Monday musings

[Political Waves]

Nancy Grace has an acceptable "side" -- have you noticed? Her head is usually tipped a particular way, so much so that she often looks stuffed to me. She's a special one, Nancy is. She prefers to filter life through the gauzy camera angle that shows her ... and reality ... as she wishes to see it. Even her anger, which is enormous and close to the surface, is scripted to make her look good: the authoritative and righteous voice for the victims. Bah humbug! She falls into my "obnoxious to the point of disgust" category -- along with Judge Judy, Sarah Palin and Michelle Malkin: those whom I avoid watching at all costs because they do not allow you an opinion ... indeed, a random thought ... of your own without going at you like a viper.

So I was intrigued when Nancy had a "wardrobe malfunction" on Dancing With The Stars, a show I never watch. She has put on considering girth since her twins were born and bouncing around unloosed one of her ample breasts from its body tape. Nancy showed some tit. American audiences didn't see it (you've got to wonder about that capability) but Europe did. Promptly dubbed NipGate by the wags, Nancy immediately denied that anything had occurred although her actions at the time illustrated a bit of embarrassment. Nancy sweeps with a wide brush when it comes to her image; her denials are all shot from the approved "side."

In honor of the occasion, and her disclaimer, I've posted a special graphic in her name -- DO go over to the blog to see it. Not to be missed by the whimsical! And do read the piece, below, on the real cost of reality television and dumbed-down entertainment offerings.

Now, let's look at another bit of smoke and mirror. Who thinks what about Obama, our chameleon-like president. While his reluctance to play offense often disappoints me, I'm not too sympathetic with those who think he's a closet Republican and a sell-out. He's obviously a moderate, obviously a liberal and obviously a creature of the establishment; what he's been able to push through a reluctant ... and most often immoveable ... Congress is all Lefty business. It's also impressive, considering the muck he inherited and more truly progressive legislation than we've seen in a long long time. It's fair to say that all the things Obama WANTED to do with his presidency have fallen back to what he HAD to do and what he COULDN'T do.

And while we're talking "do"s, let's do understand that a president has a lot of power but, thanks to the founders, he's no dictator; he can only push so far. If those around him are willing to further his agenda, things begin to shift his way. If they don't, he's a moving target. For Obama, that's true in more ways than just the obvious; keep him covered in Light.

I echo Salman Rushdie's comment on Bill Maher last week that we might pause to consider where we'd be today if John McCain and Sarah Palin were leading the nation. And ex-Governor [Michigan] Jennifer Granholm was also on the panel, talking about the unprecedented amount of obstruction this president has had to wade through. She has high hopes that he's come to the end of his patience -- having received enough political cover because people are awakening to the real intent of the Party of No -- and he'll come out swinging more aggressively for the little guy.

Let's hope so. I know this for sure: I listen to politicians spew almost unintelligible rhetoric and opinion and I'm just glad someone who hasn't gone around the bend sits in the Oval Office. In truth , it isn't the President that needs to be whipped into shape, anyway -- it's the establishment and its "norms." We need a new normal.

And we're working on it -- go over to PlanetWaves blog to get some terrific snapshots of the Wall Street occupation and join the conversation. You'll find my weekly here but don't stop with that -- visit awhile. We do great coverage of the important stuff ... a little Petrie dish of democracy going on in your cyber-neighborhood.

Here are some excellent reads to help us shift thinking about the Prez, how we got here and what it might mean, where it might take us. All of these count, in their own way, as think-pieces. And for ALL our sakes, don't start your week without doing just that!

I'll include a little bonus read, short but interesting -- does Obama DISLIKE Eric Cantor [as much as I do??] Here, Cantor is compared to Eddie Haskell, someone even the Beaver's Mother couldn't warm to. Nice!

Jude



How the Tea Party's Noxious Legacy Will Haunt Us for Years
The chaos unleashed by Fox and friends on the American political system during those two years of the Obama backlash is going to be with us for a long, long time.
Will Bunch, Media Matters for America via AlterNet
September 29, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152578/how_the_tea_party%27s_noxious_legacy_will_haunt_us_for_years?page=entire

You could make the argument that the Tea Party movement is the most potent force in American politics today. After all, the evidence is everywhere -- especially in Washington, where Republican lawmakers pushed the previously-unheard-of, tea-flavored notion that disaster aid for hurricane victims can only be paid for by cutting social programs. That was advocated by the same Tea Party faction, swept into office last fall, that has scuttled any talk that higher taxes -- even on millionaires and billionaires who thrived in an era of working-class decimation -- could ever be part of the Beltway's obsession with debt reduction. From making support for generally accepted global warming science melt faster than an Arctic glacier, to folks cheering the death penalty and then booing a gay solider serving in Iraq at GOP presidential debates, the anti-government, anti-science, anti-knowledge 26 Percenters of the Tea Party movement have been the angry tail wagging the confused dog of American police for the last 30 months. Right?

Yes, you could make that argument.

But here's the weird thing -- if the Tea Party is really such a powerhouse of political influence ... where has it been recently?

It wasn't at the small crowds for Tax Day rallies back in April (including small crowds for Sarah Palin and Donald Trump), or at the "small" crowd of only 200 activists who showed up in March for a D.C. rally in favor of shutting down the government, or the less than 100 people who were rousted this summer to rally for the Tea Party's stance on the debt ceiling (pictured at top), even with supposed movement's superstars Sens. Rand Paul and Jim DeMint at the podium.

Where's the Tea Party? It's not in Las Vegas, where the swanky Venetian Hotel has been suing Tea Party Nation for more than $600,000, for canceling a planned convention last fall when it couldn't deliver nearly enough people for the more than 1,800 hotel rooms it had once reserved. You could also fairly ask what happened to the nearly 100,000 people who showed up at the National Mall just 13 months ago for a rally organized by and starring the then-king of all right-wing media, Glenn Beck. But a better question would be simply -- what happened to Glenn Beck? Little more than a year removed from the cover of Time and The New York Times Magazine, Beck has lost his main platform on the Fox News Channel, been booted from the airwaves in Philadelphia and New York, and taken his shtick to the narrowcasting world of Internet TV.

Sure, there's no question that the so-called Tea Party philosophy is fueling the discussion in Washington and in the media these days -- where every conversation on spending begins and ends with "cutting," where every notion about government boils down to "how much less." But the bizarre thing is that this ongoing influence seems to be playing out against a broad canvas that seems to be missing the existence of an actual Tea Party.

Did the Tea Party become, in that famous Sherlock Holmesian expression, the dog that did not bark?

For the most part, yes. So what was all that barking that woke America up in the middle of the night?

It was the right-wing media, and its echoes, that you heard.

When historians look back on the surge and decline of the Tea Party movement in America, and they will, I believe the focus will be how something that was real -- anger and fear among a segment of the middle class that has been decimated by the decline of the U.S. economy -- was hijacked by a band of high-def hucksters, starting with media stars and their bosses seeking ratings, attention, and cash, not necessarily in that order. The behind-the-scene billionaires eager to save their oligarchy, and the craven politicians that they own, piled on later.

I've been thinking a lot about the Tea Party recently. It's been just over a year since my book on the birth of the movement -- The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama -- was published (and it's just been released in more affordablepaperback and e-book editions.) When I reported and wrote the book in 2009 and 2010, it was undoubtedly a current event, but now already it has the feel of history -- a moment in American politics that was both remarkable and alarming in nature.
How has the main premise of The Backlash -- that a cauldron of fear among the denizens of the American heartland over their grim economic fortunes and the rise of a non-white majority, punctuated by the election of a black president, was then stirred up by cynical manipulators like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin -- held up over a year's time?

So well that the president of Fox News, Roger Ailes, just essentially pleaded guilty to that central argument. This week, Ailes told Newsweek's Howard Kurtz, in a much discussed article, that his FNC has undergone a "course correction," quietly adopted at Fox over the last year. Glenn Beck's inflammatory rhetoric -- his ranting about Obama being a racist -- "became a bit of a branding issue for us" before the hot-button host left in July, Ailes says.

So too did Sarah Palin's being widely promoted as the GOP's potential savior -- in large measure through her lucrative platform at Fox. Privately, Fox executives say the entire network took a hard right turn after Obama's election, but, as the Tea Party's popularity fades, is edging back toward the mainstream.

Fascinating, but there's also a part of the tale here that's more than a tad disingenuous. One reason that the Tea Party is fading is that Fox is no longer promoting it aggressively, especially not since Beck departed at the start of this summer. And more importantly, the Tea Party would not have burst onto the scene in the first place without Ailes' Rupert Murdoch-owned network playing such a large part in creating it.

Remember, the concept of the Tea Party itself came not from the masses but from a TV rant -- not on Fox, surprisingly, but by CNBC's Rick Santelli surrounded by affluent traders on the floor of the Chicago financial exchange. To be sure, there was genuine public rage about the 2008 economic crisis and the bailout of the big banks, but the right-wing media -- which have remarkable influence in the top-down, narrowcasted "Dittohead" world of American conservatives -- steered anger away from Wall Street before January 20, 2009, and toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue after that date.

Credit that abovementioned "hard right turn" on Fox -- which incessantly promoted Tax Day rallies on April 15, 2009, to drive up turnout and then covered them as major news events, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Helping to pay for some of the events was the Americans for Prosperity, the front group for the Koch brothers, which had every incentive to tap the public's raw energies for its pet issues, including low taxes for billionaires and climate-change denial.

Do you still doubt that the froth of the Tea Party was whipped up by the media? Think about this: The zenith for Glenn Beck (whose show launched on the day before Obama took the oath of office) came on Friday the 13th of March 2009, when in an emotional rant ("I just love my country," he wept, "and I fear for it") he invoked the spirit of post-9/11 America and even announced a companion movement to the Tea Party called the 9/12 Project. Like magic, this 9/12 Project attracted thousands of enthusiastic joiners who posted anti-Obama rants online (in the post-9/11 spirit?), formed local chapters, and turned out in decent numbers on the National Mall on September 12, 2009, in an event that of course got considerable coverage on Fox.

Then Glenn Beck got bored with the 9/12 Project that he had created from thin airwaves. Then he went off the TV altogether. And the 9/12 Project also disappeared completely off the face of the American political map.

In The Backlash, I wrote about the fulfillment of the mid-1980s prophecies of the late media critic Neil Postman, who worried in his landmark book Amusing Ourselves to Death that entertainment values would subsume political discourse, that the powers-that-be would not resort to Orwellian censorship because we could be so easily and happily be manipulated instead. This is what exactly what we saw in Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, which not coincidentally pretty much rose and fell the same time.

Even at its peak in 2009-10, the Tea Party movement had the politicial juice to do one thing, which was turn out an energized army of Fox-watching zombies to win low-turnout primaries, as they did in Alaska with Joe Miller, in Nevada with Sharron Angle, and most famously in Delaware with Christine O'Donnell. None of these extremists were able to win the general election, even in a throw-the-bums-out GOP tidal wave election.

And so suddenly it's 2011, and Roger Ailes and Fox News decide to pull a "course correction." And just like that, the Tea Party is barely anywhere to be found.

But here's the funny -- OK, actually not that funny -- thing. The chaos unleashed by Fox and friends on the American political system during those two years of the Obama backlash is going to be with us for a long, long time. Some of that is in the extremists like Kentucky's Rand Paul and Utah's Mike Lee who did zig-zag through the electoral maze of 2010 and we are now stuck with for the next six years, at least. But mainly it's in the fear that forces of nature like radio's Limbaugh and the brief surge of the Tea Party has created in the mainstream GOP, its members so afraid now of losing a primary like Delaware's Mike Castle did to O'Donnell at this time last year. That smell of fear moved once-compromise-minded Republicans like Arizona's John McCain to the extreme right and scuttled what in 2008 had been bright hopes that Washington would take action on climate change and real immigration reform. It's what inspired so many GOPers to sign a no-tax-increase-ever pledge that will hamper America's efforts to dig from the current hole, even as the very real problem of unemployment is ignored.

And now comes Roger Ailes to essentially tell us that the whole thing was a politically motivated ratings gimmick. And yet the Beltway pundits and the politicians still can't realize or admit that the Tea Party was at its brief peak just a 26 percent tail wagging the American dog ... or that the dog stopped barking months ago. ++


Tea party is throwing more than a temper tantrum
Leonard Pitts Jr., The Miami Herald
Thursday, September 29, 2011
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/09/29/125515/commentary-tea-party-is-throwing.html

This country is in a world of hurt if the likes of Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry wins the next election. It might be in greater trouble if Barack Obama does.

I can take no credit — or blame — for that analysis. It originated with one of my colleagues, a veteran political reporter, and he shared it one day not long ago as we were chatting in the office. It troubles me for one simple reason: it makes sense.

So here is how his thinking goes. The genteel, pragmatic Republicanism of the past has been supplanted by a pitchforks and torches mentality, a funhouse mirror distortion of traditional conservatism. Meaning, of course, the tea party.

These are folks who don’t just support the death penalty; they cheer for executions. They don’t just oppose health care reform, they shout “Let him die” to the uninsured individual who faces life-threatening illness. They are the true believers: virulently anti-government, anti-Muslim, anti-gay, anti-science, anti-tax, anti-facts and, most of all, anti the coming demographic changes represented by a dark-skinned president with an African name. They are the people who want “their” country back.

The old guard of the GOP doesn’t much like them, but it likes winning so it keeps its mouth shut.

You might think Obama’s re-election would solve this, offering as it would stark repudiation of the politics of panic, paranoia and reactionary extremism this ideology represents. The problem is, these folks thrive on repudiation, on a free-floating conviction that they have been done wrong, cheated and mistreated by the tides of history and progress, change and demography. So there is every reason to believe, particularly given the weakness of the economy, that being repudiated in next year’s election would only make them redouble their intensity, confirming them as it would in their own victimhood.

And ask yourself: what form could that redoubling take? How do you up the ante from this? What is the logical next step after two years of screaming, rocks through windows, threats against legislators and rhetoric that could start a fire?

An awful, obvious answer suggests itself. You reject it instinctively. This is, after all, America, not some unstable fledgling democracy.

Then you realize it was not so long ago that a man blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City out of anti-government sentiment not so different from that espoused by the tea party. And you remember how that tragedy exposed an entire network of armed anti-government zealots gathering in the woods. And you read where the Southern Poverty Law Center says the number of radical anti-government groups spiked to 824 in 2010, a 61 percent increase over just the previous year.

And you wonder.

This is not a prediction, only a speculation — and a suggestion that those of us who have regarded the craziness of recent years as an aberration, a temporary temper tantrum from people who feel threatened and dislocated, may have been entirely too sanguine. In less than 20 years, the locus of radical anti-government extremism has moved from remote woods to Capitol Hill.

How should the rest of us respond? That’s a question we urgently need to answer. They say they’ve come to take “their” country back.

Maybe it’s time we took them at their word. ++


What Awful Reality TV and Suburban Living Have to Do With the Tea Party's Lack of Empathy
The Tea Parties are partly a product of the suburbs, where social isolation leaves communication about social mores to reality TV. Is it any wonder the movement lacks empathy?
Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet
September 20, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152480/what_awful_reality_tv_and_suburban_living_have_to_do_with_the_tea_party%27s_lack_of_empathy?page=entire

If there’s any one defining feature of the Tea Party, it’s a lack of empathy for their fellow Americans. Republican candidates know this about their base: more than their supposed love of Jesus or the Founding Fathers, more than any coherent principled conservativism, more even than the strong streak of bigotry running through the Tea Party is this gleeful “screw you” attitude. Therefore, the Republican primary has become a contest to see who can heap the most abuse on Americans Tea Partiers don’t identify with.

You have Herman Cain preening about making Muslims second-class citizens; Michele Bachmann attacking doctors and public health officials who would prevent cervical cancer in young women; Rick Perry crowing about his heavy execution rate (which includes a willingness to execute people who should have been acquitted or had mistrials); and Ron Paul drawing heavy applause from a debate audience for his belief that government should just let the uninsured die. Far from being concerned about misfortune befalling others, the Tea Party routinely supports the expansion of suffering.

To help explain this phenomena, we might remember another signifying characteristic of the Tea Party: despite the enthusiasm for country music, Tea Partiers proliferate in suburban and exurban districts. The most right-wing districts in the country are also some of its most suburban. Michele Bachmann serves the 6th District of Minnesota, which is composed of the suburban area surrounding the north of Minneapolis/St. Paul. Steve King, known for his competing hatreds of immigrants and sexually active women, serves the 5th District of Iowa, built from the suburban sprawl between Omaha and Des Moines. Anti-health-care fanatic Joe Walsh represents Illinois’s 8th District, composed of the northern suburbs of Chicago. Joe Barton, known for apologizing to BP for the White House post-oil spill investigation, serves the 6th District in Texas, which encompasses the suburban sprawl south of the Dallas/Ft. Worth areas.

There’s likely a connection between the lack of empathy and the suburban nature of the conservative base. Research shows people tend to be more bigoted toward gays and those of different races when they have no personal connection with those people. Suburbs are known for breeding social homogeneity that does shelter people from humanizing those who are a little different than them. Beyond that, suburbs make it harder to develop a well-connected social life altogether. Without that, it’s difficult to keep your empathy muscles, aka your ability to look at others and feel a common humanity with them. If you don’t use empathy, you lose it.

In the past half century or so, Americans have flocked to suburbs, attracted to the promise of large houses, quiet, and privacy levels that simply can’t be achieved in small towns and dense big cities. But the price of all those conveniences was the loss of a sense of community, as people left interconnected urban enclaves or small towns to the impersonal streets of the suburbs.

While there’s a great deal of diversity of suburbs--some are iconoclastic and some are quite walkable--the average American suburb has been notable for decades for an isolating geography and culture. Your average suburban/exurban home is set away from its neighbors with no porch or sidewalks, and suburbanites enter and exit their homes in cars that are parked in garages, minimizing their exposure to anyone who might be walking by. Of course, walking is unlikely to begin with; unlike in small towns and dense big cities, there’s very little within walking distance, killing much reason for anyone but the occasional jogger to be out on the streets on foot.

Many people living in suburbs have long commutes to and from work, minimizing the amount of time for after-work socializing. Through law and custom, suburbs discourage the proliferation of public spaces where people can congregate easily, unlike urban centers where bars, libraries and coffee shops that are a brief drive or walk away. When you have to drive 20 or 30 minutes to get to the bar to hang out with your buddies, it starts to seem that much easier just to watch the game at home.

What public spaces do exist in suburbs tend to be less welcoming and intimate than the local businesses and more neighborhood-y areas of small towns and big, dense cities. Suburbs are the natural home of big box stores and chain stores, places you may go on occasion or even frequently to get out of the house, but not places conducive to creating tightly knit communities. Megachurches that litter suburbs struggle to create the community of smaller churches of old. If you live in a small town or a city full of activities for meeting people with whom you have interests in common, you’re not only that much more likely to get out of the house to make new friends and visit with the ones you already have, but the friends you do have are more likely to know each other, creating a web of connection. In the suburbs, people have less reason to get out, and the friends they do have are much less likely to know each other, creating more isolation and loneliness.

Don't take my word for it. A study at the University of California, Davis found that suburbanites were less happy with their neighborhoods than urbanites. The reason was that the cities provided more stimulation and interaction with other people, providing a sense of excitement and connection. The interactivity of the city was replaced in the suburbs with a culture that encourages staying at home to watch TV and building tall fences to minimize interaction with others. The result for suburbanites is isolation and difficulty making new friends.

The isolating aspects of suburbia are ironically part of their draw, because people see this isolation and feel it provides privacy. But there’s good reason to believe that all this isolation destroys people’s ability to look at their fellow citizens and feel empathy, not only because they simply know fewer people they can relate to, but also because they have fewer occasions to gossip.

Gossip, i.e. the practice of people talking about others they know in common, has a bad reputation as being nothing but back-biting chatter, but sociologists see it in a much different light. In fact, gossip has two very important functions, building relationships and communicating social values. Gossip can be the passing along of negative information, sure, but it also is used to pass along positive information (who had a baby, who got a job), and to communicate value-neutral information that just happens to be interesting (who’s dating who). When you gossip, you not only bond with the person you’re gossiping with, but you are both solidifying your sense that the person you’re gossiping about is a part of your community. After all, they matter enough to be talked about.

Gossip is often used to shame and to judge, but it also keeps people interested in other people and can help build empathy. As someone who grew up in a small town, I can testify to its power to make you feel connected, even to people you aren’t otherwise close to. When we would congregate in the beauty salon in the afternoons and hear all the local gossip, we walked away feeling closer to the people that had been discussed, even the ones who were being judged. By hearing stories about hook-ups and divorces, teen pregnancy and romantic rivalries, we got to practice imagining what it’s like to be these other people. And because they were people we knew and had to deal with on a regular basis, we worked those empathy muscles harder. Yes, there was lots of scolding and lots of judging, but there was also lots of sympathizing and coming up with ideas to help people out of tight spots.

In place of gossip, suburbanites have turned toward tabloid magazines and reality TV to scratch that itch to gawk at other people’s personal lives. As noted urbanist Richard Florida explained to New York Magazine, reality TV signals understanding that it’s filling the gossip void in the lives of lonely suburbanites, by filling the set design with familiar aspects of suburban lives, but then populating it with the real people experiencing dramas that are shut off from suburban dwellers who don’t have enough interconnections to gossip about their own neighbors. Florida didn’t seem to think this was such a bad substitute, but looking at some of the effects of suburban culture on the body politic should give us reason for concern.

After all, unlike with regular gossip about your friends and neighbors, reality TV and tabloid stars aren’t people you have to deal with or empathize with. In fact, reality TV and tabloids go out of their way to make their stars seem like horrible, shallow people you can judge without any empathy at all. Enjoying reality TV is only somewhat like regular gossip, in that there’s the same judging and cataloguing of behavior. But unlike with real world gossip, there’s no empathetic side. It’s just all pointing and laughing, with very little sympathy and absolutely no value put on problem-solving. If the beauty salon in my small town had been nearly as vicious as your average reality TV show, everyone would have avoided it for fear of picking up a terminal case of bitchiness.

So this is how it is for much of suburban America: they’re being encouraged to demonize and sit in judgment without taking much time to actually get to know others and sympathize with their problems. Suburban isolation makes it harder to see other people as real, important and human. No wonder it’s increasingly easy for suburban conservatives to judge others with an unrelenting harshness that shows no indication they even realize their targets are fellow human beings. No wonder they can whoop with joy at the idea of someone dying for lack of health insurance or suggest that even married, monogamous women are dirty sluts who don’t deserve any sympathy for their health care concerns. The complex realities of living have become increasingly alien to large swaths of America. They have very little exposure to what real people’s lives are like, and it’s that much easier for them to treat other people like they’re simply toys that can be tossed out with the trash when they have no more use for them. ++


President Obama the Warrior
Bill Schneider, HuffPo
9/26/11 12:33 PM ET
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-schneider/president-obama-the-warri_b_981393.html

President Obama the problem-solver is turning into President Obama the warrior. It just might save him.

Politics is the enemy of problem-solving. That's common knowledge. Why can't the country deal with the national debt? Politics. Why can't we do something about climate change? Politics.

We see more evidence of it every day. Why is the country on the brink of another government shutdown? Politics. Why can't we get disaster relief to people who desperately need it? Politics. President Obama told a rally this month in Richmond that the American Jobs Act could pass if Republicans "set politics aside for a moment to deal with America's problems."

Set politics aside? Not on your life. House Speaker John Boehner made that clear when he said, "Tax increases... are off the table." Obama's response a few days later: "I will not support -- I will not support -- any plan that puts all the burden for closing our deficit on ordinary Americans." In other words, "Go ahead -- make my day."

President Obama is by nature a problem-solver. That hasn't changed. The president's two big speeches this month were aimed at solving the nation's two big problems -- jobs and debt. He insists on a "balanced" solution that cuts government spending ("but not... with spending cuts that would hamper growth") and also raises taxes on the wealthy ("We can't just cut our way out of this hole").

Problem-solving is cool, rational, and technocratic. It sees issues as problems to be solved, not fundamental conflicts of interests and values. But politics is not just about problem-solving. Politics is also about causes and values that stir the blood: "us" versus "them."
Republicans have become totally committed to that ideological style of politics. Problem-solving is secondary. Every issue is a battle between "us" and "them."

The minute President Obama called for higher taxes on the wealthy, Republicans denounced him for "class warfare." A spokesman for the conservative American Crossroads political action committee told Politico, "The president is explicitly driving a wedge between Americans. That's not leadership, that's borderline demagoguery."

The president's response? "That's not class warfare. I'm not attacking anybody. It's simple math." What could be more bloodless than math? Math is problem-solving.

It will probably be impossible for President Obama to make deals with Republicans to pass his jobs plan or his debt-reduction plan. That's fine with many Democrats, who believe that every time Obama makes a deal with Republicans, he gets rolled.

The jobs problem and the debt problem are not likely to be solved in the next year. Which means that any attempt by President Obama to run for re-election as a problem-solver is likely to fail. So what can he do?

He can do what he did in 2008: stir the blood. Run as the passionate leader of a cause. In 2008, it was "hope" and "change." This time, it's "fairness."

President Obama mentioned "fairness" 11 times when he introduced his debt reduction plan: "Anyone who has signed some pledge to protect every single tax loophole so long as they live, they should be called out. They should have to defend that unfairness."

"Fairness" gets Democrats' juices flowing. But it doesn't always work.

In 1984, it was a flop for Walter Mondale -- who also promised to raise taxes. Mondale's error was timing. The "fairness" theme paid off for Democrats in the 1982 midterm. That year, unemployment peaked at 10.8%. When the economy is bad, middle-class people are receptive to the argument that there's something wrong with the system. They say, "People like me are hard-working and have the right values and we still can't make it. It isn't fair."

In 1984, however, it was "morning in America." When the economy is good, middle-class Americans say, "I'm doing O.K. and so are people like me. If there are some people who still can't make it, it must be their own fault." The fairness issue falls flat.

Right now, it's not "morning in America." It looks a lot more like 1982 than 1984. "When everybody went up, it was a lot harder to make [the fairness] argument," Sen. Charles Schumer told the Washington Post. Now another recession seems imminent. "I think the time is ripe again," Schumer said. "I think the president sensed that."

President Obama can run for re-election on two messages. Why are our problems not solved? Because Republicans put politics first. They refused to compromise. The other is "my values are better than their values." Fairness trumps smaller government. After all, solid majorities of Americans support raising taxes on the wealthy.

What will the Obama campaign sound like? Like President Obama in Cincinnati last week: "I'm a warrior for the middle class! I'm happy to fight for the middle class! I'm happy to fight for working people, because the only warfare I've seen is the battle against the middle class over the last 10 or 15 years!"

Fighting isn't problem-solving. It's politics. Sometimes good politics. ++


Obama: GOP Vision Of Government Would 'Fundamentally Cripple America'
ERICA WERNER, ASSOCIATED PRESS via HuffPo
9/25/11
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/25/obama-gop-cripple-america_n_980219.html

"I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington ... I'm asking you to believe in yours."
~ Barack Obama

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