occupy movement's calls for economic fairness for provoking class warfare.

The ad hominem attacks targeted at Democrats by the media swarm of G.O.P. apologists are designed to inoculate the right from being held accountable in the court of pubIic opinion. History has shown they can get away with it, and this year should be no exception. The main stream media plays along with a longstanding policy of promoting false equivalence between the occasional misrepresentations of Democrats and the outright lies that emanate from within the right's well funded program of mass deception.

Republican voters in Iowa on Tuesday can be forgiven for their political diffidence, simply because they face a Hobson's choice: many brands on offer, but all the same flavor of right-wing extremism masquerading as populist outrage. With the exception of Paul, who as president would try to dismantle most of the progress of the 20th century, Republicans have only one choice at the polls -- economic royalists who are primarily to blame for the last three decades of declining wages and a morally bankrupt financial system that gambled away their life's savings by turning their home equity into casino chips.

That is why I say to all Republican primary voters: Save yourselves a lot of trouble and crown Romney sooner than later. He is your man. You can rationalize your choice of a former moderate Massachusetts governor by saying he looks presidential. If elected president, Romney should fit right in with the Tea Party types in Congress already sharpening the knives that will eviscerate those intrusive federal programs and departments so many of you seem willing to forgo to receive a pittance in tax breaks. Also, Romney already has the most experience killing jobs, off-shoring manufacturing jobs, and destroying entire companies while running Bain Capital. You already knew that, right?