Letter 2 America for October 18, 2013

Dear America,

Now that the most recent manufactured government crisis has come to an end, it is time for some post-mortem observations.  The first is one that has been made many times in all kinds of circumstances: no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.  Somehow, even John Boehner has come out of his unseemly failed attempt to coerce a conservative turn out of our political system relatively unscathed.  Polls show that he hasn't gained anything, but he isn't the object of abject national scorn either.  It seemed while he was jumping from horse to horse in mid stream that he could not help but lose the support of the Tea Party constituency within his party caucus, and the moderates could not have been pleased with the damage being done to them in the name of Boehner's courtship of the right-most fringe among the Republicans.  Yet, his admission that he and his collaborators fought what he characterized as "a good fight" but they didn't win--thus rendering this entire exercise nothing more than a power grab by a national minority gone wrong in which Boehner lent his power of office to the ill-conceived, disingenuous effort--seems to be a victory of sorts snatched from what seemed nothing better than a shabby political game all the way through.  That admission, given with a sort of wink and a smirk that acknowledged its petty inspiration, was not the confession of failure that it seemed.  Rather, it was Boehner slapping the American people on the back saying, "thats was a good one, wasn't it?"  It should have been a mea culpa, but instead it was the leader of the conservative ploy claiming that he was only kidding all along, which served him well in that if he had allowed everyone to believe that he really believed that using the shutdown of the government and the threat of allowing the treasury to breach the debt ceiling and default could work, he would have demonstrated himself to be an idiot rather than a cynic.  Cynicism is the conservative way, but they really don't like being called idiots.

So, Boehner comes out of all this smelling...well, not like a rose, but not like the other thing either.  And Mitch McConnell looks like the sage voice of reason, the grayer head that prevailed, and just in time to reclaim his seat in The Senate in 2014; Boehner's folly has been a godsend for Mitch McConnell.  Meanwhile, Ted Cruz, who was the school yard bully responsible for egging on the conservatives in the Tea Party for so long that they managed to do damage to our economy with their doomed-from-the-start effort, is more popular than ever with the Tea Party, and the Tea Party controls politics in his home state of Texas where politicians like Cruz and Louie Gohmert--who says such stupid things that I can't believe that even he believes them--hail from, and are in fact the paradigm for success in Texas politics.  We should have let them secede when we had the chance.  Concomitantly, President Obama comes out of all this looking less avuncular than didactic, and his public standing, quite to the contrary of being enhanced by his loyalty to his principles with just the right touch of flexibility at the end, seems to have been diminished in spite of his leadership of the successful effort to drive the minority barbarians from the gates of democracy by majority rule.  Whether it's just the form of the questions asked in the polls or the true sentiment of those polled, this outcome feels very Wonderland-ish.  I made wry reference to the Red Queen once before over the past two or three weeks, but I feel her actual presence now.  There are mad hatters running roughshod over our democracy, and it looks in the end like they will be permitted to continue to do so.  With so few congressional seats being really competitive--you have to remember that Gohmert has been elected to his seat in congress four times--what hope do we have that a rational government will emerge from our next electoral season, and frankly, I'm staying out of Texas.  Between Governor Rick Perry and these other two, anything could happen down there, and I don't want to be there when it does.

In the final analysis, I don't think that the Republicans won anything with this most recent bout of petulance, but I don't think that they lost as much as they should have.  The next round of the game will be played in January and February when the current continuing resolution to fund daily government operations expires and the debt ceiling will next be breached respectively.  My thinking over the past few weeks has been that this time, the Republicans should learn a lesson from this misadventure as the American electorate is going to chasten them once and for all, but they timed it just right.  The voters will have forgotten the small scale misery that conservatives wreaked upon them just a few months earlier come January, and they can pull this again with a relatively fresh start ten months before the next mid-term election.  That's more than enough time to outlast the American electoral attention span.  But we'll see.  Like Boehner, all we liberals can do is fight the good fight and hope for the best.  The problem is that if we don't win, we get what conservatives deserve, and that won't do anybody any good.

Your friend,

Mike