Letter 2 America for December 6, 2013

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