Archive for August, 2009

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Childish, Sore Losermen

Monday, August 31st, 2009

We are still experiencing violent rhetoric from the right. At Sen. Charles Grassley’s townhall meeting we heard:

President Barack Obama is a fascist.
This and other assertions flew through an emotionally-charged town hall meeting conducted by Sen. Chuck Grassley Monday in Pocahontas.
“The president of the United States, that’s who you should be concerned about. Because he’s acting like a little Hitler,” said Tom Eisenhower, a World War II veteran. “I’d take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me.”

As Digby comments:

Why is it that these people keep alluding to shooting Obama all the time? (And why doesn’t anyone give a damn?) Are they so far gone that they really believe that potential government spending requires them to start shooting? Seriously, nobody’s taxes have gone up. Nobody’s. The recession was already a year old when Obama took office and Bush spent a huge surplus on tax cuts for rich people which these fools all applauded like trained seals.

So they are not very convincing when they try to say that their violent rhetoric is based upon some abstract fear of deficits and socialism. Nothing that Obama has done so far can possibly justify the wild-eyed, slavering, full blown lunacy we are seeing at these town halls.
The simple truth is that they are all a bunch of self-centered, childish sore losermen who refuse to accept that a Democrat won the presidency. And for at least some of them, the fact that a black Democrat won the presidency has obviously sent them around the bend. They are in the grip of a powerful reckoning in which it turns out that most Americans don’t actually agree with their cramped worldview. Hence the crack-up.

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Posted in Politics, Watching the Conservatives | No Comments »

Trusting Government?

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

Polls are showing that the public is beginning to believe the lies and bad reasoning the GOP has cooked up to defeat Obama’s health care reform plans.

How could the public be fooled by such nonsense?

People are inattentive and gullible and many deeply resent a black man in the White House.

But Charles Blow has another explanation that I think is quite plausible.

But it’s also about something more fundamental: fluctuations of basic trust in the federal government.

These fluctuations highlight a peculiar quirk of recent American politics — according to an analysis of The New York Times/CBS News polls from the past 33 years, Americans seem to trust the government substantially more after a Republican president is elected than they do after a Democratic one is elected — at least at the outset.

That might be because Republicans eviscerate government when they are in power thus leaving a mess for Democrats to clean up; or perhaps it is because the public is generally aware that Democrats will use the government to achieve their ends so government trustworthiness is a bigger issue when Democrats are in power.

At any rate, the biggest casualty of the right-wing’s anti-government attitude and the incompetence of the Bush Administration is the lack of trust in government.

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Posted in Culture, Governance | No Comments »

Democrats’ Achilles Heel

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

The liberal Democratic message is that prosperity can be achieved and sustained only by building infrastructure and human capabilities through public works, education, public health improvements, etc.

But it takes time to generate economic growth through these mechanisms. Investments in children, for instance, take years to pay off. And in the short run, it all costs money. So Democratic programs and electoral success depend on economic growth to generate the funds to get these projects off the ground.

The problem is economic growth will be limited in the foreseeable future.

William Galston takes a look at the economic and budget forecasts recently released by the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, and it doesn’t lead one to be optimistic:

If the consensus these documents represent is in the ballpark, the country and the Obama administration are in for a rough ride. Consider the following:

After shrinking over 2009, real GDP will grow only anemically in 2010 before that growth accelerates for a few years and then subsides to below 3 percent for the second half of the decade.

Unemployment will remain persistently high, averaging about 10 percent in 2010, when Democrats will be trying to defend their recent congressional gains. It will be close to 9 percent in 2011, but remain well above 7 percent as late as 2012, when President Obama presumably will run for reelection.

After years of economic recovery and growth, budget deficits will remain larger throughout the next decade than most economists (and the administration) consider acceptable, raising debt held by the public to between 67.8 percent (CBO) and 76.5 percent (OMB) of GDP by the end of the decade.

Without spending, the Democrats can’t do what the American public elected them to do. But without economic growth in the short run, deficits will continue to increase, making the arguments for spending less convincing.

The message Obama has to sell is that the deficits will produce prosperity in the long run. But that is a tough sell for a public that expects magic ponies for Christmas. Getting the public to consider the long term is Obama’s biggest challenge. But the debate over health care and the disappearance of the global warming from the agenda suggest he hasn’t made much progress in convincing the public to take the long view.

As I pointed out earlier this week, the budget numbers are the responsibility of one G.W. Bush. But that is the card Obama has been dealt.

Unless Obama becomes the “magic neurosurgeon” with the skills to heal the collective American psyche, his electoral prospects may be dim.

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Posted in Future of Liberalism, Politics | No Comments »

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