Some Suggested Reading
Just some light blogging tonight as Mrs. Talk Talk Talk Talk Talk and I make our way back home from the Great White Wilderness to the north. One of my 9th-grade teachers (I think she was a civics teacher, but I don't remember clearly) marveled when I told her I was from Canada. "It must be very primitive up there," she said. "No," I replied, "it's very modern. They have running water and TV and everything." Never mind that the Greater Toronto Area, where we've been over the past few days, has a population of 5 million.
Avedon Carol at Eschaton pointed me to Corrente, which has a couple of intriguing posts today. Lambert writes an insightful (though long) post about the current friction between Obama and Paul Krugman (which was a topic of conversation at lunch today). You should read the whole thing (it's worth the time it'll take), but here's my favorite part:
Obama wants to "reach out," but that strategy has already been tried. Obama says he wants to "reach out" to Republicans. But Reid and Pelosi "reached out" to Republicans, and that strategy was a miserable failure.
Reid and Pelosi "reached out" to Republicans by taking impeachment off the table.
Reid and Pelosi "reached out" to Republicans by not using the power of the purse either to end the war or to curb executive power.
Read and Pelosi "reached out" to Republicans through FISA "reform" by trying to give Bush more power than even the Republicans tried to give him, when they were in the majority.
In fact, Reid and Pelosi "reached out" to Republicans by caving and capitulating to them on just about any issue you can name.
And what did we get? We got nothing.
In another post, Shane-O asks some trenchant questions about the pocket veto we discussed last night. Apparently the Prez may be trying to veto the bill in the traditional manner (which would be subject to a vote to override) and use the pocket veto (which is immune from such a vote). Could it have anything to do with veto-proof majorities of 370-49 in the House and 90-3 in the Senate? Hmmmm.
posted by Doug @ 11:25 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Doug, you owe me the time I spent reading that Lambert article. Insightful? Hardly.
Lambert sounds his thesis in a lot of the same rhetoric we hear from the neocons -- anything less than full-out war with the Radical Islamists or the Republicans (as the case may be) is nothing less than appeasement. I half expected Lambert to call Obama a modern day Neville Chamberlin.
The problem with Lambert's argument is that domestic politics is not a war. After the election, there will be no ceremony on a battleship where Richard Mellon Sciafe signs articles of surrender. Lambert understands this on one level -- he correctly points out that the right-wing smear machine will kick into high gear whoever the next Democratic president may be -- but he misses the larger level.
And that larger level is this: half the country agrees with the so-called Vast Rigt-Wing Conspiracy. Sure, they may not agree with all of the tactics and sleaze, but when it gets right down to it, half the country thinks that Republican ideals are closer to their own ideals than Democratic ideals are.
And the next president, whoever he or she may be, is going to have to govern all of those people, not just the ones who agree with him. He or she is going to have to win hearts and minds. And you don't win hearts and minds by telling 49% of the electorate to go to hell.
There are a great many people in this country who disagree not just with President Bush's specific policies, but his very style of government. The idea that as the President, he gets to ram his preferences down the throat of the American people. Is the solution to this really to do more of the same, but from the left instead of the right?
Think back a few years to Vice President Cheney's Energy Policy Task Force. The left was (justifiably) up in arms because Cheney all but ignored all voices on the left and consulted almost exclusively with the energy companies in formulating policy. But Lambert's (and Krugman's) view of the health care crisis is that Obama is foolish for not wanting to ignore the voices on the right in formulating health care policy?
That's a silly position. Like it or not, insurance companies are part of the way health care is structured in this country, and any attempt to reinvent health care in this country that does not give them a seat at the table will be stillborn. More broadly, any attempt to move this country to the left that does not acknowledge the concerns of the right will be equally stillborn. Lasting, meaningful change in this country will require the support of the overhwleming majority of the electorate, and that is going to require that the next President listen to both the left and the right.
Separately, even if you disagree with everything I wrote above, Lambert is still wrong to criticize Obama's conciliatory rhetoric. The idea that the President should be a hard-line partisan is simply wrong-headed. You don't make the chief into the hatchet man. You let the chief smile and stay above the fray while subordinates pull out the long knives. So even if you think Republicans are the enemy and must be defeated, the President is not the one who should be doing the dirty work.
I tried to post this last night on my Blackberry in Flint, and at one point I thought that I actually had, but clearly that never happened. Fortunately, after writing a fair amount, I had the foresight to save it so I wouldn't have to reconstruct. From here on out, this is what I wrote in Flint.
I'm sorry you want your time back, Jason, but I'll see what I can do. Besides, I already owe you a beer, anyway. I don't know that I'm in complete agreement with Lambert, but I do agree substantially. I fear that we do need to shove the country back toward what used to be the middle. To some extent, it is a war. There's no reason to believe that the next president won't face twice the viciousness and vitriol that Clinton did. There's no reason to believe anyone on the Right is going to be in a mood to make concessions. Why should we expect a Democratic president to be treated any more reasonably than Reid and Pelosi have been?
I don't agree that half the country agrees with the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Bush got a lot of votes, but in his first election, he was pretending to be more moderate than he turned out to be, and in the second, he was still riding a tidal wave of fear over terrorism and the Iraq war. There is not 49 percent approval for his current policies, including his executive power grab.
I agree you can't bludgeon the country into moderation, But I do think it's reasonable to play a little bit of hardball with people who have shown no interest in finding common ground.
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