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See That Chair? He Put It There.

President Obama is getting a little (and not enough, I'd say) flack for saying to a heckler at this week's Pride celebration in the White House, "you're in my house." The sentiment, while understandable, belies the fact that dissent is enshrined in our American culture, and it will come through the doors of even the President's house. Eartha Kitt, famously, angered Lady Bird Johnson by speaking forcefully about deaths in Vietnam at an otherwise non-political luncheon. Laura Bush had to cancel her planned program celebrating poets when those poets made clear they didn't support the invasion of Iraq.

But more pointedly, being President doesn't make the White House yours.

The President has walked this line throughout his term in office; there's a tension between the "great man" pose he rode into the office and the sense that he's more than a bit diffident about the glad-handing, everyman aspects of taking lofty ideas into practical application, never mind the tension of disagreement and dissent. He seems aloof, even cold. He comes off as high handed at times - he's managed, more than once, to annoy congressional leaders because he seems to have no sustained relationships that he can leverage to achieve his own policy goals. He lectures, rather than attempting to persuade.

I don't think all of this makes the President terrible, just human, and flawed. He's a smart man. He's able to see the big picture. He'e clear-eyed about what need to happens to make progress. I think he's less thrilled with people who don't see what he sees. And he's not exactly patient about waiting for others to catch up. I'm also not entirely sure it gives him a real feel for the struggles of people, say, in poverty. Or the emotional pain of a man whose lover has to be deported (the point of the Pride protestor). Feelings, emotionality... these things get in the way of clear eyed assessments. It's hard to fake the caring side (just as it's also hard to pretend to be smart).

Oddly, that's why I think the Supreme Court had little choice today but to uphold the Obamacare subsidies. And that, really is where the President may be more accurately firm in saying "not in my house."

The Affordable Care Act made provisions for each state to operate a health insurance exchange, as a way to give individuals, the self employed, unemployed, or small business workers the opportunity to buy insurance as a group. The "individual market" had been one of the worst features of the insurance market for healthcare, where premiums were expensive and policies were often terrible, providing little coverage with high deductibles. While the exchanges have issues, and policies still have some fairly high deductibles, the exchanges combined with tax subsidies for low wage workers have enabled any more people to obtain insurance.

It was the subsidies that brought the case to the Court; a small group of (questionable) plaintiffs claimed the required purchase on the exchange was onerous, and that the subsidies were illegal because they should only apply to state exchanges and not the federal exchange, based on one clause in the mammoth law. For months, since the case was taken up by the Supreme Court, there was speculation that an adverse ruling would "destroy Obamacare." Doomsday scenarios were predicted. Panic in the streets. Dogs and cats living together. You get the picture.

Calmer heads - me included - have quietly pointed out the obvious: the lawsuit made no sense. If a state fails to operate an exchange - as many Republican led states chose - then the federal exchange operates as the state's exchange, and the subsidy is for the same purpose. That, in essence, is what John Roberts said today. And it's basically the same thing the President said, in his calm, definitive way when asked about it a month ago. He also said the Supreme Court should never have taken the case. That's accurate too, though, as always, he appeared somewhat high handed in saying it.

Conservative hatred of the President has everything to do with his calm sense of certainty. "Arrogant" is their first descriptive term about him, and it has, of course, everything to do with race, though that too just makes them angrier. "It's not because he's black" they fume, and at best we can't know. But it sure seems that having this black man be so smart and so right so often really annoys them.

The President came out today for a "victory lap" speech in the Rose Garden that again made his point: I was right, this thing is working, and opponents should just get used to it. It's my house. See that chair? I put it there. It may not be the "kinder, gentler" way of expressing it, but that is not the President we have. If anything, this is the notion of a Presidency that conservatives have favored more than the left: tough, no nonsense, certain of his mind and his actions. Which may explain why so much of the loathing the President gets from the right seems so, well, childish - it's the tantrums of overfed kids who can't get more dessert. Because daddy said so, that's why. Conservatives have replaced their strongest suit - a clear eyed, almost cold, assessment of human nature and the facts - with the appeal of emotions and feel good slogans. And liberals, God love us, have gone in the other weird direction - a party of clear eyed realists using data to support the feel good policies of helping the less fortunate. Because we love them, and everybody.

More than most lefties, conservatives need the kick in the head of taking in the view of the world that doesn't agree with their every whim: they've been blind sided by Mitt Romney's loss, by the unpopularity of endless war, and now by yet another decision that says more health care available to more people is better. And liberals, while embracing the President's forcefulness in standing up for his policies, might want to look around that house and ask, did we really need a chair? and does it really need to be just, well, there? It's our house, really. And it's ok to redecorate. No matter what daddy says.

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This Is The End

I kept waiting for a moment during the government shutdown to write down some thoughts on the GOP, but as with each run-up of brinksmanship, events seemed at once to be moving too quickly and too slowly to know when to turn away (C-Span is my mistress now, and she's a cruel one). But I stand by what I said as the debacle began that Tuesday: this last brinksmanship play was the Waterloo of the Republican Party as we know it, and in the aftermath, we are seeing what it looks like when one political party falls apart.

It's edgy, I know, and prognostication is a dicey business, but in these times when yesterday's news is maybe as far back as we try to recall, it's worth remembering how we got here, and why the GOP disintegration is not a new story but an old one, a five year saga (if one starts with the failures of the Bush presidency), or 20 years (if we go back to Newt Gingrich), or 30 - if we start with Ronald Reagan's ascendancy as the pinnacle where the downhill roll starts. The point is, from those times to this, we are watching a thing that's dying. And it's worth considering why, and what's bad and what could, ultimately, be good about it.

First, we're here because Congress didn't pass a budget and follow up with Appropriations bills, as per their normal (up until the nineties) approach to governing. How'd that happen? Well, partly because Senate Republicans blocked attempts at budget reconciliation, partly because the House, saddled with Paul Ryan's disastrous, unrealistic budget plan, could not gather the ability to fit various department appropriations into the low budgets, without significant pushback from within the Republican majority, never mind the staunch opposition of Democrats.

Second, we got here because conservatives, who have guven over to simply loathing everything about President Obama, want to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act. Thus they adopted the curious pose that "all they wanted" was some sort of "Obamacare" element in any Continuing Resolution. The fact that they went from defunding to a one year delay, to simply asking for a conference, proved a willingness to "compromise", they said. Most everyone saw that this new definition of "compromise" was probably unworkable, and so Republicans replayed, almost line for line, the results of 1995, when the shutdown also redounded to their detriment.

Perhaps nothing was quite so ludicrous as, a wekk into the shutdown, when John Boehner floated the idea od a "super committee" to sit down, work out a CR, a debt deal and some significant spending relief. Never mind the lack of a discussion of taxes; this proposal was amost identical to what happened in the fall and winter of 2012, when the "fiscal cliff" resulted in, yes, a super committee... which failed to come to any sort of agreement. And what was the result of that failure. The deep cuts known as "the sequester" a trigger mechanism meant to  force a deal because the cuts were so deep and painful no one would want to see them enacted. Naturally, here we are, living with sequester cuts, which have indeed proved painful.

And how did we wind up at a fiscal cliff? Well, that's been the hallmark of the Obama years, a string of last minute deals and hastily brokered extensions, because nearly all ability to negotiate or compromise has broken down... largely becuase of a growing feeling among conservatives that anything less than their most extreme position is an unforgivable capitulation to The Left.This is especially damaging to the House where, after years of governing through brokered deals and bupartisan votes on key pieces of legislation, informal rules now insist, for both sides, that all members must vote as a bloc. And that, as it turns out, favors a longtime establishment machine pol like Nancy Pelosi, who cajoles, controls, and carefully steers her Democrats to unanimity.

Republicans can't find anything like that unanimity because, at this point, there is almost literaly no animating policy toawrds governing in the party. The opposition to ACA is an obvious example - it's not as if Republicans offer up alternative healthcare policy: they simply oppose what liberlas have passed. To this day there is no coherent Republican proposal on health policy, on tax policy, on budgeting, immigration or a laundry list of issues that could be resolved if two sides simply had a way to look at opposing ideas and find common ground. That's because today's conservatism isn't about ideas. It's about the fight, the anger, the hatred, the labeling and the disdain. The right is rewarding rabble rousers, loudmouths and hotheads who go off half-cocked, throw out ahost of baseless accusations and dare anyone to challenge them with facts. They don't need facts. They need emotion, primarily anger.

We're long past the point where Republicans can simply "wake up" and find some good sense; Watch a congressional hearing, especially from the House. Listen to talk radio. Check out a conservative blog. Don't believe me, look for yourself. There is no longer any discussion of ideas. It's just rage. I've had more than one conversation this past month with liberal friends and family convinced that we have to worry about Republicans in the next Presidental election, because, you know, as crazy as they've been, they could nominate Chris Christie, pull themselves together and be hard to beat. And I keep saying: Chris Christie can't win their primaries. Not now. And if he could... then we'd have all we need to beat him, because he'd have to sound as conservative as their base to get there.

Republicans couldn't win the shutdown battle not because of tactics, or numbers, but because what they were doing literally made no sense. The only thing that could have happened differently was for John Boehner to find Nancy Pelosi, craft a bill that could get mostly Democrats  and a modest number of Republicans, pass the CR and the debt ceiling extension and start neotiating further compromises. And literally... that's what happened. It just happened in the Senate.

Operationally, the House Republicans have abdicated governing. Either major deals will be bipartisan, or nothing will happen. That, in turn, will force another scorched earth round of primaries on the right. It's cler that even some of the most conservative GOP Reps and Senators, and certainly anyone labeled "RINO" will face a primary. And some, maybe not all, bbut definitely some, will, as with the last election, be so far off the edge that voters will take a lawn chair rather than the extreme. Except in distrcts where the extremes are really so far gone that any Hannity sound alike can win. And the right wil drift further off the edge.

The Democrats cannot be everyone's party, and the collapse of Republicans will be the test. Will a well off, well educated set of socially liberal professionals control the party;s destiny, or will the more everyday concerns of the working class and working poor become more central. This is not a theoretical, or abstract, discussion. Democrats have lived an uneasy truce vetween the working class and upscale educated professionals whose interests do not, in fact, align - most  obviously on taxation and spending policies, but even in the places where practical needs meet well meaning social liberal philosophy. Places like education. Immigration policy. Urban renewal and affordable housing, never mind community health.

The death of the right would mean a fundamental realignment of two sides. We've lived this before, and we can go through it again, even if it's messy. No doubt some elements of the Republican Party will try to salvage a broken beast. No doubt some progressives will remain caught up in arguing the extremes. But nationally, Republicans have fallen apart. There is no longer leadership, an approach to governing, a set of policies to accomplish understandable, well supported goals. These are the basic elements of why we organize, why we look for candidates, how we get the work done. Republicans had a chance - a small one - to regroup before the government shutdown wrecked them, a chance to draw lines, reestablish a center, put down some policy markers that made sense and offered a way forward. None of that happened. Because it can't happen. Because this is the end. And once we face the ending, we can move on to starting something else. 

Oh Fer The Love Of God!

I always say (to myself, anyway) you wait long enough... and there will surely be something to blog about. 

Sure enough, I decide to wait until the end of Easter/Passover vacation to get started again... and there you go.

Google's decision to run a graphic for the birthday of Cesar Chavez on Easter should really be no big deal - though I have to admit, I was a little surprised, until I realized they were the same day. Easter was a busy day this year - I'm now on Facebook, and two other FB friends (or as I used to say, friends) also had birthdays on Easter. And it was Easter. And Passover.... and a bunch of other stuff, which was kind of sad.

Anyway, I don't think it's surprising, exactly, that the conservative right went nuts over the linking of Chavez to Easter - or, more hilariously, that they mistook Cesar Chavez for Hugo Chavez, the recently deceased leader of Venezuela, which made them all the angrier. I mean, as they say, we do all look alike, especially when the last names are similar. 

In the wake of Republicans trying to rebuild a relationship with Latin Americans, though, this farce is basically example A of why most of these efforts are doomed. Too often and for too long, the right wing's predictable responses to even the mildest discussions of liberal figures - Cesar's hardly worth the controversy, and let's face it, Hugo's dead - is screaming outrage. And the outrage just seems misplaced - and in the case of Venezuela, awfully late now that the real question is whether Venezuela will simply fall apart in the wakr of his (er, Hugo's) death.

But the enmity for the Chavezes and all they represent - the union building, poverty work and immigration friendly politics of Cesar; or the communistic approach to governing Venezuela more in favor of the downtrodden - is what's really going to keep conservatism, and by extension the GOP, from going wide. There's just got to be something about Hispanic culture and politics that conservatives have to figure out how to support and present positively, or it's just, don't bother. This story is already over.

And it's not as though liberals are going to care deeply about whether Republicans get this right or not - frankly, at this point, the left's view of the right's Hispanic outreach is just that, as farce. The guys who want double edged barbed wire along the Mexican border, whose most extreme elements would actually try to round up "illegals" in every corner of the country and deport them, whose last Presidential candidate attracted about 30% of the Latin vote - these guys are not people we take seriously as any sort of threat. Have at it guys, because at the rate you're going, we'll get Hispanic support for the Democrats up to or near the 90+% numberws we enjoy with African Americans. Not even trying.

Of course, beyond the gloating, all of this is depressing. It's depressing to hear the shrill rhetoric opposed to anything that might make life even sort of slightly better for people on the edges of society, be they migrant farmworkers or the poorest citizens of a third world country. It's disheartening to see people you might otherwise at least respect as thoughtful opponents descend into the absurd anger and shrieking of the fringiest conservative elements, or even at a minimum, simply draw a line, any line, about rhetoric that goes too far. When Don Young of Alaska, a member of House leadership, blithely refers to "wetbacks" with little more than "oh, gee" from other Republicans, that's the kind of thing that shows what the right accepts in its senior leadership. For God's sake, this isn't hard.

But then that's Easter in the land of politics: dressing things up, trying to put a kindly face on the oldest of stories (I've always preferred the Potestant version, which sems to focus on the white light and the post-rising Good News rather than the more Catholic-seeming obsession with the pain and suffering He felt on the cross), candy coating the bad stuff so we won't maybe notice. The same week of all these Hispanic fumbles, the right is practically in seizures as (several) lifetimes of antigay rhetoric don't add up to a hill of beans fighting marriage equality, the battle they can lose now, or lose later. By Sunday, even Catholic priests in America were scrambling to find the right words to try and evince some sort of caring for gay people, even while condeming homosexuality and absolutey trying to rule marriage off limits. The contortions were breathtaking, the mixed messages were head scratchingly confused. We - the angry gay radicals of near limitless power, thank you John Roberts - have apparently managed, if nothing else, to turn "homophobia" into such a dirty word that conservatives almost universally flinch as they try to expalin opposing unions for people they really, really... well, we don't hate them, we just think they should settle for second best... or something. Really... breathtaking.

It's a weird Easter this year - it came too early, the weather's too weird for it, all of these crazy controversies and a new Pope who seems, genuinely, to believe that "poverty" and "humility" are not just nice words but a better, more honest way, to approach one's duties as a Priest. No cars, furs, or penthouse papal apartments? Good lord, now what?

It's a weird Easter, in some weird zone between secular and religious, where liberal theology and social justice apparently won the war while no one was looking. A moment when the Christian, decent things we can all pretty much sign on to - treating each other decently, caring for those less fortunate, helping those in actual need - seem to trump the less pleasing notions of doing for ourselves, getting what's mine, and judging others with a critical eye. It's an Easter big enough for the death of Christ, the birthday of the man who stood for farm workers, and even my friend the married gay minister. And that's pretty good... for the love of God.

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One Party To Rule Them All (The Galadriel Syndrome)

I had wanted to write this around the Inauguration, but time and travel intervened. Still, the State of the Union speech makes a good time for a similar point.

There's a moment in the first Lord of the Rings film - and I get to wear my "Honorary Geek" badge with pride here - where Galadriel explains to Frodo why she shouldn't have the Ring of Power he is transporting to Mordor. She explains how having so much power would convince her that what she was doing right and good, even as she turned herself into an omnipotent godlike presence, willing and able to destroy non-believers. Cate Blanchett does marvelous things with the speech, and the visual effects are striking, but I loved the scene for reminding us that the real danger of absolute power is not what you do with it so much as the fact that you feel that you are entitled to do it.

 

I was struck at the Inauguration, and with the politics that have unfolded in recent weeks, by the fact that, in many ways, we are a nation with one operating, successful political party. While Republicans did manage (weakly) to continue with a majority in the House, and have control of in a umber of states, this past election was a rejection of Republicans and conservatism by a new working majority that prefers Democrats. And the implications of consolidating that power - demographically, it appears to be harder and harder to imagine a route to national GOP victory - force some consideration of what it means to effectively have one party rule.

Take on banal example - the Inauguration Ball, which the Obama team consolidated into one monstrous, 40,000 person event in the DC Convention Center. Where there had previously been as many as 17 elitist, small events scattered across hotel ballrooms, now we have the equivalent of a keg party in your neighbor's field. That's liberals for ya, and my own sense of gay good taste cringes, but that's really beside the point of the optics , when the President and Mrs. Obama made three very theatrical, identical, and largely meaningless "first dances" on stages at different ends of the enormous venue. The effet was less elegant than carefully choreographed, meant to establish distance, not intimacy. And that distance and control, really, is a good indication of having the kind of power that cannot be questioned, and the impression of deserving it.

Republicans have a chance, after Obama's State of the Union, to present there own list of proposals for governance. There's lots of talk that Marco Rubio (!) will offer a thoughtful challenge to the President and a full throated defense of conservative ideas... but really, at this late date, what are they? On health care, the right has offered a "not that" argument against the Affordable Care Act and little more; they oppose any discussion of taxes that involves raising revenue; they support "spending cuts" but offer no specifics on where to cut, and on and on. On issue after issue, year after year, Repub;icans have offered less and less in terms of concrete proposals and almost no fresh ideas that get ahead of any politicla discussion. Gun controls? nope. Immigration? Not much beyond fences and arresting people.

Lately, I find myself watching panel discussions and Congressional hearings on C-Span - the other half of my "Honorary Geek" badge - and I'm struck, repeatedly, by the lack of substantive ideas, questions, or proposals coming from anyone on the right. Almost always, if the President proposed it, or the left supports it, it's simply bad. And the alternative is... doing nothing, or rolling back what's already been done (and is often already working). This is not any kind of approach to serious policy. And it's the deeper reason why, by and large, most Republicans and movement conservatives aren't being taken seriously. Including, for instance, Marco Rubio, whose jump to the front of the National GOP line has everything to do with the image he projects (of bright eyed, right wing Hispanic) and not the ideas he proposes. Rubio vaguely proposes to "do something" on immigration, but it's really too little to impress the most active Latin Americans on this issue, and his bravest notions won't really fly on the right. Moreover, he projects just the kind of youthful inexperience and naivete that defines right wing stardom these days - the more he has to chase approval on the far right, the less attractive he'll be to the mainstream. Or he'll defy the right, and marginalize himself to the fringes.

All of which is fascinating, I suppose... but as a leftie, I'm more concerned about being in the party that won. It's a far cry from my youth in the depths of the "Reagan Revolution," when our extinction seemed more imminent and our ideas seemed hopelessly out of fashion. But, well, at least we had ideas. And we kept having ideas, and rethinking and reshaping those ideas, until we adapted into the party of today. I don't love everything we've become, but that ability to adapt and rethink is the only way conservatives can survive. And right now, I think their ability to do any of that is dubious, at best. 

But what has "being a Democrat" become? In one sense I think "winning" has become the goal that defines us most, but not best; we've figured out how to win national elections, we've built a new coalition of engaged voters across a variety of interest groups, a "majority of minorities" who see that we do best when all of us have a chance. As long as we don't rock the boat, stay silent about poverty in any substantive way, and soft pedal areas of disagreement. The overt and covert silencing of dissent, the weakening of our ability to criticize our own, the papering over of internal tensions... it's these growing failures that signal the rot that starts from within. We can win another ropund of the Presidency (and her name is Hillary), we can hold the Senate, we can, even, retake the House, no matter how negatively its dismissed; but those victories, a return to one party dominance better than 2008, will mean little if all we do with them is perpetuate a new status quo. We need dissent, we need the tension of competing ideas, we need better answers than the ones our leaders just keep coming back to on their own.

If Republicans can't pull it together - and more than ever, I'm convinced they can't - than the question becomes whether One Party Can, in fact, Rule Us All. My own guess is, it can't, that we will, somehow, devolve back into two parties (at least), even if those two are drawn from a deep split within the left itself. Yes, the health of our democracy almost requires it, but it's more than that. At some point, we have to learn the lesson of, well, Galadriel: however well intentioned, it is never good to concentrate too much power into one hand. I don't know if this new feeling of Democrat ascendancy can handle knowing that, or handle dealing with it. But if we don't... the disaster that follows will, in some sense, be entirely of our own making.

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DeMinted

Elections have consequences; that's the main lesson I guess we can take away from Jim DeMint's decision to flee the Senate and run the Heritage Foundation. Like most freely chosen job switches, DeMint's decision can be seen in 2 ways, I think: a comment on where he's leaving, or a sign of where he's going.

Lots of people, naturally focused on his leaving the Senate; though I think early reads on it missed the obvious fact that DeMint is leaving largely because the GOP lost, and for DeMint's purposes, lost huge. DeMint's been, in many ways, the Most Senior Elected Spokesman of the Tea Party movement, and his backing has been a 50/50 kiss of death. From Sarah Palin to Christine O'Donnell in Delaware to Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, DeMint's been a big proponent of "replacing RINOs", a discussion that's all but meaningless to most liberals. But that RINO thing is a big deal to conservatives, and their systematic housecleaning of the GOP goes a long way to explaining the Republican crack-up (and, by extension, the shape and size of the GOP problems since 2006, or more likely 2004).

DeMint will not be especially missed; from Lindsay Graham to Mitch McConnell, it was mostly "so long, and thanks for... er, nothing." But his fleeing speaks volumes to the fact that DeMint is in some ways more of a realist than his colleagues - hence his rush to embace a Tea Party movement I'm not convinced even he entirely likes - and gets that, for now anyway, it's not going to be much fun to be a Republican in elected office. DeMint may be a conservative true believer, but if he thought he could really effectively push conservatism in government, he'd have stayed. At the same time, DeMint's canary in the coal mine move does offer some idea of how Republicans could pull it together more: getting rid of gadfly outliers (DeMint was no great shakes as an actual legislator) and drawing some lines about unacceptable extremes remains, to my mind, the base starting point of any serious Republican effort to regain lost ground.

At the same time, it's even more interesting to contemplate DeMint's rush to run Heritage. Up until yesterday, I don't think anyone knew or cared who was actually running Heritage, outside of Washington's right wing elite, and even there, Heritage seemed sort of an afterthought. There's more cachet at the top of the right wing think tank heap for the American Enterpirse Institute, and even though the Cato Institute is in a bit of a mess, they too have a higher profile and more of a specific (libertarian) voice.

This move, it strikes me, is about raising Heritgae's profile and its ability to make the news cycle with bomb throwing quotes; DeMint is not an especially serious ideas guy, not someone who puts the "think" in "think tank." He is, on the other hand, popular with Rush and Hannity and Mark Levin and the other Demi-Gods of talk radio, and an easy booking for Fox News, sure to be quoted and talked about (and, for now, a bigger star than the rest of the room at Heritage). Remaking Heritage into a louder, less thoughtful, angrier thing may well be the kind of brand definition the place needs. How that will help conservatives be more impactful or change the national conversation, I think, is harder to fathom.

DeMint and the Board of Heritage may be right that DeMint can resahpe the place into something more winning (even if, like, oh, say, President Obama, DeMint has essentially no executive experience). But from here, it's hard to see how simply being louder and more visible, angrier and more right wing helps either Heritage or the conservative movement in the long run, absent interesting ideas and a sense of renewed energy and fresh perspectives. Still DeMint was probably right to flee the Senate now, cash in and join the conservative money circuit while the getting is good. I'd just say the wise move might be to bank that cash before the far right gets seriously marginalized and cut off. I mean, the idea that  conservativism, done louder will somehow seem more winning is just... demented.

Nothing From Nothing Leaves Nothing

One of the better bitter pills the right has had to swallow as a result of the election is that "Repeal Obamacare" was pretty soundly rejected as a rallying cry. The implementation of the Affordable Care Act continues, and conservatives are scrambling to try and figure out ways to revive their opposition and paint Obamacare as terrible, yet again.

Although I've never been thrilled with the ACA, or its organizing principle - that is, codifying the employer based health insurance system we have, and doubling down on it - I think we're obliged to see how it plays out. As I've said, I remain convinced that the real looming disaster in implementing the ACA is in Medicaid and the problems with expanding that program to everyone up to 133% of the poverty line, but the crunch time for that is probably months (though months, and not years) away.

Right now, the real developments in health insurance have to do both with the establishment of the "exchanges" - health insurance markets in every state that will help freelancers and small business employees get more affordable coverage, in theory - and seeing how employers react to new requirements for offering coverage.

What's interesting to me is that conservatives have settled on "outrage" and sympathy for an odd group of employers - midsize franchisees of chain restaurants like Applebee's and TGI Friday's. It's fascinating because the chains are frantic about the costs of offering insurance to wait staff and kitchen help, and because conservatives are trying to stake a "pro-business" claim by supporting the businesses in their whining about having to provide health insuarnce to workers. 

In a similar vein came news this weekend that Wal-Mart (naturally) has decided to set 30 hours as the lower limit for insurance for its workers, provoking (naturally) new howls about how Wal-Mart pushes its workers onto welfare, or in this case, into the Exchnages, rather than take its own responsibility seriously.

The inetersting thing to me is that these stories are two sides of the same coin, and a reminder why the ACA, or some solution was needed - it's service workers in these semi-part-time jobs in these shadow fields of endeavor who have the hardest time accessing affordable health care. Restaurants have notoriously refused to pay decent wages, never mind benefits, to workers. And while wait staff - especially in top boites - can survive and even thrive on tips, the same is not the case for kitchen workers and support staff. Wal-Mart, too in indicative of a problem (especially pervasive in retail and other service work) that doesn't actually have a good answer: making insurance available to part time workers is a laudable goal... but where is the reasonable point to draw a line in regards to hours worked?

I work for a company that - for now - offers a pretty full benefit package to workers starting at 20 hours a week (it's a little more complicated, but basically this). Wal-Mart probably deserves some scorn for going with 30, rather than a more inclusive number like even 25, but any number will serve to keep some workers out of the pool. And force the into other choices.

It's easy to lambaste these business owners for trying to limit coverage, but I tend to be heartened by the reverse predicament: that the ACA has forced these notoriously cheap employers to provide at least some sort of basic health care coverage to their full time staff. The threats of layoffs and cuts to hours may happen, but these are business people who know enough to know that providing worse service will not help the bottom line. Wal Mart can run on a small crew... but it does need bodies at registers and manning the floors. And if the net result is fewer people working more hours... than we may have broken an especially bad model that was good for business, but terrible for workers looking for a living wage and benefits.

But liberals should see the arnings in all of this. First, as much we'd like it to be otherwise, these businesses have to make choices about costs and expenses against how much money they can make doing business. Less profit will force other choices. Raising prices will affect who comes and how they spend. Each equation comes with a trade off. And for workers, we shouldn't make progress for some the enemy of good for all. More coverage, even for only a subset of these workers, is itself a vast improvement.

A lot of this, though, will come back to those exchanges, and by extension to these questions of how and how well the Medicaid expansion is done. Businesses, in their plans, will be heloing to, in some ways, enhance the division between the "working poor" - those who have the jobs and the willingness to do the long hours - and a new tier of people, just under them, who choose or are pushed into situations with some hard choices and harsh realities. Will the exchanges and Medicaid provide good coverage (and if the Exchanges are that good... will employers simply push their workers onto them?) , or do they become, between them, insurers of last resort for those with the least income and the fewest choices? That question could have a painful answer, but if we're trying to decide whether a bit of something is better than nothing... well, I'd rather not have nothing.

The Money Games (Where The Odds May Never Be In Your Favor)

As we begin to sort out the "what worked and what didn't" of the election cycle, we're re-learning one of the more obvious ones: money, alone, cannot by electoral success. While lefties fretted about Citizens United and the huge sums of money put into the election by right wing millionaires and billionaires... the reality turns out to be the dud some of us predicted. With billions spent, a lot of the money was apparently mostly wasted, and changed very little.

This is especially true of Karl Rove's American Crossroads,which threw millions at a variety of races (including ads in Presidential "swing" states) and won almost none of them (including the swing states for Romney). Rove's money machine mostly solidified one thing: Rove's hold over the right wing as a power player. Sheldon Adelson's vast wealth? Wasted. Linda McMahon's nearly $100 million spent to lose two consecutive Senate races in Connecticut? Exceedingly wasted.The zillionaires put a brave face on the enormous waste, and considering the enterprises these people profit from (Adelson's shady gambling empire in Macau, McMahon's fortune from the heavily staged WWE) , there's more where that came from... but there's no getting around the waste of a King's ransom spent on losing this year's elections. 

Underlying this fear of the "big money donor" is, as I've siggested, a broader misconception and fear of mass market advertising. We are so bombarded, as Americans, with advertising messages that it's easy to assume that mass advertising really does make us mindless drones easily pushed into doing anything ads tell us to do. In reality, advertising gets us to do very little we wouldn't do anyway - eat, shop, wear clothes, and on and on. We accept advertising as a cultural given, we've explained it away as the price of captalism and free markets... but believing too much in the power of advertising is believing, ultimately, that we're really very dumb. And we're not - we're no geniuses collectively, but most of us are also not idiots (despite what I yell in my car). Advertising does not define us, or our choices, and we should question assumptions about mass media influence more than we already do.

So this was the year that political ads were supposed to be ugly, when the blanketing of ads in some markets (I can't imagine life as a TV viewer in Columbus or Cinncinnati) was so complete it was impossible to miss them... and the net/net was... about the same as last time. Ads didn't convince a lot of people that Obama was a terrible person who wanted to socialize medicine and ship auto jobs to China, nor did ads entirely convince people that Mitt Romney helped kill a woman with cancer. We watched, we saw, we went on with our everyday lives. And we voted for candidates who made sense to us for a variety of reasons, things that often had nothing to do with the messages in ads.

There's a lesson here should anyone choose to learn it - I've long thought that we won't solve the excesses of money in politics until the people who are foolish enough to waste their money start wising up and simply refuse to give it. Adelson's money doesn't make him a political genius - it makes him a gullible check writer who apparently falls for a good story and rosy promises of easy success. Linda McMahon's money doesn't make her a viable candidate; it makes her a vanity candidate convinced that looking the part is the same as being it.

Even the argiument that the Obama team are organizing and marketing geniuses for winning is suspect, and ought to be given only so much credence - as good as they did, as much as they executed well to the long view, the idea that deep database research made them extremely formidable is kind of wishful. It's simply demographic research at a micro level, and ultimately, what you know isn't necessarily all the much more than an observant person can figure out anyway. Single women weren't thrilled about the right's antiwoman, anti birth control tactics. Latin Americans want better immigration policies. People vote on the issues that affect them most, and most personally. People will accept political contacts when those contacts treat them more as individuals and less as a number on a sheet.  Retail politics isn't complicated... it's just that door knocking and building rapport at the local level is hard and takes energy and conviction. The Obama team's real secret, still, is the passion of its volunteers and supporters. And that can't really be bought.

I don't want campaign finance reform because it will make our elections magically more fair; I want campaign finance reform because the sleazy business of political contributions is embarrassing and wrong. Setting some campaign finance limits would also help save billionaires with a checkbook and no sense from themselves, and I'm all about Consumer Protection. :) But mostly, I think we'd be better able to do some campaign finance reform if we faced the obvious - all that money doesn't do very much to win elections, or even change minds. It's mostly wasted, and that's just silly. And then maybe we could look harder at the money that's the real problem: the fairly obvious bribery of the lobbying industry. That's the real problem, harder to solve, and far more dirty.

Come To Jesus

I was just a fresh, new voter in 1984, an idealistic (no, seriously) kid, convinced that Everyone Must Know That Liberals Were Right About Everything. After voting, for the first time, in my home state primary, I went off to college, convinced that the guy I wanted to be President would win. He just had to. How could anyone want four more years of that aging actor, Ronald Reagan?

And thus were my naive political dreams shattered. 

Walter Mondale won just one states: his home state of Minnesota. It was then that I learned that I had grown up in a liberal cocoon, cossetted and protected from a rougher, realer world where people didn't care about the issues I did, and didn't hold to principles that I held dear. And in 1988, I got my hopes up - again - that Michael Dukakis might win over a badly prepared, poorly presented George HW Bush... only to have Reagan and his people embrace Bush in a bear hug that dragged him over the finish line as the promise of Reagan Term III (and that, kids, is a big part of why Bush lost in 1992, because he failed to live up to that promise0.

I mention all of this because when older Democrats talk about the hard won return to electoral success - including the self doubting, sweet uncertainty so many of us carried in the last few months, despite what, we now know, was a virtual certainty of reelection for the President - we're not being theoretical. The Democratic Party I still believe in and support is not the Party of my childhood, or my teen years. We're tougher, more pragmatic, less doctrinaire (and, yes, sometimes frustratingly not as liberal as I or others might like). We keep our eye on what it takes to win elections, and we work to actually win them. We don't pin our hopes and dreams to unrealistic notions of what might be or what we wish would be... we have a clearer eye on what can happen, and what can't.

(And that, kids, is why we have Obamacare.)

The point here is that somewhere between 1988 and 1994, most liberals had a Come To Jesus moment. We got seriously tired of losing. We got tired of characterization of us and our beliefs by others who had no idea who we were or what we actually believed. And, too, we let go of old notions of how government works and what voters want that didn't really work. We ended the Oppression Olympics. We let go of ideas that only Government Knows How To Solve Problems. We softened notions that we hate Big Business, or The Rich. After all, many of us were rich, or about to become rich. And we embraced the adventurous idea that we could embrace notions of change, modernity, and innovation and use technological advancements to help us do better, help people, and succeed.

This was not done easily, and there are plenty of people who, still, resist the ideas of moderation, of giving in, of leaving traditional liberal ideas behind. We don't do enough or think hard enough about poverty. We've let a housing crisis deepen and worsen. Social Justice is still often more a concept than a plan. We have a lot of internal tensions that are likely to leave a big mess as we approach 2016. Yet, and still, we won this last election (from the Presidency to the Senate to the House, picking up seats in both houses) because we are not the Democrats of 1984.

And Republicans, in many ways, are still the party of 1992.

This election, it appears, was the "1984" for many Republicans, that the actual 1984 was for me. A moment when illusions met reality. When wishful thinking met the cold light of day. In 1980, I had excuses for why Reagan won, why it was his moment, how you can fool all of the people some of the time. That, really, was what 2008 was for Republicans. John McCain was a sad joke. Even they knew it. Sarah Palin failed. "Hope and Change" was a slogan that many found hard to resist. On and on. Iran hostages, Carter was weak... believe me, I was there. We had reasons. But 1984 was shattering. We should have won, It should have been closer. How could we have been so wrong?

I've been saying for six years that Republicans are actually in a wilderness created by the disastrous Bush presidency of 2000 and 2004. But that's just the manifestation of a far longer and deeper issues that conservatives are loath to face: that you can't be the party of the super wealthy elite and voice the concerns of the white working class. That you can't adopt rigid, absolutist positions and attract a wide swath of the public. That you cannot dismiss the concerns of traditionally marginalized groups wholesale.  You learn these lessons, adapt and change... or you die.

This, then is the conservative Come to Jesus moment. Will they actually, for once, admit and accept defeat? Can they see that the change that has to happen is change they have to make? Or will they, yet gain, call the voters stuoid, blame the "Magical Black Man", and offer excuse upon excuse about how they're right, and the rest of us, a growing and compelling majority of us, are bad and wrong? 

I am telling you, conservative folks... I've been there. We, we older liberals, have been there. We called the voters stupid, we resisted changing anything, we called all y'all bad and wrong. And then, we had a Come To Jesus moment. And we stopped doing those things. Or, at least, we realized that those excuses are not an answer, and no sense of a solution.

You'd think, really, that Coming To Jesus would come naturally to the folks who wear religiion, and an especially muscuar Christianity, on their sleeves. But then, the falseness and wafer thin commitment to actual Christian valiuues and politically driven religious piety is one of their problems, now, isn't it? Change or die, people.... change or die.

The Change We Cannot Make

Six or so years ago, I started a blog; partly out of a passion to write, and partly because, I realized soon after starting it, I was immensely frustrated by the politics of the early 2000s.

At the time I wasn't alone, and a whole world of blogging grew and thrived and started the wave of change that, I'm convinced, eventually swept Barack Obama into the White House. 

Six years later, life is different, politics is different, and my passion for writing... drifted. This year I largely sat out the election, and blogging - both thoroughly disenchanted with the politics of right now, and pursuing some personal ambitions.

In any case, I'm glad I waited. Now, I feel like I have something to say. Again.

For months - probably close to a year - I've been gamely predicting to anyone who'd listen that Barack Obama would, most likely, be reelected by a grim electorate who, while clearly not impressed with his first term, saw little alternative. When Mitt Romney steamrolled his way to the GOP nomination, I calmly told family and friends that America would not elect him President.

Yeah, I feel pretty vindicated, but that's not really my point.

Mitt Romney was a bad bet that Republicans made whose loss confirmed political ideas I've been trumpeting for months, if not years: that Republicans have deep internal issues that must be addressed to grow and thrive, that anger alone cannot win an election of make a movement, and that both Mormonism and a pronounced inability to seem genuine or sincere wrecked Romney well before the debates. I feel particularly heartened that the dark witch's brew of undiscussed racial bias and deep personal hatred for Obama of many conservatives led to nothing but failure. And I remain amazed about how months of obvious indications of Romney's unfitness - the "47 percent" remarks, the lack of any common touch, the ham-handed inability to note any comprehension of the problems ordinary people face - still left so many with some sense that Romney could win this. He couldn't. He never could.

More obviously, though, this election is yet further confirmation, as if we needed it, that the Presidency of George W. Bush and the worst tendencies of the conservative movement have combined to create a Republican Party on a slow path to complete failure. Virtually everything about this election underlines that reality:

The Forces We Can't Control

This week, in the face of a major hurricane, Republicans had to postpone the start day in Tampa of their convention.

And that, if nothing else, seems like a good set of reasons to get back into the game of writing.

I started a blog almost 6 years ago, and part of the reason for that was the times I had lived through, and a desire not to remain silent. A terrible hurricane had ravaged New Orleans. Our President was terrible. And somehow, something had to be done.

Six years later, the Republican remains a spectacular mess of a political party, its organization in disarray, attempting to put a brave face on a weak set of Presidential prospects, blown off course, yet again, by hurricanes and other forces they can't control (though Todd Akin, one would think, is something they could have controlled. Somehow). Hurricane Isaac, once headed straight for Tampa is, naturally, now headed towards New Orleans. And therein, I think, lies about all the metaphor one needs for why Republicans are likely to face disastrous results in the next three months.

There's the obvious stuff about how any planning committe should have wondered about planning a convention during the height of hurricane season in a hurricane prone city. There's the slightly surreal point that a party full of people quick to point to natural events as "God's wrath" having, well, God's actual wrath descend on them.  And then there's Isaac, headed right in the direction Katrina went, seven years ago.

Like many a liberal, I considered George W. Bush's presidency a failure very early on, probably before 9/11, though after that, calling him hopeless hardly sufficed. Sure, I'd been angry about the 2000 election. We all were. But long before conservatives called "anti-Bush rage" a thing, I stopped being angry. Anger serves little purpose. And anger was hardly the point. The failures, the long list of them, were really the point.

And the point, even now, is that we are left witha Republican Party that cannot admit failure. They cannot admit - or even speak of - the failed Bush Presidency. One can argue that neither political party dwells on failure... but liberals are, even these days, pretty quick to admit that, however nice a man Jimmy Carter is and however admirable his post-presidency acts are, his time as President was disastrous. For Democrats. And for America.

Democrats spent years - at least 12, until Clinton - paying for that failure, and the first, necessary step away from failure was admitting the failures and starting to change things. We are different Democrats than we were in 1978. The world has changed. And we changed with it - we faced up to forces beyond our control (like huge swaths of voters selecting Ronald Reagan. Twice). And we stopped trying, quite so hard, to control them.

Imagine a GOP that responded to the weather events of this week with massive volunteer efforts to send delegates and young people to the hurricane zone, away from Tampa. Imagine a GOP that pulled out a ready made slide on "improving disaster preparedness" and ticked off 10-15 proposals for ways that government (and knowing them, public-private partners) could be more successfully respond to hurricanes and their aftermath. That party, those thinkers, would be formidable opponents. 

Instead, we've got MItt Romney and Paul Ryan and a GOP that's generally at odd with itself, unable to agree on the time of day or just how mean and restrictive they want to be on almost anything. Romney, who I believe still will never be President, is the worst combination of known and unknown imaginable: what we know about him is mostly dreadful, what we don't know is close to terrifying. Ryan is surely young and energetic.... but also clearly a craven "say anything" politician trying hard to run away from a host of extreme policy ideas and positions.

However much Republicans put on their good face and their best show in Tampa (and I doubt it will be that good), what hangs over them is the stray clouds winging out from the center of a hurricane - Isaac's promise of current misery, Katrina's history still on view in New Orleans and our national psyche, and the grim cloud of the failed Bush Presidency. Until Republicans surrender some of this need for control - and yes, that can metaphorically stretch to immigrants and women's health, too, if one thinks about it - they can't get past the clouds on their horizon. And while those clouds hang there... I doubt they'll see the kind of success they crave.