Time For a Gut Check: Populist Fantasies vs. Real-World Realities
Let's shift gears just a little bit and tell our story slightly differently. Instead of complex and abstract graphics we'll let the political cartoonists tell most of it, if not quite all :). Think of this as a preamble to the the upcoming state of the Union and show and tell. We won't even load up our usual load of readings, though there are a few (one we think particularly important - David Brooks' on the misuses of populist appeals and the deliberate creation and manipulation of divisiveness. Otherwise known as selling to the lizardbrain, as we've been calling it for a while now).
We'll set this up by proving a hint - there are two head fakes here, using Randy Pausch's definition of a head fake as something you learn as the real consequence, not the ostensible purpose of an activity. 
Can You Here US Now?
The MA. election is being read, and we agreed earlier, as a signal to just how feed up the American people are with business as usual in Washington. Actually we've argued that several other things are going on as well. Fear, the ugliness of the sausage-making that's become so visible, a little local politics and a lot of economic pain.
But when you look around at these four cartoons it certainly captures a part of the zeitgeist, doesn't it? But as you look at each one of them, after you get your chuckle in - and they are admittedly pretty funny - ask yourself how true and accurate they are? Is that the real message and is what's shown what's actually going on?
Windmill Tilting and Reality Checks
We'll also admit that the flood of funny and rather bitingly satirical cartoons in this last week or so is another reason behind our taking this tack. After all after we've built up this huge inventory the chances that we'd find an opportunity to use them all in the normal course of things was pretty small and they're simply too good to let go by :)! So here's round two - which is in the same vein but a bit more on policy specifics and for which we'd challenge you to ask the same questions.
In this case was tackling Healthcare Reform really titling at windmills? Will Financial reform be worse? What about timing and importance. When, for example, at any time in the last year up until just about now were the markets in good enough shape and the recovery, such as it is or might be, far enough along to make financial reform tolerable, safe and timely? On the other side of the coin if MA. is the death knell of healthcare reform as so many are arguing do the voters have any clue as to what this might mean for their futures?
Shoveling What? Death of Hope
Taking yet another pass (we told you there were a lot of 'em) we found ourselves looking at the one in the upper left hand corner pretty carefully. Just exactly what's being shoveled there, anyway? With a bit of thought we were reminded of the old Greek myths about the "Labors of Hercules", one of which was cleaning up the Augean Stables where some of the gods cowherds were kept. Now you know what needs to be sholved out of stables, right? Sounds like a pretty good description to us of what's been tackled over the last year, right down to the smell.
By-the-way, how do you feel? What's been worked on you thought was a waste of time? What's not going as well as you expected? Who do you think is to blame for all that? What do you think should have been done better?
Is This The End?
And what about the consquences? Does this finish off Barry's presidency? What about that agenda, anyway? Bearing in mind that his general approval rating is still around 53% - sounding a death knell sounds as if it might be just a tad premature.
On the other hand Horton did indeed hear a NO - repeating ourselves there's been no major piece of legilstation that the "loyal" opposition hasn't fought tooth and toenail to stop. Remember the Rip political strategist who told 'em that there was no single important thing than stopping Healthcare Reform because it could the President's Waterloo.
Hard to see that as being public spirited or in the best interests of the country, at least in our view.
Well We. night the President will have his chance to speak to all the various concerns raised by these cartoons which seem to be a widely shared consensus.
Agenda to Date vs. Head Fakes
Remember we promised to raise and look at two fundamental questions - the head fakes if you will implicitly bured in all those cartoons. Did you guess what they were? Before we take a shot we'll indlge ourselves and re-visit the chart inventorying all the major policy initiatives that have beeen dealt with this last year and their status, again.
Here's a kind of master, macro-level inventory and status assessment in the three major policy domains: Foreign Affairs, the Economy and Domestic Policy. For each major line item we rank the status based on Importance - how vital it is to address this problem, the Threat - how big the danger to the system is if this problem isn't addressed in either the short- or long-runs, Urgency - is this a short-term, immediate or longer term issue? And the status - that is, measured against what needs to be done, how far along are we in any case.
There's a curious correction between the things that got worked on thruout the year, but especially earlier in the year as measured by the the Threat and Urgency components. For whatever reason those things that were really big threats and urgent ones tended to get worked first.
Have you figured out the head fakes yet?
One is this - what responsibility for supporting change on the part of the public is there? And what would be reasonable to expect? It looks to us as if every single one of those cartoons implies the whole ugly sausage-making mess was something inflicted on voters and they had no role or responsibility in supporting change. Or in asking for what's right. In other words they're getting what they asked for in reality, not their fantasies about magic fixes to all the problems of the last three decades that somebody was just supposed to wave away.
The second is what was reasonable to expect in the timeframe in any case? For example just how long should we have expected it to take to start creating jobs after a recovery began? This becomes especially important when you realize that another $200-300B in stimulus is required to make sure the economy doesn't fall back into the abyss. Something that was extremely unlikely in the first place given all the shrill populist labels and accusations that have been flying around recently.
READINGS
Some Obama goals left unmet They met for the first time inside the White House, three anonymous Americans who would be transformed into icons of President Obama's vision. There was a South Carolina teenager who had next to nothing, a Kansas mayor whose town had lost everything and a Miami banker who had $60 million to give away. They shared little in common except their status as honored guests of the president on Feb. 24, 2009, the night Obama planned to outline the goals of his administration in his first speech to Congress. One year later, as Obama prepares to address Congress again in a State of the Union speech Wednesday night, the stories of his three guests remain instructive, even if their lessons have changed. The past year has challenged Obama's favored themes of togetherness, resiliency and hope. The economy remains unstable. Partisan contempt has intensified. Polls indicate that Americans are increasingly pessimistic. Obama instead has experienced a trial in patience, frustration and fatigue -- and so have his three guests.
Obama’s Credibility Gap Who is Barack Obama? Americans are still looking for the answer, and if they don’t get it soon — or if they don’t like the answer — the president’s current political problems will look like a walk in the park.Mr. Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist.Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.Mr. Obama’s campaign mantra was “change” and most of his supporters took that to mean that he would change the way business was done in Washington and that he would reverse the disastrous economic policies that favored mega-corporations and the very wealthy at the expense of the middle class and the poor. Voters watching the straight-arrow candidate delivering that speech, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, would not logically have thought that an obsessive focus on health insurance would trump job creation as the top domestic priority of an Obama administration.But that’s what happened.
Fighting words Bringing in David Plouffe, the architect of Obama's brilliant election campaign, is a smart move that will surely help the president deliver his message more effectively. But part of that message has to be a clear sense of Obama's bottom line. It's not enough to use variations of the word "fight" more than 20 times in relatively brief remarks, as he did Friday in Ohio. At some point, he needs to -- metaphorically, of course -- actually slug somebody.I'm not talking about perceptions here. The point isn't that Obama should be seen slapping opponents and obstructionists around as a way of demonstrating his presidential alpha-maleness. It's that if Obama's agenda is as vital and necessary as he says it is, the White House should make its actions match up with its words.Obama's promise to change how Washington works was a major reason he got elected. He has tried to stick to this pledge religiously -- heedless of the fact that hereabouts, no good deed goes unpunished. On the stimulus, for example, Obama included a huge package of tax cuts as a gesture to Republicans, who turned up their noses and still voted no. Obama's bipartisan tango can't work if one party won't dance.Despite this outreach, Obama's approval ratings have sagged. I'm convinced that this is because results count more than process. It's true that voters are fed up with business as usual in Washington, but not for aesthetic reasons.It doesn't matter whether Obama speaks in a loud voice. What's important is that he speak in a clear voice, a definitive voice. When he draws a line in the sand -- about health care, jobs, energy, whatever -- he should do everything in his power to defend that line, even if it means bruised feelings and ruffled feathers.In the end, voters will respect Obama's accomplishments, not his aspirations. They will reward his passion, not his polish. It's fine for the president to tell Americans that he's fighting on their behalf, as long as he remembers that what they really want is not so much for him to fight but to win.
The Populist Addiction Politics, some believe, is the organization of hatreds. The people who try to divide society on the basis of ethnicity we call racists. The people who try to divide it on the basis of religion we call sectarians. The people who try to divide it on the basis of social class we call either populists or elitists.These two attitudes — populism and elitism — seem different, but they’re really mirror images of one another. They both assume a country fundamentally divided. They both describe politics as a class struggle between the enlightened and the corrupt, the pure and the betrayers. It’s easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose.So it’s easy to see the seductiveness of populism. Nonetheless, it nearly always fails. The history of populism, going back to William Jennings Bryan, is generally a history of defeat.That’s because voters aren’t as stupid as the populists imagine. Voters are capable of holding two ideas in their heads at one time: First, that the rich and the powerful do rig the game in their own favor; and second, that simply bashing the rich and the powerful will still not solve the country’s problems.Political populists never get that second point. They can’t seem to grasp that a politics based on punishing the elites won’t produce a better-educated work force, more investment, more innovation or any of the other things required for progress and growth.In fact, this country was built by anti-populists. It was built by people like Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln who rejected the idea that the national economy is fundamentally divided along class lines. They rejected the zero-sum mentality that is at the heart of populism, the belief that economics is a struggle over finite spoils. Instead, they believed in a united national economy — one interlocking system of labor, trade and investment.
Obama to Seek Spending Freeze to Trim Deficits President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit, administration officials said Monday.The freeze would cover the agencies and programs for which Congress allocates specific budgets each year, including air traffic control, farm subsidies, education, nutrition and national parks.But it would exempt security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security, as well as the entitlement programs that make up the biggest and fastest-growing part of the federal budget: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.The payoff in budget savings would be small relative to the deficit: The estimated $250 billion in savings over 10 years would be less than 3 percent of the roughly $9 trillion in additional deficits the government is expected to accumulate over that time.The initiative holds political risks as well as potential benefits. Because Mr. Obama plans to exempt military spending while leaving many popular domestic programs vulnerable, his move is certain to further anger liberals in his party and senior Democrats in Congress, who are already upset by the possible collapse of health care legislation and the troop buildup in Afghanistan, among other things.
Is it Time for a 3rd Party? Whenever people ask me what my party affiliation is, I respond “Pragmatic Independent.”The question usually comes up in response to something I wrote. I’ve been contacted by Republicans, who want me to join or advise their committees. I usually tell them that I find much of their ideology intellectually indefensible, and their marriage to the religious right offensive.When I get the same question from Democrats, my response is they seem to not understand how the economy works, are too spineless to get anything done, and are way too politically correct for my tastes.I agree with Krugman that Obama has been wimpy, when he should have been relentlessly beating the opposition over the head. Reagan never let the public forget who had driven the country into a ditch, nor did he let Congress forget he was in charge. Imagine his response if the other party rejected his plan for a bi-partisan panel.There are notable exceptions — the two NY Senators when I was growing up were statesmen — Jacob Javitz and Daniel Moynihan (a Dem and a Repub). They seem to be part of ancient history. Today, I have to search far and wide to find congress critters who are uncorrupted, understand how business works, and have the balls to call it like it is. Alan Grayson of Florida is the closest thing I have seen to what a modern Congressman should be like.We have a Congress that is a Parliament of Whores of who sold themselves to the highest corporate bidder. Why do I want to have any affiliation with either group? And I am not sure if a 3rd party can break the death grip on America the parties have.