I hadn't been following the Iranian election very closely, but the outcome--victory for a hard-line, anti-US candidate who has publicly committed to continuing Iran's nuclear program--should be cause for concern whatever one's political leanings. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sounds bad enough anyway; the real issue in my view, though, is how he's likely to strike our own hard-liners in power.
Last week's Watergate revelations got me thinking, again, about how cultural issues have cut against the Democrats from the days of Nixon onward. Since 1968, the increasing importance of these issues---from drugs to abortion to gay rights---has served to crack the mid-century Democratic coalition and led to ever-greater Republican political dominance.
It's an enduring frustration to me that even many on the right---hell, Tom DeLay himself, in the context of his attacks on Howard Dean---will pay at least occasional lip service to past Democratic leaders like Roosevelt, Truman and JFK, all of whom were far more "liberal" on economic issues than most modern Democrats; the explanation, I suppose, is that none of those past Democratic titans ever had to weigh in publicly about gay marriage or even whether or not they'd ever inhaled. For most in the kulturkampf krew, these issues far more than economic policy are prone to spike the blood pressure.
Every time I hear James Dobson or one of his fellow would-be theocrats talking about how persecuted Christians are, I always flash to Germany announcing to the world that Poland fired first in September 1939. But The American Prospect lets us know that more such victimization claims are on the way:
NOTE: This diary is adapted/expanded from a comment I made yesterday, in this thread
It's more than a year away, but it already looks like the biggest political battle of 2006 will be for the Pennsylvania Senate seat currently held by the odious Rick Santorum, R-Extremism.
The tension within the Republican Party between the would be theocrats and the oligarchs makes it much, much harder for Karl Rove to get rid of Tom DeLay than, say, Paul O'Neill, or even Trent Lott.
I can't imagine that it's only people like Bull Moose who are asking why, if "values voters" are the base of the party, the Republicans have poured so much more time and effort into destroying Social Security than banning gay marriage, censoring everything on TV and radio, and pushing the anti-abortion crusade to its presumptive climax. Already we've seen the Dobson and Lou Sheldon types throwing occasional snit fits over what they perceive as the administration's insufficient enthusiasm for their pet issues.
I've maintained since the November election that the current political situation in the United States is analogous to a "Cold Civil War"--deep, possibly irreconcileable differences between opposing factions, but no actual violence, thank goodness.
What's at stake is the future direction of the country and whether we'll essentially continue the incrementalist, process-driven system envisioned by the Founders and refined through the liberal consensus of the mid-20th century, or whether we'll move to a very different model of free-market fundamentalism coupled with social coercion backed by tacit or explicit state power. The battlefields are the halls of Congress, the TV and radio airwaves, newspaper op-ed pages, and whatever real or virtual forums remain that are frequented by people of different political persuasions.
I think this is a unique moment in American political history: a political party that has run against "government" for 40 years, now controls it lock, stock and barrel.
And they're showing, on a daily basis, just how unequipped they are to carry out the national business. They take symbolic steps, as in the Schiavo case, but eschew systemic approaches; their words embrace compassion and a "culture of life", while their governing priorities, such as the bankruptcy bill, show total disdain for quality of life. It's the logical and obvious extension of their illogical and incoherent position on abortion: we'll mandate that you have the kid, but once s/he's out of the womb, don't look to us for help.
On the heels of his statement yesterday reaffirming his support for Bush's counterproductive and probably doomed Social Security "reform" scheme, FED chair Alan Greenspan today suggested that the government look into a tax on consumption as a spur to growth.
Not only does this run counter to every notion of progressive taxation--I don't even see how it could raise revenues, based on the caveats Greenspan himself quickly added to the idea:
While Sen. Reid and Chairman Dean have helped stiffen the Democrats' collective spine and start acting like an opposition party, and the tenor of the Social Security debate thus far has been somewhat encouraging, we are continuing to give ground on key issues and conduct politics on terms and terrain all too favorable to the Republicans.
Exhibit A: the atrocious bankruptcy bill apparently set for Congressional passage. As with the recently enacted tort reform measure--but worse, for reasons I'll explain below--this is nothing more than a gift to the Republican donor class. Its likely effect will be accelerate some of the most dispiriting economic trends in the country, and worse, it's looking like a major missed opportunity for Democrats to make a stand on an issue that could energize the public.
I got into a conversation on another website recently about MA Gov. Mitt Romney, whom the proprietor of that site--an independent who generally votes Democrat at the presidential level, is with us on most economic and foreign-policy issues, and is probably to the left of most Kossacks on environmental issues, but is anti-abortion and favors school vouchers--thinks would be a formidable and appealing Republican presidential nominee in 2008. I wrote back to him that Romney, like most "moderate" Republicans who win statewide races in the northeast, might well be a tough candidate in a general election, but would never survive the Republican primaries: the same positions that made him palatable to a sufficient number of Massachusetts Democrats would damn him with both Republican primary voters and--more importantly--the power-brokers within the party, of both the Norquist and Dobson stripes.
George F. Kennan turned 101 years old last week. Now more or less retired in (I think) New Jersey, the legendary geostrategic thinker and intellectual architect of the Cold War is long departed from the news, if not this mortal world. But it occurred to me this weekend that Kennan's greatest conceptual breakthrough--containment--by default has become the operative philosophy of all Americans fearful of the excesses of the Bush administration and the right-wing ideologues who power its actions.
I'm a public policy researcher with a think tank based in New York City. A few months ago my organization co-published a report on low-income working families in New York state, which was pretty well received by the policy community, local and state officials, and the media with significant coverage in the New York Times, Albany Times-Union and other outlets around the state. Bob Herbert also prominently cited the report in the first column he wrote after Thanksgiving, even quoting from the intro I wrote for it. (Yes, this was a thrill.) On the other side of the political spectrum, business groups and even some Pataki administration officials had praise for the report as well.
So I'm sitting at my desk this afternoon working on something else and the phone rings.
I'm at work today, trying to avoid the gushing foppery masquerading as news and trying to keep my chin and spirits up on a day that strikes me as an apt occasion for mourning--certainly not a $40 million celebration in which the losers (the people of DC) are forced to pick up part of the tab.
The reality of another four years of this utterly vile government--its blend of malice and ineptitude, its astonishing arrogance, its inabilty to do anything well except, I guess, self-perpetuate through election victories--brings back all the despair I felt in those first few days after November 2. Worse, we've now seen more indications of Democratic surrender: the disgusting performances of "our" Senators in the Gonzales and Rice hearings, the baffling support of many inside the party estabishment for status-quo insiders in the race for DNC Chair. Our elder statespeople--the Bidens, the Feinsteins--in recent days have looked as spineless and unprincipled as their radical critics have long alleged. I never wanted to believe those charges; now I don't see how anyone can feel otherwise.
I've met Joe Biden a couple times, including once almost ten years ago to the day when he and his staff very generously spent the better part of three hours with a college senior who wasn't quite sure what to do with himself. His father and my grandfather were close friends, which is why I was able to sit down with him, but he was truly gracious, funny and insightful as I tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my working life. The meeting cemented the good impression I'd gotten from both family stories and Richard Ben Cramer's portrayal of Biden in the classic campaign memoir What It Takes: very smart guy, sharp and focused, funny, committed.
Floundering around for some way to keep my spirits up and sanity intact in the weeks after November 2, I tried to come up with some ideas for Democrats to mount a more effective opposition. One of them involved the concept, presented by colorless green ideas in this recent (excellent) diary, of turning Democrats' proven record of more effective economic management management into support at the polls.
The essence of fiscal responsibility, IMO, is opposition to deficits and addressing problems today rather than putting them off for later generations. With that in mind, here's what I initially came up with:
I was back in suburban Philadelphia, where I grew up, this past weekend, and thinking about the state of the Democrats and what makes oppositional politics work. As some of you might remember, the decisive vote for Clinton's 1993 deficit reduction and economic stimulus plan was cast by Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, a House Democrat who'd won my home district after something like 40 years of Republican control of the seat. When she cast it, the minority Republicans immediately started serenading her with "Goodbye Margie," all but promising to beat her brains in with this (tax-raising) vote in the midterm elections nearly a year and a half later.
I did something really, really dumb today. In a comment on the Howard Dean Does the Footwork diary, I noted in passing that Tim Roemer's position on abortion doesn't really bother me, as DNC chair doesn't really carry any institutional heft on the issue, and that in general I think the Democrats would gain from being less ideological on "cultural" issues.
Before I knew it, I was being described as "contemptuous", "ignorant", "condescending", "attention-seeking" and worse. Not because I personally oppose reproductive rights; I don't, and I took pains to note this again and again. But because I suggested that maybe it was politically wise for Democrats to think about how we were coming across to voters who, rightly or wrongly (and I'm less sure that they're wrong now than I was before I stepped into this quagmire), perceive the Democratic Party's position on abortion to be universally in favor of it, with no restrictions of limitations.
So as we know, the media blitz is coming and we need a counter-campaign NOT designed by Bob Shrum and the rest of the "professional election losers" of the Democratic establishment. We also know that the congressional Republican caucus is already feeling trepidation on this. Kos writes, and I agree, that we must give no quarter. But I also think that there is vast opportunity here--Social Security reform could be the same political graveyard for the Republicans in Congress that health care reform was for the Democrats in 1993-94.
There are already some good ideas percolating out there. Josh Marshall has the fact-based case at his blog: there's no crisis and the scheme will be a loser for most Americans. But we can't just offer a dispassionate defense of the status quo: we need to blow up the Republicans' arguments by appealing to the gut as well as the brain
