December 2013 Archives

Dear America,

The last week or so of 2013 was not such a good time to be a Republican.  First, it was revealed that over a million new families signed up for health insurance through the Obamacare website.   Then, in a New York Times article about the Benghazi attack of 9/11/11, an independent investigation yielded the conclusion that as the Obama administration said at the time, the attack was indeed inspired by the anti-Muslim film produced by a reactionary American clergyman, and in the bargain, as the administration said, it was a terrorist attack, but not an al Qaeda one.  The party leadership was left to determine which of two courses--admission that they were wrong on both issues and proposal of an alternative to Obamacare or continued stonewalling of the American public with ongoing demagoguery on both points--they seem to have chosen the latter.  The week ended with Daryl Issa, the arch-conservative, Republican operative who chairs the House Government Oversight Committee, appearing on Meet the Press to spout more self-serving hyperbole and partisan contrivance in furtherance of his relentless pursuit of The President and his subordinates in both areas.  He continued to insist that the facts were not all in on Benghazi, and he refused to admit that his criticism of the administration was more an example of caviling and semiotic parsing than it was a matter of any substance at all.  And as to the Affordable Care Act, even Lindsey Gramm, the redoubtable but civil--let's say civilly rational and almost bipartisan--Republican conservative seemed to take the low road when he was quoted as opining that the Republican Party had two choices: to offer an alternative to Obamacare or to continue harping on anecdotal instances in which the law didn't serve someone.  There were some Republicans who resurrected plans that had been flight tested in the past with no luck, but still, there was nothing new under the Republican sun.  It will be interesting to see how they fare in the 2014 mid-term elections if they continue to opt for politics over substance, and since one of their primary alternatives to Obamacare is for all Americans to pay income taxes on the value of the health insurance of those lucky enough to have it provided by their employers, the universality of Obamacare's appeal may become a universally acknowledged fact, and that certainly won't do the Republicans any good.

So, for those of us on the progressive end of the political spectrum, the year is ending with a bang, not the whimper we uttered at the end of 2012.  We have a president who has resolved not to negotiate with conservatives when the debt ceiling arises again in February, and we have a Democratic contingent in our congress that has finally mustered the political courage to fire one across the bow of the conservative Republican armada in the form of partial curtailment of the filibuster in The Senate...at least for executive appointments...portending the elimination of the filibuster if the Republicans continue their recalcitrance over the Democratic agenda for legislation during the next three years.  The moribund filibuster has been the problem all along for the Democrats in the form of their timorous reluctance to do anything about it for fear that the Republicans might regain control some time soon and use the power of the majority in the way in which the Democrats should have.  Democracy in congress is on the horizon, and if the Democrats regain control of The House while those in The Senate retain theirs, we might see a political anomaly in modern American history: a second presidential term in which real change is implemented by a president who may be a duck, but not a lame one.  In the words of the old rock song from the early eighties, "the future's so bright, I've gotta' wear shades," or so it seems at least.  These last few days of 2013 are, in my opinion, the most heartening we have seen since President Obama was elected.  The notion that for the first time in anyone's memory a second presidential term could exceed the first in terms of seminal initiatives and legislation for real change in America is innervating as opposed to the enervation that the diffidence of The President and his party has afflicted progressivism with for the almost the entire first five years of the Obama administration.  Let's hope that the Democratic tendency to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory doesn't vitiate the opportunity.

I'll speak to you next year.  In the meantime, Happy New Year.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

As usual, there isn't much to say at this time of year.  Congress has gone home, so they can't do much to us for the moment, and President Obama is in Hawaii celebrating the holiday, so no one is pointing any fingers at him right now.  But they'll be back, and the battle will again be joined in early January.  Let us all hope that unemployment compensation for the long-term unemployed will be renewed at that time because Christmas won't be very merry for those million and a half families with no money coming in.  And Obamacare seems to be taking off like a shooting star at the moment with millions finding and signing up for insurance to their advantage.  Most likely, we won't be hearing much about the Affordable Care Act after the new year begins because the Republicans will have nothing to gain by pointing out that the thing they were running against has turned into a big success, and the Obama administration will likely want to forget their only marginal competency as demonstrated after the "roll out" of the law.

At any rate, let me take this opportunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  I'll probably drop you a line on Friday, but if I don't, I'll speak to you after the New Year.  Celebrate prudently and be well.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I heard a news account of Ted Cruz blaming the Democrats for the recent government shutdown that pushed Republican popular support to all time lows.  His rationale was that the Democrats refused to defund "Obamacare," otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act, and if they had done so, the shutdown--a function solely of the refusal of the Republican controlled House of Representatives to approve a "continuing resolution" to fund day-to-day operation of the government--would not have been necessary.  To put his position in candid terms, the conservative wing of the Republican Party...the Tea Party...of which Cruz is the poster boy didn't get what they wanted in the passage in congress of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, in the decision of The Supreme Court in 2011 or in the popular election of 2012, so they used political procedure to get what the majority of the American people and the legitimate political process refused to give their small minority of rabid fiscal conservatives who do not believe in the social safety net, preferring social Darwinism to humanism.  And now comes the budget compromise that reverses the "sequester"--that was the last deal born of the recalcitrance of the Republican, conservative minority's intransigence--and thus results in reductions in the federal budget deficit of only about $2.25 billion per year for the next ten years instead of the $65 billion per year the sequester required.  And once again, the Republican right is bellowing that their ox has been gored, but this time, they are bellowing at their fellow Republicans.  It's a sign that sanity is returning to Washington.

Last week, John Boehner made it official.  The Tea Party's procrustean adherence to austerity principles at a time when they are inimical to both Republican ascendancy and the welfare of the nation is going to be called what it is from now on: political suicide.  So now, the outliers in the Republican Party, who have been controlling the direction of the party as well as the fates of all of the rational, moderate pragmatists in the party, are no longer de rigueur.   And once Boehner had shrugged off the yoke of Robespierrean repression locked onto him since 2010, the Tea Party grasp on the throat of reasoned bipartisanship began to slip.  With the elections of 2014 looming, Republicans are looking their fate in the eye, and they haven't liked what they were seeing, so they are tacking against the conservative wind in hoping of gaining some ground with the American people.  You haven't heard much from Raul Labrador lately, and he was a virtual speaker for the Tea Party in The House until the past week or two.  But he stepped way out of bounds when the Democrats ended the filibuster of political appointments in The Senate.  The tepid reception and eye-rolling sighs that his and his fellow conservatives' feigned innocence and obviously contrived claims of impaired rights received outside the party conservative elite was a shot across the bow that still-conservative-but-rational Republicans like John McCain not only heard, but publicly acknowledged.

The proof that the rout of Tea Party conservatism is under way will come in late January when the next debt ceiling increase will be required.  For the past three years...ever since the Tea Party- inspired Republican victory in 2010...fear has motivated Republican policy, and the Tea Party's surrogates have been trumpeting every policy victory, even those that were failures for the party, as if they had brought a new gospel to Washington.  They claimed--both implicitly, and explicitly in the most flagrant cases--that a new tide was rising in the American electorate, and they were it.  They gloated over each impediment to the progressive ideal that they managed to throw in front of political progress and convinced many that such obstruction was a validation of their ideals, or perhaps more aptly put, their dogma.  In six weeks or so, we will find out if they were right, and it won't be because of any election.  In six weeks, the Republican Party will be deciding its own fate when it determines whether to quietly, under protest or not, increase the debt ceiling and eschew the tactic of extortion that it has afforded them over the last few years, or fight the bad fight one more time and squander the victory, albeit an ephemeral one as I see it, that the technical failure of healthcare.com has handed them in lieu of the residual shame they were glistening with as a function of the last government shutdown.  This debt ceiling fight, and there are already hints that the die-hards in the Republican Party...the Tea Party fifth column if that isn't too dramatic...will insist on staging one, will tell the tale.  And if they succeed in goading their parent party into joining their battle, the result will be the election that could inflict the coup de grace on the Republicans once and for all, and at the hands of their own in the bargain.

So watch people like Mitch McConnell, minority leader of The Senate.  When the budget passed, he took to the floor and bemoaned it, marshaling his party's fellow conservatives to vote against it, but he knew that there were enough sane Republicans in The Senate that the budget would pass without much real resistance, and it did, 64-36, meaning that nine Republicans voted with the univocal Democratic Party to pass it.  The risk of another saber-rattling debacle for his party was averted, and he surely breathed a sigh of relief while, like the political poltroon he is, he sat safely in the weeds claiming conservative purity in service of his contested, 2014 re-election campaign in Kentucky.  There will be more like him, but most Republicans seem to be opting for a return to the civility that has prevailed from time to time in congress as a whole.  The Obama presidency may yet be saved from the ignominy of historical irrelevancy and mediocrity.  Immigration and tax reform, here we come.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The current population of the Republican Party in office is the most clinically calculating class of politicians I have observed in my lifetime, and I'm 67.  Of course, when I was young I was not as observant about these things as I am now, nor was I interested.  The question of intellectual integrity was more immediate back then, such as who was for the war and who was against it; were you in favor of the Great Society as a concept or not.  Now, it's a matter of who is telling the truth about the facts, because the art of prevarication, that is telling enough truth to lead everyone to the wrong conclusion, has been elevated to an art form in American politics, and the Republicans seem to be the current grand masters of it.  For example, a few people--maybe it will be a million or two in the end if the anecdotal reports are the indicator that the Republicans calculate them to be--are receiving notification from insurers of increased premiums or decreased coverage for their health insurance plans while tens of thousands are actually finding insurance that they can afford and that will truly benefit them for the first times in their lives, and the Obamacare program is effectively little more than a few weeks old if you consider that it was totally inaccessible for the first three to four weeks of its existence.  There were over 100,000 newly insured people or families after that first three weeks of relatively efficient operation of the health insurance websites, including the websites of the states that didn't participate in the conservatives' calculated sabotage of the law in the form of preventing the creation of websites and/or refusing to allow federally-funded "navigators" to operate in their states so as to hinder those who want to enroll in spite of the politics involved.  There will be millions by next November, and probably tens of millions, who have never had health insurance before, and among them there will be thousands of stories about how Obamacare saved their lives or those of loved ones as opposed to the occasional story of some snide twenty-something in good health who now has to pay double if he or she wants to stay with his or her current insurer, and many of those will find something better at healthinsurance.com by that time.  And I suppose that my calculus is as susceptible of second guessing as theirs, but what are the odds?  Only experience will matter in the end, and media reports planted by either side won't matter much when feet start marching toward the polls, so it's a matter of how you decided to place your bet now, and frankly, I'd rather be us than them in that regard.

It isn't as though we have no experience with programs like Obamacare either.  When Social Security was created, conservative forces marshaled themselves against it, and similarly, when Medicare was created there was furious conservative opposition.  But any attempt to undermine either program today would be political suicide, and the Republicans know it.  You can ask Paul Ryan, the purveyor of the Medicare voucher scheme.  Add to that the fact that Obamacare is their idea...and demonstrably so...and you have a political strategy that looks more and more suicidal the more you look at it, but I can understand the Republican miscalculation to some extent.  George W. Bush went out into the country to try to sell the idea of privatizing Social Security with considerable conservative backing, and all he got for his trouble was a decline in his popularity even beyond what resulted from starting two wars that cost trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.  Then there's Medicare Part D...the drug program for seniors...which used private insurers to operate coverage for seniors' medications.  It was incredibly expensive in terms of tax dollars...unlike Social Security and Medicare Parts A and B, which are funded by payroll contributions from prospective beneficiaries...and the national debt soared under the impetus of Part D plus those two wars.  Those ideas...Privatized Social Security and Medicare Part D...are two ideas that are structurally analogous to Obamacare--both employ private enterprise to implement governmentally mandated programs in accord with the Republican/conservative/Randian notion that government should be invisible and only business is efficient--and both have Republican fingerprints all over them, but that's not all.  When Hillary Clinton was leading a commission during her husband's administration looking into universal health care and that commission seemed to be leaning toward a single payer system, the Republicans came up with what became Romneycare in Massachusetts, which is exactly the same as Obamacare no matter what old Mitt has to say about it: both implement ostensibly universal health care through mandated private insurance coverage.  How much more Republican than Obamacare can an idea be?  But instead of saying, "We invented that," as the Russians used to say about everything American in the fifties, they are trying to undermine the effort...and without success in the end, and they have univocally disavowed it instead of embracing it and trying to take credit.

Once the Republicans figure out how they blundered into the mess they will find themselves in come next summer it will be too late.  They will already have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory...generally the Democrats' specialty...for an idea that was finally beneficial in some way: the privatization of the American safety net.  But the reason for that success is the individual mandate, which is the same reason that Social Security and Medicare succeeded while Medicare Part D is something less than a success in terms of cost/benefit analysis for the nation as a whole, and that is an idea that Republicans will never accept.  So, the Democratic monopoly on social conscience remains in tact and the Republican image of...well, that remains in tact too.  Chalk up one more for the good guys, albeit with an assist from the opposition.

Your friend,

\

Mike

Dear America,

The Tea Party seems to be facing its most pivotal moment to date.  First there was the profound failure of their petulant insistence on the Republican shut down of our government as a ploy with which to vitiate the Affordable Care Act--Obamacare as it is destined to be known, much to President Obama's credit ultimately I predict--which some of them even admitted they didn't think could work at the outset.  It did result in an agreement to extend the national debt limit and approve a continuing resolution to operate the government at extant funding levels, but that was only temporary, for the purpose of allowing discussion between the parties about an on-going budget agreement in which the Tea Party apparently expected to have its way.  But now that budget agreement has been formulated between Paul Ryan, the Republican House Budget Committee Chairman and Patty Murray, his Democratic Senate counterpart, the members of The House, which is controlled by the Republicans and therefore ostensibly in the thrall of the Tea Party, and it has overwhelmingly passed in The House with almost equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans.  The Tea Party were left to huddle amongst themselves to choose the next debacle to inflict on their party, the nation, and themselves for that matter.  They will complain loudly about the apostasy of their fellow Republicans and do a lot of finger pointing, but the ones who want to remain in congress will quickly relent and recognize that their fangs have been blunted and all that is left to them is licking their wounds.  Meanwhile, The Senate, which is under Democratic control, will certainly pass the two year budget, and President Obama will no doubt sign it to complete the rout of what can only be described as a particularly American political anomaly.  

While everyone complains that this two year budget isn't what they would like, the vast majority of congressman say that it is a good thing in that it keeps congress from "lurching from crisis to crisis"--Paul Ryans phrase, not mine--and tacitly it is an acknowledgment that the Republicans don't want to be fighting this battle during the next election.  Excluding the Tea Party, it seems that the rest of the Republican Party is clever enough to recognize that, while being led by a reactionary minority like the Tea Party was exciting, it has no future and it never did.  The American people, much to their credit, did a better job of restraining excessive governance than did even The Senate, which touts itself as the body that is inefficient by design so as to accomplish just that: restraint.  In the end, the Hamiltonian rationale for a Senate that would be populated by grayer heads who would damp the most populist trends so as to prevent populism from overcoming reason, and even true democracy, was a failure.  And with John Boehner facing the press when it was announced that a deal had been struck, the concept was repudiated in favor of a demonstration that even The House of Representatives eventually sees reason collectively, whether out of self-preservation instinct or just folk-wisdom.  Boehner was asked about the opposition to the two year deal, the terms of which still hadn't been made public, and he said, "Are you kidding?  We haven't even told them what's in it yet;"  the first a phrase he used again when he was discussing the government shut-down and the response of the Tea Party members in his caucus when he announced that the Republicans were going to capitulate in light of the damage being done to the party in terms of public opinion.  According to Boehner, when he made the announcement, one of the Tea Party members said, "we didn't really think it would work."  "Are you kidding me!" Boehner shouted to the press the day before yesterday when he was announcing the deal.  After a near martial castigation of the conservative forces inside and outside the congress, calling them users of the people and the party for the accomplishment of their own selfish ends, both he and Paul Ryan then effectively pleaded with their members to put the budget deal through over the objections of such outside groups led by the likes of Karl Rove and the Koch brothers, and that is what Republicans did.  Goodbye Ted Cruz.

So what will be the next Republican strategy?  My guess is it will be in the way of several acts of contrition taking the form of abandoned snarkyness in committees looking for ways to hang an albatross around President Obama's and the Democrats' necks, like the Issa hearings, which are more like a side-show than a congressional oversight effort, in The Senate where Janet Napolitano is garroted once every two weeks by some sanctimonious conservative Republican who still hasn't gotten the Boehner memo.  And there will be less of a tendency to obstruct, since that is what the Republicans have become known for, and it hasn't done them any good.  Mitch McConnell and John Boehner...McBoehnell, as I call them...will show their softer sides, and once again, there will be collegial smiles up on The Hill.  That isn't always ideal, and the occasional scandal devolves from too many people glad handing too many other people, but it's better than nothing, which is what we have gotten since 2008 when conservative forces...even in the Democratic Party in the form of the self-styled Blue Dogs...seized control from a minority position.  Hail the return of true representative democracy...for now.  In this atmosphere of partisan comity, the Obama administration can have a second life, and the American people might once again be served by their government; a sort of Pax Washingtonia.  Let's hear it for us.  After all, if it hadn't been for the threat of how we might vote, none of this renaissance of principle over politics would have been possible.

Your friend

Mike

Dear America,

The problem in American politics is ego.  The mission on which most politicians go when they seek office in Washington gets forgotten and the holding office becomes an end in itself.  That is not to say that there are no unassuming, humble members of our congress.  In The Senate in particular I can think of two: Susan Collins and the now retired Margaret Chase-Smith.  Neither ever seemed to seek the limelight, and Collins, who continues to be a voice for comity and mutual respect in our harshly recriminatory party politics.  Of course there is a temptation to note that both examples of political professionalism of the right kind are women, but there are other women in congress, and even in The Senate, who do not demonstrate the kind of restraint and civility that the two senators from Maine have over their quite lengthy political careers.  As a counterweight to the maturity of the two Maine-iacs there is the junior senator from New York, Kirsten Gillibrand.  She has made herself a reputation--when I say that I am deliberately intimating calculation on her part--for being a maverick, and we can all recall who else harped on that kind of characterization for herself in the recent past.  And much like Sarah Palin, Gillibrand is far from stellar as a thinker and quite eager for the personal attention that is indigenous to Washington politics these days.  The question is, has she earned the right to be noticed; is she a legitimate force in American politics.

She seems to make much of being a working mother, bringing her children to The Senate when she picks them up from school and letting them roam around associating with her colleagues as if they were at a family dinner.  But if you consider the options that are available to her by virtue of the fact that money is not much of an object for her and her "venture capitalist" husband, the image of her children playing with John McCain in the halls of The Senate, ostensibly out of necessity, seems a bit contrived and deliberate.  Add to that her politic changes of political direction in the form of passivity on the subject of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" while she was still a member of The House from a conservative district, which became outspoken support for repeal of the policy when she was appointed to Hillary Clinton's Senate seat when Clinton became Secretary of State, and the redolence of political opportunism begins to rise in one's nostrils.  Now throw in her overt recalcitrance on issues of policy interest among Democrats generally and her sincerity, or perhaps the lack thereof, becomes even more an issue.  She was regarded as a "blue dog" when in The House, and she continues to comport herself thusly.  She took a stand against a compromise farm bill with full knowledge that a compromise was necessary because a pure bill that protected the rights of many receiving food stamps who would be excluded from the program under the compromise bill couldn't get past the Republicans' strategy of filibustering anything they don't like.  And with regard to her signature issue, rape in the military, she makes a great show of "fight[ing] for men and women who shouldn't be raped in the military" ( I assume she doesn't think they should be raped anywhere, though she might have found a more artful way of expressing herself on the subject in order to make that clear) as if she is a crusader, which she might be if she were as interested in protecting all people from going uninsured as she was in getting coverage for first responders to the 9/11 catastrophe in New York City.  She seems more focused on the profile of issues than on the issues themselves, and while that may be just an illusion, her persistent role in her party's fights with the opposition does shed some light on her priorities, which seem to be directed at fulfillment of her political ambitions rather than fighting the good fight.

Senator Gillibrand has been likened to the Tea Party recalcitrants of the Republican Party, whom many regard as the impediment to progress on a number of issues including unemployment and the augmentation of the somewhat torpid economic recovery that the nation is now in the midst of.  This notion that such "speaking truth to power" is populist zeal rather than internecine political grandstanding, notion by which she seems to be guided, has been destructive of our political momentum over the past ten years or so, particularly since the emergence of the Tea Party as a political force in 2008, directly analogous to that of the Blue Dogs in 1995 after a mid-term rout in the first term of the Clinton administration.  The Tea Party, while purportedly telling that truth to power of which Gillibrand speaks, inspired the shut down of the government this year along with Republican intransigence on several issues, like health care reform in the form of the Affordable Care Act.  And it is no coincidence that the Blue Dogs in The House are at least in part responsible for the fact that we got insurance reform instead of health care reform in 2010 when the Affordable Care Act was the best that the Democrats in congress could do...even though they were in the majority in both houses until the end of that year.  Gillibrand was in The Senate by the time the bill was passed into law, but those of her ilk in The House, and those seeking the same kind of star power that seems to be on her wish list as a Senator, have been as responsible for the effeteness of the Democratic Party, and thus the progressive movement, as the Tea Party led Republican Party has been.

In the final analysis, self-seeking and the filibuster are the two main causes of our national political malaise.  Politicians, Senators in particular, taking to microphones to make their effusive pronouncements on their favorite issues and to fulminate as to the sanctity of their respective parties' philosophies, are clogging up our legislative process with personal ambition and a neurotic need for attention, begging the question of whether it should be in the constitution that anyone seeking office in our bicameral legislature must have been breast-fed.  Maybe the New York Times should ask Ms Gillibrand that question the next time they interview her instead of commenting on her child-care priorities.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The resiliency of the Democratic Party is quite remarkable considering its fractious nature.  Every time I resign myself to an unfortunate fate for the party most identified with progressivism a new surge of initiative and fortitude surprises me.  A week ago I had written off the Obama administration as a hapless combination of diffidence and lack of perspicacity, but today it seems apparent that The President has more political lives than that most wily of political cats, Bill Clinton.  Mr. Obama has been in enough hot water to bathe the entire nation, but in the past he has found the fortitude to embark upon a new strategy for self-extrication from trouble every time he has gotten into some, and this problem with the federal healthcare website seems just one more instance of his resiliency.  His mea culpa rang hollow when he issued it, but as it turns out, it was just the platform from which he would ultimately launch a new offensive against the mindless Calvinism of the Republican conservative wing.  So now, not only will the Republicans wind up trading the fifteen or twenty million votes of those who will ultimately have health insurance--many for the first time in their lives--for the two million or so votes of those who seem bound and determined to eschew the benefits of the Affordable Care Act's insurance marketplace in order to claim that it is a failure, they will also have to refute the ineluctable inference that their failure to support a realistic minimum wage is tantamount to a war on the working poor, who by the way also vote when conservatives don't successfully conspire to prevent it.

It seemed for six weeks or so that the Republicans had gained the popular ear with their concerted defamation of Obamacare, simply because of the technical failure of the administration to smoothly implement the law's central, emblematic feature, www.healthcare.com.  The fact that the websites problems have gradually abated and will continue to do so did not mollify a public already seduced by conservatives into intractable skepticism about universal health insurance under the law, and the Republicans seemed poised to recoup their losses from the ill-conceived and unsuccessful government shutdown strategy that they had just employed without success...again...and they were doing it with nothing but sniping at the other side.  But just as conservative Republicans had returned to the only strategy they seem to know, disloyal, nihilistic opposition, the Democratic progressives have returned to the only one they know: populist advocacy.  President Obama has relaunched a campaign that had been languishing along with his fortitude for a few months as he struggled to overcome his team's internet mistakes and wound up giving up the moral high ground out of preoccupation.

The minimum wage, which has been anathema to supply-side Republicans for all time, is the only thing standing between the working poor--who number many more than the idle rich incidentally--and abject poverty.  The unwillingness of those making millions to pay wages that might serve to keep together the bodies and souls of those whose toil enriches them has been an open wound in American politics that conservatives have been able to obfuscate with rhetoric about abortion, gay marriage and Romney-esque claims about the 47% for decades, but it always resurfaces.  In recent years, millions of people have recognized that even if it is true that the minimum wage diminishes the number of low wage jobs available, purportedly exacerbating unemployment according to supply-side conservatives, employment that doesn't lead to even a modicum of sustaining income is no favor, and the people who have to live on such wages know it.  So, if you combine that realization with the fact that lack of demand--that is lack of resources among the consuming public--is what the experts are pointing to as the real problem with our economy, it becomes apparent that the conservative, anti-minimum-wage philosophy of the Republican Party isn't good for anyone...not even the plutocrats who profess it.  And now, The President is pointing that out while conservatives like John Boehner continue to invest their future in cynical deceits about the Affordable Care Act, like his rant about it being a "disaster" earlier this week in the face of what appears to be an imminent rectification of the problems with which it has been afflicted in its incipient stages.  Once his criticism is invalidated by real and positive effect, he'll look more mendacious than sagacious, and that's a bad thing at election time.

Of course, all this is just the opinion of a dyed-in-the-wool liberal at this point, and the dialectic between Obama progressives on one side and Boehner conservatives on the other is just that: a discussion between two camps on opposite ends of a debate that at this point is moral in nature rather than factual.  But that will change in 2014.  By November of next year, the "glitches" in the healthcare website will have been repaired and it will be working well enough that virtually all who want to shop for health insurance rather than pay the individual mandate penalty will be able to do so.  There will be so many more people who benefit than there will be people who, out of spite pay that minimal price for the well being of the vast majority of Americans that the gains of the proponents of the Affordable Care Act will far exceed the self-inflicted losses of the nay-sayers on the other side as reflected in the popular vote.  And if you add the inevitable intransigence of conservatives on the minimum wage issue, which may result in an increase in the federal minimum but will never result in a sufficient one to represent social equity in the minds of the great majority of the voting public, almost entirely because of conservative resistance, the portent of the 2014 mid-term elections looks much like that of the 1996 mid-terms that cost Newt Gingrich his political future, John Boehner playing the Gingrich role in this reprise of that obduracy-inspired Republican disaster.

Yes, the future is looking rosy for us progressives...not right now, but soon.  And we have two unlikely cosponsors of that success to thank: a president who seems to find his bearings just in time and over and over again, and a speaker of the house who never learns.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

As we get closer to 2016--granted it's still three years away--the talk turns more and more toward the presidential election, even though the discussion of the mid-terms still hasn't begun in earnest.  But the future of American politics is much more interesting than the present.  The Obama administration looks more and more like a lesson in what not to do, and the Republican hegemony in congress, even in The Senate where they are in the minority, has been a meaningless interstice in American history during which the ruling party hasn't left its mark, but has rather ensured that no one else could.  So what does 2016 have to offer by way of a change?

I think that the primary season--which will be full-blown for both parties as there will be no incumbent in the field--will be far more interesting than the Republican primaries were in 2012.  There will be plenty of blather and bombast, but from the field of blatherskites there will emerge, by necessity, two candidates that will have much to say about the direction our country takes over the rest of the first half of this century.  My prediction (and it isn't much of a stretch of prescience) is that Hillary Clinton will be opposed by Chris Christie, and the discourse will be substantive rather than tendentious, meaningful rather than partisan.  Of course, there will be challenges to both candidates from within their parties before they emerge as the chosen people, so to speak, but they will amount to much sound and fury signifying nothing, as The Bard put it.  The Democrats most likely won't put up much of a fight.  Clinton is the scion of the Democratic golden era in which the party's leader, Bill Clinton, couldn't commit political suicide despite his best efforts.  He left the country better off than he found it, and his immediate successor promptly squandered the good Clinton had done, entangling us in two interminable wars, inspiring an age of such overt cupidity that our economy crashed around our ears by the end of his term.  And even though Barrack Obama inherited a nation so dispirited that it still hasn't recovered five years later, he was incapable of mustering the political fortitude to do what needed to be done during his first term, and he has been only marginally less timorous during the first year of his second.  So Hillary Clinton, boosted by the best Democratic campaigner of the modern era, will look like salvation to a people starving for charisma and competence.  Initially, Vice President Biden may give her a run for her money during the primaries, but he will eschew the internecine sniping that will be the only instrument at his disposal in favor of party unity, and he might even become the first person to serve as vice president in two different administrations.  Otherwise, there is Duval Patrick of Massachusetts to consider, but no one else looks like a contender, so there it is.  Clinton for president...again.

On the other side, there will be carnage...savagery...Republicanism.  Ted Cruz and Rand Paul will fill out the triumvirate of Republican candidates with Christy, who by then will be a shadow of his former self physically, but that much more viable as a candidate on account of his weight loss.  And he will look very good next to the other two, both aesthetically and philosophically, but Paul and Cruz will die hard.  They are both narcissistically motivated, and neither of them has anything but Tea Party dogma going for him, so they will split the conservative wing of the party and Christie, like Mitt Romney, will be the last man standing by default.  But unlike Romney, Christie actually has a political philosophy, and everyone will know what he stands for, which actually straddles the political fence, but with sincerity rather than cynicism.  He can tolerate same-gender marriage but he opposes big government.  He is a populist, but he brooks no babble from the populous.  He is shamelessly pro-business, but he is not above reaching across the aisle for socially conscious remedies to problems that need him, like disaster relief.  In short, Christie is the first potential Bunyanesque figure to emerge from Republican ranks since Ronald Reagan, who was more of an empty suit than a hero in reality, but conservatives still think of him as their patron saint, which says more about conservatives than it does about Reagan.  And I have to admit it, Christie is not just a viable contender for the presidency.  He might well be the front runner by the time the primaries are over and the campaign starts in earnest.  His problem will be that he has no political paragon to turn to for support the way that Hillary Clinton does.  The next election may be about Bill more than Hillary in that it may turn on how effective he is when stumping for his wife rather than himself.

However the next election goes, it is an exciting prospect.  In my opinion, the American people can't lose as long as those two are the nominees.  We will get someone strong, decisive rather than impulsive, and philosophical rather than dogmatic.  That's what this country needs: a president who thinks with his or her own head rather than someone else's, and in Clinton and Christie, we have a choice to make on which we can only come out better.

Your friend,

Mike