NYCweboy

Sarah Superstar's Sequel

Since finishing her "book tour" - a term that really had little to do with book selling, in any case - Sarah Palin has found a new line of speaking engagements, as the official rep of "Tea Party, Inc."

And, as usual, she's garnered just what she wanted: publicity. And we're back to hand-wringing, on all sides about her perceived role in politics, and how we should taker her "seriously."

Okay... let's.

Palin has made a string of appearances in the past few weeks, mainly at "tea party" related functions - which, it should be noted, has become an elastic term meaning, usually, a protest gathering of conserative rank-and-file meant to complain about some Democrat. That, in itself, is a warping of the original "tea party" momentum, which its organizers argued represented widespread grassroots anger at both parties, and especially at the failure of government to listen to average people and their concerns.

Now, of course, it was pretty clear all along that this "broad based, cross-party" line was at best, debatable; but much of what's happened since has indicated a serious approach by many activists to try and reshape the Republican to be more closely aligned with their conservative goals.  That's opened up a number of Republican primary races and a general sense that longtime incumbents in the GOP face problems with the base.

Which is where Sarah Palin's curious appearance as the movement's sudden "spokesperson" begins to make some fresh sense.

Palin's other appearance in recent weeks was this past week at a long-planned rally for John McCain. McCain, among other things, is facing an unexpected primary challenge from JD Hayworth, a former Phoenix Congressman who was among the most conservative in the House (and left under a fairly large Abramoff cloud). Hayworth's conservatism is, really, the more natural fit for Tea Party types, something conservatives have been mentioning since he announced.

Palin's appearance, spouting her usual vague exhortations to support the people over those beaurocrats in DC, attacking the "media" for supporting liberals and liberal policies, probably went a long way to marginalize Hayworth and solidify McCain's primary win (meaning a likely easy reelection in the fall), by effectively co-opting tea party rhetoric to her own purposes. This is a reality that wasn't entirely lost on some conservatives, especially those who were fairly lukewarm on Palin's continued presence as a GOP icon since the loss in the 2008 election.

It's something of a myth that Republicans are, largely, thrilled with the energy and passion of tea partiers; the reality is that while Republicans need an energized base, like Democrats, the establishment structure is not especially interested in change or tension. To the extent that "tea party momentum" can be used to drive some Republican wins in otherwise hopeless races, great; to the extent that it reflects internal tensions and removal of already successful candidates and office-holders... the leaders would be fine with getting that squelched.

That's why the result in Texas - where primary voters rejected dozens of tea party candidates and gave GOP incumbents strong majorities - probably point to what's going to happen in the fall: candidates who were already "baked in" to Republican plans (Marco Rubio in Florida, Pat Toomey in PA) can wear the "tea party" mantle easily, while other tea party challenges will be left aside.

And who will tell the tea partiers to celebrate those losses as victories? Well, Sarah Palin, for one.

Nothing so far - and nothing to come, I'll bet - will show any ability on Palin's part to influence an election; even helping McCain, strategically, will not prove Palin has power, only that their odd alliance remains mutually beneficial. What Palin can do, is to knock the wind out of the real energy of tea party types to change the overall makeup of the GOP, by turning the nergy for change into energy for her cult of personality.

In the long run Palin will be no more viable for higher office than she has been, despite continued fascination by some; she remains an intellectual lightweight, incapable of articulating the kind of policy knowledge or proposals that would drive a real Republican route to future success. She's reflective of a larger GOP sense that all they can do, at this point is exploit fear and anger and hope - vaguely - that antipathy to some Obama policies and fear of change will drive substantial election wins.

The problem, of course, is that continue to perpetuate this approach... and you just make it harder and longer to face, down the road, the need to go in a different direction. And that direction has no need for Sarah Palin (it does need people like Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan, who are probably the real losers in Palin's continued celebrity run). And getting Pain off that center stage will never be easy... unless someone's already figured out how she'll implode and is just biding their time.

Live At Red Rocks

I'm not a travel blogger, I don't do travelogues.

It's not my long suit; I do love to travel, but I don't do enough of it. And even then, I'm not one to obsessively catalog hotels, restaurants, airlines, airports... okay, maybe a little, but not enough to make a career of it.

All of that said, this has been a great week so far: Mom and I have been traveling around Arizona, first in Tucson, then driving north to Sedona, arguably one of the most beautiful places on earth. So I feel I'd be remiss to my friends and regular readers not sharing some of what we've seen.

Most of the pictures are on mom's camera... and unfortunately, she didn't think to bring along the cables. So for now, here are a few shots from my cell phone. Isn't the digital age amazing?

This is just outside Tucson, in the Saguaro state park. Down the road aways is the Desert Museum, which was very interesting and informative. This was taken on a promontory midway up a big peak. I didn't get a shot of the valley to the right of this.

I can't entirely put into words our arrival into Sedona; you drive up this highway, there's a bend in the road... and suddenly this is what's in front of you. The red rock formations surround Sedona proper (and Oak Creek, just to its south), meaning when you step out of your hotel, or any shop... there it is. Again. It is almost unbearably beautiful.

Today we went hiking around Oak Creek; this is the view on the trail up to the Red Rock Cathedral, a church carved into one of the formations. I didn't make it all the way up: the final stretch was especially steep, and Mom gave out very early on; which was a shame, since she missed stuff like this. On the plus side, she and I have been collecting rocks for The Most Adorable Nephew in the Universe, and I found a number of good samples.

That will have to do for now. Dinner calls, and hopefully, I will have some more over the next couple of days, before we fly home.

UPDATE: Turns out I do have the cable to link Mom's camera and my laptop. More pics shortly.

Talkin' Bout My Generation

One of the more memorable (in a good way) moments from the Oscars this year - the tribute to John Hughes featuring a number of the players from his films - got me to thinking about how that generation, my generation, has become somewhat invisible in film and television.

Few TV shows, and almost no films, feature characters in their forties. Some are older, many are much younger... but for us, the teens of the eighties, we are largely ignored.

I'm convinced that it has a lot to do with demographic realities; we come from the "baby bust" period when birth rates in the US started to decline, and over time, it's been clear that we're not quite the market the Baby Boomers are, or their kids. There aren't enough of us. We grew up a little too fast, and I'm not sure we're driven by advertising quite the same way. But the net result, in the culture, is our invisibility. Just ask Molly Ringwald.

Perhaps that's why I find Greenberg, the new offbeat comedy featuring Ben Stiller, to be quite such a revelation. Showing one of us - a mid-forties slacker lacking in purpose and ambition - Greenberg, for once, makes us visible, in all our contradictions and missteps, and gently offers a sense of teasing acceptance.

Stiller's character - the title role -  doesn't even show up for the first fifteen minutes or so. Instead we meet Phil and Carol Greenberg, his brother and sister in law, through the eyes of Florence, their family assistant. A Hollywood power couple (like most everyone in the film, career specifics are a superfluous detail), the two rely on Florence for most every function of ordinary life, and the over reliance shines through as the family (with two young kids) packs for an extended vacation in Vietnam, with Florence picking out the Carol's clothes for the trip.

After they leave, Phil's brother Roger arrives, ostensibly to house-sit and build the family a doghouse, but mainly, as he explains repeatedly, to take a break and "seriously do nothing" after spending some time in a mental institution following a nervous breakdown. While Roger tries to live a life independent of everything and anyone, he's also somewhat helpless, and eventually, he and Florence strike up an awkward, tentative  back and forth, which clearly involves some level of mutual attraction. Their progress is alternately stymied and helped by their respective friends - Roger's pal Ivan and Florence's friend Gina -  as well as the illness of Phil's dog, Mahler.

Written and directed by Noah Baumbach - who has made a budding career of middle aged discomfort (The Squid and The Whale, Margot at the Wedding) - lets Greenberg unfold in a show, shambling way that masks the depth of feeling that drives it. The payoff, though, is enormously worth it: when Roger confronts Ivan about the dissolution of the rock band they had in their misspent youth, and the personal tensions they both studiously avoid, it's well worth the wait... as is Roger's ultimate ability to be there for Florence under her most trying circumstances (I won't give it away more than other reviewers, but if you remotely consider yourself a feminist, you will genuinely appreciate what Baumbach's done with Florence).

Baumbach's skill here brought back memories of Shampoo, the underappreciated Warren Beatty film from the seventies built around a similarly aimless loner. Like the other male beauties who came into their own in the late sixties and early seventies (Newman, Redford most immediately), Beatty's success onscreen was often being an emotional cipher, his unreadability suggesting layers of depth. Ben Stiller's approach, by contrast, is to play the piece emotionally naked and exposed: Roger is one long, raw, exposed nerve, and Stiller continues to amaze me with his fearlessness onscreen (which makes allowances for his discomforts off). Roger isn't entirely likable, or entirely reasonable... but those qualities humanize him and make the moments of gentleness and caring all the more fully earned.

As Florence, Greta Gerwig is also a revelation, effectively underplaying her circumstances in ways that amount to emotional ambush as her details are revealed. I think she may also be one of the best foils Stiller has had, able to keep up with his layered performance and the smart script. Then too, Rhys Ifans, who I tend to think of as uneven, is great as Ivan; and Jennifer Jason Leigh - Baumbach's wife, who also cowrote the script - makes a welcome return as Roger's old flame, uninterested in rekindling.

The marvelous scene between Leigh and Stiller is a good example of the film's strength in small, uncomfortable moments. Lots of reviewers have tried to sample the screen's understated wit, I won't even try... but Greenberg's letter of complaint to Starbucks brought instant guffaws of recognition and dead-on putdowns. If Greenberg were little more than the sum of its main character's less savory moments - the unhappy cloud that he carries, lovingly, with him at all times - then it would be little more than another rung in the long indie ladder of dismal complaint films about the modern condition. Greenberg's strength, and its surprise, is in finding the warmth and joy in our setbacks, in seeing us in our middle age, and not running away or giving up on us. People try to put us down... Greenberg doesn't.

The Lay Of The Land

Today was a travel day - Mom and I are spending a week in Arizona - and the view from up in the air (as opposed to the view of Up In The Air) got me to thinking about housing and sprawl and our economic challenges.

I love to travel and I love to fly - it's the physical representation of the thing I value most: new experiences, and the chance to see things from another perspective. I don't think Americans do enough of it - whether it's physical travel outside of one's usual area, the challenge of meeting and talking to people much idfferent from ourselves, or taking in opposing points of view (not a bad lesson, either, in this polarized, post-healthcare moment).

From the air, I'm always struck by suburban development - how cookie cutter so much of our housing is, how we neatly cut squares of property into smaller plots, dot them with houses, run curvy roads through them... and just eave them there, maybe to get hooked up with other squares, or not.  When I was traveling more extensively, in the mid nineties until about 3 years ago, what was stunning - as well as the fact that everyone, apparently, seemed to be flying - was how fast the sprawl was taking over, how fresh fields and plots of land suddenly sprung house frames and street markings, and new subdivisions magically appeared. Who, I kept wondering, was filling up all this property? Surely, I thought, this is some unsustainable result of the Baby Boom; and eventually, I figured, hbouse prices would fall sharply.

How little we know. And now we know what happened, and some of why.

What struck me, today, in my travels - aside, again, from the fact that far fewer people are traveling, but on more crowded planes - was how much sprawl remains. Those crazy, outlying subdivisions built not even on the edge of existing suburbia... but just out there, in the country, in hopes that civilization, or urbanity, or something... would soon come to join them. Dallas/Fort Worth has had this for years; in Tucson, it just seems that much weirder and weirdly misplaced.

And there's just so, so much of it that's left.

I think folks in the northeast can miss the visual and practical realoities of the sprawl out in the Midwest and Far West; in the northeast corridor, surely, our build-out had the effect of tying a string of urban enclaves - from Boston to DC... arguably even to Richmond - which already had hearty, well built suburbs, and for quite a while, considerable demand for housing. That reality wasn't the case out here; much of the building was speculative, hopeful... wishful. And now, the party's over... but the houses still stand.

The overabundance of housing stock - and more to the point, the fact that a good bit of it is located in places where it's just totally unnecessary - is, to my mind, the elephant in the room when we talk about, and don't talk about, sunny ideas of economic recovery. As long as houses - the primary investment of many people - continue to lose value, as long there's essentially no way for many people to sell a home or move... a lot of economic growth simply can't happen.

All of this seems well worth remembering on a day when the Obama Administration admitted, yet again, that their plans to get banks to work with people in foreclosure are simply not working, and as they attempt, weakly, to strike at the real problem - loans where the principle home value is out of line with the actual value of the house. The proposal, still, is too little, too late, and is unlikely to salvage many individuals... or the overall economy. Add in the fact that The Federal Reserve is muttering about ending or reducing the levels of mortgage repurchase by Fannie Mae and Freddis Mac - which have been artificially propped by the Fed, and have in turn artificially propped up a good bit of the mortgage market - and it's likely that what looks like economic recovery, and weak recovery at that... may well be just delaying the dropping of yet another round of disastrous housing news that pummels the economy overall.

Sitting in the hotel, getting ready for dinner and a movie, it's easy to look at this from a distance; the hard part is... knowing the lay of the land, and not knowing what we will ever be able to do about it.

Friday Evening Faunalude

jinb
 

Notgonnachange (The Hopey, Changey Remix)

Back to the idea of changing the healthcare bill.

One outcome of passage and signing - never mind waiting on the Senate to pass reconciliation fixes - is a spate of "what's in it for me/you/them" articles and handy calculators and discussions of what Congress and Obama Hath Wrought. Let the theorizing begin!

For my money, the best evaluation - and takedown - of just what the bill won't do comes from Violet Socks over at The Reclusive Leftist. Less useful, I think, are some analyses coming from economists suggesting either massive gaming of the system, or the probability of tinkering. We don't know enough, I think, to know how a lot of this will play out, and I'd hesitate to assume that many people will simply not take insurance, pay the penalty (which would, for some, be lower than any premium) and wait until they get sick to find coverage (remember, no preexisting condition denials).

No, for my money, the nearest indication of what we may be in for is looking to November and how much Republicans can capitalize on their opposition. If the "repeal or reform" line takes hold, that could be the first sign that healthcare refrom has a long distance between passage, signing and implementation.

Like many, I don't think "repeal" is realistic, and already, some senior Republicans are backing away from absolutes to a more considered position of gaining seats in both houses to push through changes. That, I think, may have some appeal, and may find resonance with some voters. The idea of repealing the popular elements of the bill - the preexisting conditions pieces and lifetime/annual caps - and of doing, more or less, nothing to get most people insured won't find broad appeal. It never did, which is why Democrats succeeded best with the "this or nothing" type arguments.

Republicans could, though, campaign on what will appear, to some, as "tinkering": pushing their idea of tort reform, adding lower premium "catastrophic" insurance options into the exchange mix... these are ideas that have given the right some slim shred of seriousness, even if the proposals are, in the end, problematic. Given a new law which itself invites substantial problems down the road, Democrats will have a hard time arguing that the right's bad fixes make substantially less sense than some of the unpopular elements of existing reforms.

Still, to me, much of this will be moot: what I think is likely to crop up, probably as soon as this fall, or certainly by next year, are budget projections about Medicare and Medicaid funding that will probably send a shock through the system. With few real attempts to control costs of care in Medicare, with millions set to come onto the Medicaid rolls (and milions of baby boomers doing the same to Medicare), the 5 to 10 year out prohections for both programs is sure to skyrocket. That's going to complicate plans for the "doc fix" on Medicare reimbursements, itself an avoidance of cost controlling in the program Congress has never had the stomach to see through to completion, and bodes poorly for other, harder choices.

One last point, really, is that I think two things are, for now, surely off the table: any of the dreams of the bill's supporters that we'll be revisiting much of the bill and building, say, that "public option" that still crawls along, refusing to die; liberal attempts to cast this bill as a "good start" and something to build on seem entirely unrealistic. Likewise, more sadly, I think progressives who envision regrouping and fighting harder for "Universal Healthcare" or single payer options have little to hope for in the short run; this mess will have to play out a good long while before many will find that kind of upheaval even worth contemplating... and I'd say pretty quickly it will be clear that "Medicare for All" won't just be attractive but challenging... but simply impossible.

With Republicans chomping at the bit to stir up yet more fear and anger, and faced with spiraling, undiscussed future costs... I think we'll be revisiting a lot of what people think is coming in 2014; and I think it could be surprising how little of the reforms actually hold up as a result. Even in the space of a few days, even with the reconociliation process still underway, it's remarkable to me how euphoria is gradually being replaced, so quickly, with doubt and concern. I thought the window was short on cheerleading for this plan... but I thought we'd at least make it into April before the cheerleaders were back in fight mode (endless campaign, anyone?). And come 2014, we'll see if we still have anything like the health insurance hope and change we were promised... or indeed, the same President who promised it.

Grandma, Tell Me Bout The Good Old Days

One of my favorite memories from my youth is going down to visit my Grandmother for a week or more, usually, and really getting to see her in her everyday routines. She was a working mom, but always attentive to her house and the chores, and she instilled the ethic in her kids... and on down to us (except, possibly, for the plastic slipcovers... though she did do away them years later).

I am thinking of her, on the lazy summer afternoons when we would be playing or napping, and she would take her laundry in off the line (it's a small house, which is the main reason for the lack of a dryer for many years), sit on the oversized daybed in the kitchen (the overflow guest bed), and fold the wash while watching her stories. My grandmother was a longtime watcher, and as I recall, it was Search for Tomorrow, As The World Turns, and Guiding Light. She did wind up watching The Young and the Restless... but she tended to call it racy.

Anyway, I am thinking all of this, because I am about to take time to fold my laundry, sitting on the couch, watching my news stories on the TV. The world evolves... but familiar habits return. I miss my grandmother; I haven't seen her in a number of years (it's a complicated family situation, which I've touched on previously), and lord knows, she may not be here much longer. For the moment, it will have to be enough to have her present in what I do, and the touchstones that join us as a family.

The Triumph Of The Permanent Campaign

Like a number of people, nothing's bugged me quite so much about the rush to dignify the process of passing healthcare reform than assertions that this legislation was pursued for noble reasons. The insistence on ennobling the bill (excuse me, law, as of this afternoon) with qualities it does not possess, beating back objections with cries of "pipe down, this is important and historic" tends to ignore what really drove the entire process of this bill, and will probably define its aftermath as well: political calculations meant to influence future elections.

What we're witnessing, I think, is the ultimate result of a series of steps towards setting up Washington, and service in government, as little more than a way station to permanent campaigning for office.

This may seem obvious - I can see a number of people saying "weboy, you naive sod, it's always been thus" - but such assertions, I think, tend to underline how this endless campaign mode has taken hold of our collective discussion of politics. It's not just winning for winning's sake - notice that the loudest, most intemperate, and often most misplaced cheers after Sunday night's vote amounted to "nyah, nyah, suck it, losers" aimed at the GOP - it's the sense that our policies and processes are now in service to the needs of elections, rather than the other way around.

There are a number of reasons for this shift, but I think the most obvious observation is that this is not a sudden, wholesale event, but a series of gradual shifts, which is why undoing them is far harder than it appears rhetorically (there's a lot of muttering about the problems of excessive fundraising, the need for campaign finance reform, etc); more to the point, the will just isn't there - for each side, the prospect of winning under whatever scenario is in play is far more attractive than the hard work of making unpopular, controversial choices that might give the other side some sort, really any sort, of advantage.

It Depends On What You Think You've Won

Already, those whose instincts are to try and write the first draft of history have taken fingers to keyboards - believing it somehow akin to taking quill pen to parchment by the light of a fading candle - to tell us how bravely historic and impressive last night's vote was.

Thanks a lot... but no, thanks.

As with every step along the healthcare process - and indeed, emblematic of the whole "future tense" discussion of the Obama Administration - the backpatting and self congratulating are premature. The Reconciliation bill is not law yet (we'll see if Harry Reid can actually follow through on promises not just to pass the bill, but to pass it cleanly in a way that doesn't require further House action), and the Senate bill remains, even with those fixes, more problematic than boldly impressive.

Oddly, I think Ezra Klein actually managed to put things into a relatively helpful perspective - in the process, I think, of showing the kind of progressive incrementalist he is growing up to be - by calling the bill, in essence, bold incrementalism. Where he, and many others, are wrong is in these fanciful assumptions that we've entered into a "start" on reform that leads, bright lined, to future action on further reform.

(And that, I think is a good lesson to the angry progressives who've opposed this bill all along, passionately arguing that the real solution is single payer: your enemy was not this bill, but the ability of many "reasonable" liberals to accept half-loaves and promises of a bright tomorrow. You have to trample on your friends' dreams to get the kind of change you really want. And I think many progressives - dreamers all - don't have that level of cruelty within us.)

What we're getting is what we've got: an employer based healthcare system, that tries, on the margins, to cobble together solutions for those who don't fall, neatly, into the employment box. That's how you expand Medicaid (without paying for it), add in health insurance "exchanges", and generally increase regulatory pressure on insurers to continue coverage when its economically challenging - preexisting conditions, the "lifetime costs" of people with expensive procedures, and such. Structurally, the bigger problem is never addressed: separating healthcare and employment is key to any rational reform that would actually change how we deliver care in this country. Without that, we're really doing very little.

With a bill that kicks the most substantial changes way down the road, which hides from the hardest choices - even Nancy Pelosi's claims that the "Medicare Doc Fix" (which, essentially, runs away from any serious effort to rein in Medicare reimbursements) will happen later shows the dishonesty in all of this - we're not getting real reforms, not any time soon... and in the long run, not at all. Republican claims to "repeal" the reform bill are unlikely to succeed (or to occur)... but incrmentalism is probably also the road map of how incrementalism will also come out: much of what's in the Senate bill could be nibbled away, years before it's even set to take effect.

In the end, I think the rush to claim history's mantle, to hail this passage as far more than it ever was or will be is a signal about Democratic desperation to have something, anything, to point to as a success in a dismal Presidency that is, by any honest reflection, not quite what anyone wanted.  The bill passed, in the end, because failure would, too obviously, underline what hasn't happened as a result of electing Barack Obama. But in a month's time, maybe less, I suspect that the underlying reality will shine through: redefining a "historic win" can't shield Democrats from what's likely to come - renewed divisiveness, lack of additional accomplishments, and  in November, midterm election results that will make everything that much harder and much less positive. To those who would take today, and the days that follow, to cheer a little too loudly, I can only say, it just depends on what you think you've won.  And maybe, try thinking again.

But I Do Know One And One Is Two...

One note from yesterday, before trying to unravel the drama of last night - I think both sides are mistaken to think that the debate over healthcare reform is changed by challenging cost estimates of the overall bill.

All over the Sunday talk shows yesterday was a conversation that went, basically, like this:

Republican stand-in: The bill increases the deficit! CBO is wrong! A lot of stuff isn't included!

Democrat stand-in: CBO says we're reducing the deficit, and more savings come in the second ten years. And who doesn't believe the CBO?

I tend to agree with Republicans that it's a fallacy to believe that rosy numbers from the Congressional Budget Office prove that healthcare reform is deficit neutral or even deficit reducing. This is an expensive change to our health insurance systems, and there are just too many unknowns to say, confidently, that we "know" that the net effect on the government is to reduce overall costs.

At the same time, the Republican charges make no sense for two reasons: first, Republicans have no particular comprehensive solution on healthcare, and the fixes they've proposed don't particularly reduce the deficit either; and second, the Republican charges about cost tend to ignore that any significant attempt to change our healthcare system and get it to work better for more people would have to involve some significant outlays of money. Our current approach to healthcare is, essentially, to keep some people from getting the care they need based on price. Changing that means the money has to come from somewhere.

Still, the bottom line here - and why the debate was so meaningless, ove and over - is that all the charges and countercharges are taking place in a fantasy land. Our government is already carrying unsustainable levels of debt. Adding to that debt is at least unrealistic and probably unconscionable. But no one, really, is prepared to make the really hard choices needed to approach our spending and revenue problems, or to tell the general public just how painful that correction is likely to be.

In the end, the debate over "what the healthcare plan costs" won't move anyone because on this, the two sides are plainly divided and unlikely to move: even if cost estimates are unrealistic, most Democrats have decided the benefits outweigh the problems of cost, and most Republicans have opposed health reform over far more basic disagreements than anything about spending. And the whole discussion is easiest if we don't ask more questions... and if we pretend not to notice the bigger problem... what a Wonderful World this will be.