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Austan's Powers

I'm a fervent enough Clinton supporter from 2008 to have never quite warmed to Austan Goolsbee, one of then candidate Obama's key economic advisors. And not much, since, has changed my opinion of him, or his economic views.

So it's been hard for me to get too worked up, either way, with the announcement of his resignation to return to his tenured position at University of Chicago, one of those prized posts you don't just give up permanently.

Still, Golsbee's exit is as good a time as any to point out that I tend to agree with the generally dim view of many lefties of the President and his economic team. It is indeed telling, as many have observed, that pretty much all of the President's incoming economic team - his budget director, the head of his economic council and the council of economic advisors, just for starters - have all been replaced. It's probably even more indicative of the problems this Administration still has on economic policy that the most senior person in the room, now, is Tim Geithner, who - still -  seems terribly grim and unpleasant in nearly all his television interviews, and an apologist for the banking sector.

If there's a reason to wonder if the President can survive the 2012 elections, it's all about failures of economic policy. The failure to rein in banks. The failure to squarely address the foreclosure mess. The failure to make sure the have-nots in our society are adequately protected and helped, over the haves.And, yes, the failure to the combination of government revenues and spending which have allowed deficits to spin further out of control, making much of our bad economic situation in this country that much worse.

It's not that Austan Goolsbee somehow, magically, had the way to address these issues; no one has those powers. The real problem which Goolsbee always embodied, for me, was the sense that Obama, as an executive, was not necessarily temperamentally that different from George W. Bush, in that he seems especially dependent on a small group of close friends and advisors, mainly from Chicago who tend to treat him with a kind of deference and loyalty that seems especially damaging. There's no one, even now, who seems both close to the President and able to challenge the prevailing worldview of a set of well educated, well off, like minded intellectuals. If Goolsbee was, as I suspect, the closest thing there was to that in the room, then his leaving is somehow as bad as it seems - the pool of close loyalists shrinks, and anything like a dissenting voice is even further away.

There's just no way, at this late date, to dress up this President's economic policies as better than miserable failures. The only saving grace, really, is that the alternatives, as embodied in Republicans and the right, are pretty much worse to nonexistent. No President in modern times may have survived economic conditions as bad as this President might... but the previous examples do have stark choices that this round seems to lack. Jimmy Carter looked much better than Gerald Ford. Ronald Reagan was more appealing to many than Carter. Bill Clinton was clearly superior to continuing with George HW Bush. I don't think you get the same feel from, say, Tim Pawlenty or MItt Romney, never mind Michelle Bachmann. Or Herman Cain.

Perhaps the healthiest result of letting this economic debacle play out - as bad as it is, and as worse as it could get - is that we may, in the long run see some discrediting of the current orthodoxy, especially on the left, that we can only trust the views of an educated, professional elite. Not, as the right would have it, to enshrine a kind of Luddite, anti-intellectual populism... but to begin to look to a wider range of education, experience, and ideas. It's too bad we may have to blow up the Democratic Party along the way... but that's what we probably deserve for putting too much faith in Austan's powers.

Anthony's Song (Tweeting Too Hard Gives You A Heart Attack-ack-ack-ack)

I started this blog - purely by chance - as the sudden scandal and resignation of Mark Foley unfolded. You remember Mark Foley, right? Congressional pages? Male pages?

Never mind.

America is a nation with a curious culture when it comes to sex. It's about puritanism, and guilt, and voyeurism, and capitalism, and it screws with our heads, ruins our public discourse, and fascinates us, all at once. We are the nation that the French think of as uptight prudes, and the ones with enough experience and sense to arrest Dominique Strauss-Khan rather than look the other way. We are the nation of some of the most virulent antigay bigots and the largest gay pride parade in the world.

In short, girl, we are a hot mess of a nation when it comes to sex.

Some people say it's Republicans who can't handle allegations of sex and scandal in their public officials. I tend to disagree - I don't think they like it (and I do mean sex), but I think they know how to handle it. Democrats, on the other hand, like to think we can "handle it", but I think part of the lefty charm is actually that Democrats are often deliberately, sweetly naive. We don't have any idea what to do with affairs and sexting and fetishes and so much more (SO much more), because, every time, it all just seems so new and unexpected. Arnold Schwarzenegger cheated on Maria Shriver? Bill Clinton let an intern flash her panties? Anthony Weiner sent some girl a picture of his hardon?

Really?

It's not that liberalism is somehow equivalent to "no moral compass"; it's just that, well, we need a minute to put the new data into some sort of perpective. This can often be labeled "overthinking it."

Democrats like to say we "handle sex scandals differently" - than those uptight, prudish Republicans - but really, we don't "handle" them at all; and in that, I think, we reflect, more fully, the national muddle when it comes to sex and acting out sexually: mostly we'd rather not know... and when we have to know, it's mostly how can we make this go away, and quickly. It would be a much better story, really, if the liberal view of sex were, in fact, demonstrably liberal: that we felt people should talk, freely and openly about sex and sexuality; that the free expression of love and desire among people is perfectly natural and understandable; that what we deplore is sexual acting out that involves force, coercion and lack of consent.

We don't do that. But liberals like to pretend, often, that we do.

Anthony Weiner's place in our odd discussion of sexuality is not new; his song and dance about "I couldn't possibly have sent some girl a picture of my hardon that accidentally wound up going out over the internet to everyone on my twitter feed" is not new and didn't seem true pretty much the minute he said it. He lies badly. And hypocrisy, really, is the standard for American scandal that can't really be overcome.

There will be a lot of "I can't judge Anthony Weiner" comments from lefties, which isn't really true, either (Rachel Maddow's take on the scnadal was a good barometer, really, of how to deftly manage the "I'm not judging" while reveling in every tacky seamy moment of his fall). Of course we judge. Of course we look. Of course we stare. That's what we do. That - the staring part, the quietly judging part - is who we are as a nation. Voyeurs, who think it's rude to stare, but would often pay extra for the privilge of staring longer.

Whether Anhony Weiner stays in Congress or resigns in disgrace - or some other yet to be seen scenario unfolds - doesn't really fascinate me (I'd love to say the naughty pictures don't fascinate me... but pictures of boys on the internet are life's little joy, these days). What fascinates me about this "scandal" is what makes it "scandalous" - a notion about sex as dirty and hidden and shameful and naughty that we can't, as a culture, seem to shake. And our choice, really, is to adopt, as conservatives already do, a kind of rigid, inflexible standard for behavior that's often unrealistic and needlessly cruel, or adopt a kind of senseless, messy "anything goes" notion of permissiveness that creates as many or more problems than it solves.

Or we could, painfully and mostly haltingly, try to continue a national process of growing up, of treating sex and sexuality more openly, a little more honestly, and with some sensitivity and humanity. That kind of approach might, in the end, help us to separate what's not so important in this case - the fact, say, that he was aroused - from what might be kind of inappropriate - sending unwanted, highly sexually charged messages to people we find attractive.

I mean it's just a thought. And it seems like a waste of time... but that's what it's all about.

Worst Song Ever: The Definite Article

Today, a few songs that shouldn't have tried to be definitive:

Bruno Mars, The Lazy Song. Lazy deserves better than this; though it's unfair to single out Mars, entirely, for a genre of songs in which young men celebrate indolence and upper middle class shallowness. Many of them are rap songs, you know, the ones about riding in the limo, popping the Cristalle, bottle service at the club, yada, yada. Mars, though, deserves to be singled out for a lazy song that can't even bother to make laziness seem appealing or fun. I'm also leery of of lines like "in this castle, I'm the fricking man" which, in these Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (i.e., Will and Kate) days, only underlines how far from royalty your eaverage American really is. Stupid, sloppy, and not nearly as fun as it imagines itself to be, The Lazy Song really only has appeal when one is, well, working. On days when I really don't feel like doing anything... and actually do it... I like my music to actually entertain me.

John Cougar Mellencamp, The Authority Song. Mellencamp has more than a few duds in his repetoire (I've shied away from "Pink Houses" all this time), but I was reminded how bad this particular tune is while flipping around my XM radio. And again, the chief complaint here is... this isn't much fun: "I fight authority, authority always wins." Really? Where's the fun in that? Pointless rebelliousness, always losing one's battles, isn't exactly a great argument for challenging the status quo. Mellencamp's delivery almost puts this over, though, like much of his midtempo work, it could use more instrumental bite (and sound less like Footloose) - musically it's not putting up much of a fight, another reason, perhaps, that he's always losing.

Simon & Garfunkel, The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feeling Groovy). Surely, Midtown Manhattan's vita bridge deserves better than this prime example of sixties hippy-dippy feel good foolishness. Instantly dated, it doesn't even have the subversive joy of suggesting that feeling grrovy might be a chemically induced high, No it's just loving life and sunshine and flowers. Even the small, gloppy, treacly part of my personality finds this teeth-grating, and it even breaks the flow of the otherwise exceptional S&G's Greatest Hits. No, really, tell me it doesn't.

Medicare, "The Truth About The Economy," And The Republicans Real 2012 Problem

The election of 2012 will not be about the economy.

I know this flies in the face of a lot of conventional wisdom, and lord knows, it just makes me look (again) like a pesky contrarian (and possibly centrist apologist), but I've listened to a lot of reporters talk about the 2012 election being about "the bad economy" with a kind of certainty I just find to be false. In some sense we don't know, really, how the election story of the coming year will play out. And, in another, what we already know is that, very likely, the possibility of considerable economic recovery between now and a year from November looks especially remote. But this coming election, I'm convinced, is not going to be, in simplistic terms, a referendum on "President Obama's handling of the economy."

Let's stipulate, fairly, that the reelection of Barack Obama is by no means a given; bad things can happen, Republicans could yet find a strong candidate, and some things just can't be foreseen. But if a Republican wins, in the end, it will not be about punishing the President for a bad economy. It will be because Republicans have, in some fashion, successfully combined all the polarizing, negative, often wild-eyed anti-Obama rhetoric of the right into a case for replacing him.

And we will still have a bad economy. And Republicans will be no more likely to have a solution for it than the Democrats do, and probably less.

Since the unraveling of Paul Ryan's budget proposal - with its self-defeating proposal to eviscerate Medicare, gut Medicaid and trade the savings for more tax cuts - I've said to anyone, anywhere that the Medicare proposal was a nonstarter that would surely die a quick death. What's been fascinating, watching the politics unfold, is how quickly the whole idea unraveled, and how stuck Republicans are with proposing it. And in all of that, I think, are some good indications of why the upcoming elections are already looking dreadful for Republicans, and why the key issue of the upcoming races will not be so much "the economy" as it will be an election about ideas, and the lack of them, a Republican Waterloo that looks less like, say, 1992 and Bill Clinton for them and more like 1984 and Walter Mondale.

Friday Evening Floralude

 

jinb

These Are The Days

Brave promises and all, my writing resolve collapsed this week under the literal heat, and the more abstract pressure of other projects. While I'm not working 40 hours, I did wind up working six days this week, and it simply threw me off.

As frustrating as it can be to find writing stalled, this week was a reminder that at my other job - my "real job" if we must - I am finding a place in the world that is pretty good, even a place I might want to stay.

We had a visit from our "big bosses" yesterday - the District Manager, Area Director, and the Regional VP. The Regional VP used to be our Area Director, so it's not entirely as forbidding as it sounds, and all three of them think very highly of my boss, our store manager. So there's pressure, but it's not all bad pressure.

But part of the reason my boss is so well regarded is that she takes visits by management seriously, so there was a lot of pressure to clean and organize and put on our best face. It's hard work (in a word, it can be summed up as "bleach"), but if you do it right, you'll know right away it worked. MOstly because... they won't say anything about it.

As bad as the heat was this week - until it broke, day before yesterday, the humidity and high temps felt more like August (and the breaking point included those horrific tornados across Western Massachusetts) - it was relief to go into work and clean just because of air conditioning. But more than that, as much as my boss worried and fretted, we pulled together and worked as a team and achieved the desired result. And we did it with laughter and a positive vibe and a sense of positively pulling together. All of which makes hard work pretty rewarding in itself.

Soon enough, things will change. The heat is broken, life is easier, I am typing this while wearing long pants and not seweating - a nice break from the Memorial Day weekend onward. Someday, maybe even soon, my boss will be promoted to her own District. I may, somewhere down the road become an Assistant Manager and have to leave the comfortable nest of my protective and supportive supervisor. Thinking about the likelihood that this great environment may not last forever, that change is ineveitable, and heat and discomfort return... I remembered to look back on the hard work this week and to appraciate all that we have, that I have, right now, in this moment. These are the days to remember and to appreciate... the sweetest days we'll know.

And that's a good a place as any to take up writing some more.