Resolved and Irresolute (Disappointed and Discouraged)
I haven’t written a new post here since June of last year, after being quite disciplined about keeping things up. There’s a simple reason why, and it’s not just that I was busy at YES or Baseball Prospectus, but that I was fed up. I didn’t think, after eight years of the worst president in history (James Buchanan didn’t have his finger on the button), that I could be disappointed in an Obama presidency, and now that I’m here writing this, it seems that I am not disappointed. I think a more accurate word is disgusted.
Throughout the active period of this blog, I constantly spoke of the necessary solution to unemployment being a WPA-style jobs program. Not only did nothing of the sort happen, but until quite recently unemployment was paid only lip-service. In a recent chat at BP, I was asked to take a break from baseball questions as the chat came on the occasion of the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts:
JZirinsky (Washington, DC): Steven,let’s talk politics for a minute: What are your thoughts on the MA special election today and what it might mean for healthcare in this country?
Steven Goldman: My feeling is this: the people tend to punish the party they think is screwing them. Whereas Obama and pals have had just a year to do that, as opposed of eight years of the other guys, well, the other guys are out of sight and out of mind. Specifically, the administration has taken its eye so far off the ball they look like late-career Ruben Sierra. It was, from day one, not the war, not health care, not any other danged thing, it was jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. Instead, they got involved in other stuff, much of it important, but not as important as that. So they gave the banks billions and did relatively little for jobs creation, and everyone can see where their priorities are. If they had just helped put people back to work, they could have had anything they wanted on healthcare (which, btw, they mismanaged) or anything else. Coakley, win or lose, is just the people’s pinata of disillusionment. As for health care, my guess is that the so-called centrist Dems take a Brown win or even a narrow Coakley wins as a rebuke and go running for the hills. Given that the bill is so badly flawed, I’m not sure that’s a bad idea.
That was a flip answer (for me, those chats are about speed), and there’s so much more I could have said, about the administration’s backpedaling on Guantanamo, on DADT, on its failure to lead on health care and sell out the negotiations to the entrenched interests even before they had begun, its reluctance/resistance/refusal to investigate the Bush administration’s abuses, which is important in more senses than just political tit-for-tat. There’s a higher power to be served there, and pursuing it might have done a lot to ease our constipated Congress. I’ll get to that in another post, if anyone is still willing to read after all this time.
Beyond Obama and the ineptitude of an administration that would lead and won’t counter-punch, the paramount reason for my frustration is this: while there has been jockeying between political factions for the hearts of the voters virtually since day one of the Republic, there used to be more of a sense that election season was election season but in between you had to accept the results and get on with the business of running the country. That obviously didn’t mean 100 percent cooperation, but you picked your battles. The basic maintenance of the country wasn’t neglected to score political points. That has changed. On one side of the aisle, we have a party that only says no, which means its loyalty is to party first, country second, and of course the Constitution not at all. On the other side, the Democrats (in case you were confused as to who was who) are, in the words of Winston Churchill, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. Putting your trust in these guys is like rooting for the Kansas City Royals. Who would want to who didn’t have to?
So the country, and by extension us, is a priority for no one, and we’re reduced to being the audience for a kind of masturbatory reality show version of a government while Rome burns. The Democrats have won and haven’t shown that they have a plan. The Republicans will win in November on a nihilistic platform that won’t lead anywhere either. There’s nothing left to hope for. As such, I’ve found that even when I’ve had time to write something here, I’ve felt too discouraged to try. What use would it be, when we’ve given up as a country? Karl Marx wrote of history, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. I’m not sure which version of the fall of an empire we’re in here, but I’m leaning towards farce. Imagine the ad for the movie: “The United States is a zany romp!–Gene Shalit.”
Still, even if our leaders have quit on us, we can’t quit. I’m going to stick with it if you will. Let’s light a candle and curse the darkness. Who’s with me?
February 18th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Me!
My dad is so upset, he’s convinced that Kirsten Gillibrand is going to lose in November, even though he couldn’t name her only declared Republican challenger, and when I told him the guy’s name, his response was, “Who’s that?”
Besides the lack of leadership on key issues - TR didn’t call it a bully pulpit for no reason - what’s actually disgusted me the most about Obama is this. There was Dick Cheney on the TV this past Sunday, saying, and I quote, “I was a big supporter of waterboarding”. That waterboarding is torture, and that torture is unconstitutional and we have a number of statutes, to say nothing of treaties, that make torture and conspiracy to torture a federal crime, is indisputable. And Obama KNOWS this. HE TAUGHT CONSTITUTIONAL LAW FOR TWELVE YEARS! He as much as anyone knows what the rule of law means.
Yet has Cheney been arrested yet? Of course not!
Farce? You want to know what a farce is? We are a country where the GOP impeaches a President because he lied about getting a blow job, and turns that incident into an international scandal that the media covers for eons - but the Democrats, when drowning in incontrovertible evidence that the former Vice President committed a heinous crime (as Lewis Black might say, HE FUCKING CONFESSED ON NATIONAL FUCKING TEEVEE!), do nothing.
I feel a little better now, having typed that.
So yeah, I’m disgusted too, but I’m not despairing yet. Pass a candle, please.
February 18th, 2010 at 8:48 pm
I’m with you Steven. Glad your posting again–hope you can keep it up.
Y’know, I devoured Heinlein in high school and emerged a naive libertarian. Then I mostly ignored politics in college and for awhile thereafter, voting for Nader, then Kerry. I thought of myself as an independent then. Growing up in NYC, my baseline for normal is probably pretty liberal, but watching the Clinton administration in my formative years, I couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for the Democratic Party. That Nader vote reflected my desire for “another path;” I held my nose and checked Kerry because Bush was obviously abhorrent.
I actually would have voted for McCain over Nader or Gore in 2000. Then he went batshit crazy in time for 2008. I was *not* looking forward to voting for Hillary. Then I got as swept up by Obama as anyone else. Fed up with the political system and irrationality of the Bush years, Obama apparent promise of change was irresistible. The Race Speech was where I absolutely jumped on the bus–it seemed like at last someone was defying the Kabuki play that is American campaigning.
To watch the Democrats squander every opportunity since the election, to see them show time and time again that they’re afraid to publicly and proudly proclaim the supposed tenets of their beliefs, to see them foiled at every turn by assholes and idiots…ugh. To apply Bill Simmons’ Levels of Losing: I went through An Achilles Heel (Level 15) loss: “this defeat transcends the actual game, because it revealed something larger about your team, a fatal flaw exposed for everyone to see. … Usually the beginning of the end.” And when HCR dies, that’s upgrade it to a Dead Man Walking (L11): “applies to any playoff series in which your team remains “alive,” but they just suffered a loss so catastrophic and so harrowing that there’s no possible way they can bounce back. … Especially disheartening because you wave the white flag mentally, but there’s a tiny part of you still holding out hope for a miraculous momentum change. … So you’ve given up, but you’re still getting hurt, if that makes sense.“ And with the Senate’s failure to pass anything of substance even with a 59 or 60 seat majority, there’s an element of the This Can’t Be Happening (L8): “the sibling of the Full-Fledged Butt-Kicking. … You’re supposed to win, you expect to win, the game is a mere formality. … Suddenly your team falls behind, your opponents are fired up, the clock is ticking and it dawns on you for the first time, ‘Oh, my God, this can’t be happening.’“
Anyway, barring a miraculous turnaround, I’m back to thinking that both parties are below replacement level. The Repubs are actively damaging, the Dems passively so. The long and short of it is that the Republican Party inspires outrage and loathing in me, while the Democratic Party _merely_ drives me to apathy. USA! USA!
February 18th, 2010 at 9:15 pm
Nice post, Steve. Pretty well sums up why I often go through long periods of complete indifference to the machinations of the American political system.
February 19th, 2010 at 10:05 am
Wow….what a surprise! You vote for a guy without a shred of administrative experience and are surprised that he has failed. You lefties make me laugh.
You never learn.
February 19th, 2010 at 10:06 am
Stick to sports.
February 19th, 2010 at 11:51 am
Steve, glad you’re blogging politics for a while. Don’t you sometimes wish we had stats to measure performance of politicians the way we do ball players?
We could say that Obama has a .988 CPAT (that’s campaign promises attempted: health care, cap & trade, education reform, ask don’t tell) but only a .018CPE (that’s campaign promises enacted, giving him credit for I*’m not exactly sure what).
Or maybe we could say that Obama has a .307 PPP/Ar (that’s prior president position adopted, e.g. Gitmo, renditions, signing statements).
We could say that Obama has a great appearance rate (he’s on TV all the time), and his Orator’s Index is an incredibly high .827.
But that’s not really possible in the context of our political scene. The things we’re all complaining about - the continuing strength of the “special interests,” the inability of the Senate to do business at all have been going on pretty regularly for, well, 200 years. And I think it was Will Rogers who said that he didn’t belong to any organized political party - he was a Democrat. Same old, same old.
I voted for and supported Obama with great hope, not only because he’s smart, but also because his campaign was run so terrifically that I assumed he could manage the politics of the Presidency. Instead, he off-loaded leadership to Pelosi and Reid, to perhaps his ever-lasting regret. He seems to be the most inept political president since Carter. Hope he turns it around.
February 19th, 2010 at 9:16 pm
Steve, for a guy so blisteringly articulate and rigorously careful in his judgments with regard to baseball, I find your caricatures of the issues of the day surprising and bitterly disappointing. Your influence on my understanding and appreciation for baseball is immeasurable because you always attach data and logic to your arguments. Your post above is a rant, nothing more.
What bothers me isn’t your conventional liberalism (you are not a libertarian in any sense of the word), it is the fact that you castigate your opponents as unpatriotic citizens who care more about party than country. Forgive me, but if someone accused YOU of that, you would more than likely take umbrage, no? I wouldn’t blame you.
The administration’s optimistic projections call for a debt/GDP ratio of around 80% by the end of the decade. President Obama is trying to tell us that by adding a new entitlement that guarantees health insurance for 30 million Americans, that debt burden will be reduced. This is the left’s version of the Laffer curve. This fabrication alone makes this administration beneath contempt, and I wish you recognized that.
February 21st, 2010 at 7:42 am
Ian: What is the Republican response to the health care situation? I’ll start taking Republicans seriously again when they offer a serious, unhypocritical, fact-based response and not just bald-faced obstructionism. I can see where someone might disagree with Obama’s policies from the right (or the left), but how can one support the tactics of the Republican Party? I truly don’t know how one can look at the actions of the Republican Party over the past, oh, forty years, let alone the past 13 months, and not see them as consistently caring “more about party than country.” I can certainly see how one could argue the same about Democrats. But I don’t know how one defends Republicans, I really don’t. Unless you’re in the top 1% of income or phenomenally un-libertarian when it comes to social issues, what does the Republican Party do for you?
As for data and logic: see the writings of Paul Krugman and Nate Silver for fine examples. This is SG’s personal blog, I don’t think the same standards apply. You’re seizing on an post that conveys Steven’s emotions–I think his posts always the “data and logic” he’s absorbed form other sources, just as I hope my comments do.
Krugman argues that the debt/GDP level will certainly be high but not historically so. Besides, what’s the alternative to increasing the debt until we’re back on our feet as a country? It’s going to take years to dig the federal budget out of the massive hole left by the previous administration’s spending regardless of whether HCR is passed or not. (Of course, a better (single-payer) plan would do much more to reduce healthcare costs in future budgets, but even the current, flawed plan is a relative pinprick compared to overall spending.)
Re: “President Obama is trying to tell us that by adding a new entitlement that guarantees health insurance for 30 million Americans, that debt burden will be reduced.” Talk about a caricature. As Krugman wrote a few weeks back, “As I’ve written before, the pieces of reform are interdependent. You can’t do one or two pieces on their own. Ban discrimination based on medical history, and you get an adverse-selection death spiral, in which healthy people opt out and premiums soar. You can’t solve that without both requiring that healthy people buy insurance and helping those with lower incomes afford the premiums. In short, you basically end up with the Senate bill. ” Your premise is flawed in any case: the government can add any expanded entitlement with as much or little effect on debt as it pleases simply by offsetting costs with tax or other revenue.
February 21st, 2010 at 9:27 pm
Mike K: Re: What the Republican Party “does for me.” Alas, my standards for governance are far less than your query implies. I judge a party based on who is less likely to make ghastly policy decisions, and on that score Republicans now and historically really do come out better than Democrats, at least since the 1960s.
Re: Krugman and debt. Krugman was considerably more interesting before he became the left’s answer to Charles Krauthammer, which is to say an extremely bright hatchet man. He is someone whose criticisms must be addressed (and not dismissed out of hand because they entail no thought or energy a la Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd or Glenn Beck), but in the end he is a hatchet man. And he is almost alone in insisting that our future debt burden is manageable. It is not, as even the President acknowledges. And more importantly, our creditors.
And if you agree that our debt is a problem, you must further acknowledge that the health care plans under consideration in the House and Senate are galactically ill-conceived. They will enshrine in the law a right to health insurance but do nothing to “bend the cost curve,” despite the President’s argument to the contrary. Even if the bills under consideration are scored by CBO as “deficit neutral,” an almost certainly dubious contention given the accounting gimmicks and supernatural assumptions regarding the fiscal restraint of future Congresses, the only way they get there is to wrench savings from Medicare that are needed to address the looming financial train wreck that is imminent even if we do not add a massive new entitlement.
I think you and Steve share the same problem, Mike, which is that your (completely understandable) distaste for Republicans has impeded your desire to fully grasp how horribly irresponsible this administration is. Hey, I’m all in favor of deficit commissions, even if they’ve never worked before. But that hardly compensates for Obama’s strenuous efforts to further saddle me and my ever growing brood with enormous new debt. It is debt that felled all the great powers throughout history, and we are almost certainly going to join them all.
February 22nd, 2010 at 3:44 pm
Ian: cogent points all around. Nice to have a civil debate over this stuff for once.
ghastly policy decisions: Forget since the 1960s–how can you not look at 2000-2008 as tilting the scale so far as to break it? What portion of the debt that worries you so is directly attributable to W’s Iraq War and Rx Drug bill? Anyway, I’m pretty close to tossing both parties overboard at this point (see below). I do think, though, that Democrats (A) have better (read: less venal) intentions all around and (B) *generally* have more rationally minded and morally grounded followers. Both those points go a long way with me, even if Democratic politicians prove over and over again that all career politicians are, you know, icky.
Krugman/debt: what say you to Krugman’s point that we’ve managed this level of debt before? It certainly won’t be in our creditors interest to call in debt prematurely–I’d argue that as far as China, Japan, and the world is concerned, the US is “too big to fail.”
HCR: see, I start from the premise that health insurance should be a right, and work from there. It saddens me that a better bill isn’t on the table, but I think even this relative monstrosity will be a net positive, if passed. What alternative do you propose to the healthcare problem?
last point: you might be right. My problem up to this point has been that this administration has been ineffective rather than wrongheaded. But as they continue to abandon progressive policy, they’re pulling farther and farther away from me.