Obama: Hope? Hope He Can Throw a Punch

Every once in a while I catch a "Classic Boxing" match on TV.  The fights which really amaze me are the ones where the fighters don't seem to be able to do much at all for the first thirteen rounds and then in the last two rounds there are more flurries and, sometimes, out of nowhere a punch seems to land and it's all over.

I'm hoping President Obama is in that mode.

Since the last election, I've been dismayed at his inability to throw a punch. He blocks some punches reasonably well, or he did when his opponents were Sarah Palin and John McCain, but against this Romney cat, who seems to be channeling Reagan, right  down to his voice, the President has been, as he usually is, pretty quiet.

Now his managers seem to have come up with a strategy of attacking the Mitt with the same invective his Republican opponents used: The guy is a vulture capitalist and what that means is "I got mine. You're on your own." So he makes his money in the US of A, using the internet the government gave him, the roads the government built him, flying around at airports safeguarded  courtesy of the FAA, and then he parks all the money he made in Swiss bank accounts and off shore islands, having used the tools his country's government provided but being unwilling to pay the taxes which would repay, in some small measure, the government which made all this possible.

It's the old idea of his having been born on third base, and thinking he hit a triple: He had all the advantages given him and he winds up believing he earned those advantages through his own efforts, without help from anyone else.

It's what the Republicans have to sell. And the Democrats are finally beginning to voice some tepid disapproval.  But the Democrats still can't throw any big blows. They are still satisfied with a few jabs to keep their opponents from launching any big shots of their own.  

Here's what a good right cross would sound like: 
 "You know, I tried  to find common ground with Republicans since I became President, but haven't had much luck. There just isn't much I can find to agree with,  coming from them. But I finally have found something I can agree with at least some Republicans, those Republicans who described Governor Romney as a 'vulture capitalist.' Now, that's not a phrase I originated; that's their phrase. In fact, I can find no definition of it. But if they mean a man who swoops down on a dying company and starts eating away at it, who takes what he can from it while it's struggling to survive and says, 'I got mine. You're on your own,' well then, I can agree that is what we've seen of Governor Romney. He parks his money, made off the suffering of ordinary working Americans, in Swiss bank accounts and then claims he wasn't responsible for how that money was made. It all happened, he doesn't know how, while he was off managing the Olympics. Well, if he didn't know how, he should have.  And you sure should know how. This is not just politics as usual. I am talking about a man and his values. The saddest part is, he cannot even see what is wrong with what he did.  He thinks the right values are, 'I get mine and you ought to go out and get yours, but we owe nothing to each other or to the collective effort we call the government of the United States of America. We can hide our money from the government which nurtured us, and that's just all in the game. Because that's all it is to us.  As Republicans, we don't see any ethical obligation to give back. We just take all we can.'"

Bite or Be Bitten

"American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt...My friends who will not recognize this fact seem to me like a bunch of musicians sitting down to play a symphony concert in a forest where there is a man-eating tiger loose. For my part, much as I enjoy symphony concerts, I want to put my fiddle away in its case and get a rifle and go out and settle with the tiger."

             Upton Sinclair, 1918.

At times like these, when President Obama seems constitutionally incapable of answering the Republican cannonade, it is reassuring to remember this is not a new thing in our history. There have always been men, leaders even, who are not up to the fight, who would fiddle while the republic burns, thinking somehow they are not dealing with predators but rather with nice gentlemen in smoking jackets who will want to retire for cigars and bourbon after the debate. 

President Obama should be saying:  "The Republicans are bought and sold by billionaires like the Koch brothers, and all those who sail with them. They dance on the string manipulated by these rich, shaddowy men, and if you vote Republican, you are on the end of that same string. It is a string which connects the Republican Supreme Court, which has ruled, rather which has created rules which make it legal and Constitutional for rich men to buy and own politicians. This is the difference between me and my opponent and his party. I am owned by no one. I am owned by the American public, and I believe that public without a strong and vibrant middle class is terminally ill."

Dream on, Mad Dog. The vicious will bite and the kind hearted will be bitten.

The Supreme Court Wrecking Ball

It is pretty remarkable, reading reactions to the Supreme court ruling on Obamacare, to see people writing in the New York Times who are supposed to know what they are talking about saying such stupid things:  Thomas Friedman tells us, "I was inspired by a simple noble leadership impulse at a critical juncture in our history--to preserve the legitimacy and integrity of the Supreme Court as being above politics." And Adam Liptak, who is the Times' Supreme Court correspondent, a Yale graduate, seems incapable of the most rudimentary analysis, saying, "In the last term, the Roberts court proved itself resistent to caricature...Roberts recast the legacy of his court."


The fact is, this one decision by Roberts did not undo the radically rightward posture of the court, and in fact, as Pamela Karlan, a Stanford professor of public interest observed, it did just the opposite. By ruling Congress could not pass laws under the commerce clause, but only under its right to tax, Roberts served notice the Congress could do precious little in the future, without his stamp of approval. 

Under the commerce clause and the clauses which allow Congress to provide for the public welfare, and under the enforcement powers of the 14th ammendment the Congress was able to pass the New Deal and to forbid landlords from rejecting tenants on the basis of race or religion; it was able to prohibit development of fragile wetlands; it was able to establish Medicare and to require schools receiving federal aide to give girls equal opportunity to play sports. Under its role in promoting the general welfare, it could fund the National Institutes of Health and under its 14th amendment powers, it could prohibit local laws which discriminate against voters of certain races with bogus voter ID laws. 


All of this is under attack by right wing extremists, and they now know they have a sympathetic court, at least 4 members of that court on whom they can rely.


Adam Liptak tells us the court is no longer a 5 conservative, 4 liberal court of idealogs, and the chart (reproduced from the Times article above) shows, he says how true this is. But if you stop to really look at this chart, it suggests exactly the opposite. In cases where there is a substantial social content, i.e. where it's a powerless individual against an authority, like the strip search case, or the case of 14 year old defendants facing life sentences or the case where a defendant faces a plea bargin, you have the Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts tetrad voting for entrenched power always. The fact that Kennedy sometimes switched to vote with the liberals does not make the court any less predictably conservative. 

Of course, half the cases are decided by 9-0 votes, but those are the cases which have no social/political aspect. When values and politics are at stake, the four horsemen of the radical right are to the right of Rush Limbaugh, and with Justice Scalia channeling Limbaugh, one might think Romney will nominate Limbaugh to the Court, if he gets the chance. Why not? 


The Times editorial board got it right when they said, "They have been radical innovators, aggressively stepping into political issues to empower the court itself."


If Romney wins this election, we are in for decades of conservative ascendancy, through the court. 


If Obama wins, there is at least a chance, if he has enough Congressman winning with him, he could take the advice scholars have given:  Add two new Supreme Court Justices during his term and two new justices for each new presidential term until 19 have been seated and allow only the most recent 9 to vote on decisions. That way the court could be openly political as it now pretends not to be, and it would reflect the trend in electoral politics, as the tide ebbs liberal or conservative. 


But at least we would escape a conservative court dragging us down when the rest of the country has changed its mind--which is just what happened during the Great Depression and which almost sunk us then.

What is a Republican?

I suppose this is an unsophisticated question.  After all, we all know country club Republicans and we know what they think about most things: They are rich and want to stay that way and want to pass all they have on to their children. But then there are the Joe Sixpack Republicans who drive trucks or maybe they own a gas station/garage or maybe they put on siding or do HVAC.  These people are more interesting. These are people who have not made enough money to join a country club and never will, but what are they thinking?

Well, for one thing they think "government" is essentially just another incarnation of the vice principle in charge of discipline they hated in high school. They may like their friend, the cop, but in general they don't like police. They certainly do not like the IRS or the federal government, although they love the Armed Forces and they cross their hearts and take off their hats when the national anthem is played at ball games. They own guns, or at least they like shooting them at gun ranges and it makes them feel as powerful as any black man who might happen to be President. They may harbor the dream of someday moving to Idaho and living off the grid, where no government can find them.  On the other hand, they love the idea of government agents stopping a car of Hispanic looking men and demanding "their papers" and dragging off these criminal invaders to some jail for the crime of   wanting to pick crops or build homes or bus dishes for minimum wages.

They agree with Ron Paul that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional, although they make no provision for their own retirement or health insurance and their parents are dependent on both federal programs and if their parents didn't have these programs, then their parents would become dependent on them.

They hate the idea they are not lone gunslingers riding across the endless grassy plains, dependent on no one. They live in fact in a technicolor fantasy world which is deeply contradictory in its beliefs and unconnected to reality.

But they like it. 

Sabotage

Mitch McConnell is a name few of my neighbors here in New Hampshire know.  They know the names of the Boston Red Sox players, but that's about as far from New Hampshire as many of them extend their interests.


Mitch McConnell is a Washington creature. Voters from Kentucky send him to the Senate because he's Southern slick. He can stab you in the back and you think he's just patting you on the back. 


One thing about Mitch though, he occasionally is disarmingly honest: When speaking of some legislation designed to pump federal government money back into the economy, to stimulate, resuscitate and invest he examined the proposal and concluded it might just actually be good for the economy and balked. If he allowed this bill to get through the Senate the economy might recover and he said, "Why would I want to help elect Obama to another term? My first priority is defeating him."


So there you have it, put about as plainly as you will ever get from anyone in Washington. The Republican leadership frankly acknowledges they perceive their job to make the citizens of this country so miserable they will blame the President and throw him out.


Implicit in all this is the conviction the voters are stupid enough to not realize or to not care if they do realize the responsibility for the failure in the "Obama economy" lies with the Republican party and it's refusal to act for the benefit of the country.


I suppose, what they are really saying is: Having Obama is such an evil outcome, it is better to make the people, the economy, the children, the patients, all the nation's  institutions suffer  than it is to keep this horrible person in office. 


I am told this is not a new concept in American history--I am told that opposition parties of the past have thought it their primary job to defeat the devil incarnate in the White House at all costs. I will look into this.  I suppose you might say the election of Lincoln was such a time, but in his case it wasn't just the opposition party hated him--they hated him for a reason, They thought he would end slavery. 


In Obama's case, it's a little like the question we were all asking after the Twin Towers attack--Why do they hate us so?


Of course, the Republicans call him names--a socialist, a radical--but he's a pretty mild mannered guy with a very centrist agenda and he's been willing to compromise more than his own supporters feel comfortable with.  The "reasons" spewing forth from Rush Limbaugh and company are, it must be admitted, pretty lame. It is clear Rush and company are in fact genuinely apoplectic about the simple fact Obama is living in the White House. They do not like the man, or they do not like what he is. 


Looking at President Obama on television, I don't get it. He strikes me as so inoffensive. That's the maddening thing about him, from my point of view: I wish he were more offensive, more like Barney Frank, for example. Someone who can throw a punch, someone who will reply to some Tea Party loonie who calls Obama a Nazi, "On what planet do you spend the majority of your time?"  


So why do they hate this man so? Why would they be willing to bring down World Trade, National Trade, The Entire Economy just to rid the country of this ostensibly inoffensive president? What has been his offense?


You will have to draw your own conclusions. 


My own is GWB, or attempting to.

On the Eve of The Supreme Court Decision

While we await the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare, the New Yorker appears with an article by Ezra Klein, "Unpopular Mandate,"  which expands understanding: It begins by summarizing the history of how this law came into existence, and ends with a study of belief systems. 

As for the history of this law, it, oddly enough, originated in ideas which had their gestation in Republican think tank, The Heritage Foundation, in 1989, the idea of a mandate to buy something appealing to conservative thinkers and it was served up as an alternative to what conservatives really feared, the single payer. Years later, Democrats, realizing they could never get a single payer (read government) system like Medicare-for-all through the narrowly divided Congress, picked up this idea. Democrats like Ron Wyden managed to get some Republicans to support the principle and through various iterations it emerged as a compromise from the Democrats. 

But, of course, when the Republicans saw a Democratic success gathering force, they reacted in a great panicked howl and the day after the law passed, Republicans launched their lawsuits to bring it down.  All the authorities said there was absolutely no way this law, this mandate,  could be unconstitutional--all the authorities but the unschooled ignoramuses like Mad Dog, who knows very little, but he does know one big thing--This Supreme Court will always vote for those in power and against those trying to disrupt the status quo. 

Klein ends by reviewing a set of studies in which people who identified themselves as either very liberal or very conservative were presented with two sets of proposals for a welfare policy, one which proposed  more generous welfare benefits than have ever been enacted, but it was labeled as emanating from a very conservative Republican source; the other was a proposal for a meager, scaled back program,  labeled as embraced by Democrats. 


Intriguingly, the conservative readers embraced the generous ultra welfare program, presumably because the label "Republican program" over rode the effect of the actual content of the program. The readers really did not care about the specific content, all they cared about was the "reference group" or, I would argue, they started with the idea of where they wanted to go, and they circled back to that no matter what the "facts" of the program were. (The liberals did the same thing, choosing the decimated program for the poor because it was labeled the Democratic alternative.)


This is sort of the "Only Nixon Could Go to China" syndrome. Well, if Nixon says it's okay to make nice with the Chinese, it must be. We can trust him on this. He's the ultimate cold warrior. If Kennedy had tried to do this, or Clinton, or certainly Obama, well then, it would have been treason.

And that is clearly the way the five member majority of the Supreme Court functions: It considers the source and circles back to where it wants to be. The details, the substance, all principle is over ridden by the ultimate goal--in the case of the court, to thwart the liberal, the Democrat and to support the conservative.

By this reading, had this very same law had been presented to the Court as a Republican  law, challenged by the Democrats, Antonin Scalia would have risen up in righteous indignation over the attack, asking why the Democrats objected to the operation of a market place solution in a capitalist society?

If this election were about something really substantive, for my money, it would be about electing a Democratic president with enough of a Democratic majority in both houses, to push through a reform of the Supreme Court, with three new justices and only the most recent 9 being able to vote on new cases.  Remember the Constitution does not specify how many justices, and no amendment would be necessary.


I would love to see Obama re elected, but truth be told, if he is not given a Congress to support him it would be like pushing the man out of the plane without a parachute--there's no way he can bring you anything if you don't provide him with the means. He'll just wind up flattened on the ground.