Class Warfare & Tyranny

A number of years back, during the Bush administration, a New York Times columnist (I believe it was Paul Krugman, but haven’t been able to find the article) wrote a piece that began with the recounting of a story of a group of aggrieved peasants in some eastern European country raiding the house of the local noble who owned their land, murdered him and his family, and razed his land, all in predictably gruesome fashion. This, the columnist described, was a meaningful instance of class warfare, wherein the poor and the rich were quite literally locked in battle. In contrast, Democratic proposals at the time to not extend tax cuts to the super-rich were not class warfare in any meaningful sense of the word. The value of this column and this story was that it called to question the lunacy of describing relatively minor disagreements on taxation policies “class warfare,” a term that the GOP and the press were happily using.

When I read a piece like the one in today’s Times on the growth of rightwing Tea Party activism in the face of an African-American Democratic President, I wish Krugman or whoever it was would write a column about actual tyranny. Reporter David Barstow describes the evolution of a retired woman in Idaho as such:

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

Teabaggers may think they are “bracing for tyranny,” but there is no reasonable explanation that tyranny is coming to America. I get that Barstow is just repeating what he’s hearing from his subject, but the paper of record shouldn’t be helping to further such an inflammatory and falsifiable claim as President Obama is moving the US towards tyranny. Perhaps a reminder of what tyranny looks like would be a helpful reminder for both political reporters and the Teabaggers themselves.

Hypocrisy

Working in politics, I’ve become increasingly unimpressed by charges of hypocrisy. When you look at the arguments surrounding how Democrats should strategize on the filibuster and whether there should be vocal pushes for “up or down votes,” it is not convincing to me that one party or the other has no standing to critique a particular course of action because four years ago they held the opposite position.

That said, Glenn Greenwald has identified a truly despicable instance hypocrisy by pro-torture, anti-habeas corpus Republican bloggers in their ginned up outrage over the rule of law in Haiti.  There’s a big difference between political positioning changing with time and applying righteous indignation for the preservation of judicial proceedings if and only if they apply to Christian Americans.

Dodd: Senate is “A Dysfunctional Institution”

Mike Stark does some great work interviewing Senator Chris Dodd, getting him to speak out against the obstructionism by the Republicans that have turned the Senate into a dysfunctional institution.

he had some pretty strong words for the conduct of certain Senators (that remained unnamed), saying they needed to “start acting like Senators”.

But perhaps the most revealing thing Senator Dodd said was that because the Senate is currently dysfunctional, “because we’re frustrated right now over an abusive use of a historic vehicle that led to the essence of what the Senate is,we’re about to abandon the essence of the Senate.”

That came after he said, “I’m saddened in a way… the reason the Senate works is because the chemistry of the membership makes it work. That’s why it takes unanimous consent to do almost anything. And the essence of the Senate was basically a longer, slower look at things.”

The audio of Stark’s interview with Dodd is below:

Must Read

Tenzin Dorjee, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, has a must-read piece in the Global Post on non-violent resistance in Tibet. It’s a great piece that outlines the efforts made over the last two years by Tibetans inside Tibet to peacefully resist China’s military occupation through both new techniques and methods that date back to Gandhi and King.

Meyerson on Democrats & Unions

No nation has ever been home to a middle-class majority absent a sizable labor movement. In their failure to advance labor’s prospects, the Democrats condemn themselves to a future of fewer Democratic voters and their nation to a future of mass downward mobility.

Harold Meyerson is right – it’s about damned time Democrats were responsive to the needs of working Americans in labor unions. Meyerson points out that Carter, Clinton and now Obama have all turned their back on labor’s key legislative and policy needs. And to what end? A declining labor movement, a declining middle class, and a reduction in benefits for American workers. Political timidity is, in this case, a clear recipe for economic failure in America.

Moreover, labor is a key constituency for the Democratic Party and one that is ignored at their own peril. I’ve made the case in the past that the primary reasons Democrats won big in 2006 was because of labor’s bodies for field turnout and voting and the netroots messaging in opposition to Republicans. While labor’s war chest is a fraction of what big business brings to the political table, it is still the biggest constituent of the Democratic coalition. At a time when Democrats political prospects for 2010 don’t look good, giving the middle finger to one of your political firewalls is not a good idea.

Ben Nelson

So, is Ben Nelson going to jump ship to the Republican Party some time before January 2011? After all, his opposition to some of President Obama’s key legislative issues (health care reform and labor reform) is now being compounded by his opposition to President Obama’s nominees. Steve Benen writes of Nelson:

In other words, a senator who claims to be a Democrat will not let a Democratic Senate vote, up or down, on some of a Democratic president’s nominees. It’s not enough to vote against them, Nelson wants to prevent his own Democratic colleagues from voting on them at all.

This doesn’t look like the actions of a Senator who is planning on staying within his party’s good graces for years and years to come.

Now, to game it out, Nelson is too junior on Ag, Appropriations, Armed Services & Rules to benefit from a seniority bump by switching parties. He’s exercised a lot of control over what happens with this Democratic caucus by being one of the last votes for any issue; switching parties would probably remove him from the cat bird seat of swing vote largess.

The real question regarding Nelson is whether Harry Reid or the White House will start getting tough on him. Will he be punished for opposing Craig Becker? Will he be forced to pay a price for demanding such a high price on his support for health care?  If Senate leadership and the administration don’t get tough on Nelson, I’m sure he’ll be happy to keep being a problem child for years to come. But if Reid and Obama show some backbone and decide to stop getting pushed around by Nelson, they may give him an excuse he’s looking for to bolt the party and go help out the GOP full-time. That outcome may matter to some Democrats, but it certainly wouldn’t bother me a lick.

Obama’s Small Circle

I think Steve Clemons is right about how President Obama should respond to the critique by Edward Luce in the Financial Times of his tight inner circle of Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs. Clemons recommends Obama take Luce’s piece seriously and evaluate how the White House decision making structure is failing, particularly in replicating the best parts of his campaign.

Governing is not the same as running a political campaign. In this case it means that Obama can’t rely on a tiny inner circle to make all decisions and dominate access to him. He has to open up to expert and advisers with a range of opinions. On the other side, though, Obama has to make his White House more like the campaign, wherein there was a broad acceptance of challenging Conventional Wisdom and listening to new ideas. This was facilitated by a campaign rule of “no assholes,”  which opened lines of communication and fostered creativity.

It’d be one thing if Obama’s small inner circle had helped him achieve great things in his first year, but they haven’t. Instead the administration has floundered, failing to pass health care reform, climate policy reform, immigration reform, labor reform, or banking regulation. Even if the President loves his inner circle and wants them to be the ones running the show, he has to at least recognize that this team hasn’t gotten the job done.

President Bush was rightly criticized for living in a news bubble and maintaining a tiny inner circle – Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzalez and a few other interchangeable figures over the years.  He was cut off from reality and voices that cast doubt on what the inner circle was advising him were pushed aside. While no one is suggesting that President Obama is operating in a bubble, the critique of maintaining a tiny group of core advisers is a serious one that should be listened to attentively by the President.

Fifty-nine

It’s remarkable: one year ago, when the Obama administration started, Democrats had fifty-nine votes in the Senate (though two were in the hospital (Kennedy & Byrd) and one, Al Franken, would not be seated because of frivolous Republican lawsuits). At the time, we were at an historic moment where big ideas were not only necessary, but possible. As such, the administration and Congress charged forward with plans for economic stimulus, labor reform, and health care reform.

A year later the economic stimulus has begun to work, labor reform has been moved to a back-burner about 900 miles from the President’s kitchen, and health care reform is perceived as a legislative impossibility…because Democrats have a mere fifty-nine votes in the Senate.

Fifty-nine votes is not a hurdle today any more than fifty-nine votes, which really meant fifty-six votes, was a hurdle in January, 2009. Fifty-nine votes, when used as a stated or implicit excuse for not accomplishing Democratic goals, is pure bunk. Not getting things done is solely going to be attributable to failures of leadership by the White House and the Democratic Senate leadership team. What is leadership? Partly it’s making an effective public case for a policy issue. Partly it is making clear to your caucus that they are safe to support the agenda you want them to support. Partly it is whipping votes through horse-trading, cajoling, and threatening senators to vote the right way. As far as I can tell, none of these things have been happening, particularly since the loss of the special election.

To wit, see this article in today’s New York Times. While it has an optimistic title, “Obama Maps a Way Forward for a Health Overhaul,” the title actual is belied by the text of the article, which includes this line: “Mr. Obama still did not chart a specific legislative strategy for moving a bill through Congress.” I’d hazard that it’s hard to “map a way forward” without “chart[ing] a specific legislative strategy”. I suppose Obama’s map for health care legislation since the Massachusetts loss look something like this:

  1. Have a real debate on the issues
  2. ????
  3. Sign the bill into law!

This isn’t leadership. Fleshing out #2 would be leadership. And let’s be clear: Harry Reid could do a whole lot to fill in the details here, but he isn’t either. The blame isn’t all Obama’s, but a preponderance of it, at this point in time, certainly is. After all, he was one of the loudest voices for saying that when Democrats had fifty-six functional votes in the Senate that this was the moment in history to pass health care reform. That he cannot muster the same confidence when he has three more voting Senators in the Democratic caucus is a disaster of, to borrow his word, historic consequences.

Democrats are looking for excuses to fail, but I for one do not buy it and I’m tired of it being sold to me by people who I and millions of people like me in the Democratic base have spent years working for, donating to, and voting for. Forget explaining to me why forty-one is greater than fifty-nine – this bit of idiocy is so solidified in Democratic conventional wisdom that nothing can dislodge it now. Explain to me why fifty-six is greater than fifty-nine.  Maybe then I’ll understand why this President and this Party have effectively abdicated their responsibility to get done the things they promised us they would get done.

Question Time

While I certainly think having a regular dialogue between President Obama and the opposition would be a good thing, I hope that if he’s going to give time to the GOP, he also gives time to Democrats, particularly progressive Democrats, for public questioning and debate. This can’t be just about engaging his conservative opponents. He has progressive ones too, progressive Democrats whose legislative agenda he has repeatedly undercut or opposed.

I enjoyed watching Obama swat down dumb Republican talking points last week in Baltimore, but hearing a centrist Democrat tell me why positions slightly to his right are wrong is not interesting to me. Hearing him justify why he is not fighting for health care reform nor labor reform nor immigration reform, on the other hand, would be educational.

Good Faith FAIL

Apparently the Chinese government doesn’t know what it means to negotiate in good faith. A round of talks between the Tibetan Government in Exile and the Chinese government just concluded. It’s the first round of talks since 2008 and an important step for these two nations. However, it looks like the Chinese government is not negotiating in good faith:

It was the ninth time the two sides have met since 2002, but Mr Zhu said the positions of both sides remained “sharply divided” – a situation which had “become a norm rather than an exception”.

According to China, at this latest round of meetings the Tibetans again reiterated their hopes for the introduction of greater autonomy in the Himalayan region.

But Mr Zhu said there was no possibility of the “slightest compromise” on the issue of sovereignty in Tibet.

He also attacked the Dalai Lama, whom he said was a troublemaker.

“He should make a thorough self-examination of his words and deeds and radically correct his political positions if he really expects results of contact and talks,” he said.

How can these talks be viewed as anything other than a stalling tactic by the Chinese government if they are publicly saying there is zero chance of productive talks unless the Tibetan Government drops all of their demands for a resolution to China’s occupation of Tibet by instituting meaningful autonomy? They are ruling out any and all compromises, other than the TGIE simply giving in.

Throw in the fact that China is now “warning” the US government that we will face consequences if President Obama meets with the Dalai Lama.

The Chinese government is trying to bully the Tibetan Government in Exile, bully the United States, and bully anyone else who deigns to question their 60 year illegal military occupation of Tibet.  Their behavior is embarrassing and yet another sign that they are not a legitimate member of the global community.