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Nothing From Nothing Leaves Nothing

My last post about the President being merely mediocre as opposed to a total failure elicited familiar comments about the threat posed by President Obama as the Democrats who will eviscerate Social Security and Medicare. I tend to think it's a testament to his mediocrity that something the President hasn't even done continues to be the biggest concern about his Presidency - as bad as he is... most likely he'll get worse.

In a remarkably scandal-free August, the President has spent the past week or so touring the Midwest on a bus run of three states, largely unsuccessfully trying to reverse generally negative assessments of his recent handling of the economy. His latest threat is to offer some sort of "jobs proposal" next month, a near perfect encapsulation of all that is wrong with his Presidency: more speeches, less doing, no real attempt to offer practical solutions to problems real people face, and doing next month what arguably should have been done yesterday, or months ago.

Is it any wonder then that even the President's most ardent supporters are reduced to making the weak argument that the President deserves reelection because the Presidency is ineffectual?

I've been a big fan of "VastLeft" over at Corrente and his(?) darkly funny cartoon dialogue between Obama supporters and Obama skeptics. Recently, this cartoon has become part of a duel between Glenn Greenwald and Scott Lemieux over just how ineffectual Obama has been and whether it's a function of the person, or the nature of the Presidency.

At the risk of shocking some regular readers, and in an attempt to reclaim some "true left" cred, I'd just like to say I'm pretty much with Greenwald (and Armando over at TalkLeft) on this one: it's Obama who's ineffective, not the Presidency. The bigger problem - and why the cartoon is so depressingly prescient - is that in a choice between Mr. Ineffective and some rabid right wing Republican... I'll still pick the ineffective Obama.

This goes back to a point I've been trying to make about the problem with reelecting Obama; as it stands, it seems entirely likely to me that Democrats, and some independents, will turn out strongly to reelect the President, despite the fact that a significant portion of the President's base of support is less than thrilled with him. Grimly reelecting a mediocre, ineffective President may be enough for the President's team (they already seem curiously detached from the very real frustrations of many true lefties), but it's going to make for a dismal few years of the President most likely pleasing no one. And then we face the prospect of trying to reconstitute left wing politics in time for 2016.

It's not that I'm worried, as so many still are, about how "dangerous" President Obama is to Social Security and Medicare; as I said last time, I don't think the angry left is giving enough credit to the President's actual successes in staving off the very worst of what the right has to offer (including especially lousy ideas like privatization of entitlement programs). But this President's mediocrity is dangerous because he's been so ineffectual on the crucial issues that probably matter most in solving our economic woes: sorting out the mortgage mess, reasserting some control over the banking and finance industries, dealing with health care costs rather than providing health insurance, and on and on.  

If President Obama is no President Bush - forcing through damaging, dreadful policies until the country simply can't take anymore - that's probably been more a saving grace than an absolute disaster. Yes, it's dismal to watch things like last December, where the President negotiated with himself on some "middle ground" position on the Bush tax cuts, rather than simply letting all of them expire. It's not the Presidency that's ineffective, it's this President. 

Even so, the problem of this President not being the liberal anyone seems to want him to be isn't all his fault; it's the confluence of how Obama was sold to the public in 2007 and 8, along with considerable disarray within the left, and the lack of a clear sense of purpose and direction as to what we're trying to accomplish. The coming election is shaping up to be a depressing rehash of the same old arguments in part because there's no real organized effort from the left to challenge the incumbent President. That's not something that can entirely be blamed on the President. If he's giving the left nothing to believe in... there's no real search for the "something" that would be better than nothing. 

And that's the thing: as bad as he is, Barack Obama is a preferable alternative to anything Republicans are likely to offer up - surely better than the prospects offered by Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachmann, and now Rick Perry or even Paul Ryan. It's that grim choice, and those lousy alternatives that define the shape of the coming election, how bad it will be, how dismal we will feel after all is said and done. He's the mediocre option we're apparently stuck with. And next to nothing... is about as good as it gets.

Teachable Moments... With Molly, Gail and Rachel

The transformation of Gail Collins into a latter day, New York based Molly Ivins is somehow sad to watch. I think Gail Collins was doing such a nice job of being Gail Collins – a savvy, feminist New Yorker with just a hint of jaded cynicism – that it’s near painful to watch her try and replicate Molly Ivins, and her personally brilliant style of sugar tipped, poisonous sarcasm.  The difference may seem nuanced, but Southerners, really, have cornered the market on seeming super nice while in fact being extra super bitchy.

In all of this, I blame Rachel Maddow: the more Collins becomes part of Maddow’s rotating cast of snarky columnists who share her darkly sarcastic take on the day’s events (It’s already ruined Chris Hayes and Gene Robinson, among others), the more her writing gets infected with trendy catchphrases (Maddow may well be the triumph of the Brooklyn Hipster on cable TV news), and the less Collins actually works to tether her otherwise trenchant commentary to deeper insights about the issues of the day.

There’s a string of recent NY Times columns to illustrate this, but let’s just take yesterday’s as the most recent. In it, Collins bemoans a generalized trend of increasingly turning over public education functions to private businesses – from for-profit colleges to charter school management firms, to teach certification enterprises – to make a case that this is proof that Republicans are terrible and education should be left to… well, Democrats. And I mention Ivins, because one of Collins key examples, and not isolated, is a long anecdote about for-profit teacher certification in Texas.

(This is probably as good a time as any to note that, since the New York Times has instituted that bizarre paywall scheme where you can only see a small number of articles for free in a month, I will no longer link to the Times. First, it’s a waste of my limited free article cache to look for article links; and second, clicking through without realizing it’s the Times wastes yours. If nothing else, I stand for the notion that newspaper articles should run free on the internet.)

Ivins, of course, was renowned for being an arch Texas liberal who made mincemeat of the failures and foibles of the Texas legislature, itself a spectacular, scandalous enterprise full of big characters and legendary outrageousness. And while that’s kind of similar to the amazingly dysfunctional mess-ups of the New York state legislature in Albany, it’s also very different. Collins has a finely honed sense of how to convey the mix of hopelessness and squalid decay of Albany and how it eats nearly every good thing and person put into it… but trying to pin her own snark onto Texas comes off – as it should – as condescending, a kind of northeastern class superiority that tends to undermine her sarcasm as she deploys it.

There’s a lot of attention on education at this moment – a symptom, I suspect, of the painful choices local governments have to make as our current economic realities dictate. Charter schools, teachers unions and pensions, vouchers for private schools… all of these issues stem, primarily from the reality that local governments can’t afford business as usual approaches to education spending. And along with for-profit colleges, the choices we are having to make, as parents, students, and members of our communities, are changing the nature of American education. It’s fair, I suppose, to bemoan the changes and note their negative impacts. But, reading between the lines of Collins’ dark cynicism, the alternatives are almost nonexistent. It’s basically “let’s not change anything, because the alternative are these terrible ideas that are terrible, in many ways, because conservatives like them.” It’s just not an answer.

I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate here and say that for-profit companies represent a potential positive development in education; my opposition is a combination of my Mom’s sense that things like people’s health and education should probably not be run for a profit… but also my own sense that, in fact, education is not a profitable enterprise, no matter how you try and provide it. The for-profit technical colleges may make money, but there’s a reason that the training they produce is held to a lower standard than that of not for profit schools. There’s also a reason that such options are proliferating, having everything to do with a fetishized notion that a “college degree” somehow makes a better, more employable person… and everything to do with an economic reality that training, say, to be a nurse or even a nurse’s aide, will at least get a job that pays the bills.

This new, Ivinized and Maddow-ish version of Gail Collins can, easily, unload her sarcastic venom on the various, crazy details of education policy in various localities… but the larger problem we have is the kind of thing I think a savvy New Yorker with vast experience and a jaded eye could inject some real insight: Charter schools and vouchers and all the rest are really details in an education debate about something very basic. Either we commit to a system of public education for children – and frankly, we don’t really have any serious alternative to it – and spend the money for it, or we don’t. Either way, there will no clear cost-benefit analysis that will prove we did the right thing.  Either way… there isn’t really a joke to be told.

 

On The Insignificant Moments, And The Pointless 47th Anniversaries

What do you get for a 47th anniversary?

I'm sure there's a Hallmark list out there somewhere, but I'm mostly being facetious; my point is... we don't generally concern ourselves with "anniversaries" that don't end in 5 or 0. And even then, we're probably being a bit excessive with our cultural addiction to mindless counting.

My larger point is that up until a few weeks ago, maybe, no one particularly cared that Glenn Beck was going to be part of a rally at the Lincoln Memorial which, as it turns out, happened to coincide with the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King giving his "I Have A Dream" speech at the same place.

Coincidence? Probably not. But unlike many who seem to be convinced the apocalypse is at hand - including many of Beck's fans, one might note - I tend to think the lesson from yesterday's gathering was mostly that collective assemblages on the Mall in DC are kind of silly. We like to think that America is a culture overwhelmed by mass opinions, run by the will of crowds, all too familiar with the tyranny of the majority.

The reality, I tend to suspect, is that in America we tend to ignore just how not true any of that is - that the real proof of the amazing freedoms that we've created in this country (the freedoms we are convinced will evaporate before our eyes at any moment), is just how little power the majority, or the crowd, has over any one of us. Nowhere, really, offers a place for the anarchist separatist quite like some out of the way spot in some forgotten corner of an American city. And nowhere else is that lonely separatist likely to find a bunch of others, free from intrusion or harassment by the outside world.

Let your freak flag fly, I say.

More Of The Helpful Advice Of Michael Bloomberg

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, for suggesting that "using an air conditioner" or "going to an air conditioned place" will help us in a 100 degree heatwave. What else can you tell us?

On winter:

"Put on a coat. Possibly a hat and some gloves."

"Stay indoors, where it's warm, or go to a warm place. I like to fly to Bermuda."

On energy savings:

"Turn that off. Do you think I'm made of money? Oh wait... I am."

"Close that door, or are you trying to air condition the entire neighborhood?"

On eating and diet:

"Do you really need a third cup of coffee? I'm thinking no."

"Instead of that high calorie meal, why not just have a protein bar?"

On dating:

"Would your mother approve of the guy with the tattoos? Probably not."

"Before you just rush off to bed... try going to a movie, or maybe out for a meal."

More to come... since the man can't seem to help himself.

Shrek 4: What's Forever For?

Virtually anything with a "4" after it's name is an exercise in disappointment - it's a sure sign of a tradition being carried on too long. In books and films (though not television, where a fourth season often means a show hitting its creative stride), it's generally an idea stretched too thin, characters with nowhere left to go, and plots that feel forced.

So, knowing that, why did I go to Shrek 4, a/k/a Shrek: This Has Gone On Too Long?

I have to admit, it's mostly the trailer. With its scattershot jokes at all sorts of modern, up to the minute trends and refusal to follow the fairy tale formulas, Shrek films were a somewhat subversive delight, the mass marketing of jaded cultural cynicism (a near perfect contradiction). And occasionally - more in the first two than the second two - the randy bits of humor wer enough to overlook the safe, reined in parts, and the fairly threadbare plotting that barely held it together.

Shrek: Forever After has little of the payoff of the others. It's not that the cultural commentary isn't there... it's just clear that no one, especially, tried very hard.(which is especially unfair to Eddie Murphy's still inspired turn as Donkey - all that puffed up showmanship has nowhere to go). But, in retrospect, the latest Shrek doesn't necessarily sit all that far from the others: and perhaps the real problem with the whole series is that the Shrek films have never, ever believed in real magic.

[And though I rarely do this, I feel it's only fair to say in this case, the review deserves a Spoiler Alert. I'm going to bring it key plot points of all four films]

NY Politics, The River Rolls On

What's so depressing - disgusting, really, but that's not a word I use comfortably - about the unraveling of New York state politics is how predictable and overdue it all is. I haven't written about Governor Paterson's recent run of bad press - or, more precisely, the growing examination of his chief aide David Johnson - because it just seemed like piling more on top of a conclusion I reached months ago: there was no reason for Paterson to run for a full term, and he probably shouldn't be Governor at all.

It's this kind of obviousness, like the fact that, even this week, his closest political allies could barely muster the frank words to tell him its over, that says more about what really dogs New York politics than anything else. In the end, it's not the scandals, which are so plentiful, or the number of politicians who benefit from the rusty broken Democratic machine still churning away across the state... it's the depressing (disgusting) fact that there's almost no one who will to stand up and try to stop it.

With Paterson, it seems clear that the reluctance to really call him out had everything to do with, well, poltical correctness of the worst sort, the sort that causes Democrats to flinch at having to be critical of a black man with a disability for fear of offending someone. Wanting to see progress for black people, or smashing old notions of seeing disabilities as limiting, becomes meaningless when we can't set minimal standards for expectations of competence, never mind hold onto expectations of excellence. We will one day, find a wonderful blind black man who will amaze us as a great Governor. That man is not David Paterson.

We can comfort ourselves, in New York, with the fact that no one, really, elected David Paterson Governor; this isn't a state where we carefully look at our Lieutenant Governor candidates (though many will now, I suspect) and they have been fascinating disasters (remember, we produced Betsy McCaughey). We've long put up with the fact (I've been watching this for more than 25 years, and I remain amazed) that Albany is corrupt, poorly run, and seems to suck the life and decency out of almost anyone who goes there. You learn not to get your hopes up. You learn to pretend it's not so bad and that minor efforts at progress can be looked at as major accomplishments. And when the next scandal breaks, you shake your head, and remember... it's always been thus.

I think Eliot Spitzer up-ended a lot of that cozy, sleepy acceptance; his dynamism, his energy, really did cause a lot of people to hope for some shaking up of Albany with his election, and his spectacular fall caught almost everyone short. Even now, there's a hearty band who insists that a former Attorney General who basically broke the laws he was sworn to enforce can somehow "come back" into elected politics; hope springs eternal. We won't be getting Spitzer back, though; we'll be getting Andy Cuomo, who by name and by reputation represents little hope for a fresh approach to changing the culture or improving the operation of state government overall.

Paterson could yet resign - he's clearly the lamest of ducks, and further revelations of scandal are bound to come - but that leaves us with the dubious prospect of Richard Ravitch, who was "appointed" to the Lt. Governor spot in a controversial, not entirely constitutional process. Making him Governor - with all the promises that he'd "do no harm" and "just serve as a placeholder" - will never be as simple, or as benign as some suggest. It's just another example of how New York government keeps getting made up as it rolls along, heedless of any connection to rational standards, or, you know, laws. Just ask Michael "third term" Bloomberg.

Paterson's no isolated example; he's the latest in a long line of disasters waiting to happen, like the State Senate that collapsed under his watch, like the Senator - Kirsten Gillibrand - he will have saddled us with for years and years to come. A lot, I suppose, will unravel as the house of cards of our state budget implodes under a weight of debt and poor choices stretching back years and years (an $8 billion shortfall this year, and surely worse news to come, both statewide and at local levels). And, as a passionate Democrat, if it means an unraveling of the sad, sleazy spectacle of my state's party... like many, I won't mind that so much (it's not as if state Republicans, flailing around with choices like Rick Lazio for Governor and George Pataki for Senator represent any kind of improvement). The real fools, now, are the people convincing themselves, still, that it's not so bad, that hope lies just around the next corner, in the persona of our next shining new pol. The water churns, the river rolls on... and if we maybe keep our heads above the water, we can put off drowning just a little while longer. Nothing, really, will save us.

Look, Muffy, An Editorial About Us!

One of my favorite things in the New Yorkers I read as a child growing up in Maryland were the little squibs at the end of long articles. They would feature misprints, examples of interesting malapropisms, typos that made a sentence completely unitintentiionally hilarious, things that newspapers miss in the rush to get the paper out the door.

That doesn't happen so much now - I blame Tina Brown - but my own sense of subversive humor gets re-kindled, now and again, while perusing the paper and tripping over an unintentionally hilarious or revealing moment. Like, for instance, yesterday's bizarre editorial on 3-D movies in the New York Times, which ends:

The actual world doesn’t have to create the illusion of its three-dimensionality. Its depth is so pervasive that we forget to notice it. We register it with a kind of 3-D equanimity, taking in everything as part of the natural field of view. There’s an unexpected serenity, a calmness, in how we see.

That was the pleasure of walking up Broadway from the theater. When a man looking for spare change said “Hey, bub!” his face didn’t leap into the foreground, nor did we suddenly see ourselves walking toward him from his point of view. The light mist that was falling didn’t hang like the northern lights between us.

It was a pleasure to take 3-D for granted and marvel, for a few blocks at least, at the subtlety of the special effects inherent in ordinary perception.

... missing from that last sentence? "Then we told the bum to stop bothering us, got in a cab, and headed back to the Upper East Side." Isn't New York glorious?

You Manipulative Son Of A...

Via Andrew Sullivan, one of the most flawless assessments of Glenn Beck yet, and further proof - as if it was needed - that Stephen Colbert is genius.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bend It Like Beck
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Michael Moore

The Future Is Now. And Really Far Away.

I haven't written politics for a while... indeed, a lot of my writing struggles have been to find something, anything, else to write about instead. Bring on the movie reviews!

Sure, some things have happened... but it's striking to me how little robust political discourse there is, just now, and few issues to really debate. My barometer in these things is dinner conversation with my Mom: if we can find  have a lively back and forth to wind up basically agreeing, things are okay. If we actually find a contentious point of serious disagreement, things are really good.

Lately, we're lucky if there's even one topic to discuss from an op-ed in the Times. And that's pretending that there's something even worth debating.

When I started thinking about this the other night, and trying to explain my political thinking just now, I realized... I said my peace about six months ago; and almost nothing has changed since then... except that things have gotten worse.

Back in April I said:

I think we may miss the biggest accomplishment the Obama Administration's first three months have wrought: that we now live in an exciting time... the future.

Yes, the biggest change, I'm starting to notice, is that we no longer live or speak politics in the present tense, but in a fascinating, conditional future tense - "If healthcare reform happens" or "when this economic crisis is over...."

If a picture paints a thousand words... we can't seem to paint one about how things actually are; or actually admit that... well, not much has actually happened. And herein lies a critique of The Obama Administration that hasn't quite taken hold yet: for all the talk about bold plans and brave ideas... we have very little to show in the way of actual change, actual reform, or any real action on all those multiple "key issues" that we're told are so crucial.

And mostly, I find the observation still holds: whether we continue to debate a healthcare reform plan - best described, at this late date, still, as "sketchy" - or the illusory elements of an economic recovery that is really not happening, our way of talking about politics continues to be in the conditional tense... how we will live if various developments take place... and much less consideration for things as they actually are.

Glennhoward Beck Beale

It's fun to talk about now nutty the Glenn Beck show is.

It's less funny - indeed, it's almost painful - to watch it.

If you're home at 5 - a time slot, one might recall, where Fox parked nearly as nutty John Gibson - you can try watching Beck; honestly, I get through about 7 minutes, tops before I just have to stop. People complain about Rush Limbaugh being toxic... but listening to Limbaugh's show is annoying mainly for the long and trying commercial breaks. Limbaugh himself? Disagreeable... but not nuts.

Beck's been bouncing around cable and radio for years, taken semi-seriously, largely dismissed as frings, but that changed when Fox made the decision to put him into the evening lead in slot (in a world where we accept that Neil Cavuto's lamer effort at 4 is ostensibly meant to be a Wall Street, business style wrap up of financial news). Since his arrival live at 5, Beck's sucked the oxygen out of taking much of cable news - and certainly most of Fox now - as a serious, respectable medium.

And to think, all he needed to do it was to make the fantasy of Network into reality.