Letter 2 America for October 25, 2013

Dear America,

Most of the Tea Party members, those in congress in particular, are wild eyed reactionaries, and while they are a menace, it is easy to recognize them, and thus easy to see them coming when they have a new tactic on their collective mind.  Ted Cruz is a bombastic Texan with an obvious kind of self-serving patter.  You know what he is going to say before he says it, and the only thing that ever changes about his speeches is the specific order of the words and phrases he uses.  He has his legion, but because he is so obvious, the fact that he is out of touch with the majority of the American electorate insulates us all from the harm he might otherwise do.  The same is the case for lesser acolytes of the Tea Party cause like Michelle Bachman.  She is nothing but a sloganeer and a mindless shill for what she thinks is Americanism, and like Cruz, she is preaching to a choir comprising only a minority of American voters.  Everyone rational in this country is turned off by such politicians, and that renders them only minimally threatening to those of us who believe that progressivism is the proper course.  For the most part--almost entirely in fact--the Tea Party movement is made up of that political type: hyperbolic, demagogical, and overtly intellectually dishonest.  But there is one exception of note to that stereotype in a position of prominence in the Tea Party movement, and that is Raul Labrador.  If your grown daughter brought him home for dinner, you might well say to her afterward that he was a nice guy and worthy of becoming your son-in-law.  He seems calm, level headed, fair minded and temperate.  But in Labrador's case, it's all a ruse.

Now that the government shut down is over, conservatives are up to their usual tricks, finding fault with the Obama administration and the Democrats wherever they can contrive it, and frankly, sometimes it doesn't take much effort to find those faults.  The health care exchanges aren't working so well here at the start of the operation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and frankly, it is my least favorite health care alternative too...except for the free-market "system" we have had until now.  It has flaws and inequities built into it, but at least it does something about the nearly fifty million Americans who have not been able to afford health care in the past.  The Affordable Care Act makes health care...well...affordable for tens of millions for whom it wasn't affordable before The Act was passed.  In other words, it's better than the nothing that conservatives are offering.  But Labrador thinks that abolition of the ACA--Obamacare as he and his ilk pejoratively call it--is a moral crusade, and his benign manner can almost make one forget his monomania on the subject.  Raul Labrador is the stealth wacko in the Tea Party, and that makes him dangerous.  To be specific, I recently heard him say, with uncharacteristic vituperation in his words, that he wasn't willing to negotiate with The President after what he did during the government shut down because Mr. Obama was trying to destroy the Republican Party.  His claim was that President Obama didn't deal with the disloyal opposition fairly.  But if you examine the past month during which this crisis was manufactured and prolonged by the Tea Party minority within the Republican Party, it will be obvious that President Obama did nothing at all.  He simply said that he wouldn't do anything as long as the conservatives kept the government closed and threatened not to increase the debt ceiling when it became necessary.  He said he would talk to them about anything, but not while the country's financial well-being was being held hostage.

On the other hand, during that time Labrador appeared more than once on Sunday mornings to state his position.  On Meet the Press, for example, he said that a compromise that he would accept in lieu of defunding Obamacare, which was the original conservatives' quid pro quo for reopening the government, was delaying its implementation for one year.  But then he was confronted, and he admitted his intentions, specifically to use that year to work toward repeal of the law: not toward reforming it but toward repealing it.  So, Labrador's idea of a compromise was for his collaborators to be given another year to work against the reform of health care in America that took a century to accomplish even in its current, deficient iteration.  He thought a compromise would be for him and his fellow recalcitrants to get the first installment of what they wanted, but that isn't compromise; it's capitulation and President Obama had made it clear that there was no possibility that he would consider any facilitation of an attempt to repeal or nullify a law that had been passed by a majority in congress, endorsed with an electoral mandate and validated by the Supreme Court.  Now, since Labrador didn't get what he wanted, he is characterizing that denial as unfair, and he is vitriolic about it.  It seems not to matter to him that the majority of his party had reservations about what he wanted and how he was willing to get it, nor is he deterred in his indignation by the fact that even the public among whom he had some sympathizers at the outset had repudiated his Tea Party's strategy roundly.  He has gone from the seeming voice of reason to a foot stomping, petulant adolescent berating his father because he won't give him the car keys as long as he insists on driving too fast and drinking while he does it.  And all the while, Labrador keeps his tone level and projects a kind of rationality, even though it is only a façade.  That's what makes him dangerous.  He looks like a normal guy...but he is actually one of them.

Your friend,

Mike