The Left and God

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This piece in the NYT caught my attention.

Not only do Democrats in general and Liberals in particular have to become comfortable with religious thinking, they must also learn to engage and embrace those who characterize themselves as “spiritual, but not religious”.

This is healthy and a shift I am confident the Party of the Big Tent will manage with ease and grace.

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July 3, 2010 · Posted in Politics, Spirituality  
　　　　

SC’s Alvin Green is the Future of Politics in CA

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An unemployed, semi-literate veteran won the Democratic Party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate in South Carolina Tuesday night in a harbinger of all future primary elections in the State of California.

Thanks to easily propagandized voters in my state, we just passed a ballot initiative creating open primaries. That means each party’s nominees for office are chosen not by party loyalists but by anyone who wants to cast a vote for whatever reason. In the case of Alvin Greene of South Carolina, his party chair had never met him, had no encounter at all with him during the primary campaign. He spent no money, ran no ads, and apparently pretty much stayed home during the primary. He won because in SC — as now in CA — tens of thousands of Republicans whose incumbent candidate Jim DeMint faced no opposition got together and decided to vote for the worst possible Democratic opponent to ensure their guy’s November victory. This effectively kills two-party politics in SC as it surely will here.
DeMint is one of the worst demagogues in the Senate. The Democratic Party in SC probably couldn’t defeat the guy anyway. But the malicious vandalism of the open primary guarantees the people of SC won’t even have a viable option in November.
What crap.

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June 10, 2010 · Posted in Politics  
　　　　

Liberal Philosophy, Conservative Philosophy and the Great American Center

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It seems to me that, when it comes to politics, Americans can be seen as divided into four basic camps: liberals, conservatives, centrists and apathetics. The first three groups vote, to one or another degree, and they’re the focus of my thoughts here.
There are likely dozens of points of differentiation between liberals and conservatives. Here are the most important that leap to mind.
Faced with a seemingly irreconcilable conflict between the general welfare and the good of the individual, liberals will tend to support the public good and conservatives will tend to favor the individual’s rights and position.
Liberals believe in equality of opportunity implemented through government regulation and laws where necessary. Conservatives believe that fairness derives better from an unregulated and freely competitive society.
In terms of international policy, liberals tend to favor multinational efforts (e.g., the United Nations) aimed at diplomatic solutions to conflict that are ultimately mutually beneficial. Conservatives tend to favor the promotion of America’s national interests, as they perceive them, over and if necessary at the expense of other nations and to oppose U.S. involvement in multinational organizations like the UN and the OAS.
Cultural pluralism and tolerance for a wide range of viewpoints characterizes liberal thinking while conservatives are inclined to oppose policies that encourage pluralism and immigration.
In general, liberals favor a large and strong central government that can equalize and homogenize policy and practice across state borders. Conservatives, by contrast, favor states rights over national government power and a resultingly smaller federal government.
There is of course a broad spectrum of intermediate positions between these two extreme variants as I’ve painted them here. But those who subscribe to the tenets of one or the other of these political philosophies — and who apparently comprise about 60% of the voting public (35% liberal and 25% conservative, approximately) — tend to make political decisions and cast votes based on these philosophical frameworks.
What of the center? How do unaffiliated, independent voters make difficult political decisions where they can’t or don’t have enough information or time and attention to make a fully informed objective decision? What ruler do they measure against? My sense is that the broad center of America, which despite being a minority nonetheless determines the outcome of virtually all elections, makes decisions based primarily on two factors: what they deem to be in their own best interest and what they perceive to be the views of their neighbors and friends. This tends to vary issue by issue, location by location. As a result, the center acts as an unpredictable balance of liberal and conservative perspectives. I also think they tend to cast less well-informed votes on the issues that fall outside the main editorial focus of election cycles.
For example, if you are asked to choose among three candidates for, say, the airport commission, how do you know which of those candidates is really the best person for the job? Without spending considerable time researching them, you probably don’t. But if you’re a liberal and one of them is endorsed by the local Democratic Party, you probably have a tendency to vote for that candidate. Similarly, if you’re a conservative and one of the candidates is favored by the GOP, you probably cast a vote for that person. In both cases, you have a right to expect and believe that the candidate you choose will at least subscribe to the broad philosophies of governance of the party endorsing them.
But the independent? It seems to me they have no steady or reliable basis on which to make such judgments and therefore tend to make largely arbitrary decisions. This is the group to whom political advertising is mostly directed. Exposure is more important than substance or policy.
Somehow, this seems to be at the root of a great many of our political problems as a nation. Uninformed voters making arbitrary decisions about second-tier candidates and policy questions tend to produce scattered and often contradictory results.
I don’t have a solution but it does seem to me the problem is one that gets far too little attention and  debate.

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May 21, 2010 · Posted in Politics  
　　　　

Obama’s Supreme Court Nominee Unsurprisingly Bland But Fur Will Fly

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Word is that President Obama will nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. It’s a choice that will make neither conservatives nor liberals particularly happy but she may just be sufficiently bland and academically qualified to run the confirmation gamut with ease.

Kagan, like Obama and Stevens, is a product of the University of Chicago Law School. She’s also a former dean of the Harvard Law School. Both her academic and her clerking credentials are brilliant. But she has no judicial experience, has only argued a handful of cases before the Supreme Court and is sure to draw the fire of the Right because of her stance on the subject of gays in the military, a wedge GOP issue.
For its part, the Left will stew and grouse about her stance in favor of several key Obama policies that are effective continuations of his predecessor’s practices, as well as her track record of middle-of-the-road views on Constitutional issues seen by liberals as litmus tests.
Although she was a ranking legal officer during the Clinton years, her view of the “unitary presidency” is somewhat jaundiced (she thought Clinton more guilty of attempting to extend executive power than Reagan).
Apart from her complete lack of practice as a judge — a fairly infrequent occurrence at the top court — she is eminently qualified as a legal scholar and she’s largely unburdened by any definitive public stands on most of the controversial issues of the day.

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May 9, 2010 · Posted in Politics  
　　　　

Who Does Reform Hurt Most Politically?

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I've been reading a lot and thinking even more about the historic passage of somewhat meaningful health insurance reform and its political impact. Because although the impact of the reforms will take years to assess and will undoubtedly change a great deal in the intervening years, the political impact is just a few months away.

Simplistically, the primary elections will be pretty clear, I expect. The GOP, across the country and across the board, will take a hard shift right based on the outcome and the process in DC as viewed by the hard-core base. I expect the Democrats will shift slightly to center based on the fact that many Lefties will stay home out of disappointment that Obama's agenda has been so centrist. But it is at least possible — depending on how the political leaders in the Democratic Party play this — that the Left could be convinced to turn out in larger numbers to support continuing improvement of the reforms that have now begun.

But when it comes to the General Election in November, things are far murkier to me. Assuming I'm right and the GOP tacks hard right and the Dems shift even slightly to center, independents may find themselves forced to vote for Democrats even though they might wish they were even more middle-of-the-road because the alternatives will be so outside the mainstream. That could result in smaller Democratic losses. Even if the Democrats energize the Lefties in their base, independents may still be unable to vote for Tea Party style candidates who are running on platforms of "No" and "Repeal Health Insurance Reform."

But it is possible that I am misreading the public and its sentiments vis a vis health insurance reform. I was glad the Dems got the job done well in advance of the election because a lot of the near-term important effects of the law will be kicking in before voters go to the polls. That will give fence-sitters a chance to see how well this works and I suspect it will be the key deciding factor among independents and moderate voters in both major parties. If, however, the reform sputters, doesn't work well in its early implementation, and is susceptible to honest attack by the Right, that could shift a lot of sentiment in that direction.

I guess my bottom line is that health insurance reform itself won't have as big an impact as its implementation and real-world experience. The Dems still have a heck of a job of governance and PR ahead of them but if they can keep things headed in the right direction and stay on message, the chances of dampening the GOP's predictable gains in the off-year elections increase dramatically. And if that happens, the GOP could be on its last legs and a new party might well find room to emerge for 2012.

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March 23, 2010 · Posted in Politics  
　　　　

Kucinich Caves. I’m Not Sure if That’s Good or Bad

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Well, a flight on Air Force One and some presumed strong arm-twisting by the Chief Executive have apparently led Ohio Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich to change his vote on health care reform. The best champion of true Liberal thought in Washington had been withholding support because the bills now wending their way through Congress do not include a public option. He has now decided to be pragmatic and vote for what we can get now and hope we can fix it later.

As I wrote a couple of days ago on this topic, I admire Kucinich for his principled stand on this issue. But I'm of two minds on this new development.

On the one hand, the pragmatic position has some limited value. It may well be true that if we don't do this now, we will not do it for decades. The GOP will inevitably make significant gains in November and make it even harder for the Obama Administration to get its agenda enacted into law. And the public will lose interest and move on to the latest scare scenario ginned up by those whose interests are best served when the rest of us are cowering in the corner.

On the other hand, I have very little confidence that the fixes that follow this major bill — if fixes there be — will ever include the public option that I view as absolutely essential to real health insurance reform. Kucinich was right: without the public option, this legislation is a huge boon to the insurance industry in return for some wrist-slapping regulations I suspect they've already designed 11 circumvention strategies to suit.

Ultimately, this country will have a single-payer system even if that has to come in the wake of an economic Armageddon caused by the greedy expansionist health care system.

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March 17, 2010 · Posted in Politics  
　　　　

Should Kucinich Be Punished for Keeping His Promise?

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Press reports and email newsletter updates this morning indicate that Ohio Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich is being pressured by not only the White House but by  the MoveOn group for sticking to his campaign promise to vote against any health care bill that doesn't include a public option. Obama visited Kucinich's district to make his pitch for his plan (which explicitly and intentionally excludes a public option). The MoveOn folks plan to picket Dennis' office tomorrow when he makes an appearance there. 

As you know if you read this site very often, I am a huge fan of Kucinich. I backed him in the Democratic Presidential race in 2008 until he dropped out. I'm a member of his initiative to create a Cabinet-level Department of Peace in Washington as many other governments around the world have done. He is the only lawmaker with whose views I am in almost complete agreement as far as I know. He can be a bit of an ideologue, but there are times when that is a good thing. One of those times is when compromise would seriously harm or jeopardize an important social justice program or undertaking. And that is arguably the case with the current health care reform debate.

It appears that the House may be about four votes short of being able to pass the Senate version of health care reform as the first of two steps to creating real reform for the first time in modern memory. If Kucinich doesn't relent, the bill may die and we may end up with no health care reform at all this year. He and several others — including notably MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow — feel that a bill that omits the public option (and which is seriously flawed in many other ways) may be worse than no bill at all. I've been teetering on the knife-edge of that issue myself in the last two weeks. I am deeply disappointed not only that the public option isn't in this bill but also that Obama and his team were ostentatiously indifferent to its inclusion. The hard Leftie in me wants to side with Kucinich here.

But the bill does do some important and needed things that may be very difficult ever to get into a piece of legislation again. And even though it does, as critics have charged, essentially provide on the order of a trillion dollars' worth of business to a business that remains greedily criminal in its business behavior, on balance I'm inclined to subdue my Inner Leftie and support the bill with only a minimal amount of enthusiasm.

However, to punish Kucinich for doing two rare things among politicians — stand up for what he truly believes is right and keep a campaign promise on which at least some of his supporter funding was based — seems to me to be ludicrous. MoveOn's decision to get 100% behind Obama's weak compromise bill is one thing. Its decision to oppose legitimate liberals who oppose the bill as a matter of principle is quite another. I fear that MoveOn has gotten too big for its britches and is now trying to be as centrist as Obama. No ultimate good can come of that for those of us who believe in an expanding role for the federal government in social justice causes.

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March 15, 2010 · Posted in Politics  
　　　　

NYT’s David Brooks: A Mind-Changing, Sane View of Obama

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My good friend and minister Rev. Vicky Elder sent me this column by New  York Times opinion writer David Brooks today. It is one of the few times that I have been persuaded in so short a time to shift my viewpoint on something this important.

Brooks, not one of my favorite commentators, makes a very calm and clear case for Obama's actual nature an role in our political culture. He draws a clear distinction between the Right's view of Obama as a ruthless, arrogant socialist bully, and the Left's view of him as a weak-willed, overly intellectual political compromiser with no clearly defined vision. The truth, he suggests, lies somewhere between those two extremes, which he says results from both extremes living in political "cocoons" which isolate them from the truth about our President.

Vicky has been trying to tell me this for some time. But I've been obstinate in my Leftiness. I am glad to have read this column, to have reflected on it seriously and to have concluded that Brooks — and she — are right. Viewed more objectively, from Obama's left-center position on the spectrum, his first months in office have actually be stupendously productive and effective on almost all major policy fronts

I will still feel free to criticize Obama when I think he deserves it, but I will no longer behave as if he were a life-long liberal who has turned traitor to the Left an its causes (though I am the Left and those causes). 

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March 12, 2010 · Posted in Politics  
　　　　

Delusional HuffPost Columnist: Obama Would Be Happy With 2010 GOP Win

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I have, as you have probably detected on your own, greatly reduced my focus on politics in the past few months, shifting my attention to technology and spirituality and continuing to talk sports when something truly interesting comes up. Frankly, I'm part of the tired Democratic "base" that has finally come to realize that it doesn't matter much which party is in power, not because there are not major differences between the parties (there are) but because they are both partisan groups more interested in getting and holding power than in governing wisely.

But this morning I read a piece in the Huffington Post I couldn't resist sharing. In this piece, columnist Simon Johnson proposes that the Obama Administration would be secretly happy if the Republicans win the 2010 Congressional elections and take over the legislative duties in DC. In fact, he says Team Obama is actively pursuing just that strategy. Huh?

He provides all sorts of weird and inaccurate analogies, including badly confusing the strategies and outcomes of the Carter and Clinton administrations (as some of those who commented on his column point out). But in the end, the old journalistic rule, "Follow the money" turns out to provide the real clue to Johnson's motives for this poorly thought out bit of stupid conjecture. He is the author of the about-to-be-released book 13 Bankers, which is sharply critical of the U.S. banking industry. His column provides a few glimpses into his real agenda: accusing Obama of not doing enough to control and regulate the rampant greed of the bankers. FWIW, I agree with him on that point. I was hugely disappointed in Obama's choices for key financial posts in his administration. I do not understand why Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner still has a job. But to make the ludicrous leap from "he's not doing enough about the financial situation" to "he wants to let the GOP win so he can blame them for all the stuff he can't fix" is just so simple-minded that it hardly befits a guy with a Ph.D. who's on the MIT faculty.

The Republicans will score big gains in November. The out-of-power party nearly always does in the mid-term elections. I don't think it's at all clear that they can gain control of either house, let alone both. And their all-but-inevitable win has nothing to do with the Obama team's strategy. To claim that it is betrays a woeful ignorance of American politics, regardless of one's academic credentials.

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March 6, 2010 · Posted in Politics  
　　　　

Kuttner Tell it Like it Is for Progressives in Congress

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On Huffington Post today, leading progressive thinker Robert Kuttner says out loud and clearly what i’ve been thinking and saying perhaps not so clearly for a long time. If the Democrats want to regain the real power the electorate clearly wants them to have, they need to start sounding and acting like Democrats instead of Republicrats or Demublicans.

He calls for two immediate steps to be taken if the Dems want to retain their majorities in Congress.

First, he says, scrap the filibuster. Amen.

Second, he says, it’s time to strip committee chairmen of their powerful roles if they don’t step up to the podium and act like Democrats. He points specifically to Max Baucus (Finance) and Chris Dodd’s likely successor on Banking, Tim Johnson. Dodd is retiring and Johnson, aka the Senator from Citigroup, is next in line for the chair of that powerful committee. Dodd’s been weak enough. Johnson would be a disaster, effectively giving the Republicans a strangle-hold control of the group for the foreseeable future. There are probably a handful of other Democratic Senators who should be unseated from chairmen’s jobs but perhaps something less drastic — like imposing some party discipline for a change — would work just as well with less emotion and in-fighting.

I like these ideas, both because they are overdue and because they are things the Democrats can control. If they don’t want to be turned out of control for their complete inaction, they must grow a spine and start acting like the power brokers they are. If they don’t, then we get the kind of government we deserve.

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February 15, 2010 · Posted in Politics  
　　　　

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