tales of copper city

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.

"Obama's Wars"

Bob Woodward has a new book coming out, Obama's Wars, and I don't plan to read it. I probably should. But the main "news" is the disarray in the White House over Afghanistan, according to the New York Times.

Many of the top people, including some among the military, seem to believe that we are headed for failure.  

What was their first clue?

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.

Living with hopelessness and death

Pema Chodron, in her book, When Things Fall Apart, writes about living with hopelessness and death in a short but utterly shattering chapter that, on first reading, I completely rejected.  I've always been in the hope business, hoping for the next election, the next job, the next town, the next whatever. Chodron argues that we have to give that up; that kind of hope is a delusion. Everything changes, everything goes away, everything can disappoint. "Life is about getting into a boat that is just about to sail out to sea and sink," she writes, quoting Shunryu Suzuki. That's a little strong, especially when you are 73, as I am, but you get the point.

Contingency rules

“This is merely contingency.”

This was the first comment I received after a noon seminar to a group of bioethicists, the new field that had formed to minister to the rapidly growing medical industrial complex

I almost laughed out loud. I wasn’t really sure what my questioner specifically meant by his comment, but I knew a thing or two about contingency.

I knew that for my life contingency ruled and it also ruled in the strange field of public health that I had accidentally stumbled into.

Across the border line

Here is a wonderful blog, The Border Reporter, that reports on news that has made it across the border line.  I agree totally with the author's essay about the baleful impact of the likely legislation requiring local police to stop and investigate whether an individual is in this country illegally. This is a very bad idea for reasons I will add later in addition to those mentioned by The Border Reporter.

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.