How Republicans Are Like Crazy Lottery Winners

It's been only a month since I last posted, pre-election, about drastic cuts to education funding threatened by a Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan administration. Thankfully, that fear won't come to fruition, though the jury is still out on potential spending reductions for the nation's public schools in light of the stalemate over renewing federal tax rates and reducing the budget deficit.

With the re-election of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, we are now in the lame-duck Congress season politically, wherein the news is much the same as before the election — most of it highly ironic and filled with uncertainty. The ultimate irony remains that Republicans resist a deal on taxes even after last November's broad-based voter repudiation of the Romney-Ryan proposals.

One explanation of their obstinate behavior is this: Having successfully prosecuted the Citizens United Supreme Court case granting them unlimited political fundraising access to corporate contributions, Republicans now suffer from the syndrome well-known among winners of the Powerball jackpot, wherein all that sudden wealth makes them crazy and unable to think rationally. As Joe Nocera writes in Saturday's New York Times op-ed piece:

People who suddenly fall into extreme wealth — whether because of an insurance settlement, a professional sports contract, or a lottery win — rarely know how to handle their new circumstances.

I would simply add the Citizens United windfall to this phenomenon, which has reached directly into the Republican Party psyche and largely explains why they appear unable to side with President Obama and Congressional Democrats, who simply want to extend the so-called Bush tax cuts, that otherwise will expire at the end of the year, for 98 percent of Americans. It's hard to believe that, free of their newfound wealth conferred by the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce jackpot, and a plethora of political super pacs, Republicans otherwise would deny a tax cut for 98 percent of Americans. Isn't this what their Grover Norquist pledge is all about? Lower taxes? Like I said, the only explanation is that Republicans, like too many past Powerball lottery winners, have gone bonkers.

Still, even with such lunacy in this time of uncertainty in Washington, there is much good news. Let's review the highlights in a faux-Mitt-Romney-like five-point presentation:

1. The re-election of Barack Obama restoring the promise of hope and change around the globe. The viral mobile phone photo of a Nick Nolte-like Mitt Romney pumping his own gas does likewise.

2. The circus sideshow that is John McCain objecting to Susan Rice's Benghazi talking points. This partisan attack reveals the senator's hollow soul and Rice's ability to withstand the heat and potential to fill the pantsuits of globetrotting Hillary as secretary of State.

3. The release of the remarkable and inspiring Stephen Spielberg film Lincoln. Its depiction of our 16th president's moral courage and political wiles — in delaying the South's Civil War surrender and promising political patronage positions (talk about a Republican "job creator") in order to secure passage of the 13th Amendment to our Constitution outlawing slavery — stands as a shining example of steely resolve for President Obama's second term.

4. The ad nauseum mainstream media coverage of the so-called dangers of the fiscal cliff facing Congress. This reporting underscores an important new symbiosis, e.g., how dysfunctional both Congress and the media have become, since the "fiscal cliff" (referring to a combination of tax increases and heavy-handed spending cuts that would kick in beginning in 2013) was entirely fabricated by Congress and has become a key part of the story usually left out by the increasingly right-leaning, corporation-friendly MSM.

5. The slow trickle of Republicans repudiating their Grover Norquist no-tax-increases pledge. I like this one primarily for the "Grover is So Over" headlines. If Grover were smart, he'd get behind the tax breaks for 98 percent of Americans, release his Republican friends from his crazy pledge, and find a career in the carnival business.

Education, the Forgotten Campaign Issue

MAITLAND, FL - I live in central Florida in a suburban town known for its nationally-ranked public schools. As my wife and I did in moving here in 1988, the neighborhood's reputation for delivering a very good K-12 education is probably one of the chief factors in everyone's choice. The people who live in my neighborhood, mostly middle- to upper- middle income professionals with growing families, are rightly proud of their elementary, middle and high school. But when I walk my dog on these bucolic tree-lined streets these days, I see signs of disaster ahead for public education on a majority of the front lawns. That is, political signs indicating broad support here for the Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. These two confirmed enemies of public education promise to cut federal funding for public schools and, more ominously, would likely severely cut the U.S. Department of Education if elected. My neighbors, in other words, with their votes on Nov. 6, inexplicably threaten to crush their own children's future educational prospects along with the dreams of millions of young Americans today and for generations to come. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2012/0827/Obama-vs.-Romney-101-5-differences-on-education/K-12-spending

Romney and Ryan, of course, have a hand in this willful ignorance. Each of them has determinedly said as little as possible about education on the stump for good reason: They would cut federal education spending drastically, shifting costs onto already financially strapped states and families. When a student asked Romney earlier in the campaign season about his support for students struggling to pay off college tuition bills, Romney suggested that such students borrow money from their parents. His record as governor provides little promise as well. A program Romney championed in Massachusetts offering "free" tuition for the state's top 10 percent in student performance proved frustrating for many of the state's cash-strapped families because it didn't cover thousands of dollars in university student fees.

Ryan's own stated policy plans demonstrate an even more draconian intent. The Education Trust, a nonpartisan research firm, estimates the Ryan budget plan would cut almost  $170 billion in student aid over 10 years, wiping out aid for less-than-halftime students, severely limiting qualifications rules, and converting the entire Pell Grant program into a vulnerable non-discretionary line item that could easily get axed by a Republican-dominated Congress, where Ryan would be the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. About 1 million students would be out of luck if Romney-Ryan prevails. 

What would the impact be for my Florida neighbors? According to a study(http://www.americanprogressaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/RomneyUStateBudgetsBrief-1.pdf) by American Progress Action, the Sunshine State would lose $361 million in federal funding for education and job training in 2013 alone. The result of a Romney-Ryan victory threatens an added burden on Florida property taxpayers such as my friends in Maitland -- that is, a choice of cutting benefits or raising taxes. And in the Republican-dominated statehouse, chances are the only option left open for discussion would be cuts in education funding. After all, this is a state where the government-run lottery promised to bring salvation to education, but since its inception in 1988 has managed to deliver under 40 percent of its revenues to the state's Educational Enhancement Trust Fund, covering only one-twentieth of Florida's annual education budget, according to a CBS News investigation (http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500690_162-3269456.html) that also reports Florida's per-pupil education spending went from 37th to 46th in the U.S.

Why has this turned out this way? Shamelessly, the legislature simply replaced taxes shifted from the education budget with lottery proceeds, resulting in a net loss for public schools statewide over the last two decades. (61% to 53% of state spending between 1986 and 2003, as reported by the St. Petersburg Times here. http://www.sptimes.com/2003/11/03/Columns/Don_t_be_fooled__lott.shtml

In stark contrast, President Barack Obama has expanded the Pell Grant program substantially, while also pursuing changes in elementary and middle school policy geared toward improving the public school system's effectiveness in delivering positive student outcomes. His policy plans include no cuts to higher education grants, in service to his belief that broad based public support for a college education correctly addresses corporate America's growing demand for better-trained work force as the economic recovery accelerates. Furthermore, the president substantially favors policies that address the rising cost of higher education -- which is the second largest pile of debt facing American families today. He does so by cutting in half the interest owed on federal student loans, limiting monthly payments by linking them to the students' post-graduation income, and by reducing the total lifetime outlay for such loans to $20,000. No one doubts that, like their promises to kill Obamacare, Romney-Ryan administration would eviscerate most if not all of those initiatives.

President Obama has also focused on pragmatic improvements allowing schools to deliver better service to children at the classroom level. According to the White House, "To date, President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative has dedicated over $4 billion to 19 states that have created robust plans that address the four key areas of K-12 education reform as described below. These states serve 22 million students and employ 1.5 million teachers in 42,000 schools, representing 45 percent of all K-12 students and 42 percent of all low-income students nationwide." http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/k-12/race-to-the-top

Like much of Mr. Obama's agenda since the 2010 election, his American Jobs Act proposals, with money to fund K-12 teaching positions lost to state budgetary shortfalls, have been ignored by Republicans in Congress who are intent on increasing already generous tax breaks for the very wealthy. "That's backwards. That's wrong," the president argued in a White House video seen here. http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2012/08/18/weekly-address-congress-should-back-plan-hire-teachers

So why all the Romney-Ryan signs in my school-proud Maitland neighborhood? I'm sure some of the folks here must be too busy to delve into these inconvenient facts. Perhaps my alternate hypothesis about this issue, though, is best summed up this way:

 "It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated." 

- Alec Bourne

An Open Letter to Obama: Why We Are Agitated

Dear President Obama,

I guess you’ve noticed, as I and some of my colleagues here on Daily Kos and elsewhere in the liberal punditocracy face the final weeks of the 2012 presidential race, that many supporters who were celebrating your lead in the polls merely eight days ago now are acting all jittery and agitated after you and Mitt Romney faced off last week for the debate in Denver. With all due respect, Mr. President, please allow me to explain our concern.

Mitt Romney clearly hosed you. Romney’s romp seems, overnight, to have moved the meter back toward the 48 Red-48 Blue division in America. That is a political precondition Mr. Romney and his minions wanted and needed again this election year, because it threatens to put the race for the White House, as in 2000, back into the Supreme Court, where Republicans know you will lose, 5 to 4. Even more incredulous for those of us who are counting on you, a 48-48 split in any swing state could put your fate into the hands of the many Republican voter-registration apparatchiks who are greasing the wheels of their political lives on the false accusations of voter fraud.

Mr. President, already, the resulting post-debate blowback provides a fairly obvious shift in the Right’s narrative. Your debate performance is fueling public vindication for the far-right-wing’s reality shape shifters, who are spending billions to restore the Reagan-Bush-Bush II reign of the 1%, by the 1% and for the 1%.

Your ardent supporters are mad because that unexpected debate debacle, Mr. Obama, was a stomach-wrenching turn in our political fortunes, not only yours. It was our worst nightmares realized. I can understand how this happened. You, Mr. President -- unlike the $220-Million-Dollar-Man and congenital liar that Mr. Romney surely is -- prior to the debate hadn’t arrived at the point of Electoral College Map desperation as the Romney-Ryan ticket had, and your campaign pushed you into following a run-out-the-clock game plan on debate night. Sorry to say, it was a disastrous decision.

Your supporters also are feeling knots in their stomachs today, knowing that something went terribly wrong on that stage one week ago, but not understanding exactly what was happening. The political uncertainty clouding your campaign, which has not been tamped down despite your new verbal thrusts on the campaign stump this week, may prove to be a new and corrosive element in the weeks ahead. Far from having “a bad night” as you admitted this week, the debate was an utter disaster. As Mr. Romney, Mr. Ryan and their surrogates themselves might gleely point out in the coming weeks, you built that.

Mr. President, we are angry that you apparently were prepared to debate an admitted “severe conservative,” and you appeared shell-shocked by the Moderate Mitt who showed up loaded for bear and cleaned your clock in almost every debate segment, His false attacks and reality-busting distractions (I’m talking Big Bird here) were designed to blur and lure --  blur the serious cuts to non-defense spending certain to come under a Romney-Ryan administration and lure your campaign’s brain trust into producing a “Romney Blames Big Bird” online video. We cringed today seeing that your campaign took the bait. Pathetic.

The Romney campaign took ownership of that stage appearance merely by being allowed to stand next to a great American president, before a TV audience of more than 60 million viewers. You perfunctory performance let them turn what should have been a stout defense of your policies of economic fairness into a classically misleading Republican political pitch full of false equivalency and prevarication. We feel sickened because the Republicans were, once again, proven to be the media savants who effortlessly spin fantasy and myth into focus-grouped middle-of-the-road pablum worthy of both George Orwell and Ayn Rand novels.

While you looked down, looked away, and looked disengaged, Mitt Romney attacked your policies, your promises, and your personality with almost no rebuttals. You know, rebuttals... arguments in response to debate attacks? This isn’t a “salesmanship” demonstration, as you tried to spin it yesterday. This was a heavyweight boxing match in which you, Mr. President, appeared unable to recover your footing for the entire night once Mr. Romney knocked you senseless before the first round was over.

This first debate was more than a “bad night” for the majority of Americans who are counting on you, in your second term, to keep this country of ours heading in a reasonable, forward-looking, pragmatic middle-class-jobs-building direction. We are sick to death seeing Romney’s snarky scion’s entitled smirk carry over into his numerous appearance in Ohio this week. Mr. President, we retch seeing actual voter sentiment for your campaign slipping away simply due to Mr. Romney’s demonstration of superior debating prowess.

Fact-checkers to the rescue? Hardly. Mr. Romney’s Etch-a-Sketch reversals, despite their factually specious nature, eviscerated your aimless talking points and other assorted ramblings. Like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, to name two prominent examples, Mr. Romney pretended to be the more reasonable man in the room. And while we know better, Romney’s dominance allowed uncommitted voters to take an imaginative leap to envision the upside of a Romney-Ryan administration projecting this brand of feigned forceful, confident bravado around the world.

So now we must acknowledge: Savvy political tactics, not policy wonkiness, wins the day. Fixing the strategy for your next debate starts with understanding what went wrong. I will begin the conversation here, and I invite my friends who care about your re-election to add their suggestions to this diary. Here’s some of what I think needs to be addressed:

• What to avoid: Too polite. Too cerebral. Too cool. Too disconnected. Too arrogant. Too above-the-fray.

• What one tactic to definitely nail: Going for the jugular.

• For everyone in the top tier of your campaign team, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and jettison this administration’s tendency to worship at the alter of cautious consensus. Say exactly what you feel. With passion. Sell yourself. Identify the majority voters’ attitudes where your policies coincide with public opinion.

• Don’t be shy or hang back because of any misplaced tendency to avoid confrontation. Your political strategists (should) know full well that any post-debate questions should be treated as incidental flare-ups easily mopped up in the weeks ahead, as Romney spokespeople and their paid shills at Fox demonstrate daily.

• Do your own 180-degree pivot on any and all political talking points in order to sound like the more reasonable man running for the presidency.

• Press issues and economic results during your first term that resonate with businesses, banks, and investment professionals. Don’t let Republicans define you as anti-business.

• Attend to your advantages as president. I expect Mr. Romney to keep bullying and disparaging you. Return the favor by touting your impressive results and comparing them to his spurious contributions as an entitled corporate raider and ineffectual and often absent Massachusetts governor.

• Attend to stage optics. Look directly into the camera, not at the moderator, and lean into the podium like you want to break out like a caged animal on attack.

• As I last wrote recently, I’d like to see you, Mr. President, turn in more scenes like the ones Jimmy Stewart had in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Passionate. Directly attacking the discredited myths baked into the many years of Republican mendacity. Physically, act confident, even a bit dismissive toward Mr. Romney. Tell him to wipe that disgusting smirk off his face, to his face. Don’t call him “governor.”

• Keep this one thought in mind: that this time around, truth and good intentions must win out over lies and evil.

A week after the first 2012 Presidential Debate, one truth is clear: Being assertive and aggressive isn’t being unpresidential. For someone as resilient as you, President Obama, this should be a chance you appear hungry for. As you prepare for the rest of your campaign, look in the mirror every so often and admire the man who has courageously taken on al Qaida, taken out Osama and throttled the greedy excesses of the 1%. You have given this country a health-care plan that shows, for the first time in a generation, that government truly can do the right thing for all of us. Even the glib President Bill Clinton can't crow about that.

Sure, you’ll never be able to win the support of the Right-wing nut jobs who have taken over the Republican Party. In the coming debates, let the G.O.P. extremists seethe with hatred as you force them to confront each one of your past successes and your positive plans for future progress. Remind our citizens of the values you champion, such as compassion, justice, equal opportunity, and cautious, responsible vigilance.

One more thing. As long as I have your attention, Mr. President, I would like to thank you for all you’ve done and all you will accomplish in the coming years as president of all Americans.

Sincerely yours,

Fred Abel, blogger

P.S. My campaign contribution is on its way.

cc: Vice President Joe Biden, Michelle Obama, Jim Messina, David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Robert Gibbs, Dan Pfeiffer

Romney's Advantage in Tonight’s Debate

As Democrats and progressives, let’s not kid ourselves about tonight’s debate. Mitt Romney is already the winner. Here’s why: superior stagecraft and tons of money.

Romney’s the winner not necessarily because his arguments were more persuasive. He’s better off merely because he showed up for the first audition and didn’t fall on his face, and the experience will only sharpen his image as a leading man in the next two debates. He’s won because, even if you don’t agree with anything he or his party espouses, Mitt Romney is a super-wealthy individual who appears to have the potential to fill the role one might imagine a Hollywood casting agent would seek for a presidential movie. He’s Michael Douglas with a taller forehead. A latter-day Ronald Reagan with a better command of tax avoidance, if not the delivery of his screenplay’s lines.

Now that Romney was able to stand on a Denver stage side-by-side with the sitting president and be treated with all the respect of that office and that event, undecided viewers, as well as advocates of the president who are professing lower enthusiasm for their choice this election season, received all the visual cues they needed to seriously allow themselves to consider -- perhaps for the first time -- Mitt Romney playing the most influential part any person could assume on the world stage.

Mitt Romney came out the winner Wednesday night because of some major built-in personal advantages he has in approaching these auditions. We have known, for example, that he himself strongly believes in his fitness for the role. He’s been angling for the part since, well, probably from the day his dad, George Romney -- the former head of a Detroit car company (American Motors Corporation), Michigan Republican governor (1963-1969), and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (1969-1973) -- was permanently furloughed on his path to the White House. That happened when George, a leading contender for the presidency in mid-1967, offhandedly described himself as being “brainwashed” by military advisors about the progress of the Vietnam War. It stands as one of the most memorable verbal turds of presidential politics in history, a gaffe heard around the world and certainly one that influenced young Mitt to tenaciously pursue the country’s highest office for much of his adult life. One could argue that George Romney’s famous abject failure back prior to the 1968 presidential primary is the foundation of his son’s passion for the part. Mitt Romney is on a mission, much like “W” was in going after Sadam Hussein, of finishing off what their fathers couldn’t.

Romney was the winner tonight because, despite new attempts at bringing common-sense rules to the 90-minute televised presidential debate format, the very form of formal debates infers a false equivalence that favors the challenger. Tonight’s debate locked the incumbent candidate in a place with no escape route from exposure to fallacious arguments or scripted attacks on his record. That is especially advantageous to Romney in light of this year’s particularly mendacious Republican campaign playbook. For the incumbent standing behind a podium on that stark stage tonight, there was no hunkering down behind the securely locked doors of the White House Situation Room or using the flag-draped backdrops of the office to burnish his message. By nature a cool customer, the president was exposed to subjective comparisons this particular man might certainly wish were ruled off limits: emotion, passion, ideological purity.

Romney and Ryan certainly have been failing -- up until the debate they were anywhere from three to ten points behind in key swing-state polls -- to make any of the G.O.P.’s well-funded scripted distortions of the president’s character or record stick. No matter. With the first debate under his belt, Mitt Romney and his supporters were smiling on the Republican talk-show victory tour on Thursday. Democrats may have had the advantage this summer and early fall, gloating over their opponent’s sliding poll numbers -- amid embarrassing videotaped sideshows showing Clint Eastwood bumbling through an imaginary inquisition of the president on stage at the Republican convention and Romney and Ryan both disparaging a large percentage of Americans as “moochers” and “takers.” The appeal of injustice among middle-class and more privileged whites has had a long history of political success in my lifetime, and it seems this year to have been given a rousing revival among a broad swath of voters who view an African-American president with suspicion if not downright scorn.

As we know from the daily tracking polls, however, Mitt has the support of 40-something percent of Americans who buy into the Romney-Ryan Republican narrative of lowering taxes on the rich purportedly to create jobs for the middle class. Why so many Americans believe that -- despite that very policy’s failure during several Republican administrations during the last 50 years -- is irrelevant, as are the arguments about it one way or the other. The month ahead will only open new opportunities for the Republican party to build their momentum and bring America, perhaps, a rerun of the 2000 election -- close enough to, um, squeak out a victory in November, by hook or by crook.

But, like all successful scripts, the next scenes certainly will come with their share of plot twists. Expect to see a barrage of Republican attack ads that will seek to put the president on the defensive over unemployment and worldwide Muslim unrest, drive up the incumbent’s negative ratings in the polls, and build on Romney’s “good first impression,” freshly viewed. The media will, of course, buy into the excitement of such a tightening race, thereby ensuring its fruition. How much money can we expect the Romney-Ryan campaign and its surreptitious SuperPacs to unleash? No one knows for sure, but with the Supreme Court Citizens United decision clearing the way for unlimited amounts of cash commitments from the wealthy, Republicans like Romney, who promise to permanently lower tax rates on the wealthy, stand to benefit.  “It will be no holds barred on the Republican side,” says a former political director at NBC News, Elizabeth Wilner, who is Campaign Media Analysis Group vice president for Kantar Media, considered to be the second largest global market research company. “All that money the Obama campaign has been expecting Romney to spend on ads will finally start to flow. The Obama campaign is betting on their message, while the Romney campaign is betting on tonnage.”

I hope I’m wrong about this prediction, but I fear I’m not. By Thursday, the presidential reelection campaign will be feeling the full force of the Republican Party’s media carpet bombing and the probable turn of voter sentiments toward their candidate, who, they will argue, they’ve successfully positioned as the “underdog.” The president’s reelection team will be scrambling to come up with a response as the race tightens. Let’s hope our president, with his extensive ground game and political campaign contributions of progressive friends in Hollywood and the business world, steps up his game and delivers a full-throated performance commensurate with the high stakes in this election.

Personally, I’d like to see Barack Obama turn in more scenes like the ones Jimmy Stewart had in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Passionate. Directly attacking the discredited myths baked into the many years of Republican shapeshifting. Confident that this time around, truth and good intentions will win out over lies and evil.

Sounds like a great Hollywood movie in the making, but first we have to make sure we have nailed the script.

Imagining the “Presidential Zinger Debate”

Reportedly, Mitt Romney is preparing for his first meeting with Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential debates by learning to deliver what his managers describe as "zingers." As is typical for the inept Romney campaign in need of a quick injection of populist appeal, though, their very admission of his memorizing stinging remarks weeks ahead of the Wednesday night confrontation in Denver undermines the very definition of zingers as quick, witty and spontaneous. Do you wonder what a debate full of zingers might sound like? I have, and I think President Obama will be ready with his own retorts. So follow me to the first imaginary "Presidential Zinger Debate."

Romney: President Obama wants the American people to give him four more years even though the last four has been an abject failure to deliver for the middle class.

Obama: Gov. Romney’s campaign has shown great expertise in giving their candidate credit for my administration’s policies when they’ve worked, and blaming me when Republican policies haven’t.

Romney: America cannot afford more big government entitlements from an Obama administration bent on turning this country into a Paris on the Mississippi.

Obama: If Gov. Romney has his way with two terms in the White House, like President George W. Bush, American taxpayers will be on the hook for $6 trillion in debt -- all done in the name of “smaller government.” (He can be seen adding the quotes with his hands while saying this.)

Romney: President Reagan once famously said: “Government is the problem.” Mr. President, you are proving him correct.

Obama: The truth is, with the exception of Romneycare, your single term in office in Massachusetts, Gov. Romney, made that very point.

Romney: Look, my position on Obamacare is it’s a massive government takeover of health care. By definition that can’t work. It might have been right for Massachusetts, but most Americans agree it is better handled for less cost with private insurers giving the public what they ask for, unimpeded by government bureaucrats. 

Obama: Okay, so let me get this straight. You’re saying the Affordable Health Care Act actually works in practice, but as far as you’re concerned, it doesn’t work in theory?” Help us out here.

Romney: My economic plan is simple: Put people back to work by getting the government out of the business of picking winners and losers. That’s my top priority and the only road back to American prosperity.

Obama: Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of Detroit auto workers now back on the job because we believe in the American workers, who heard Gov. Romney call for America’s car companies to go bankrupt when the banks had already written them off.

Romney: Thanks to President Obama here, the amount of taxpayer spending on social programs over the last four years is greater than the New Deal and the Great Society put together. (Those are the facts, people!)

Obama: When Democrats spend money on the safety net, Republicans call it “unaffordable” and “wasteful.” Then they turn around and give billions in tax dollars to oil companies that don’t need the money and call it a “subsidy,” a “smart investment.” I call it "corporate cronyism."

Romney: The mainstream media has it wrong. Paul Ryan and I don’t favor the wealthy and big corporations over regular folks. We favor the all-American value of work rewarded.

Obama: I think Gov. Romney and Mr. Ryan have their words in the right place, but their policies not so much. An independent analyst found that their economic goals, if enacted, would cost every family in America about $2,000 a year more in taxes.

Romney: I promise you this: My administration will end the gridlock in Congress by calling for the passage of a balanced budget amendment by the end of my second term. (He smiles broadly and stares at the president.) 

Obama: Why is it whenever Republicans in Congress want fiscal responsibility and budget cuts, the discussion starts and stops with “non-defense discretionary spending” -- in other words, programs that support the 47 percent of Americans Gov. Romney says are, and I quote, “moochers”? (Again, he uses his hands for the quote marks.)

Romney: Mr. President, you want America’s needy to occupy Wall Street. I want Americans to occupy the assembly lines!

Obama: Now, I know one thing a majority of Americans doesn’t want: Mitt Romney occupying the White House!

2012 Election Poll for the Low Information Voter

Hello, low information voters. I’m writing today to make your choice in the presidential and Congressional elections easier for you. While I’m at it, I’d like to help out the detail-averse politicians who have expressed a desire to turn the 2012 election into an simple referendum or poll. So here goes. You need only answer these few questions:

1. Who is to blame for a stagnant American economy that took eight years to develop, going from a budget surplus to a trillion-dollar deficit, and led to what became, in September of 2008, a catastrophic worldwide failure of the banking system?

A. Bush-Cheney (R)

B. Obama-Biden (D)

C. Ralph Nader (I)

D. Ralph Reed 

E. Reince Priebis

F. The Hawaiian official who handled Barack Obama’s birth certificate

2. Who do you trust to help the middle class climb out of the worst worldwide economic recession since the Great Depression?

A. Republicans

B. Democrats

C. The very investment banking and big business leaders who created the financial and real estate disasters and then profited from taxpayer-funded bailouts while the middle class lost trillions of dollars of equity in their 401k accounts and homes — in other words, the very wealthy citizens who are now providing billions of dollars in secrecy to one party while they demonize public employee union members for essentially doing the same thing for their opponents

D. What recession?

3. Who has proven since January 2009 that its mission to limit a U.S. political leader to a single term in office would not be deterred, even if it has meant that no jobs bills can get a hearing in the House of Representatives, that virtually every Senate bill faces a filibuster and subsequently requires 61 votes rather than what otherwise should be a simple majority of 51 votes, and that it’s okay if it sends the U.S. credit rating, and therefore the entire economic recovery, into a tailspin because the other party has the temerity to expect Congress to authorize payment of this country’s bills, many of which were created with the votes of those who declared this high-tech political lynching?

A. Republicans

B. Democrats

C. Grover Norquist

4. Who has packed state legislatures with concerned citizens who are attacking non-existent voter fraud with restrictive voter-registration measures to hold down minority, Hispanic, and senior citizen voter participation while also declaring that highly contentious states such as Pennsylvania are now in the bag for the white candidate?

A. Republicans

B. Democrats

C. Uh, what are you talking about, bro?

That's it, people. I told you this election would be easy. Now get out there and vote, even if you already think you have.

How Can We Trust Republicans, Who Presided Over 74% of Our National Debt?

No matter what your party affiliation, if you are concerned about our federal deficit and are considering voting based on your perceptions of that issue, here are some facts. Between 1952 and 2010, Republican presidents have spent 36 years in the White House, compared to 22 years for Democrats. That works out to 62 percent of the time for Republicans (see spreadsheet, in red) and 38 percent for Democrats (in blue). Now, for the financial impact of the story, the debt created during each administration is as follows: Democratic presidents contributed 26 percent of the total deficit over those 58 years; Republican presidents contributed nearly 74 percent of the deficit, according to figures from the federal Office of Management and Budget.


The raw figures reveal the dollar amount of deficit left by each president. The bottom line: Democrats added about $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit; Republicans added $9.6 trillion. The Republican presidents’ deficit spending is nearly triple the amount added by Democratic presidents.

The difference between President Reagan’s $1.6 trillion in debt and President Clinton’s $1.4 trillion is significant in light of how often Republicans hurl the “tax-and-spend liberal” label at Democrats. What label perfectly describes George W. Bush’s $6.1 trillion? Radical Republicanism! According to Stephen Slivinski, director of budget studies at the Cato Institute, total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush’s first term alone. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton’s last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush’s first term. Under Bush, Congress passed budgets that spent a total of $91 billion more than the president requested for domestic programs. Bush signed every one of those Republican bills.


If these facts don’t gibe with what you expected, well, that’s the secret sauce of the Republican political strategy as far back as I can recall. That Republican strategy is simply this: keep repeating their big, fat lies. Lie about how Democrats are “tax and spend liberals” (Republicans are the big, wasteful spenders). Lie about how Republicans are the party of smaller government (government growth in terms of spending has mostly followed Republican success in the presidency and Congress). Lie about how their policies of tax breaks for the wealthiest 1 percent help create jobs for the rest of us (they haven’t, otherwise Obama would have inherited a much stronger economy and employment would have been trending down, instead of up, during his first year in office).


Have no doubt: Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are the poster boys of lying. Their Radical Republican agenda calls for $250,000 in annual tax breaks to each of the wealthiest households, raises taxes on the middle class, and cuts the benefits of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, health care reform, and education, programs which largely benefit the majority of middle income Americans.


If you are a 1 percent income earner, then go ahead and support Romney-Ryan. They’ve got your back and will ensure your continued success, albeit at the expense of society as a whole. If you are in any other economic classification (earning $250,000 a year or less), your vote for Romney-Ryan will be a vote against your own financial self-interest.


Indeed, as the president has been pointing out more frequently in his campaign, even the wealthiest Americans have benefited from his policies of holding down taxes on most Americans and expanding government spending while the Bush-Cheney Great Recession of 2008 slowly recedes. Obama’s building the economic recovery from the middle class and out has, at its heart, the best interests of all America.


But don’t expect any radical Republicans to sign on to that effort. Before Obama was even sworn in, Republicans met in secrecy to agree to a plan of zero cooperation with anything Democrats proposed. It was, and is, a pact with the devil they made to turn around their political fortunes following the 2008 election. The Republican promise to make sure Obama is a one-term president has resulted in the slow economic recovery and the lack of job creation since 2010, when many Congressional districts sent anti-Obama Tea Party members to the House of Representatives and the Senate.


Since then, virtually no progress has been made despite Obama’s attempts at a grand bargain, including cost containment and jobs and infrastructure bills, that would have delivered easily 2 million jobs in the last year alone. Nevertheless, far-right Congressional inaction has met with radical Republican political success, with the added result of costing the government its pristine bond rating and leading to higher borrowing costs that all taxpayers will need to cover. That’s your radical Republican Party in action, and their gift to you: a hidden tax hike, in effect.


You sent them to Washington to do your bidding, didn’t you? Have they done what you sent them there to do, create jobs? No, they lied to you, and now they expect you'll have a short memory about their abject failure. Instead, the radical Republicans have and are all about ensuring the continued success of the wealthiest among us and their top-down political agenda, using their vast superiority in private political fundraising to skew public opinion with more trickle-down policies, with the promise that you will benefit, too (a lie).


But don’t worry. There’s a simple fix. You can fire them come November, by electing folks who truly have been trying to put our best interests ahead of their own political survival: Democrats.

Booker's Teachable Moment

If you want an example of a Democrat's problems when running for president, look no further than the blowback from Democratic Mayor Cory Booker's "Meet the Press" appearance over the weekend. It is truly a defining moment, though not in the way the Obama campaign would have preferred. Booker basically gave Mitt Romney and Bain Capital credit for positive economic outcomes while criticizing the Obama campaign for its political ads questioning the Bain Capital track record of profiting at the expense of failing businesses. Today, Republican campaign managers are popping champagne corks in celebration of a black Democrat providing ammunition for their own ads, released today, stating the case for positive private equity outcomes and offering further "proof" of Mitt Romney's claim that his Bain experience qualifies him as a economic savior in waiting.

Booker is only the latest in a long string of Democratic voices placing one of their presidential hopefuls in the awkward position of having to explain or cover for the poorly worded, bumbling and undisciplined statements of surrogates. Who knows what Booker had in mind by defending Bain Capital. Let's remember that Obama's road to reelection requires that his campaign defines Mitt Romney to align with the reality that is truly nauseating: radical Republican policies that exploded the national debt, deregulated us into the Great Recession, and drove our economy into the weak performance that greeted President Obama on his first day in office, from which he has almost singlehandedly extracted us even as the radical Right in Congress has dedicated itself to his failure.

Whatever Booker might have had in mind, he certainly must have gotten the memo that job creation for the middle class is central to the president's reelection. He had to know that Mr. Obama is going after the sordid record of job destruction under Romney's Bain. He admitted seeing the Obama campaign TV ads highlighting those job-killing outcomes. Does he underscore that message on "Meet the Press"? No, instead he goes out of his way to distort the message of those ads and deplores their use by the Obama campaign. Almost as damaging, he drew false equivalence between those ads and the radical Right's proposed fallacious broadside on Obama using Rev. Jeremiah Wright. What was Booker thinking? Was Booker thinking at all? Did he consider how destructive his words would turn out to be? If part of Booker's message needed to be communicated, why did he not consider summarizing them in a private message to the president's campaign instead of freelancing them in front of millions of potential voters?

A presidential campaign with about six months till the election can recover from a gaffe such as Booker's, but not if that type of gaffe becomes a recurring string for which the president's campaign must spend precious days and weeks backtracking to put out the brush fires. If defining the Republican candidates as insensitive to the middle class is going to take hold, Democrats perhaps needed a defining moment showing them what happens when a surrogate goes rogue. Booker's boneheaded words have provided that. The Obama campaign and supporting Democrats now must rededicate themselves to perfecting the discipline required to make their definitions stick -- a discipline that Republicans historically have mastered along the road to the White House, which they have occupied 68 percent of the time since 1953. That fact has to make even Mr. Booker nauseous.

03022012blog

Fiscal results projected for current five men running for president; lower bar is better. NYTimes

The Debt We All Owe to Republicans

I ran across an incredible fact recently: 86 percent of our national debt was racked up by three Republican presidents (Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and G.W. Bush), and they did it in just 20 years. It took more than 200 years for all of our other presidents to accrue the other 14 percent.

If the U.S. electorate understands nothing else, this single fact should inform all Democratic discussions and decisions leading up to the presidential election. The reasons why this Conservative causal effect on our national debt should resonate like no other this year is crystal clear: Republicans will argue ad nauseum that, 1. the blame for what ails our economy - our national debt and unemployment picture - lies with liberal Democrats, and 2. they alone can turn the economy around by restoring the Reagan/Bush agenda.

If history teaches us anything, plenty of voters will buy their sales pitch despite the abject failure of the modern Republican Party's trickle-down economics to address America's jobs and long-term deficit picture.

The primary job for Democratic campaign strategists this year must be to commit a laser-like focus on two fronts: 1. teaching and reminding voters about the Republican history of economic failure that caused the budget deficits, and 2. annihilating the Republican nominee’s proposals, with particular emphasis on their tax policies, purporting to rescue the economy.

In this election, the subject of taxes is key, because we have seen how Reagan’s and the Bushes’ election-time promises of lowering federal taxes have impacted all three electoral results (negatively for the second term of the senior Bush), while guaranteeing job losses and the exploding federal deficit under their 20 years of governance which favored the wealthy and corporate plutocracy at the expense of the rest of us. In that regard, Democrats need a forceful, factual campaign to convince independent voters that their financial self-interest is best served by an Obama-proposed tax rate structure similar to Bill Clinton's, which led to the last budget surpluses and job growth before in the modern presidency.

I would love to see Mr. Clinton enrolled in an election-season-long speaking tour to accomplish this voter-education goal. And he should be joined by all current Congressional Democrats in an all-out, grass-roots voter reeducation effort that zeroes in on the sordid modern Republican economic record reflected in that 20-year record cited above. For it is that Reagan/Bush fiscal miasma that has pushed this country into the Great Recession and threatens further damage if the deceptive low-tax pandering of the radical right is left unchallenged.

For its lesson plan, the Democratic Party need look no further than the teachings of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who writes today that all four Republican presidential aspirants propose draconian measures to cut federal programs beneficial to the majority of Americans while…

“squandering all the money thereby saved - and much, much more - on tax cuts for the rich.” 

Krugman goes on to conclude,

“It has been obvious all along, to anyone paying attention, that the politicians shouting loudest about deficits are actually using deficit hysteria as a cover story for their real agenda, which is top-down class warfare.”

For too long, too many voters, I am afraid, were not paying attention, and we all have paid a very dear price for that inattention. Thus my call for a concerted campaign focus on the recent history of Republican fiscal malfeasance and it's devastating consequences. After all, as Sir Winston Churchill said, 

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

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.

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.

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.

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/