tales of copper city

"What happened to Obama's passion?"

This New York Times Op Ed article by Drew Westin, a professor in psychology who specializes in political communication, has written a scathing article about Obama that is a must-read.  It's harsh but most of it wrings true to me.  The main point is that Obama simply refuses to adopt a "narrative" that explains what he's trying to do as president.  As a consequence, this leaves most in the public with the need to "fill in the blanks."   

Westin's book The Political Brain is terrific; he thought hard about how to communicate politics with the public. His diagnosis of the phony "centrism" of Obama, based on a false rendering of just what "independent" voters want and need is perfect.  Obama believes that if you chastise the left, and occasionally chastise the right, most people will deduce that you are a centrist. But that's way too timid. Obama needs to talk about practical policies that people want and will support, even if Fox News calls him a "socialist."   

Obama needs to stop worrying about Fox News and he especially needs to stop taking liberals to the woodshed.  The president needs to stop pulling punches when he explains his policies.  He needs to say, over and again, that he inherited a disaster of an economy because that was true and important to remember.  He needs to try for more spending to help the economy and the unemployed.  He needs to fight for the working class. He's going to be attacked for waking up in the morning by the GOP so he should stop worrying about their slogans.

Above all, he needs to stop trying to win the approval of the "powers that be" on Wall Street and the major banks.  They nearly took us all down....and instead he named people to fix things that participated in, or facilitated the take down.   

Westin comes scarily close to wondering if Obama's over his head.  I think the better choice of words is that he is too timid, too lacking in courage when it comes to doing things that gets him whacked by Fox News. He spends way too much time worrying about the polls and too little time trying to do what's right, and taking the consequences.  

Liberalism as necessity

Gabrielle Giffords, D-AZ, our U.S. Congresswoman, narrowly defeated her opponent in a tough election fight. This will be Giffords third term and she is a strong member of the House, she is politically astute, she voted for health care reform in a district with a lot of Republicans, and she is also a member of the Blue Dog caucus.

Giffords was quoted in the Sierra Vista Herald as saying that the Democrats must become more centrist if the party is to survive. (The pic is from the S.V. Herald story.)

With all due respect to a member of the House that I like, voted for, and made telephone calls for, this is hogwash.  The Democratic president is already centrist and he's still called a socialist by a right-wing that has become an enormous con game, a party preaching the populism of the little guy and once in office doing everything it can to enrich the big guys.

Will Obama be going presidential?

Dan Froomkin at The Huffington Post has some excellent ideas about how much Obama can get done without the House and Senate.  

It's really remarkable how much leeway a president has if he has the guts to take advantage of it. The list of opportunities to act without Congress is very, very long.

I hate to say it, but George Bush would take this path.

Obama would have to act like a president, be a president.

I love New York

In two weeks, we will be returning to New York, to the 25th anniversary convocation of the founding of the School of Public Health at the University at Albany, SUNY. This is part of what I plan to say.

This school was the dream of Dr. David Axelrod, then the Commissioner of Health for New York, and Dr. David Carpenter our first dean and his staff turned that dream into reality. Carole and I joined that effort three years after the school began, in 1988.

My wife and I are so grateful to be asked back to speak at this important celebration. This is an incredible honor, an opportunity to say once again, we love New York.

The best health care system in America?

If you want to read a book that will stand everything, and I mean everything, you think you know about health care upside down, then read Phillip Longman's Best Care Anywhere, 2nd Edition: Why VA Health Care is Better Than Yours. 

I have this friend...

I have this friend.  I've written about him before.  He lives in southern California. He is my oldest surviving friend. He is 75, a few years older than me.  He has a really bad case of cellulitis in his legs, complicated by obesity.

I know he is worried that he may eventually may lose his legs and so he sits and waits and hopes that this time, with this antibiotic, the infection will eventually give up and go away.  We don't ever discuss the possibility that he might lose his legs.

He is not married and while he has contacts and a handful of friends that he talks to each week by telephone, he is largely without friends who come to see him, who visit and talk, or who help him get out to a restaurant or to the grocery store.  He thinks his twice-a-week housekeeper is fiddling with his credit card.

He is not poor but he is having difficulty with a reverse mortgage, a difficulty that arose over a dispute with a bad contractor, and as a result, the mortgage company is no longer sending him any money because he refuses to pay the bad contractor.  He  is holding onto the money that was supposed to be paid to the contractor but hasn't been because the work is so horribly botched. 

The local and state building inspectors are sympathetic but they seem to be always reluctant to separate even bad businessmen from money owed to them.  Once again the bias in our democracy runs toward business and not toward the little guy.

Some of my best friends are economists

I have a good friend in Bisbee, Doug Dunn, who has an economics degree. Doug and I have been talking about Haiti and he called me out on my criticism of the U.S. "dumping" of cheap rice in Haiti and "ruining" local producers. 

I'm sure he was right to do so; not all trade, especially for staples like rice is "dumping."  But Haiti is an outlier in everything and I really don't have a clue as to how we ought best help them. 

I had sent him a reference to a "mea culpa" piece on Haiti by Bill Clinton.  But then I got to thinking about NAFTA and how limited my understanding of it is, and also about how economics has, in a way, shaped my whole career in public health.

When politics get personal

Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave the best speech of the night when health care reform finally passed. Her speech points the way to the future, showing the Democrats how to think about and promote what they actually voted for.

Pelosi repeated the late Democratic Speaker of the House Thomas "Tip" O'Neill's dictum that "all politics is local."  This means that most Americans judge national policies by how they actually affect them where they live, in their communities.

And, for most of what government does to improve health and safety, it's not so easy to tell.  People often have to be reminded, sometimes years later, that public policies have improved their community's health by cleaning up the environment, reducing smoking levels, lowering highway crashes, or reduced heart disease and cancer rates.

And even then, the media and the public tend to forget and instead focus on the latest scandal from Washington or Phoenix.

What was the crucial factor for how the Dems voted?

Nate Silver at 538 has the best quick analysis of the best predictor for how the Democrats voted---or didn't vote---for the health care reform legislation: the percentage support for President Obama in the congressional district in 2008.  This was more important than the likely competitiveness of the upcoming 2010 race as established by four different sources. 

I think this is good news for the party overall, because it showed that, apparently, many Blue Dogs grasped that they needed a strong president to help their own reelection prospects and so they supported Obama down the stretch.  The major defections came from Democrats who represent districts where Obama was a distinct liability.

I suspect this will help the party find the path to a more national party: by carefully selecting issues, like health care reform, that will bring much loud noise but that will also prove popular with the electorate over the long run. 

The big challenge for Democrats is fashioning a national party with issues that cross over the divides of race and anti-government rhetoric with clear benefits to ordinary people after the smoke and noise fades away. Last night makes me confident that the Democrats are on the right path.

Will it pass?

Will it pass?  I am very anxious but I think it will, and maybe with a larger margin than last November in the House.  I sense that many Democrats,  liberals and conservative, recognize that a no vote will seriously damage the Obama presidency and will hurt everyone's chances in November, no matter how they vote in in a few days, perhaps as early as this Sunday. 

The Republicans are going to throw everything at the Dems from now to November, no matter how they vote.

Oh, did I forget to say that I have been wrong before?