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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. 

... Including And, And The

I'm less interested in Lance Armstrong "coming clean" about his doping habits than I am about the sense that it was appropriate, or necessary, for him to take his confessional to Oprah, and why Oprah seems to think of herself as national obsolver of celebrity sin. Armstrong's behavior, and his lying about it, strikes me as fairly clear well before he admitted it on television; and Oprah showed, yet again, why this role of confessor is hardly her strongest suit. She got few if any specifics about his doping practices, rarely challenged his (debatable) accounting of past events, and was hardly probing nor suggested the kind of familiarity with cycling or the medical issues around doping to quiz him in any thoughtful way.

That's hardly new; along with the casual assumption of her role as celebrity confessor comes a docile media rarely willing to hold Oprah up to her own past, challenge any aspect of her (even still, however limited) popularity, apparently awed, still, by her (even somewhat reduced) wealth and clout. Oprah's strength in daytime talk television was never particularly related to her strengths as an interviewer (I'll maintain Donahue was way better, forever), but more her ability to empathize and speak for a segment (a surprisingly large segment, in retrospect) of the audience who shared her sense of struggle over personal issues and sense of empowerment from within. OWN has lately, with some desperation, been programmed with significant amounts of old "Oprah Show" broadcasts, and they are, often as not, fairly illuminating just in terms of the host's own transition from charming neophyte to polished celebrity sob sister. The sobbing didn't change... but she did.

Armstrong's fall was, in its way, mostly inevitable; our society lauds athletes in weird ways, and leaves them few options as their athletic prowess fades. It doesn't diminish the talents of those who can run faster, kick harder, jump higher to point out that those physical skills are temporary, at best, and no proof of overall personal greatness. You don't have to be a good person to be a great athlete, and too often we grant too much of the former and, in a sense, take the latter too much for granted. It's why, after so many years of watching, I find Olympic athletes, especially the stars, more sympathetic than laudable. Outside of those grand arenas, out in the real world, I'm not sure those unicorns really have a place in the world.

"Doping" is a curious scandal, one that I'm not prepared, as some are, to call a hanging offense. How much of Lance Armstrong's success was the extra kick of steroids and EPO and blood replacement will be hard, if ever, to sort out, and in the end, hardly matters. He shouldn't have done it. But we can't, I think, confidently claim to know what would have happened if he never had. Perhaps the really sad story is that, without drugs, Lance Armstrong could have achieved many remarkable things, and those things, the true things, are the ones we'll never know.

Instead, we are left with Lance Armstrong, the man who lied and lied and lied again, who lied when it would have been easier to tell the truth, and who, most likely, hardly knows enough to know how to tell the truth, fully, at this late date. It's okay, though, because Oprah says so. I mean, it is... right?

(The title of this post comes from Mary McCarthy's memorable line about Lillian Hellman during their decades long feud, mostly about Hellman's "memoirs" that put herself central to the major developments of major events. "Every word she says is a lie," McCarthy said. "including 'and' and 'the'.")

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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 Retail Worker's Dark Weekend

For various reasons, I try never to shop on "Black Friday Weekend", avoiding the post-Thanksgiving madness and the media-constructed frenzy of shop-til-you-drop consumerist Americans and their lemming-like trip to the malls. I've worked in retail too long to see the romance, I don't like crowds, and frankly, the "bargains" of this shopping holiday are overstated.

It's also the case, these days, that I will probably also be working for most of it.

Black Friday this year was notable for a couple of things - one was the encroachment of the shopping into the actual Thursday of Thanksgiving, and the second was a planned, notable, if debatably successful attempt at labor actions outside of many Wal-Marts around the country. Even by the organizers' generous assessments, the number of workers participating in these protests was in the hundreds, though media coverage did clearly amplify the noise and the effect of the protests.

The remarkable thing, really, is that it's taken much of my lifetime for Thanksgiving to be breached by retailers as sacrosanct; only Easter Sunday - and Christmas Day, I suppose - remain as the day of no shopping, and that anachronism may be the hardest to topple, but it's also the one that makes the least sense (at some point, Christian traditionalism will be damned). Literally 20 years ago, I was having conversations with family and friends that one day, obviously, retailers would launch the "Thanksgiving Day Sale" - I mean, heck, one day, Macy*s was sure to notice that there was a crowd of people outside the store after that darn parade, if nothing else - and one more domino would fall on the notion that for one day, at least, we could forestall the real American pastime (shopping, not football).

Let's be clear: we don't close stores for the sake of shoppers. Keeping shopping out of Thanksgiving wasn't some kind of "have respect for this important American holiday, consumerism can wait." No, the point of closing stores was simple human decency for the American worker. Let's take one day, just one day, and nobody, or almost nobody, should have to work. The problem with Thanksgiving, arguably, started with my company, Starbucks; we're the most major corporation I know of that sees no particular reason to close its outlets on any holiday at all. Almost all Starbucks are open on Thanksgiving, for at least some portion of the normal day. Many are open on Christmas. We are almost all open on Easter, normal hours. We close early on days like New Year's Eve and the Fourth of July. But we are open. Always open. And people get bewildered when we close, even for obvious practical reasons, like a hurricane.

But Starbucks isn't just a restaurant - food being the general exception to "closed on the holiday" - we are a retailer, and we are located in shopping centers and malls like the other retailers and we sell more than just drinks and food and we're helping, I think, to erode the idea tbat there's one day, any day, when a retailer should be closed. 

And the people who get punished, when we lose even one day of being closed... are workers.

I was struck, this year, by the fact that, however small, people (and the media) seemed to take nte of the workers. It wasn't a big story, and it was surely subsumed by the stories of stampedes and fights and all the attendant madness of crowds. But the Wal-Mart action and the Thursday opens did get people talking, and talking about what these things mean to workers. Which is, after all, almost all of us. We are a nation of service workers, now, and it means that many of us work to serve the rest of us. It's a different equation about work and what we think of people who serve and it's complicated... and I think we're only just beginning to sort out the cultural and social implications, never mind the political and economic ones.

The Wal-Mart action revived the favorite liberal topics of how bad the big W is, how badly its workers are treated... but Wal-Mart in many ways is really just a stand-in for most of retailing, where the wages are low, the hours are long, and the rights of workers mean but so much. Attempts to unionize most retail workers, in or out of Wal-Mart, are rarely successful, and are unlikely to succeed en masse or long term. To say this is to be labeled "anti-union", and I'm not; but the realities are stark. I've been in retail a long time, and I've known many, many of the women (mostly) and men who work there. Don't take my word for it... but most of them are not interested in a union. And won't be. They are students and mothers and transient and free thinkers. Not being organized provides a kind of flexibility and set of options many workers want, and even need. Unions have not found a way to convince retail workers, generally, of their value long term. And still, that's unlikely to change much.

Even more to the point, as I've said before, because we are no longer a nation of mostly manufacturing jobs, Unions do not really respresent the majority experience of most workers in this country now. Yet "Organized Labor" is allowed, mostly by Democrats, to serve as the "Working Person's Voice" even when the policies unions promote don't necessarily refelects the needs and opinions of most workers. What we need, really, is a change in how we talk and think about the issues of work and labor in this country, and try harder to develop a sensible labor policy that reflects who we actually are and what we actually do. That's why, I suspect, the Affordable Care Act has managed, quietly, to be  a key selling point of President Obama and the Democrats this past election - it's not perfect, but it makes sure many workers will get health insurance, a practical slution many people need. Similarly with the debates of contraception and abortion - in the place where airy philosophical debates mean less than the practical issues of real people actually face.

I don't think we can "save Thanksgiving" from the retail encroachment; the wall has been breached, business needs have overtaken simple decency and humane respect for workers and their families. We will, as we do, work around these new relaities. We are workers, after all. But I think this year may mark another, more refreshing turning point, one where the discussions around our working lives, and the pratcical need for a life beyond work, begins to become more public, louder, and more insistent. It doesn't mean service workers will unionize, and new laws may not be the answer (certainbly, that's not the whole answer); the change we need is cultural, social... not just political, and not just economic. 

And I could go on... but I really have to get on with my day - I have to work this evening.

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.

So... You Either Have Insurance Or Pay A Tax, But Congress Can't Make The States Offer Affordable Coverage To Poor People?

There will be lots of focus today on the 5-4 upholding of the indvidual mandate, and that's sort of fair: the requirement to have insurance or pay a relatively small fee was the linchpin of a much broader consitutional argument, and that argument, as I suggested earlier this week, remains a non-starter. While Congress may not have the right to "compel" commerce, it does have the power to tax you if you don't show proof of health insurance. It's worth pointing out that 4 Justices would have accepted the Commerce Clause argument, while 4 others would have rejected the tax claims as well. So... basically, only John Roberts thinks that Congress can tax you, but can't regulate commercial inactivity. Or something.

Lost in today's coverage - except, admirably, from Megyn Kelly on Fox - is the 7-2 decision that may yet prove the bigger problem: the Court sharply limited Congressional ability to force the states to expand Medicaid coverage or face the loss of all Medicaid funds. The practical implications of this are still being sorted, but from what I can tell, this could be not only a huge mess for Medcaid recipients, but also for the individual mandate.

Remember, the ACA does about 4 things to make sure that everyone has access to affordable health insurance: most people will get covered by their employers (including ending pre-existing condition limits, lifetime caps, and extended coverage for young people on parent plans to age 26), seniors remain covered by Medicare, people above 133% of poverty but unemployed (or self employed or such) can buy coverage on new "insurance exchanges"... and people at or below 133% of poverty figures were to be covered by Medicaid.

Unfortunately, Medicaid right now isn't budgeted to offer that kind of massive expansion of coverage. So Congress, trying to paper over the problems of adding a huge budget increase did what it usually does when poor people are involved: Congress played math games, pretending that a less than full increase of funding can somehow cover the first five years of the expansion, and then told the states that after the first five years, a large bulk of the expansion would become their budget problem instead. 

Let's be clear: Medicaid right now already fails to adequately cover the small number of people in dep poverty it needs to cover. Medicaid expansion doesn't just enormously increase the problems of insuring poor individuals (who, most likely, need healthcare they can't afford now, meaning costs for care will have a large initial spike... but Medicaid is also the insurer of last resort for poor elderly people in nursing homes. By widely exapnding the ability of people to qualify for Medicaid, it's likely that even more elderly people in extended care will need coverage. And for the sunbelt states - most of which were the main parties to this suit - that cost increase could be crippling.

What the Supreme Court said - apparently - is that these states could decide not to expand Medicaid and to refuse the funds tied to the expansion, but still receive their existing Federal Medicaid grants. And it may be, as some theorize, that even with that permission, a number of states will take the extra money and do some sort of expanded offering to their poor citizens. But it's also quite possible that Texas, say, will just refuse to do anything, not lose the limited Medicaid funds it already gets, and leave millions of poor people with no real way to get insurance coverage.

And guess what happens then... under the mandate's tax policy... they owe the tax.

In a sense, Roberts has shown himself to be a more traditional conservative, a more Reagan era appointee than many guessed at the time of his appointment. A product of the Reagan Justice Department, Roberts was part of the first wave of true believers, and his decision - and make no mistake, this ruling is all him; no other Justice or group of Justices agreed with the whole of his opinion - reflects those beliefs. While he makes more allowances for federal power than some far right types would like, he also shows the myopia to policies which make it hardest for people in poverty to change their circumstance, a classic Reagan-era conceit. This is "Welfare Queens" and Bootstrap Logic all over again, and in some ways worse. And the end result is some real mischief, which explains why my sympathies lie most with the angriest Justice: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who correctly pointed out that health care reform is meaningless if it doesn't help the most vulnerable and in need. Upholding a tax on lack of insurance was never the worst thing this Court could do - the worst thing would be making it harder to make sure poor people never faced that tax.

And that's exactly what seems to have happened.

Learning to Madison

I haven't written a lot about politics in a while. Hell, I haven't written much of anything in a while. Oh well.

Last night, I got mildly caught up in the angst of Wisconsin's recall election. But not too much... which probably goes some ways to explaining why a seemingly controversial, not exactly popular Governor managed to survive one of the few recall elections ever held (though apparently he's the only one who ever survived.

There's lots of talk about the "money in politics" part of this story, and no doubt, throwing millions and millions of dollars at a desired result has to help, but I just wanted to take note of a few of the less popular, less liberal friendly lessons this election might be giving us. Not to annoy anyone - even my closest friends have given up on me ever being a proper liberal - just to lay out some of the political issues that the left struggles with. So here, as they kind of occurred to me:

• Elections are local, and specific choices between actual people. There was lots of blather, last night, from people who don't live in Wisconsin, about the Governor's race, but I was struck by the fact that this election was basically a replay of the last one... and Tom Barrettt lost that one, too. I don't live there, I have no idea what Barrett's been like as Mayor of Madison. But apparently, Wisconsin does. There's a part of this story, I think, that both hasn't been told, and relates to the local scene. And I'm not sure many people not in Wisconsin really care what the details are. But they probably matter to how this election shook out. A corollary from this is that it's hard to extrapolate a "national message" here, though conservatives would like this to prove that Mitt Romney can/will beat President Obama. I don't buy that, not yet anyway. 
• Unions represent a small fraction of the entire populace. This is a reality that frustrates many lefties and makes it hard to come up with a new kind of liberal politics, because Union paricipation in the Democratic Party - financially, through volunteerism, and with expectations for return on investment - is out of proportion to that reality. We are well past the old romantic days of a manufacturing based working class well spoken for by union bosses, and liberal and Democratic Party politics have to move past those old mindsets. That's not an "antiunion" sentiment... but to the extent that this election was a referendum on public sector unions, the votes reflected a couple of unhappy corollaries: non-union households are not especially sympathetic to the remaining union gripes, and lots of people think it's reasonable to rein in government spending by cracking down on union benefits, which are perceived as plush.  Democrats can't stop Walker and Walker-like conservatives while clinging to outdated notions of "pro-union" boilerplate.
• Don't pretend there isn't a fiscal crisis. Walker's anti-union push was built on the noiton of making "hard choices" for how to deal with reducing government spending. I get that many liberlas don't like this, but Walker won by making these "hard choices" sound reasonable, and part of his success was that opposition to it sounded myopic and unrealistic. And while I don't think Wisconsin has huge national implications, there is a point to be made here about the coming budget, debt celing and tax fights in Washington: "raise taxes on millionaires" is hardly a serious approach to reining in spending or addressing revenue issues. 
• You can't fight money with nothing. Nobody wants to feel bought, and few want to think of themselves as mindless sheep, easily driven by propaganda to a desired result. All of the "this was about money" griping can't evade the fact that removing Walker was not unachievable, even with millionaires sinking lots of money into a desired result. Which is why I keep saying liberals need more of a call to action than anger and resentment towards a small number of rich people. People vote FOR things; and liberals who care should figure out why so many people - especially people who could have been persuaded otherwise - voted for Scott Walker. Again. Ideas matter, laying out a choice matters, and anger alone isn't a strategy. 

Mitt Romney's Problem Isn't Being Rich. It's Being Mean.

Ah, the "Bain Story". It's the campaign narrative that simply refuses to die, no matter how Republicans try to wish it away. Mitt Romney's experience as the head of Bain Capital are both his attempt to prove his business savvy, and his opponents' attempt to paint him as the evil example of the 1%.

I'm not sure a lot of people - even the people who are trying to use Mitt's Bain experience as a cudgel against him - entirely understand why the attacks are working. And working they are. As much as "pro-business" types would like to turn Romney's business acumen into a net plus, as much as some private sector types want to paint Obama as an anti-Capitalist at least (or "socialist" at worst)... the protestations about "demonizing Mitt Romney" tend to underline that the attacks are working and something is sticking, though no one, exactly, can seem to say what it is.

One obvious point is that criticism of Romney, or of Bain more generally, is not, by itself, anti-business. One investment firm's choices are not some stand-in for the entire field private equity, and if there are aspects of the private equity world that trouble people... well, that's probably an ancillary benefit - possibly the only good thing - to come out of this debate. Private equity could stand more scrutiny, and certain practices deserve more consideration, both from a business perspective, and a more human one.

 

It's that "human perspective" that's probably the real story here, and why these stories of Bain's business practices are resonating with the voting public. It's not that Bain's key stakeholders made millions that really gets people down (bringing me back to an old, and apparently upsetting point for others that being rich and making money, by themselves, ae not bad things, necessarily), but it's the practices they employed to get that money. Specifically, what I think is resonating about these stories is simple and human.... it's the part about the layoffs. And the fact that laying people off seems mean.

One of Mitt Romney's main flaws as a candidate - and there are, after all, so many - is that he seems intent on a cerebral, logical argument for his election. He seems awkward and uncomfortable with direct emotional appeals to voters; he comes off, often, as cold. I'm not even sure these perceptions are accurate, yet they do seem to prevail.

And really, Romeny would be in worse shape if President Obama himself had a real strength in emotional appeal, but really, he lkind of doesn't. As we've all observed on the left... he's no Bill Clinton, in ways good and bad. And one of the bad is that, unlike Clinton, he doesn't establish the kind of immediate emotional connection that Clinton still does, almost effortlessly. 

I don't think elections should be won or lost on emotional appeals... but these are difficult, emotional times, filled with uncertainty. Appealing to people's logic and clear thinking isprobably a waste of time. Across Europe, across North Africa and into the Middle East (the "Arab Spring"), it's clear that emotions are driving a lot of people's political judgments. Out with the old. Out with the insensitive. And out with the people who insist we have to think practically, above all else.

 

Bain's business decisions may, in the B-School sense, make perfectly logical sense. And I don't think "capitalism" is under any threat as a result of ads against Mitt Romney about Bain. Lots of people, even lower level workers, understand that business leaders make hard decisions when it comes to growing and sustaining a business. In practical terms, what's best "for the business" at a particular moment may include retrenchment, closings, firings. But on a personal level, those deciions are, almost always, painful ones. People will be hurt. Lives will be up-ended. There will be pain and suffering.

Mitt Romney isn't suffering bad perceptions about his work at Bain Capital because he seems like a bad businessman or not smart; rather, he's been hurt by these ads because he seems mean, unconcerned with the real-life consequences of firings and reversals and how they affect ordinary workers. And he's lousy at expressing empathy; he continues to talk about life changes and reversals with the distance of abstraction, and the cavalier superiority of someone who has, most likely, never known one. President Obama, no, doesn't do mcuh better; but when the focus is on Bain and Romney's business decisions, the quesiton isn't whether Obama can empathize more. It's whether Mitt Romney can empathize at all.

Conservatives are lousy with this stuff; they see Democrats and liberals as little more than sensitive wet rags, crying for trees, yelling about the poor, hugging the downtrodden and disdaining those who are normal, successful. Conservatives look to emotional appeals as a last resort, and even then, the emotions thay appeal to tend to be anger and superiority. You're better than they are. Be a winner. Let people in need learn to take care of themselves.

Liberalism, too, could probably stand to learn to be tougher, and rely less on these soggy emotional appeals. But by keeping the "Bain story" focused on the sense of bewilderment and loss, the suggestion that we can't turn our government over to someone so incapable of understanding the actual, practical impacts of layoffs and bottom line thinking... Democrats are on to something. It's something that can win this election. The problem of course is... once they win, there's no indication that these Democrats, however sensitive, will be any more help than those useless, cold business types.

Articles We - Still - Never Finished Reading: Knowing Is All

[The President]...acknowledges no rules. This past week, one of his campaign websites posted an item entitled "Behind the curtain: A brief history of Romney's donors." In the post, the Obama campaign named and shamed eight private citizens who had donated to his opponent. Describing the givers as all having "less-than-reputable records," the post went on to make the extraordinary accusations that "quite a few" have also been "on the wrong side of the law" and profiting at "the expense of so many Americans."

These are people like Paul Schorr and Sam and Jeffrey Fox, investors who the site outed for the crime of having "outsourced" jobs. T. Martin Fiorentino is scored for his work for a firm that forecloses on homes. Louis Bacon (a hedge-fund manager), Kent Burton (a "lobbyist") and Thomas O'Malley (an energy CEO) stand accused of profiting from oil. Frank VanderSloot, the CEO of a home-products firm, is slimed as a "bitter foe of the gay rights movement."

These are wealthy individuals, to be sure, but private citizens nonetheless. Not one holds elected office. Not one is a criminal. Not one has the barest fraction of the position or the power of the U.S. leader who is publicly assaulting them.

- Kim Strassel "The President Has A List", Potomac Watch on the WSJ Opinions page, today.

... And disclosure, despite Strassel's heavy breathing, does not equal initimidation. Political donations are public, the names and amounts a matter of record; what gets attached to those records - like, say, one's history in business or one's other political interests - is what we do with the First Amendment. We say stuff. And it gets heard.

Strassel's dark mutterings about vast Presidential conspiracies is probably most hilarious for the Nixonian referencing, given that Nixon's darkest political tactics - the searches for scandal and the rummaging in people's pasts are hardly things the Republicans have disavowed or left to the past. This, after all, from the contingent that still tries to trump up "Bill Ayers" and birth certificates and suspicions of Islamism into painting the President as monster. But hey, all's fair... until you ask just who's giving money and why.

Strassel's being mostly incoherent here, arguing for a kind of secrecy or some sort of "hands off" approach to donors she can't dcodify or describe in a straightforward way... mostly because it doesn't exist. And for me, this morning, this made a nice companion to pointing out the general pointlessness of Frank Rich's "eek, money!" complaints on the opposite end. Strassel's companion point form the right is just as silly: if people plan to give enormous sums of money to try andunseat the sitting President, knowing who they are and what their agendas might be is hardly the "abuse of power" Strassel is trying to claim. It's mostly one, small shred of valuing openness and information over secrecy and hiding. And like many conservative commentators who seem to find investigative reporting somehow not just beyond their skills but somehow beyond the pale, Strassel seems to be arguing against the very paper she works for.

Knowing is good. It's just that knowing alone isn't going to stop the stream of milionaire donations, anymore than vague threats of reprisals (which the President, one could note, really didn't make.) But hey... why let that stop a good column?

Articles We - Yup - Never Finished Reading: Rich Man's Burden

If you want to appreciate what Barack Obama is up against in 2012, forget about the front man who is his nominal opponent and look instead at the Republican billionaires buying the ammunition for the battles ahead. A representative example is Harold Simmons, an 80-year-old Texan who dumped some $15 million into the campaign before primary season had ended. Reminiscing about 2008, when he bankrolled an ad blitz to tar the Democrats with the former radical Bill Ayers, Simmons told The Wall Street Journal, “If we had run more ads, we could have killed Obama.” It is not a mistake he intends to make a second time. The $15 million Simmons had spent by late February dwarfs the $2.8 million he allotted to the Ayers takedown and the $3 million he contributed to the Swift Boat Veterans demolition of John Kerry four years before that. Imagine the cash that will flow now that the GOP sideshows are over and the president is firmly in Simmons’s crosshairs.

 

- Frank Rich "Sugar Daddies," New York Magazine Apr 22

 

...Except that, if you check out the informative graphic attached as a sidebar to Rich's article, Simmons is hardly "representative": His 15.4 million in contributions is second only to Sheldon Adelson's 20 million plus, and the tqo of them are 10-15 times ahead of far more "representative" contributions that range from about 1-2 million, generally. That's not a huge discrepancy (though the dollar figures ought to count for something), but it's indicative Rich's generally bombastic approach to the whole topic. There are prefectly good reasons to be concerned about the role of a small, but significant, number of wealthy contributors to both political parties, but Rich's fashionable hair-raised (or as Lucianne used to put it "dress up over head") screed is more about repeating familiar tropes with little real insight, overstating both the rxtent of the problem and properly identifying its more troubling aspects.

Rich does concede that a number of donors to Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove "Super PAC" that most liberals fixate on most, are secret and that, in part, there are another couple of "anonymous" $10 million donors yet to be identified. Fair enough; but even then, the number of truly "enoromous donors" over five million seems to number roughly less than ten. Moreover, Simmons is also a pretty "representative" example of throwing enormous amounts of money at a problem without seeing much in the way in the way of results. Simmons acknowledges having dumped similarly large sums into the 2008 election, to no particularly good end, and there's no real indication (despite Rich's panting and pointing) that his largesse this year will have any more effect; that doesn't make him "dangerous," that makes him a "patsy" to what I woud call some "unscrupulous" operators promising the moon and delivering a lot less. In just a few sentences, Rich goes a long way towards making Simmons seem like an old man frittering his fortune rather than a political genius - which is not exactly strengenthing Rich's point about fearing these people.

The thing which deserves far more examination than we've made in our society, is that, while "money equals speech" may be the Supreme Court's greatest error, it's not clear that "money equals success" in elections. The 2008 election - along with the two previous ones - are noted for the enormous sums raised, but the outcomes of the last few elections seem less determined by funds than by other factors about when to vote for change and when to affirm the status quo. John Kerry didn't just lose in 2004 over money issues; his failure to inspire voters, even (especially) those in his own party played an enormous role in his loss. Similarly, Obama's fundraising abilities were in many ways a subset of the real qualities that pushed him into the White House: charisma, personal appeal, and the promise of a fresh start. John McCain could have spent a small fortune - and in fact noth he and the GOP did - and still have lost as drmatically as he did.

A lot of this has to do with assumptions about the power of advertising that rarely get properly questioned, challenged or examined in more than a surface way. In a culture where we are bombarded by marketing messages from morning to night, we rarely consider what advertising really moves us to do, why, and how to realistically asses ts reach. We assume, because it is asserted repeatedly, that "negative" advertising on politicians will "ruin" candidates' electoral chances, even when, privately, many of us admit that we find these ads less than useful, often ignore tham, and seek out other, more useful information to make a choice. Yes, that's what separates "informed" voters from a group that probably is more easily swayed; even so, it's hard to know that the enormous sums spent by Crossroads is really buying any kind of real success for conservative ideas or candidates - the successes of 2010 for the GOP, surely, are a lot more about a national mood than a lot of negative ads, however Rove wants to dress up his power as a "mood alterer". Mostly, the millions backing Rove's organization seem meant, mostly, to prop up Rove as a political celebrity whose "power" as a broker is more assumed than proven (a role, I've observed, that traces back to his supposed "genius" in supporting George W. Bush, a similarly dubious proposition).

None of this is to dismiss legitimate concerns about the power of enormous wealth to buy political access, influence electoral outcomes, or suggest that I think "money equals speech" or support the current role of "Super PACs"... but I do think that a lot of the noise about the terror of "all this money" from the left is, well, just noise, mosty meant to try and lmit the actual success of the spending of conservatives, and try and ignore the large spending by groups (say, unions, anyone?) supporting the left. And, as always, I feel compelled to point out that many of these critics ought to clarify their arguments - if this is about simply being personally wealthy (and Rich is not one for distinctions), that's a different issue than the politics of spending said wealth. And as I keep trying to gently say... I think it's probably a waste of time to hate wealth. That's not going to go away. The political ads, hopefully, will.

(Also, much like "Worst Song Ever," I think I may need Ground Rules. But really, I don't hate all of Frank Rich's writing.)