tales of copper city

Back to the election maps and the future

It helps from time to time to recall the differential distribution of election results as filtered through our system of 50 states and the electoral college.  It's complicated but it reminds us that even though public opinion may be skewed toward, say, reforming the health care system, the fortunes of the two parties are so equally distributed that a more conservative democracy may lose in a presidential election yet lose because conservative democracy has a fallback position: stalling, obfuscation and outright lying.

And the winning party may be less than skillful in countering these fallback maneuvers on the part of the losing party.

In time the public may grow so frustrated, disgusted, and mistrustful of the winning party for its inability to deliver on its promises and even administer a punishing rebuke to the winning party in a state like Massachusetts that should have been perfectly safe. 

The real world of crazy conservatives

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones on the sad fact that, while some conservative writers hold nuanced views on the issues of the day, in the real world that liberals live in, they are fighting some truly crazy ideas.  Here's an excerpt from Drum's piece, which is a must-read:

Why Washington loves the filibuster

Jonathan Chait of the The New Republic has an excellent piece on why official Washington is reluctant to give up the filibuster.  Meanwhile the nation lies in gridlock.  An impressive electoral victory by President Obama is dribbling away, which, of course, is why the Republicans love the filibuster.

And Obama refuses to retaliate with recess appointments over the Senatorial "holds" on his appointments.  

Barack Obama seems harder to understand the more we get to know him.  He lets the Republicans have their way with him.  

Dancing at two weddings

Obama's latest comments expressing admiration for several top bankers, and indifference to their bonuses, despite his recent criticism of the same, is a reflection of his attempt to "dance at two weddings."

He's trying to convince the chief capitalists that he understands that they live in a "winner take all" capitalism, while the rest of us don't and that this is just how capitalism works and he's okay with that.

(Of course, as Paul Krugman points out, these particular capitalists nearly brought the whole show down, which is far, far more important an issue than their grotesque salaries.)

And Obama is also trying to say that he's on the side of Main Street and those who are not participating in  "winner take all" capitalism and never will. 

This is the basic contradiction of the Democratic Party: it wants to cozy up to the chief capitalists and not just for campaign contributions, and it also wants to appear as dyed-in-the wool populists or at least progressives. 

 This is what I mean by "dancing at two weddings" and it is killing the Democratic Party. 

Gratitude

For all my complaining and criticizing I am so grateful that President Barack Obama is sitting in the Oval Office. Here in .pdf format are some wonderful pictures of  The_First_Family that are surely making it around the Internet.

Gracias a Dios.

A striking contradiction

As noted in by Henrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker, a headline in the Village Voice, the day after the Massachusetts election, read like this: “SCOTT BROWN WINS MASS. RACE, GIVING GOP 41-59 MAJORITY.”

And this:  Kevin Drum reports on Bruce Bartlett's response to Governor Pawlenty's likely race for president in 2012.  Bartlett, a former Bush adviser, argues that Pawlenty,

Like all Republicans these days, Pawlenty wants to have it every possible way: complain about the deficit while ignoring everything his party did to create it (Medicare Part D, two unfunded wars, TARP, earmarks galore, tax cuts up the wazoo, irresponsible regulatory and monetary policies that created the recession that created the deficit, etc.), illogically insisting that tax cuts are a necessary part of deficit reduction, and never proposing any specific spending cuts.

Across the border line

I spent the morning across the U.S.-Mexico border at Naco, commemorating two years of operation for El Centro de Recursos para Migrantes, the Migrant Resource Center.  A special part of the ceremony was to dedicate our new toilet, a much appreciated addition by volunteers and migrantes.  The baño was built by some of the volunteers and others who are friends of the Center.

Founded by Cecile Lumer and Peter Young, both of Bisbee, the purpose of the center is to offer food, clothing, water, limited medical attention, a telephone call to family, and, for many, money to return home by bus, if the returned migrants so wish.  

The system is rigged

The State of the Union speech the president gave last night was good, but I'm still concerned that President Obama is not fighting the way he should to defeat our democratic system's built-in advantages for conservatives and the status quo. 

There is no doubt that the president understands how the system is biased against progressive change; yet he shows little tendency to use the resources of his office to fight back against these biases by really getting into the faces of some conservative Democratic Senators or by constantly reminding the public about how the system is stacked in favor of money and power.

I write a lot about how we have two systems of democracy in the U.S.: progressive democracy and conservative democracy that uses the built-in biases of our Constitutional order originally designed to defend the Slave Power (the South) and slavery and ever since to defeat a more progressive democracy.  

What happens after Massachusetts?

Yesterday, I would have wagered that Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts Attorney General and Democratic candidate for the Senate in Massachusetts would in the end squeeze out a victory on Tuesday. 

I was wrong.  And now we will have endless analyses about what happened and what needs to change. Here's mine.

1.  Retail politics.  People everywhere like to be asked for their vote, face-to-face as much as that is possible. Massachusetts especially likes retail politics. Martha Coakley didn't seem to appreciate this fact and even if she did she isn't good at it, and this counts in a state that reveres hands-on politics. 

Actually, I think Coakley knew her weaknesses and she was determined to coast to victory given the overwhelming number of registered Democrats. Why give a political unknown free publicity with a too aggressive campaign? And this angered Independents and some Democrats and energized the Republicans.  

And by the way, where was the White House back when it became obvious that Coakley was running a bad campaign?  Why did they wait until it was too late?

Above all, voters don't like to be taken for granted.  They read that as arrogance.  I saw the same thing happen here in a small town election and it ain't pretty.

2. The divides within the Democratic party. The far more important point is that the Democrats have a huge problem.  The opposition Democrats  face within their own party in rounding up sufficient votes for victory, whether in reforming Wall Street or health care, has not been lost on the ordinary voter, whether Democrat, Independent, or Republican.  

This endless controversy has given the average voter pause. Who is taking their side when they are losing their homes and the banks are thumbing their nose at the Obama administration? And given all the confusion over health care reform, do the Democrats know what they're doing?

Government

I found this entry under government in Frederick Buechner's Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary.

If...governments don't reflect the dreams of the people they govern or serve their wills...you wonder what on earth governments are.  Reading the newspapers you get the sense of them as small, irascible groups within each capital---far more of them men than women---who behave in ways that under normal circumstances would land them in the slammer in no time flat. They seem to have a life and purpose of their own quite apart from the lives and purposes of anyone else. They are perpetually locked in desperate struggles with each other that have little to do with the general human struggle to live and let live with as little fuss as possible. It's we ourselves who have given them the power to pull the whole world down on our heads, and yet we seem virtually powerless to stop them...

About the only objection I have to Buechener's lament is that it is too narrow in scope.  The same powerlessness we feel toward our democracy we also feel toward those gigantic institutions in the so-called private sector who control our lives in ways that we are powerless to prevent.

I have taught government and politics all my life and in my retirement I wonder if in my teaching I had become something of an apologist for a democracy that has simply proved inadequate to our times and challenges, incapable of bringing the powers that be, inside and outside of government, back to the business at hand of helping us live out our days with as little fuss as possible. 

Instead they largely seem interested keeping us on the edge of our seats waiting for the next fresh hell that government should have prevented or prepared us for years ago.