by hilzoy
Barack Obama has posted on Dkos. It’s a thing of beauty, all the more so because he has posted explicitly to disagree with some of the people there, not to preach to the converted. Check it out.
"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
Many in the choir seem to hold to the belief that the path to power starts with engaging in bad behavior more skillfully than the opponents. Maybe, maybe not. Hasn’t worked so far, but it’s early yet.
Hasn’t worked so far, but it’s early yet.
See your previous sentence about “more skillfully” 😉
What, you’re saying they need more practice? Could be, Anarch.
“Many in the choir seem to hold to the belief that the path to power starts with engaging in bad behavior more skillfully than the opponents. Maybe, maybe not. Hasn’t worked so far, but it’s early yet.”
I beg to differ. If you had written that it hasn’t worked so far for Democrats, I would agree with you.
Wow. So far, everything that Obama says or writes just impresses me more. I’ll have to keep watching his career to see what he actually does (rather than what he says), but if he keeps on the way he’s going I would vote for him as president in a heartbeat over just about any other Democratic or Republican nominee I can think of.
“Many in the choir seem to hold to the belief that the path to power starts with engaging in bad behavior more skillfully than the opponents. Maybe, maybe not. Hasn’t worked so far, but it’s early yet.”
What these people don’t seem to realize is that though this tactic might work, if they had some actual principled goal they were trying to achieve with said power, they’ll have thrown it away by the path they’ve taken. (Of course, that doesn’t matter if they just wanted power for the sake of power and the spoils thereof.)
I think he’s doing here what a good politician does–he flatters the American voter, saying that they are non-ideologues, straight shooters who call things as they see them and have an innate sense of decency and, wouldn’t you know it, if things were explained to them carefully using non-inflammatory language they’d support just those policies that Obama favors. So this is a politician practicing his trade, not the disinterested analysis of a political observer. But he might be right about the correct approach for a Democrat to take. And I agree Democrats shouldn’t impose litmus tests on each other and drive out the ideologically impure.
Exactly. I guess it’s possible to re-cloak oneself in moral righteousness after taking part in the crapfest, but it’d take a while to do so credibly.
I’d thought that was so obvious that I wouldn’t need to say it. Guess not. Consider it corrected.
Barack Obama will never be President of these United States.
I will start taking the conciliators and appeasers….oops…the affable and reasonable seriously when I start to see some frigging victories. And if you think postponing the destruction of Social Security was a great triumph then your expectations are very low indeed.
I do not believe this country, nationwide, is massively more conservative than it was in 1920 or 1935 or 1965. Yet policy seems to be moving back toward the Gilded Age.
What, you’re saying they need more practice?
All I’m saying is that the antecedent hasn’t been met so we can’t draw any conclusions about the failure of the consequent.
“All I’m saying is that the antecedent hasn’t been met so we can’t draw any conclusions about the failure of the consequent.”
Congress during the late 1970s and early 1980s?
Neither antecedent nor conclusion is anything that I’m standing behind, Anarch. Just saying how it looks to me.
I have observed a tendency by some to urge the D party toward a sort of MAD of dirty tricks with the R party, and the ones doing the urging are guys like Oliver Willis (just as an example). So there are at least a few out there who believe this tactic will succeed.
If there ever was a chance I’d pull the D lever, it would not be because they were bigger assholes than those under column R. But that’s just me.
Not sure he actually addresses the “Dems have to have a clear position, to stand for something, in order to prove to voters they have a backbone” view he notes except to conclude that coming up with policy is hard work.
Something about that sounds familiar, somehow…
If there ever was a chance I’d pull the D lever
This is the root of the problem, Slart. You’re a smart and decent person, a part of the group of voters that seems most likely to be swayed by policy arguments. The administration that you support is an abomination. Many Democrats look at the ’04 election and find themselves unable to believe that there is anything we can do to get your vote. So we have to look to other voters, and acknowledge that they may require other sorts of convincing.
I’m not sure, but I am sure that trying to out-asshole the incumbents is not going to do it for me. It’s like another level of insanity: take that which does not work, and work to perfect it.
I’m not sure who I’ll vote for next election, SCMT; it depends on who’s put up. If it’s your contention that I’d never not vote Republican, you’re already wrong. I’ve pulled the D lever and even the I lever when I thought that was a better choice. Howard Dean never looked to me like a better choice than…well, than anyone, and his behavior of late just underscores that assessment. If the tactics of the D party is to out-slime, out-lie and out-cheat the opposition, why on earth would you think that’d INCREASE my odds of voting for them? The only reason I can imagine you’d think that is that I have a preference for the worst a politician has to offer.
So Slarti, what’s your impression of Obama so far? Is he someone you would consider voting for?
Honestly?
I believe the Republicans will gain one or two Senate seats, a few House seats on 2006. and win the Presidency on a close electoral college vote in 2008. I believe this pattern will continue for at least the next half dozen elections, until they achieve something like 300 house members and 65 Senate conservatives. SCOTUS will be 6-3 solid Scalia clones.
In ten-twenty years the affable and reasonable Democrats will start to publicly speak up, but it will be way too late. A depression or World War couldn’t change the balance of power. Praise the Lord, I will be dead.
How shrill should the left be? How shrill is a mini-gun?
I’m not sure, but I am sure that trying to out-asshole the incumbents is not going to do it for me.
That’s not what SCMT said; he pointed out that the Democratic efforts in 2004 did not win you over. The Democratic campaign in 2004 was not one of trying to out-slime the Republicans (as if that were possible given the present administration’s slimy resources). So the fact that a slime campaign will not win you over is irrelevant; Democrats are not losing anything by failing to win you over.
Hey speaking of slime have you guys heard about this great new use for it?
Howard Dean never looked to me like a better choice than…well, than anyone
There’s the problem, though. When George W. Bush is one of the options, why didn’t Howard Dean look like a better choice?
I’ve seen Democrats – committed Ds who would never consider voting Republican – say that they’re looking forward to 2009 even if a Republican candidate gets in, because anyone – anyone at all – looks like a better choice than the present incompetent incumbent.
Faced with a choice between Kerry and Bush, an incomprehensible number of intelligent Republicans decided that they’d rather continue with the disaster area than vote for a man they knew to be more competent than the incumbent. (I’m not arguing any special status for Kerry: I’m simply arguing that he has a far better track record of competence than George W. Bush did in 2000, and an infinitely better track record of competence than Bush did by 2004. But then, the same would be true of a large number of politicians.)
It’s hard to figure out, given that in 2004 so many Republicans opted for a disaster area, what on earth the Democratic party could do to get them to vote D.
I think the biggest problem I see with his essay is where he says
The situation we’re in is that the Republicans that have gained power have done so at the expense of any sort of coherent ideology, at the expense of all credibility and honesty. The strategy they used takes advantage of their lack of honesty, and the strategy causes the lack of honesty. The strategy makes it so that the most successful politicans are the ones that only care for power for its own sake. And the strategy is the best political strategy available with our electorate and electoral system.
The only way to keep the Democrats from going mad with power should they gain it is to change our electoral system, to change our political institutions. Because progressives are at a structural disadvantage. The country is structured so that fascism is the natural endpoint of the ideological progression of the most powerful people in the country over the long term.
In other words, Obama is way too optimistic.
It’s hard to figure out, given that in 2004 so many Republicans opted for a disaster area, what on earth the Democratic party could do to get them to vote D.
Yeah, that’s a baffler. I think our identities (who we are, who we think we are, who we would like others to think we are, who we would like to think we are, who we think we are supposed to be, etc) get all tangled up in our political choices. So, in this context, “Bush is bad, but I’m not the kind of person who votes Democrat.” Switching over requires people to think about who they are and then make a decision to change who they are. That’s a lot of inertia for a political party to overcome.
Providing a clear, palatable to the audience, explanation of what “being a Democrat” means would be a good place to start.
Yes, actually. Point one in his favor: he hasn’t yet said anything that didn’t sound well-considered and fair. Point two in his favor: he hasn’t yet said anything that seemed to be untrue to who he is. If I were in his constituency, I’d feel very fortunate.
Still looks like the same thing to me.
That’s a question that maybe you should hang out with for a while. I’m not saying that to be a smartass, I’m saying that because you really need to see how Howard Dean is not an acceptable choice for the Oval Office. He wasn’t even acceptable to mainstream Democrats.
Given a choice between two parties chock-full of self-important, lying, bloviating windbags, I’m going to go with the one that’s at least nominally going to go along policy lines that I agree with. At present, that party is c) none of the above. Right now I might be more inclined to pull the lever for someone who’s simply honest and trustworthy, even if I knew that he/she stood for things I simply don’t agree with. Hell, I’d vote for hilzoy right this instant, if she were inclined to run for anything at all. I would likely disagree with her as often as agree, but I’d know what I’d be pulling the lever for.
I don’t require that you believe any of the above, BTW.
Hard for me to imagine the Dems running someone so bad I’d vote R.
(above in ref to the Presidency)
Could you imagine the Rs running someone so good that you’d vote R? I can imagine an analogous situation for me, but given the conversation here I rather doubt it’ll ever happen. If Obama’s reception over at dKos is any gauge, it’s a near certainty it won’t.
Hmm, maybe that’s “Hard for me to imagine the Rs running somebody I’d consider voting for over a ham sandwich”. I would at least have thought about McCain in 2000 for a few minutes. I would have thought about voting for Slart or von for a while, depending on who the V.P. was, even though I liked Gore a lot on policy.
(above x-posted)
Oh yeah, if _Powell_ had run in 2000 I would at the time have had a hard think.
Slarti, if I am reading this correctly, you are saying that:
1. engaging in bad behavior doesn’t work for Democrats, but (at least by implication, and it was what I was implying) it does for Republicans.
2. You far more frequently vote for Republicans than Democrats (in spite of 1).
3. You consider Kerry in 2004 to have run a campaign which was on a lower road than Bush (and I join with Jeremy Osner in wondering how you could possibly come to that conclusion).
I put these together and come to the conclusion that for you, taking the low road is something which you will tolerate in a Republican, but not in a Democrat. Please tell me if I am misreading you.
Slart:
Two points –
(1) I’m not arguing that we could get your vote through slime; I’m saying we can’t get your vote. So we look to others, and try to sort out what will convince them.
(2) I’m deeply curious about what made Dean unacceptable. AFAIK, the only non-centrist thing he said was that he was against the Iraq war. I think a lot of people find that an acceptable position (or even the right position) now. He was also the most “straight talking” of the Presidential contenders. Is it just his position on the Iraq war that would keep you from voting for him?
1) You’re still listening to what you want to hear, I think.
2) See 1).
3) See 1).
Consider that there is more than one variable. Let’s flip this around: if you were to have your dream about how you were represented in government, would the current version of the D party be just as you designed it to be? If not, why do you vote that way (assuming you vote that way, if not treat it as a hypothetical)? If the Ds aren’t exactly as you’d have them be, why in the name of all that’s holy aren’t you voting R?
Let me know if, on considering those questions, the point doesn’t become more clear. If the D party is exactly as you’d design it, consider this one of those things you’re just not going to understand about me.
why didn’t Howard Dean look like a better choice?
That’s a question that maybe you should hang out with for a while. I’m not saying that to be a smartass, I’m saying that because you really need to see how Howard Dean is not an acceptable choice for the Oval Office. He wasn’t even acceptable to mainstream Democrats.
Slart —
I’ll accept that this is not intended to be smartass, but it is maddening. Trust me — I’m a mainstream Democrat. The candidates I root for are in the dead center of the Democratic party. I thought Dean was perfectly acceptable, and I can’t figure out why you wouldn’t find him acceptable unless you actually tell me.
That doesn’t mean that you don’t have perfectly satisfying reasons for opposing him, but implying that a little introspection should reveal to Jes that Dean was self-evidently unacceptable is, as I said above, maddening. All I get from what you said is “I couldn’t possibly have voted for Dean, and I won’t tell you why. If you were worth engaging with you’d already know.”
I would have voted for a Republican, if given a good choice, until sometime in the mid 90s. (For Congress or President, I mean.) Now, I think I would not, and the reason is that I believe that the Republican party has been taken over by, well, crooks. (DeLay, Abramoff, et al.) Since a vote for a Republican would be a vote for someone who would further empower the Republican party leadership, I would not vote for a Republican now, unless the Democrat were some complete and total nutcase of a dangerous sort.
This cuts both ways: I think that in the 50s, I would have had a very hard time voting for Democrats, despite the fact that I would have agreed with them on most matters of policy, simply because to vote Dem, at that time, was to vote for a party held hostage by segregationists. From, oh, 1929 through 1945 I would have thought that there was something even more important than undoing segregation, but that’s just because of the flukey fact that we had two such monumental crises as the Great Depression and WW2. Under any more normal circumstances, meaning 1945-early 60s, I hope I would have voted Republican.
Which is to say: I would have been with the Dems on most issues, but would have seen the party as having a structural feature that generally precluded my supporting them until it was changed.
I think that if I were Republican now, I would feel similarly. The extent of corruption in the Republican leadership is, I think, unprecedented in my lifetime. It matters that it be defeated.
That’s fine but it makes it hard to understand why you would not self-identify as Republican. (If I am remembering correctly that you posted a few months back, that you were renouncing that party affiliation.) Because it sounds like you are saying, you’re a Republican who might conceivably vote Democratic if the Democratic candidate were perfect in your estimation. I don’t see what Democrats have to gain from listening to political advice from someone who feels that way.
(Sorry, that last post was directed towards Slart’s previous one, a couple were interleaved.)
Slarti,
On item 1, if my statement that engaging in bad behavior works for Republicans is incorrect, what did this exchange mean to you:
“If you had written that it hasn’t worked so far for Democrats, I would agree with you.
I’d thought that was so obvious that I wouldn’t need to say it. Guess not. Consider it corrected.”
If you are saying that you vote R for after balancing a number of issues, and this is one of them, that’s fine. But if so, then I do not follow how you can then say that engaging in bad behavior, by itself, prevents you from voting for Democrats.
See any commonalities between the Democrats of the 50’s that you couldn’t vote for and the Republicans today, hilzoy?
Please tell me where I said perfection is a requirement. And no, I don’t believe I self-identified as a Republican, here. If so, oops, force of habit.
My problems with Dean pretty much all stem from that he prefers to think those who don’t agree with him are evil. Conversation over; he’s no better than any of the other idiots who confuse access to the soapbox with eloquence. What I’m at least attempting to say is that so far, Obama is not one of those idiots. Strong mark in his favor, and I’d at least hope that most people agree.
I did vote for Bill Nelson, and will vote for him again when he runs against Kathleen Harris. I also voted for a couple of Democrats when I lived in Alabama, and even voted for Ross Perot in a fit of pique. I’d vote for Joe Lieberman if he were to win the D nomination, and may have voted for him last year had he been a candidate. You can argue that these aren’t “really” Ds if you like. As for Rs that I’d reelect, Jeb Bush would be one of them (the Schiavo affair notwithstanding). In a state that seems to be well above average in the realm of crooked politics, Jeb’s done a great deal more right than he has wrong.
I wonder if you could point out an instance of Dean calling people who disagree with him “evil”.
That was a very thoughtful article by Sen. Obama. If I were an Illinoisan (Illini?) I would be glad to have him as one of my Senators.
Bob and Jes, I think you are too pessimistic about the Democrats’ future. These things tend to go in cycles, and I think the Republicans are getting to the point where the Democrats were in the 70’s – arrogant and complacent, and ripe for a fall.
(And I say that as someone who almost always votes Republican.)
Right now, the Republicans have well-oiled party machinery and the best attack dogs, but those things don’t last forever (remember the Democratic city machines?). All the Democrats really need is the right candidate – maybe a combination of Bill Clinton’s charm and blue-collar appeal, but with real national security credentials. You put forward that person and you’ll see crossover voters.
I can’t think of who that might be off the top of my head, but sometimes the right person sneaks up on you. What were Clinton’s odds when the ’92 campaign began?
Slarti, my question wasn’t “Why wasn’t Dean acceptable?” in a vacuum: it was “Faced with the choice of George W. Bush returning for a second term as President, and anyone else” – why wasn’t Howard Dean a better choice? What, in your estimation, made Dean unacceptable for the Oval Office when Bush was the only other alternative?
Slarti: As for Rs that I’d reelect, Jeb Bush would be one of them
Given Jeb Bush’s skill in fixing elections, I’d say you don’t really have a lot of choice about that. But I’d certainly concede he seems to be decidedly more competent than his brother.
SCMT: now that you mention it…
More generally: I voted (in MA, mid 80s) for Bill Weld over John Silber (competent, if a bit heartless, R over vicious D). And I even registered as a Republican in 1980. That doesn’t really count, since I did it to vote, in the primaries, for Anderson over Reagan — Reagan’s policies seemed to me fiscally irresponsible, and I was a deficit hawk even then. Plus, the race between Carter and Kennedy on the Dem. side didn’t do much for me.
Then I forgot to un-register, so in the 1984 primary I got to vote for my sister for President and my boyfriend for Congress. She wasn’t 40, and he wasn’t even a US citizen or even in the US at all, but I figured the chance of either of them winning was sufficiently remote that that didn’t matter. (This was before Mass. had crossover primaries, and Reagan was running unopposed.)
Me, too. Probably a poor choice of words, but based on the level of vituperation directed Rightwards.
1.0, apparently, but only obvious after the fact.
I might vote for Bill Bradley if he ran for President as a Republican, and I might vote for him if he ran as a Democrat.
I would vote for Hilzoy.
I would vote for Slart, unless Hilzoy were running against him.
That said, given the current lineup of likely Republican candidates for everything, and given the Rovian cast of their handlers and the nasty punks in the Young Republicans on campus, I think shrill and pissed-off and brutal is the ticket for the Democratic Party.
Would prefer nice, honest people, but they get eaten alive which is why Bradley, Hilzoy, and Slart won’t be on the ballot.
Further, I’m not interested in the principled, uncorrupt Republicans who are fed up with Bush because he has blown, so far, the effort to abolish Social Security and Medicare. I’ll take my Republicans nasty, corrupt, and incompetent any day over Republicans who wish to complete that agenda, however principled.
By the way, I’m posting from another computer because something ate mine at home.
I would vote for George W. Bush for a third term if made a law that “fatal error” messages were henceforth rendered in plain English.
All the Democrats really need is the right candidate – maybe a combination of Bill Clinton’s charm and blue-collar appeal, but with real national security credentials. You put forward that person and you’ll see crossover voters.
Assuming that the votes get counted, which is something that Diebold voting machines (with their lack of paper trail to confirm how people voted) means that you can’t be sure of that any more. Any election where Diebold machines are in use is an election where the results can be changed, untraceably. Whether or not they were in 2004, we don’t know: we can’t know. (We can look at exit polls and guess, of course.)
Whether or not they will be in 2006 or 2008: we don’t know: we can’t know. Using Diebold machines means electoral fraud can be untraceable. We know for a fact that the 2000 election in Florida was stolen (yes, Slarti, I know you’re about to tell me you don’t believe it): but changing the votes electronically, no paper trail, no record that they were ever different, is much safer.
Even if hilzoy weren’t running against me, I’d write her in rather than vote for myself. Why anyone would want to be President, I have no idea. On reflection, that makes voting for hilzoy an exceptionally unkind thing to do, by my own standards.
I guess we’re going to find out, aren’t we? Because there seems little inclination on the part of anyone to do things differently.
You know, for someone who doesn’t want to talk about this any more, J, you could hardly talk about this any less. If there’s going to be an open thread on this, you’re going to have to promise to come up with the goods.
Trivia: the ballots filled out by Slartibartfast are (and will continue to be):
a) Punch-card
b) Butterfly
c) Electronic
d) Optical Scan
Slarti: if I disagree with you, it’s only to get back at you for writing me in, even in your imagination. (I agree: why on earth anyone would want to be President is a mystery.) But: the Democrats have not, in fact, been particularly shrill recently. We really haven’t. We confirmed Roberts. We have not gone to town on DeLay, Frist, Abramoff, that guy in procurement who was arrested, Larry Franklin pleading guilty, the people connected to Abramoff who were arrested for a mob-style hit — and that’s just the last week.
Newt Gingrich on the House Bank scandal — that was shrill and pissed-off and brutal. The Democrats, at the moment, are none of the above. They have lost their voice.
This Kos diary takes up the complaint I made above. In less-measured tones, needless to say.
Yes, I agree that’s true if “recently” is some period of time on the scale of a couple of months. By the inclinations of some, then, you’re being far too nice.
More broadly, though, what I’m saying is something to the effect that it’s really, really difficult to claim the moral high ground after you’ve abandoned it. I’m not saying that criticism is out of bounds, I’m simply saying that reasoned criticism is probably more likely to find new ears than the shrieking kind.
But this is all sounding a bit like advice, so scratch that.
Despite that, you still don’t seem to be falling into our arms, Slart. While it would be a better world if neither party was rude about their disagreement with the other, abstention from rudeness doesn’t get us any votes, including yours. While being ruder might preclude you from voting for us, you’re not voting for us anyway, so your preferences aren’t a relevant subject of consideration.
I wonder if Slarti’s problems aren’t much the same as the Bull Moose’s. He doesn’t want to be a Democrat — he wants to be an old-school Republican. There aren’t any old-school Republicans, and it looks like there never will be any.
The Bull Moose bit the bullet and decided Democrats were better than the current incarnation of Republicans, but spends most of his time griping about how today’s Democrat’s are the Golden Age Republicans he so fondly remembers.
Perhaps Slarti just isn’t ready to bite the bullet and give up on the GOP returning to sanity.
More broadly, though, what I’m saying is something to the effect that it’s really, really difficult to claim the moral high ground after you’ve abandoned it.
Just out of curiosity, what “moral high ground” has the Democratic Party “abandoned”, which the GOP (preumably) still has?
That came out snarkier sounding than I meant it. What I meant was something more like: There’s a certain minimal level of unpleasantness inherent in pointing out that you disagree with someone on policy. From my point of view, you seem to perceive that minimal level of unpleasantness as offputting and unacceptable when it comes from Democrats. Given that, while you seem to be a decent guy and I’d love to have your vote, it doesn’t seem to be accessible to the Democratic party outside very specific circumstances, and crafting a message to appeal to you is not going to garner a lot of votes.
“Despite that, you still don’t seem to be falling into our arms, Slart. While it would be a better world if neither party was rude about their disagreement with the other, abstention from rudeness doesn’t get us any votes, including yours. While being ruder might preclude you from voting for us, you’re not voting for us anyway, so your preferences aren’t a relevant subject of consideration.”
Do you think there is a large number of people who are not currently voting for Democrats but would if they were ruder?
I agree that both parties being equal (other than core policy), I am most likely going to vote R. I’m not sure if that’s what you’re saying; if not, I disagree. And there isn’t much I admire about the current priority set on the R side, so I think I’m a bit more up for grabs than you’re representing.
That, I kind of agree with. I’m not sure if rude is exactly what I’m talking about, though.
Do you think there is a large number of people who are not currently voting for Democrats but would if they were ruder?
Well, there’s a level of clarifying the points of disagreement between the parties on policy matters that can come off as hostile and unpleasant, and that I think that Democrats could get more votes by doing more of. It is perceived as rude to say: “Issue X is vitally important. My position on X is correct because of A, B, and C. My opponent’s position on X is wrong because of D, E, and F. If my opponent gets into power, bad things will happen relating to this issue.” Nonetheless, without that sort of rudeness, no one is going to vote for you.
i can’t think why anyone would imagine the Democrats have abandoned the moral high ground. But then I judge by actions, not words. Although the Republican leadership has been claiming the moral high ground for years , their behavior and policies have been in consistant contradiction of morality for decades. Democratic politicians have more principled policies, but brag on themselves less.
And no, opposition to abortion does not constitute moral superiority.
And Slarti: for what it’s worth, I think you would not vote for me if I were running as myself, but Karl Rove or some similar figure spent a little time on crafting a storyline about the evils of hilzoy. It goes without saying that, as a Democrat, I would be a radical left-winger, out of touch with American values. I opposed the war in Iraq, so I must be an appeaser who is not serious about fighting terrorism. Obviously, I do not love this country. I’m an effete academic, trapped in my ivory tower, studying, heh heh, Philosophy.
I’m a feminist, which (according to me) means someone who thinks that men and women should be treated with equal respect and dignity, that this (like dealing with the aftermath of segregation) is not as easy as just deciding to do it, but takes some careful thought and unearthing of stuff we’re not aware of, and that this work is worth doing, but in the caricature would mean: someone who is trying to make your little boys and girls into little androgynous robots who all share little unisex bathrooms.
I’m not religious, which means I have no moral values, and also that I secretly sneer at Christians and want to rob them of their faith, or at least make it illegal for them ever to pray. I support gay marriage — well, what do we need to say about that? Next thing you know, I’ll be supporting the rights of pedophiles to marry the three-year-old of their choice. I’m a vegetarian.
Plus, I think I have said, here, that I smoked dope (four times!!!). I have, in the past, been depressed, and have taken Prozac. (a history of mental illness!) I could go on, but why? You get the point.
“Nonetheless, without that sort of rudeness, no one is going to vote for you.”
Maybe so. Though the type of rudeness I see from Democrats is much more of the Rep. McKinney variety than reasoned discourse which you seem to label rude.
“But then I judge by actions, not words.”
Is that for the US only or does that count for Iran and North Korea as well?
😉
Sebastian: if you’d like me to be rude to you in some other way, you have only to ask 😉
No, I’m such a jaded Republican that reasoned discourse doesn’t even strike me as rude.
That you did so and admit to it (projecting to the almost-certainly fictional future, here) would most likely get you my vote.
Yes, I get your point. Would this fictional scenario include you abdicating all that you hold dear in order to retaliate in kind? I’m thinking probably not, which changes things in my eyes just a wee bit.
You know, I honestly can’t get worked up over rudeness in Democrats when the Republicans are being both rude (“fuck off”, as the Vice President says) and engaging in the wanton slaughter of innocents, trashing our domestic security and our standing abroad, and all that. If my house were on fire, I wouldn’t worry about mixing up the good silver and the flatware while shoveling them into a bag. Same deal.
When there is a widespread and sometimes effective Republican challenge to the Bush administration on torture, waste, and corruption, then I will feel obliged to listen serious to criticism about Democratic manners. Until and unless, it’s beam-in-your-own-eye time.
That you did so and admit to it (projecting to the almost-certainly fictional future, here) would most likely get you my vote.
You voted for Gore!?
Seb: Nope, I wouldn’t. But then, part of the reason I would never think of running for office is because I can see so clearly what the attack line against me would be. (Or, more likely, several to choose from.) (I mean, there’s also the ‘effete academic snob from a family of effete academic snobs’ line, and I think that what, when I was younger and it was a larger part of stuff, I used to think of as the Fact of Dad could be deployed against me, if used subtly.) There are the relatives who are Swedish Social Democrats, = socialists. The number of ex-boyfriends > 1 . (Actually, the number who comment at ObWi > 1.) (Mental illness, dope fiend, and promiscuous! (Where the actual facts support the caricature about as much as in the dope fiend case.))
Sorry: last post to Slarti, not Sebastian.
LB, if you what you got from that was I’d vote for anyone JUST BECAUSE they smoked pot, you got it wrong.
As someone with no party affiliation…
Dems are not losing a battle of nasty names and mudslinging. They are losing the war of defining their vision in relation to the American myth. Dems need to start spinning their own version of the American myth. It’s not Rush that is winning the arguments, it’s Reagan. Rush is just appealing to the picture of America that Reagan painted.
This is not a ‘party of no’ sort of statement, so much as an acknowledgement that most Americans want to believe the myth of the ‘self made man’, and that the Dems don’t have a similarly romantic myth to rely on. The Dems need a good myth to sell.
Brotherhood?
I’ve long thought that the Democratic pitch should be “good neighbors”.
You and someone you love? Your business. Likewise with what you read and watch and think about, as long as you’re not leaving health hazards lying around your yard or beating up the kids (or the loved one, come to that). Need a lift to the store while your car’s in the shop? Can do. Maybe we can work out something to do it regularly, and spread the costs of hauling the groceries around. Don’t like your neighbor’s religion? Tough. They get the same privacy and security you do, or at least we’re going to try to keep us all safe and able to make our choices. If you take a poke at them over, it’s your fault; same as if they take a poke at you.
And there’s some things we do together because it just makes more sense. Each of us keeps our own yard up, yes, but we get together for the roads and the sewers and all that.
And so forth and so on. Start from personal choice and respect and the merits of cooperation, and go up from there to dealing with the vast array of real help any of us might need.
“Brotherhood” is not enough. It doesn’t play enough off of the rugged individualism that’s part of the American character (and which many progressives have forgotten). And social justice, in my book, doesn’t work as well as social mobility…
Dems are not losing a battle of nasty names and mudslinging. They are losing the war of defining their vision in relation to the American myth. Dems need to start spinning their own version of the American myth.
I agree. This is what I meant when I wrote that Dems need to “provide a clear, palatable to the audience, explanation of what “being a Democrat” means…”
Political parties need to sell “identity narratives” right along with policy prescriptions. As you note, only one of the parties is doing this now.
Oh, and after further reflection, I think the hilzoy for President thought experiment wasn’t particularly well considered. Maybe she’s exactly where she’ll do the most good right now.
Of all the nights to go to bed early and miss all this fun.
It’s not a question of being “rude”. It is a question of specifically manipulating appearances in order to convince just enough voters to tip the balance. While one would think that it would be a simple matter to aim for the center and marginalize the two extremes, people who are advocating the the Dems reply in kind are realizing that it doesn’t seem possible. It seems to them (and more and more to me) that David Stockman’s admissions that you do what you can to win the election and then you take whatever steps you have to (the original article is here behind a subscription firewall), rather than being a bit of a bad dream, were an increasingly accurate prediction of the future.
Now, I don’t want to suggest that doing what you can to win the election and then patching everything up is solely the territory of Republicans. I do want to suggest that this current administration has skipped the second step.
I don’t want to be accused of denying all evidence in order to avoid changing my mind, so I have to say, something to support the notion that Dems don’t need to go the mattresses is lacking.
It may be a question of defining an ‘identity narrative’. But part and parcel in narrative is ignoring all points where that identity seems to be contradicted. Thus, the party of small government or the party of efficient government or the party of no nation building presents its facade, as long as you ignore the man behind the curtain.
Since people have links to DKos stuff, I’ll note that there was something by Hunter over there that I can’t find, but the short version was him jumping on some Republican for saying something like ‘the Dems are playing with fire’. I want to say that it was a superb rant, which already reveals that I am leaning towards the Dems go nuclear and let the devil take the hindmost.
Unfortunately, (and apologies for the rather inflammatory observation, if the hat doesn’t fit, don’t put your head in it) the Dems seem t be leavened with people who actually think that the truth is important, a category I hubristically put myself in. I worry that folks like us are basically standing in front of the Wal Mart on the 4th day of the flood, worrying about the ethics of breaking in to get bottled water.
At the moment, one line of attack has opened itself up. Note Brad DeLong and Yglesias. Looking at Bennett’s words, I agree, but why should I devote one iota of energy to defending a Bill Bennett? And if I can find some bungee cords to hook the gamblin’ Man to any other administration official, why is this a bad thing?
Yglesias has a new this that deserves to be noted in light of this discussion
I still have this altogether quaint attachment to the truth, but it may be like a vestigal appendix that will need to be cut out. I am also reminded of a quote about the French Revolution that noted how, like a volcano, when it came, it didn’t simply take the truly corrupt at the top, but along with them, took all of those who were trying to reform the system to save it. Sauve qui peut.
Sorry, here is the link to the Hunter post. I understand Hunter is also from Mississippi?
“Under any more normal circumstances, meaning 1945-early 60s, I hope I would have voted Republican.”
Hilzoy, with all due respect, even during that era the politics of race was much more complicated than you seem to be saying. Are you saying Truman would be worse on race than Dewey, or Stevenson worse than Eisenhower? Paul Douglas(D,Ill) introduced the weak Civil Rights Act of 1957 which LBJ managed to wheel and deal to passage…involved the Snake River Dam in Washington; Everett Dirksen(R,Ill) the stronger version in 1964, which Barry Goldwater voted against and then gained his party’s nomination. I suggest, respectfully, you study those eras more closely.
Even discounting the historical change that now makes the like of Javits or Brooke or Rockefeller an utter impossiblity in today’s Republican party, to call the Democratic Party of 1955 “hostage to racists” is really unfair to many fine men, and makes me wonder if you have listened to too much Republican revisionism.
Bob M: It wasn’t reading Republican revisionist history so much as going through a binge of labor history recently. (Thank TPM Cafe for making me realize that I knew next to nothing about the history of the labor movement in the US.) It seemed as though at every turn, some piece of legislation that would have helped a whole bunch of people, and might just possibly have helped, to some tiny extent, the lot of southern blacks, was for that reason deemed utterly unacceptable by the Congressional Democrats. You’re right, though, that I should look more carefully at the history of the Congressional Republicans on this topic.
And it’s not just that the Dems were not good on civil rights then; the point was more that the Dixiecrats seem to have had a veto on policy affecting civil rights, so that the Democrats then were institutionally hobbled. Which was meant to be the parallel to the Republicans now. Even if I agreed with their policies, the fact that they have introduced really breathtaking levels of corruption, and have done so as a body, would probably make me vote against them, so as not to let this go on.
It wasn’t reading Republican revisionist history so much as going through a binge of labor history recently. (Thank TPM Cafe for making me realize that I knew next to nothing about the history of the labor movement in the US.)
I’d also point out that the reactions in dealing with the labor movement in the US are deeply entwined with the worldwide problems of dealing with the anarchist/progressive/socialist/communist movements that emerged at the turn of the century. I wonder if the TPM links talk about the Wobblies or Big Bill Heywood. It would be unfortunate if they didn’t, but understandable, because Heywood, after being convicted of espionage and sedition for calling strikes during WWI, jumped bail in 1921 and fled to the Soviet Union, where he died in 1928. I shudder to imagine the hay that could be made if the labor movement acknowledged this linkage.
(If the links do show this, you have my permission to ridicule me for 3.78 posts)
“…was for that reason deemed utterly unacceptable by the Congressional Democrats. You’re right, though, that I should look more carefully at the history of the Congressional Republicans on this topic.”
Wikipedia breaks the 64 Civil Rights Votes down by Northern and Southern branches of each party, and I would need a breakdown on most issues along those lines. Were Northern Republicans more sympathetic to labor issues than Northern Democrats? Somehow I doubt it.
In addition, I can imagine Republicans using race in the 50’s and 60’s to damage and weaken the Democratic Caucus. For example, just guessing, I could imagine Dirksen defeating a liberal Douglas in Illinois with a combination of Southern rural Republican conservatives and Chicago blacks, claiming the Dem Party is the party of racism, and then screwing his urban black voters on every piece of economic and social legislation to come along. Somehow I doubt Dirksen had a great relationship with Daley.
Oh, and of course my own political analysis should be understood along the lines of Lincoln may have had some good points, but he was a Republican.
Everett Dirksen
An excellent and fair extended biographical essay on the greatest Republican of the era.
Also a first approximation of the complicated history of 35-65. I scarcely know what to say. I suspect Slart and Sebastian would love him.
Oh, and of course my own political analysis should be understood along the lines of Lincoln may have had some good points, but he was a Republican
Bob, I’d ask you to marry me but 1)I’m married and the crowd here isn’t into poly-whatever (discounting the folks who say that it is the natural urge of men) and 2)it might be interpreted as simply a pr stunt in support of gay marriage.
I now realize that the path is clear. Do what the Repubs do but do it with a sense of humor.
Slart, what do you think of someone like Feingold?
As for Obama’s piece. I don’t know quite what to make of it. The people he defends by name–Leahy, Durbin, and Feingold–absolutely deserve it. They are on my top five list of The Good Guys in the Senate (along with Levin and Obama himself.) The Roberts vote is a close call, withdrawal from Iraq is an impossible issue, and Ithink those three are voting their conscience.
But there is an awful lot of truth to the Kos-ites’ story line. The Senators they are usually angry with aren’t Durbin, Leahy and Feingold–they’re Lieberman, Nelson, Biden, Salazar and Kerry. The votes they are angry with aren’t usually on close issues like withdrawal from Iraq or Roberts. They are on things like the decision to go to Iraq, the marriage amendment, the Gonzales confirmation, the bankruptcy bill, the energy bill, the estate tax. And for many Congressmen on many issues, the problem is not principled disagreement; it is cowardly, unelightened self-interest. And whether it’s right to demand party loyalty on a vote depends more or less entirely on what you’re actually voting on.
There are a lot of hard issues the country faces right now, but there are also a whole lot of easy issues we’re screwing up very badly.A lot of hard problems, but not so many hard Senate votes.
He closes all right though.
Someone like Russ Feingold, or Russ Feingold?
Ok, that was a smartass question, but in a good-natured way. I don’t know much about Russ other than he was hooked into the one thing I dislike the most about John McCain. Spiffy idea, but ought to be in every encyclopedia beside “Law of Unintended Consequences”. I do hold that against both Feingold and McCain, but I don’t see it as automatic disqualification.
Reading Feingold’s Wiki, I see some things I like. I’d have to study him a bit more, but I don’t see anything (other than McCain-Feingold) that casts him in a bad light. And I think his heart was in the right place, there, even if he failed to foresee the result. What I like most: his pledge to live in Wisconsin rather than DC, and his pledge to spend a rather substantial time talking to people in the state.
I pretty much meant Russ Feingold.
I don’t know. When I discuss actual issues with you and Sebastian and Moe there seems to be a lot of common ground, but I absolutely and completely fail to understand how you justify being on these people’s side–and you are. It’s like we see eye to eye on a lot of issues, but there’s some invisible algorithm in your head where you multiply every Democratic wrong x 100 and divide every Republican wrong by 100. Cynthia McKinney somehow outweighs Hastert, DeLay, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Frist. Howard Dean’s tendency to shoot his mouth off somehow outweighs this administration’s utter contempt for the Constitution. I know that decent, smart, informed people still support these guys, but I cannot for the life of me understand how. And I haven’t the foggiest clue how the Democrats would reach you. I really think it’s hopeless. Your minds are made up in some way, for some reason, to a degree that, while it’s conceivable we good get your vote, I have so little clue as to what would persuade you that hasn’t persuaded you now, that if I were a campaign strategist I would certainly write you off.
Katherine, put Russ Feingold up and see what happens. Or you could keep putting your feckless guy against our feckless guy, expecting us to choose yours.
Seems pretty straightforward to me, but I live inside my head.
Campaign strategy is one of those things that I detest about politics (besides nearly everything else), so it’s good that you’re not. Really, the D choices are as puzzling to me as the R choices seem to be to you. You seem to be interested in what makes us tick, though, and that’s rare in my experience. Maybe one day we’ll get this all sorted out and reach a new, less frustrating impasse. When rocks fart, at this rate.
this thread at Dkos says it for better than i could regarding Obama:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/30/224211/286
The important, and truly shocking, part is that Obama referred to a “straightjacket.”
🙂
There are a couple of things going on here.
On your first point, before I snipped, I was saying similar things and would have found that more or less an adequate extremely brief, but sufficiently accurate, descriptive of the situation through the admin of 41.
But I think the situation is considerably more complex by now, and the description has been come insufficient and inadequate as fairly accounting for the sort of structural changes and advantages the Republican Party leadership has slowly instituted since first achieving control of Congress in modern times, and then regaining the Presidency, and institutionalizing a wide variety of power advantages in Congress, with much of corporate America and the power of Big Money, with the K street lobbyists, and so on. This sort of thing, and this, for example.
And because of that, I have to say that from the point of view of any sort of Democrat, rational as well as irrational, the problem isn’t remotely simply regaining the Presidency, nor even both houses of Congress as well, nor dealing with the generations of Republican-appointed judges dominating the judiciary for at least a generation or two to come, but doing all of the above and fighting, if not rolling back, the pretty much Grover Nordquist’s entire strategy of the past generation of politics, and that dating back to at least the Nixon era, or, at the very least, the Reagan era (I have no objection to Ken Mehlman’s attempts to disavow the recent racist past and to-whatever-present-extent of the Republican Party; it will only succeed in gaining minority votes if it’s real, and if it’s real, fine and well and good and hallalujah).
I could be more coherent about this, and possibly more coherent, with more time and wordage perhaps, or perhaps not (perhaps just more time and better wordage), but I’m trying to edge back into commenting, so pray forgive.
Needless to say, that I find something not understandable could prove that it isn’t understandable OR it could prove that I have limited understanding. But I don’t think I’m alone on this one.
And bob, you’re making a big mistake. Lincoln was delightfully shrill sometimes. I only discovered this recently–the Cooper Union address and the remarks on Dredd Scott are the first examples that come to mind but there are many others. People talk about the Lincoln Douglas debates like some kind of triumph of civility & an exchange of ideas among worth adversaries–I haven’t read those, but in Lincoln’s speeches and letters, his contempt for Douglas oozes from between the lines. As I’ve said before, you can be harshly critical and still be classy about it.
See also Obama’s late, great “I’m opposed to dumb wars” speech. And, well, a lot of things by hilzoy.
“Looking at Bennett’s words, I agree, but why should I devote one iota of energy to defending a Bill Bennett?”
Fairness, honesty? In purely practical terms, it will gain you some credibility with some, albeit at the expense of ill will points from folks who hold a Bob McManus-type view, so I don’t know how the practical argument ultimately plays out.
“And if I can find some bungee cords to hook the gamblin’ Man to any other administration official, why is this a bad thing?”
Why are lies of omission bad, in general? Why is dishonesty for the sake of a cause arguably bad or not so bad as to not be unjustified?
Granting arguendo that there are times it’s morally acceptable, or perhaps we’re even morally compelled to lie in some circumstances (Oskar Schindler, say), but presumably few would argue against the notion that there must be sufficient justification for making a dishonest argument, or — and it’s not the same thing, but it’s perhaps on a related moral plane or spectrum — not speaking up someone to defend them from a baseless charge, even if they are thoroughly guilty of other offenses or evils, perhaps?
And, yeah, Bill Bennett has no standing with me to speak to ethics or morality or much of anything else, other than perhaps on Vegas restaurant tips, and I think he is, in general, slime, and should hold little or no place in public standing or discourse, but on this particular quote, while it was completely impolitic, highly inflamnatory, and therefore extremely foolish to utter, it was factually correct, though trapped by its shortness as a sound-bite into being, ah, incomplete. I can’t see taking it as evidence of Sekrit Genocidal Preferences or plans, I’m afraid. But I’m content to tar Bennett with being a moralizing gambler, and wrong on policy, as a rule, and having all sorts of sleazy compatriots, and so on.
Katherine, to slartibartfast: It’s like we see eye to eye on a lot of issues, but there’s some invisible algorithm in your head where you multiply every Democratic wrong x 100 and divide every Republican wrong by 100. Cynthia McKinney somehow outweighs Hastert, DeLay, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Frist. Howard Dean’s tendency to shoot his mouth off somehow outweighs this administration’s utter contempt for the Constitution.
Well said, Katherine. I wonder if your friend slarti will ever address your main point.
“I shudder to imagine the hay that could be made if the labor movement acknowledged this linkage.”
Any history of US labor that doesn’t either discuss at length Big Bill Heywood, or that doesn’t deal through its full length with the labor movement’s integral, if frequently mutating and struggling with multitudes of factions on both sides, inseparability from the history of Socialist and Communist movements in U.S. history would have to be so inaccurate as to be useless or downright damaging to understanding.
Of course, any useful history also has to fully and honest explain the relationships, good and bad, distinguishing the elements to be proud of from the elements to be ashamed of from the elements to merely shrug at or roll one’s eyes at, and taking note of the AFL-CIO’s anti-communism, and the dominance by the Fifties of anti-communist liberalism in the American left as a whole, and similar threads, as well as the Trotskyite and Stalinist and earlier radical left threads.
Slart–I think one of the uses of a site like this is anthropological–understanding what the people on the other side one can have some respect for are actually thinking. But to say what one really thinks can lead to some real hostility. And I think for the conservatives here who have gotten along the best with the liberals, there has been a real hesitancy to do that. I can see why, but I find it really frustrating. What drives me crazier than incivility and much crazier than a little profanity is a feeling that people are not really engaging with what I am saying. This, I think, is what leads some of the liberal posters to Demand Satisfaction in the form of annotated explanations of why you voted for Bush last November and would do so again and will probably vote GOP in 2006(glad to know you draw the line at Harris though): you listen to our arguments, you often don’t disagree, at least not directly–and yet in the end it doesn’t seem to matter very much to you.
More likely, you agree less than I think but don’t wish to say so, or there is something else you even care about even more that outweighs all of it. But I have not the foggiest clue what it is, and I’m not sure you guys have really done a thorough explanation of why. It couldn’t possibly be the existence of Michael Moore, Cynthia McKinney, or Howard Dean sticking his foot in his mouth every so often. So what is it? If you think my views are inexplicable it’s not for lack of me trying. I’ve explained in excruciating detail what I think is wrong with this adminsitration and this Congressional leadership. So has hilzoy, so has Edward. I wrote many long endorsements of Dean, and of Kerry back in the day. Hilzoy’s a Clarkie and I’m leaning Feingold and many of us are Obama groupies and I remain a giant Durbin fan. I came up with an entire theory of jurisprudence in response to Sebastian’s criticisms of liberal judges.
I have not seen anywhere close to that level of detail about why anyone supports any GOP Congressional leader or potential presidential candidate. I’ve seen a lot of vague claims that the Democrats are worse, which when we get into specifics often turn out to be 15 years out of date or to be about people who are relatively powerless or sins that are relatively trivial compared to the arguments we’re making. There’s probably a better, more thorough explanation than that. But honestly, where is it? Why do you support these guys? I’m genuinely curious. You wrote a pretty good explanation on election day IIRC but it was also very short, and a lot has happened since then.
My honest curiousity wouldn’t necessarily prevent me from jumping down your throat at parts of the answer, of course, but geez, we do that to y’all anyway. And I’m from a big family, so I guess it’s conceivable to me that people could jump down each other’s throats on a semi-regular basis and still like and respect each other.
(i’m not expecting it on this thread, obviously. More of a long term request.)
“Looking at Bennett’s words, I agree, but why should I devote one iota of energy to defending a Bill Bennett?”
Fairness, honesty?
Well, this is turning into a multi thread discussion and since the question that I thought we were working on in the post was whether the Dems should keep doing what they’ve been doing or adopt Republican tactics, I thought that Bill Bennett seemed like a nice lab experiment, given that he’s already done so well demonstrating the psychology of gambling. I know that for my part, I’m not going to cite his comments about abortion and black babies against him, which does take some energy which is kind of like the mental energy one expends deciding whether to tell someone their fly is open or the tag of their bra is sticking out of their dress.
But active defense? I dunno, this might have been just a pull on the slot machine to get himself a few more radio markets and he might get angry if I defend him, especially since I am such a heavy hitter on the internets.
and it’s not the same thing, but it’s perhaps on a related moral plane or spectrum — not speaking up someone to defend them from a baseless charge, even if they are thoroughly guilty of other offenses or evils, perhaps?
Perhaps, and I’m certainly willing to pay for that in full, with interest, right after the Dems control all three branches of government. Brave new world.
Of course, I jest. If anyone who posts here regularly gets barracked for saying something logically correct but in such a way as to have both sides of the aisle come down on you like a ton of bricks, I will defend you with my dying breath. Be reassured.
I’ll note that, having carolled Feingold last Christmas, he seems like a really decent guy up close and personal. Came to the door in sweatpants and a T-shirt, eating leftover Chinese (“I’d offer you something to eat but my wife’s out of town and I just ordered enough for me!”), was appreciative of our carols and was gracious when one fellow caroller went into totally fangirlish squee-out for like three minutes.
And his voting record, which is what’s really important, is pretty damn good too.
Katherine: I have a Theory, based on nothing but air and hunches. (Naturally, not being a conservative myself, my theories are automatically suspect.) However:
I think that (to vastly oversimplify) the Limbaughs of this world have managed to construct something fictional called Liberalism that is genuinely odious, and that this has permeated discourse to such an extent that it is now an unconscious given in a lot of people’s thinking. I mean: it’s in the air people breathe, by now. And this means several things. First, of course, that any Democratic politician has to overcome this immense credibility hurdle before even being heard.
Second, that things we say that could possibly be construed as indicating our hidden Liberalism (where the capital L now means the caricature) are often so construed. Especially what with the right-wing blogs and media that seem to specialize in taking tiny snippets of what people say, out of context, and holding them up as evidence of what they knew all along. And I really think they do think they “know” this, in a lot of cases, even though it’s false.
Thus: Are you less completely in support of some war than you might be? Evidence of appeasement. Do you ever criticize anything America does, like torture? You secretly hate America and are working to undermine it. Propose a new program, any new program? More big government, and evidence that you think that government, not people, should be responsible for their lives. Oppose a tax cut? You think all our money belongs to the government. Support gay marriage? You’re against traditional values. And so on, and so forth.
(I mean: remember when Teddy Kennedy gave a speech saying that we should make it clear that we did not plan to stay in Iraq indefinitely, and that we should consider various things, like announcing no permanent bases, but also withdrawing (I think it was) 12,000 troops to make that point, and the right-wing blogs called that suggestion ‘near treasonous’? Remember when Bush went on to do exactly that, without raising so much as a murmur of disapproval?)
It also means that Democrats are at a loss as to how to respond, and in my view have responded in exactly the wrong way. They think this is about issues, and so some of them consider trying to swing right. But in fact, according to me, it is one big attack on our character, and the only way around it is to show that it’s wrong about one’s character. Tacking right makes us look wimpy and insufficiently attached to anything like a principle — it looks that way because it is that way. Being very, very clear about what we believe in is, I think, the only answer.
This is one of the reasons why I disagree with Bob M.’s view that we should respond in kind to the Republicans. (The main reason, of course, being moral.) We need to distinguish ourselves from them by actually having character. (And we absolutely need to stop nominating people with all the personality of a limpet. I liked Al Gore — I thought he was really smart and thoughtful, and a much nicer guy than Bush to boot — but we need to nominate people whose self shines through.)
But it will be incredibly tough, I think.
1.0, apparently, but only obvious after the fact.
Not to pile on, Slart, but what do you see in the Frequentists? Their cramped way of thinking leaves so many important and interesting questions unanswered, even unaskable. What would it take to get you to go B? They may not support everything you believe in, but can’t you respect their reasonable and open-minded approach and see that they’re better for this country?
hilzoy, like your limpet comment, except that don’t limpets have character if not personality? They cling with their muscular foots to their chosen rock in despite of the buffeting sea – sounds like the kind of creature _I’d_ vote for.
“…the question that I thought we were working on in the post was whether the Dems should keep doing what they’ve been doing or adopt Republican tactics….”
I like to think those aren’t the only two items on the menu.
And, of course, as you know, even those two categories break down into a lot of subcategories, of which I’ll have a few of each, at least, thank you, and not others. (I’ll take notes from the Republicans on long-term setting up of foundations and think tanks and youth organizations, and other such tactics, sure; the sliming and lying and being deceitful, not so much, sorry. Not because I’m such a pure person, but aside from it’s being wrong, I think that it’s too easy for that stuff to come back to bite you in the ass, and the cost-benefit-risk-credibility ratios don’t convince me it’s a good bet, at least for Democrats who need to actually stand for, and therefore be, generally not very corrupt or dishonest or deceitful, to win elections.
I may be hopelessly naive, of course. One can observe, say, that LBJ got along quite successfully while being corrupt, dishonest, and deceitful, as well as mean, petty, and generally exhibiting no moral sense whatever. But, at the least, I think to make that strategy work, you certainly have to be very very very very good at it.
“They cling with their muscular foots to their chosen rock in despite of the buffeting sea – sounds like the kind of creature _I’d_ vote for.”
They tend to lack in the oratory department, though.
I’ll take notes from the Republicans on long-term setting up of foundations and think tanks and youth organizations
But how much of these things have as their foundation redirecting money from wealthy donors who are giving with an expectation of return as well as the setting up of people coming up from these organizations with sinecures awarded on the basis of loyalty rather than competence? (of course, right here, I start running into problems, I mean, could I vote for a party that fielded a candidate like Katherine Harris?)
It seems to me that a lot of this infrastructure grew out of less than honest foundations. Certainly, people like LBJ weren’t shy about using political patronage, but they generally left a space for people who were interested in performing competently. Of course, the third option is the pox on both your houses where one sighs a world weary sigh and suggests that nothing is new under the sun. This is a bit harder for me personally to pull off as I’m in my 40’s by dint of having the knees and back of a 70 year old and the mind of a 10 year old.
I have this great fear that the Japanese have got the system down and the US is merely following. The most recent LDP election concerned a manufactured hot-button issue. It also had the spectacle of the LDP running approved candidates against LDP incumbents who had rebelled against the Prime Minister, so that when the LDP lost, they also won.
“I’ve seen a lot of vague claims that the Democrats are worse, which when we get into specifics often turn out to be 15 years out of date or to be about people who are relatively powerless or sins that are relatively trivial compared to the arguments we’re making.”
This probably looks convincing to you because you have come of age politically when the Republican critiques of all sorts of liberal programs have finally been taken seriously. I came of age politically in a time when many liberals seemed to be arguing that Communism was simply something you had to live with (and many insinuated that it pretty much wasn’t worth fighting against). I was taught by a teacher who openly defended the Tiananmen Square massacre. I came of age in a time when it was still an open question whether or not the cycle of dependency on welfare would be fostered indefinitely. I came of age in a time when Democrats still argued that the huge housing projects of the inner cities were a brilliant idea. When obvious goods like NAFTA were fought against tooth and nail. I look at posts on TPM which say things like “of course we are ok with NAFTA but CAFTA is too much” and laugh because it is nice to see Democrats “of course” being for free trade in theory–that wasn’t a given in the 1980s. I grew up in a time where it appeared that the Courts were to be the ultimate law-givers in all important areas and the legislatures only left to fill in some details. The conservative critique of how those aspects of governmental liberalism worked was and is compelling and I’m not at all sure that the Democratic Party has learned from them. The errors of backlash against those ideas are also becoming evident. But I’m not yet willing to go back to the old Democratic leaders. Let people like you, Katherine, grow up and assume leadership of the Democratic Party with an understanding of how the market can be good, how handouts can foster unending dependency, how taxes should be spent prudently and how government should be about tempering excess rather than controlling everything, and then I will be voting Democratic. There is still too much of the 1970s and 1980s Democratic Party around. I’ll fight to make things better, but I’m not willing to start all over again by letting people who haven’t given up the disasterous ideas of the 1970s take power.
Show me the Democrat who cares enough about education to take on the teacher’s unions and I will be convinced that she understands my concerns enough to get my vote.
Unfortunately I’ll be waiting longer than you will for a Republican Congressman willing to take up Bush on torture.
Torture is a horrible evil commited on a few people–condemning tens of thousands of black children to awful schools so that they can’t learn while your party then deepens racial divides by crying racism when they don’t do well–that strikes me as corrupting the heart of America every bit as much as what you choose to write about. Setting up programs which incentivized the perpetuation of a permanent underclass and denying that was the effect of the ‘charity’ programs for decades isn’t particularly great either. Those are 15 years in the past because people (many of them Republicans) fought against them and won. 15 years isn’t that long ago. Most of the people in charge now were well on their way to power then.
Sebastian: condemning tens of thousands of black children to awful schools so that they can’t learn while your party then deepens racial divides by crying racism when they don’t do well–that strikes me as corrupting the heart of America every bit as much as what you choose to write about.
Show me what Republican politicians have done any time in the past 20 years to improve public schools in low-income districts. Because to me this sounds awfully like a right-winger complaining that left-wingers aren’t doing enough what his party isn’t doing at all.
Let people like you, Katherine, grow up and assume leadership of the Democratic Party with an understanding of how the market can be good, how handouts can foster unending dependency, how taxes should be spent prudently and how government should be about tempering excess rather than controlling everything, and then I will be voting Democratic.
Excuse me for a while as I wax nostalgic for the days when we only wasted a few billions a year on welfare under Democrats instead of about $150 billion a year losing a couple wars.
After watching these arguments in two centuries now, I tend to disbelieve them. I watched in the 90’s as many claimed to be libertarian (‘orthogonal’, and all that). However, almost all of them spent almost all of their rhetoric trashing liberals.
This century, I see many who claim to be independent, but believe any and all ludicrous lies about Democrats, while swallowing the most ridiculous GOP propaganda.
I see them watching what the current administration has done and accepting it, but expressing terror of the thought of a Kerry administration.
In the end (and the beginning, and the middle, as was and ever shall be, etc) these people are Republicans. They embrace what I call ‘deniable Republicanism’, where they can have their Republicanism, but not the blame.
I don’t think it is very fair to jump on Sebastian as there is not a lot of specifics there, so we would just be taking our frustrations on him. imho
“This probably looks convincing to you because you have come of age politically when the Republican critiques of all sorts of liberal programs have finally been taken seriously. I came of age politically in a time when many liberals seemed to be arguing….”
So if I present to you all the flaws and horrors of the Republicans of the Sixties, Fifties, and Forties, you’ll acknowledge those as even more relevant, due to their yet further precedence? I suspect not.
I’m really not clear how the argument that one may be, personally, most affected by the arguments going on when one was at formative ages, should be regarded as a convincing argument to anyone familiar, as you are, with the notion that history matters, and a whole bunch of prior decades are extremely relevant to our contemporary politics, not just the decades of one’s personal formative years.
I doubt that’s the argument you are making, but if it’s not, I’m not clear what the relevancy of when “you have come of age politically” is.
(I also don’t agree with a number of your appraisals and conclusions, and would argue that you assume and assert a vastly higher degree of support by Democrats for failed programs than existed or exists, and assume and assert a considerably distorted appraisal of the “failures” of many programs compared to actual benefits, but it would take a great deal of effort to argue the specifics, and even if I convinced you about Program A, B, and C, having virtues, I wouldn’t expect that to change your overall view; let’s just say that while there are a variety of axioms we can agree upon — government programs are not magical cure-alls, nor do they end up designed well, if they are, by magic; governments can indeed do damage with bad programs; and so on — there are also opinions we have, I think, that conflict (your default assumption appears to be that government programs, per se, are apt to do more damage than good, and I certainly don’t think that’s more true than an assumption that a government program will automatically do good and nothing but good).
To pick on one issue in pithy, but purely general, terms, we had a sh*tty, screwed-up, welfare system across these United States in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, and now in the Nineties and Oughts, we have a sh*tty, screwed-up, welfare system across these United States.
It’s quite possible this is clearer if one has had occasion to deal with the system as a “client,” rather than just from reading policy papers and statistics.
There are actually a considerable number of other options than a) a system which is set up to deal only with locking people into a long-term, immobile, situation that is dehumanizing, enabling of destructive behaviors, and inhibits to the point of downright almost preventing moving out of the system; and b) simply harassing people out of the system and then declaring “look at the tremendous success of our program! We got X zillion people off welfare! (And we don’t actually care if they went off and died, or improved their lives, or became crack dealers, or did get decent jobs, or what, so long as we can point to that single set of numbers, and ignore all others!; the conversation’s over, and things are great!)”
Really, there are plenty of better ways to go than just those two incredibly bad choices.
Slarti: 1.0, apparently, but only obvious after the fact.
I forgot to mention that that got an actual LOL out of me. Well played, sirrah!
Gary Farber: [Limpets] tend to lack in the oratory department, though.
But is that actually a negative?
LJ: I don’t think it is very fair to jump on Sebastian as there is not a lot of specifics there, so we would just be taking our frustrations on him. imho
Seconded.
To add on to a point made above: this is a rare chance to find out what people actually think. Please let’s not blow it in a quixotic quest to prove some point or other; there are plenty of other threads in which to do that.
To expand slightly on my remarks to Sebastian, let me pull up something I know: in the new improved, conservative Republican world of welfare in Colorado, a single adult male, no matter his degree of health or disability, is entitled to this form of non-dependence-inducing welfare aid: $0. You’re entitled to food stamp aid up to ~$110/month or so. Beyond that, you’re on your own, as regards any other aid; there’s not a single dime given for any other form of “welfare” or health aid.
It’s certainly true that that limits dependence upon the State. Very successful at dealing with that problem, one might argue.
Of course, that’s the end of the story for most pleased by “welfare reform.” Look at all those people we’re no longer pouring money out to and down a hole!
Wait, do any single males in Colorado (and various other similar states) possibly need help? Perhaps they might be able to get a leg up with the right sort of help? Is it reasonable to be utterly indifferent to the health or lack of it in single adult males? Who cares? We’ve successfully reformed welfare, and the numbers of recipients are down!
There’s no further conversation from the Right here. Is there? Am I missing it? Have Colorado Republicans proposed any solutions for helping those in need in the past decade? Nah. The problem has been solved. The conversation is over.
Colorado is hardly the only state such as this. But even in a State such as New York or California or Massachusetts, traditionally the most generous states with benefits, have you ever tried to find a place to live with a total income of, say, $180/month from your Most Generous Welfare Payment? Certainly that was the largest allowable payment to a single adult male in NYC a few years ago when I last was familiar with the situation there. Whoopee, quite an inducement to stay on welfare, eh?
Since I’m writing somewhat sloppily at the moment, I don’t consider e.g. Gary’s post — on preview, now posts — “piling on” since he’s actually introducing new data points and arguments into the debate. Since I can’t articulate the line, though, I’ll stop now.
liberal japonicus: I don’t think it is very fair to jump on Sebastian as there is not a lot of specifics there, so we would just be taking our frustrations on him.
Oh, I’d quite happily debate Sebastian (or Slarti) (or both) (or any other intelligent Republican) if they cared to come forward with positive, fact-based arguments why it was better to install Bush in power for another four years than vote for Kerry – or indeed any other Democratic candidate. But as they don’t or they won’t or they can’t or they could but they’re just too embarrassed to admit what Karl Rove made them believe in 2004, well…
“Please let’s not blow it in a quixotic quest to prove some point or other; there are plenty of other threads in which to do that.”
Okay, I’ll just ask a question: what are some current solutions or melioratives for the problems of people either growing up in the the world of the underclass, or who have fallen on hard times, that good Republican conservatives are advocating? What, at least, should they be? And I don’t mean platitudes and generalities such as “we’ll grow the economy, as that’s the best way to lift all boats,” or “tax-cuts will grow the economy and provide more jobs” or “we’re for enterprise zones which will provide more jobs.” What are the Ideologically Correct Conservative, but also effective, suggested specific solutions for the various problems of poverty? What might Congress pass in the next year, and why isn’t it on the table?
“And bob, you’re making a big mistake. Lincoln was delightfully shrill sometimes”
Oh, I don’t hate Lincoln. I was halfway joking, of course. Lincoln was a great man, as, well heck, Everett Dirksen was a great man. I do hope that it is understand that I practice what I preach, and my rhetoric is intentionally hyperbolic.
But Lincoln was a Republican. As opposed to a conservative There was a period when I had this topic a little tighter, but it has been a few years, so forbear.
1) The born-in-a-log-cabin, rags-to-riches story. At Lincoln’s time, this was seen as an example of exceptional character, but somehow has become transmuted into the meme that anyone who does not manage to rise above his origins shows a lack of character. In any case, the irrelevance of class origins is not a conservative theme…see Russell Kirk.
2.) The years as lawyer-for-hire working for the railroads on liability cases.
3.) The spending of huge sums of gov’t money to advance commercial and business interests, i.e., railroads and Alaska.
4.) The view of constitutional rights and principles as things to be discarded or ignored when expedient.
5.) The use of war to advance moral or idealistic principles, as opposed to what is directly to the nation’s interest or profit.
6.) Largely indifferent to religion, or considering religion a private matter of no interest to gov’t. Yes, we have a different Republican party now, a confused one, but the reconciliation of business interests and religious interests has often been a problem.
Etc. Yes, Democrats have and are “guilty” of these traits at times. Some of my understanding of political theory comes from a shallow study of 18th century English politics, and the conflicts between Whigs and Tories, especially as expressed by Samuel Johnson & friends. And if Republicans and Democrats have more in common with each other than they would have with Johnson or Burke, it is because we are all Whigs now.
But the gap between the conservatism of a Cella or a Tacitus and the whiggish Republicanism of Bush and Delay can in part be traced back to Lincoln.
Show me the Democrat who cares enough about education to take on the teacher’s unions and I will be convinced that she understands my concerns enough to get my vote.
Unfortunately I’ll be waiting longer than you will for a Republican Congressman willing to take up Bush on torture.
I must protest against this identification with attacking torture, and attacking teacher’s unions, as somehow equal concessions to “the other side”. When Republicans start taking on the looting of the treasury and corporate giveaways, then I’ll look for realism from Democrats about unions. They all have their funding sources.
I don’t want to defend everything any teacher’s union has ever done — though to my mind the Teamsters were far worse, back in the day — but this idea of teachers as anti-student never made sense to me. I lived in Boston in 1974 and I know who was “condemning [lots] of black children to awful schools” and it wasn’t the teachers and it wasn’t the Democrats.
That’s the thing that bothers me about all these right-wing bogeymen — high taxes! unions! the New Deal! Communists! — where is the sense of balance and perspective? None of these things happened in a vacuum. All were created by people to meet their needs at the time. (I’m speaking now of the Communism of Marx and Engels, not the Soviet thugocracy that co-opted the name and the PR but conveniently forgot about the state-withering-away part.)
Some of these things went too far and needed to be scaled back. But this scaling back has been going on for some quarter-century now. So now in 2005, you trot out teachers unions and we’re supposed to get out the wooden cross and the garlic? Sorry, but no.
Do teachers have no right to organize then? What about others? Are we to return to the days of Homestead and Ludlow?
You want to avoid returning to the liberal excesses of the 60s and 70s (and 30s). Fine. When we get back to that, I’ll be with you. (I wouldn’t have been at the time, but I have learned some things since then and your remarks about welfare in particular I have much more sympathy with now. But I hear Gary on this point too.) But right now it is the excess of the right that bother me much more, because they are in the present and near future, whereas the excesses of the left are in the past and (maybe) further future.
I would prefer that the pendulum stay more or less in the middle. But if it’s got to swing, it should swing both ways, not just right — right — right.
What specific Democratic economic & welfare positions today do you object to? Why is what the parties stood for when you came of age more relevant than what they stand for today?
I am married to an economics professor and hang out with a lot more econ professors. They believe in theusefulness of market and in capitalism. They also recognize that markets are better at some things than others. Now, Harvard and MIT are on the liberal side for econ departments, just as Chicago is on the conservatives. But liberals have a much easier time defending Democratic policies TODAY on economic grounds than conservatives have defending Republican policies TODAY on economic grounds. And this is after some backsliding by the Dems on free trade since the Clinton era–though it is also after just fiscal insanity by the Republicans. Mankiw is seen to have totally discredited himself.
They sound an awful lot like Gary when it comes to welfare reform and poverty.
Education is a horrible, intractable problem, but it is not one that there is any evidence at all can be solved simply by “taking on the teachers’ unions” in some unspecified way any more than it can be solved simply by throwing money at the problem. Private schools do better to a great extent because of selection effects–the schools can toss out the worst students, and the parents select those schools because they out a high priority on their children’s education. Teacher’s unions make things worse by protecting bad teachers but they make things better by making conditions better, and the profession more attractive, for good teachers. Among public schools which lack private schools’ selection advantages, I wonder if there is any correlation at all between the strength of the teachers’ union and the district’s success.
I think in hilzoy’s case, it’s a matter of: you believe the caricature, because you live in a very liberal area and have met a # of people who fulfill it and remember some Democratic politicians of past eras who fulfilled it. But parties change, and the people you most dislike were never actually in charge of the Democrats.
I’m noticeably LEFT of center as far as the Democratic party in Congress. Do you realize this? If I were in the Senate I think I’d be on that dreaded “top ten liberal senators” list, and certainly top fifteen
I think Anarch’s right btw, and am most interested in your response to the first paragraph of all that. If you want to phrase it in terms of GOP policies and positions that you support and the Democrats oppose, which outweigh everything else, that would be better still.
Btw, I suppose torture affects relatively few people, but the war on Iraq taken as a whole did not. And I think Bush’s domestic policies are less defensible than his foreign policies. I focus on that issue because I’m well-informed about it.
I’ve been meaning to blog on this relevant piece. However, others got to it. I’d be interested in Sebastian’s view.
While this is an excellent discussion and the very sort which brings me back here regularly, I must agree with Amos on the question of which party is interested in condemning poor black children to terrible schools. As an extra data point, see this anecdote from TPM, describing the views of a former Secretary of education who is in the news for other statements these days.
Key phrase: “At any rate, since Mr. Bennett had been Secretary of Education I asked him to support the bill in the crucial stage when we needed Republican allies. He told me he would not help, because he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers,charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education. Well, I thought, at least he’s candid about his true views.”
Sorry about that.
The post should be:
While this is an excellent discussion and the very sort which brings me back here regularly, I must agree with Amos on the question of which party is interested in condemning poor black children to terrible schools. As an extra data point, see this anecdote from TPM, describing the views of a former Secretary of education who is in the news for other statements these days.
Key phrase: “At any rate, since Mr. Bennett had been Secretary of Education I asked him to support the bill in the crucial stage when we needed Republican allies. He told me he would not help, because he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers,charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education. Well, I thought, at least he’s candid about his true views.”
A random reason I can’t imagine voting R: the former R. Sec of Ed opposing internet access in schools. Because he opposes public education.
As usual I’m late but shorter.
Woo, deja vu all over again. Clearly there are Jungian archetypes at work.
The key insight is hexapodia.
also, the torture issue is also wound tightly around the Constitution issue–a belief in unlimited executive power is something more than a bad policy choice to me; it goes to first principles.
Thanks, Sebastian, for the generational post. I think it does a good job of articulating exactly what I meant when talking about the myth of America.
Anyone who wishes to truly engage with the Right on any issue needs to look at Seb’s manifesto and understand, not that it is factually correct and air tight, but that it fully incorporates the foundational paradigms of a good portion of the right and the swing voters.
Read Kuhn. Reagan represents a paradigm shift, and no amount of arguing will shift us back from the Reagan Era to the Great Society. If the Dems ever wish to regain control, they have to find a new paradigm. Until they do, the swing votes will continue to land on the right, because it is not about facts, but about the underlying assumptions upon which those facts rely.
No, I’m saying those who were gaining power in the late 70s and 80s are still around in the Democratic Party and are in some case still influential. Not so the Republicans of the 1950s–most of whom are dead.
Jesurgislac, I have to chalk this up to you not having direct exposure to the US school systems–which is understandable because it is typically controlled on a local level. They are typically controlled by school boards. In the inner cities (which are the ones everyone is complaining about) they are almost always (I would say always but I’m sure there is one somewhere that isn’t) completely controlled by Democratic teacher’s union surrogates and have been for more than my lifetime. Conservatives have made a number of attempts to make changes–federally with a call for testable standards (strongly and successfully resisted for decades) and locally (in the late 1980s) with a short-lived attempt to wrest control at the school board level. They have been mostly unsuccessful and it would not be unfair to say that Democrats have been almost completely in control of the largest and worst schools in the US for generations.
Homestead and Ludlow have so little to do with the teacher’s unions that mentioning it is a bit crazy. The teacher’s unions indirectly (and sometimes directly) control management in lots of school districts.
Hilzoy: ” ….I’ll be supporting the rights of pedophiles to marry the 3-year-old of their choice. I’m a vegetarian.”
I was considering running for President in 2008 and, if elected, appointing a rotating cabinet of Obsidian Wings front pagers and posters, but it has come to my attention that Karl Rove has gathered evidence that I was engaged for four days ro a stalk of celery in the early 1970s. Plus, there was the radish incident.
Incidentally, Rilkefan’s link to the article regarding Bennett is just one example of why I will not vote anyone in this Republican Party. They have willfully recruited Jacobin revolutionaries who wish to destroy institutions, not inprove or reform them.
They have removed the idea of compromise from our Republic. A Republic without compromise will die.
Unfortunately, I agree with nous thanatos that there has been a paradigm shift. I also recall that Robespierre ended up receiving the same haircut he gave to his enemies.
I am, of course, cognizant of the fact that
The Republican Party is compared to Marie Antoinette AND the Jacobins. That’s a particularly worrisome type of big tent.
“No, I’m saying those who were gaining power in the late 70s and 80s are still around in the Democratic Party and are in some case still influential. Not so the Republicans of the 1950s–most of whom are dead.”
Better, thanks. Where should I go with the notion that therefore, logically, if one has a very strongly negative opinion of the current Republican leadership, one can fairly argue for the next forty years that the Republicans can’t be trusted back in power yet, given that a significant number of Republicans of the Oughts will still be around? Is that an equally convincing argument (if one assumes arguendo that the current Republicans are indeed at least as dire and destructive to the country as those horrible Great Society and Watergate-era Democrats were, as I have to deal with arguendo, as well)?
Going back to those terribly destructive days of the Great Society, while I’m more interested in discussing the success and failures of programs than of people, as the questions of what does and does not work remains utterly relevant, whereas the question about the people of the past are now only historically interesting, I take it that you regard, more or less, at least generally speaking, those Democrats who favored Great-Society-type antipoverty programs as having been bad policymakers because they made such, in your view, destructive choices of programs?
If so, what do you have to say about the Republican anti-poverty policies of the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies? (And of the leaders who put them forth.)
I’d be quite interested in reading some discussion from you of your opinion of that subject, if you might feel so kind?
We could start by discussing what those policies were. So: what were those presumably far, or at least significantly, superior ideas, Sebastian?
Special bonus question: who would you say, loosely speaking, are the top five (more, if you like) Democrats of all history that you most admire? Who are some models for the current Democratic Party, in your view? (Feel free to speak up here, too, Slart.)
Please excuse the typos in the foregoing post.
Apologizing for Gary’s typos takes real chutzpah there, John.
Sebastian, your description is not accurate as far as any of the cities that I know of. Take New York: there is no school board, the system is run by a chancellor appointed directly by the mayor, and Bloomberg and Giuliani are not exactly best buddies with the teacher’s unions. They are also Republicans. In Boston there is a school committee but it’s appointed by the mayor
–who is always a Democrat in Boston, but there are an awful lot of charter schools & other things that piss off teachers unions.
Those may not be typical, but they are the only big-city school systems I happen to know about at all.
The other school system I know a bit about is my hometown’s. Your description is far, far, far more accurate of my upper middle class, suburban school district than it is of New York City. But that was a pretty good school as public schools go, at least if you were in honors track it was. Teachers do VERY well on Long Island.
So your description is false as applied to every school district about which I have specific knowledge. Maybe I’m an outlier, but you’re going to have to prove it with a lot of specific examples. As it is you’ve just got a caricature.
Rural schools are often as bad as urban schools, there’s just less publicity about it; they’re smaller, it’s not as visible. Don’t get me started on what a friend of mine from rural Iowa has told me about her high school social studies class (they learned about “the three races.”) As for biology class…And it’s not just anecdote; if you look at overall statistics on the education system, the blue states do a lot better than the red states. I don’t think that’s a function of liberalism as much as it’s a function of wealthier, more educated parents, though. The single greatest predictor of students’ performance seems to be their parents’ wealth, education level, and involvement. A lot of “standing up to the teachers union” proposals involve punishing teachers for things beyond their control.
Some of the best public schools in America are in the suburbs of big cities. The teachers unions in those districts are often very powerful, if teachers’ salaries and benefits are any guide.
“Local control” over education, which you seem to object to, is as much a conversative rallying cry as a Democratic one. (I’m agnostic about it.) Which party is it whose members say they want to abolish the Department of Education? In any case it IS the reality in a lot of America, and it is not one that either party objects strenuously to, which means that public education is a great basis for voting in a local election, okay for a state election, and pretty lousy for a federal election.
“No, I’m saying those who were gaining power in the late 70s and 80s are still around in the Democratic Party and are in some case still influential.”
In which case surely you can point to the specific bad things they are responsible for TODAY, or you can point to the specific good Republican policies they are obstructing TODAY, which cause you to vote Republican.
And these don’t need to just exist; they need to outweigh the good things the Democrats would do and the bad things the Republicans are doing.
“Apologizing for Gary’s typos takes real chutzpah there, John.”
Nonsense, I’m thankful to anyone who will accept the responsibility and blame, and I’ll stoutly back up their claim as accurate, if need be. Besides, John need make no apologies after making his “[t]hat’s a particularly worrisome type of big tent” remark, as well as many others equally as amusing or funny, since they make up entirely for his full responsibility for typos alleged to be “mine” just because they’re in my comments.
If you feel that the problem is with Republican philosophy I’m quite certain that you will feel free to continue to hold them up as examples for as long as it suits you. Of course it is only 25 years since the 1980s and I’m not talking about the Great Society Democrats. I’m talking about the Democrats who steadfastly refused to fix the apparent problems with the policies of the Great Society Democrats–especially with respect to welfare and housing policy. I don’t blame people for trying things, I blame them for clinging to policies which are making things demonstrably worse for three or more decades in a row. I’m talking about the Democrats in the 1990s who still resisted welfare and housing reform after nearly four decades of seeing what it did. (And that puts us well into Democrats who are still in charge of the Democratic party.) If you don’t like Bush stubbornly sticking it out in Iraq for two years I can’t imagine why you think clinging to the programs which helped solidfy a permanent underclass for almost 50 years is laudable.
You’re still not coming up with any positive reasons for voting Republican, Sebastian.
What do you mean “stubbornly clinging to the programs”? You have still failed to give a single specific example, of the sort that Congress recently voted on or is about to vote on. (Being in bed with the teachers unions in a general sort of way is too vague for me to make any sense of. Most of ) Are you arguing that Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and Section 8 (which is not the same thing as public housing projects) created a permanent underclass? Or disability and veterans benefits? If you’re arguing about aid to families with dependent children/TANF/what we usually talk about when we mean “welfare”, what Democratic leaders are currently arguing in favor it? Not Clinton. Not Gore. Not Bradley. Not Kerry. Not Edwards, Dean, or Clark. Not Obama, Clinton or Feingold. Not Durbin, nor Reid, nor Pelosi, nor Sterny Hoyer.
So far you have not argued against specific policies the Democrats cling to. If I don’t misunderstand you, you’re arguing that some Democratic politicians–I’m not sure which ones specifically beyond being pretty sure Ted Kennedy is one, though he actually supported No Child Left Behind–who once supported some policies you think were wrong remain in office.
And you’re still not even close to arguing in support of specific Republican policies and powerful Republican politicians today. And are further still from addressing the argument that at least we ought to have divided government.
I mean “recent” in terms of five years. I suppose “current” would be more like it–issues that are now in dispute. Especially since so many of the welfare reform bill’s opponents voted against it not out of any illusions about then-existing system, but because of reasons like those in Gary’s post above–they feared the alternative was worse. Note that Moynihan voted no. Voting against the bill for those reasons would not imply any desire at all to resurrect the old system now that it’s gone.
And if your problem is with Democratic philosophy, you ought to be able to articulate what that philosophy is and what your problem with it is. To me this just confirms hilzoy’s 2:24 post.
Finally, I am not “assuming” Democratic leadership who support policy A, B and C nor I am I assuming Republican leadership who support policy X, Y, and Z. There is no need to assume. There are actual candidates, actual elected officials, actual records, and actual policy positions to go off. I’m arguing about the actual people who, today, are leading the two parties and the actual policies they are actually supporting and opposing. I argue that John Kerry is preferable to George W. Bush, Harry Reid is preferable to Bill Frist and Nancy Pelosi is preferable to Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay–you respond that this TA you had once was worse, that Ronald Reagan was preferable to Jimmy Carter, and that Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer voted against the welfare reform bill in 1996. To me this seems like a complete nonsequitur.
“Those may not be typical, but they are the only big-city school systems I happen to know about at all.”
New York has never been able to push through useful school reform though the last attempt was I believe in 1999, DC is a classic Democratic-controlled war zone, Detroit don’t even talk to me about, the inner-cities of California are a disaster area: Oakland, Fresno, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego. Each of those cities are larger than many states. New Orleans has been a horrible place for decades. Boston isn’t pretty, and most of the charters and such only existed very recently (note I say most, I understand there is one charter that has been around a while). The fact that after 50+ years of mismanagement we can occassionally get a good charter school going is most decidedly not encouraging, although I guess it could be worse and the number of useful reforms could be actually zero instead of practically zero.
As for current education issues–testing and vouchers are both resisted by Democrats at every stage and at every level of goverment. NCLB would never have passed in a Democratic-controlled Congress, and neither would any other reform. The only reason it gets Democratic votes now is because they don’t want other worse things (and because the testing issue was sufficiently watered down as to effectively punt the issue into the future.)
“And you’re still not even close to arguing in support of specific Republican policies and powerful Republican politicians today. And are further still from addressing the argument that at least we ought to have divided government.”
Sure. I wouldn’t mind a Democratic House of Representatives. I think some of the best things happen with a divided government because both sides get quickly punished when they overreach. I wouldn’t even mind an occasional Democratic senate if it weren’t for the fact that Democrats are completely off-kilter on judges. Unfortunately I don’t know a reliable way to get to divided government.
“If you don’t like Bush stubbornly sticking it out in Iraq for two years I can’t imagine why you think clinging to the programs which helped solidfy a permanent underclass for almost 50 years is laudable.”
Thanks for your response, Sebastian, but for the record, I’m reasonably sure I’ve never said the first; my position on the war, while always evolving, has more or less been luke-warm tentative support for it initially, despite the President, great disillusionment which commenced rapidly after the fall of Baghdad, an ongoing and consistent restatement of my view from before the war, that it won’t be possible to determine whether it was, in the end, a good or bad idea, until at least five years from the invasion, and possibly ten, have passed, and a considerable amount of subsequent increasing outrage and horror at the failures of execution of the war, leading to ever-greater doubt as to whether it will have been proven the right decision, but continued ambiguity and uncertainty on my part. I suspect you either have my views and record confused with someone else’s, or are merely presuming unwisely.
On the second, I’m quite sure I’ve never advocated “clinging to the programs which helped solidfy a permanent underclass.” I, like many Democrats who appear not in your storyline, and who seem to appear, if not invisible, at least very tiny and obscure, to the point of not being worth mentioning, in your eyes, was all for various varieties of “welfare reform” by the Eighties. Trust me, I have have a great deal more personal reason to have desired that, at least on passing later occasion, than you, I suspect.
What I, and most Democrats, didn’t go along with is the idea that most Republican welfare “reform” was mostly other than what it was largely enacted as: ways to throw people off the rolls, rather than to drastically change how the system engaged with people and what it tried to help them do, and ways to cut back on costs and spending, per se, without the least interest in what was effective versus ineffective, or wise versus unwise, spending. It was a punitive plan, and little more, and a fig leaf for simply getting at the political goal of furthering Republican policy of eliminating those awful benefits of government that lead people to the dreadful mistake of voting Democratic and for their own interests.
Genuine welare reform I remain passionately for, although I’m by no means expert, or even deeply knowledgeable, on the subject.
But it’s hard to “reform” welfare after you’ve simply mostly been eliminating it.
Quite probably you and I could knock together a welfare reform package we could reluctantly agree to, and find to be a considerable improvement on either the past or present. But, alas, I have no faith in the faintest in the good will and good faith of the Republican leadership in possibly doing so, and I gather you feel similarly about the present Democratic leadership, and that’s the problem.
I come from a small city in a mostly rural county in upstate NY, where I was born and raised and still live (the Boston thing in the 70s not having worked out). In any of the school districts around here, the teachers have never ever been in control of anything outside of their classrooms. I recall a teacher’s union election back in junior high school, but that was 40 years ago and the union lost.
The main problem with the local districts is the funding model. Their main source of income is the property tax, which (historically, in this area) has not risen as fast as inflation. So the rates keep creeping up, and we are faced with a perpetual choice between impoverishing education, and impoverishing people who are land-rich but cash-poor.
In practice we compromise and do both.
Teachers were never the problem here. Bashing the teachers unions was never the solution here, only a distraction, so I tend to look on it with a jaundiced eye.
But then, I’m from a semi-rural area and there are few of us so we don’t count. In a city like NY, to the extent that Sebastian’s picture was ever valid, it represents a problem recognized and dealt with. To the extent that it’s still a problem in other cities, it represents a local problem that politicians in other areas should not have to have a voice in, especially as part of some kind of litmus test to decide if Democrats are worthy of voting for yet.
“Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer voted against the welfare reform bill in 1996.”
This is most certainly not irrelevant. You know perfectly well that politicians say one thing when not in power and do other things when in power. That is the problem with modern Republicans too. I firmly believe that if Democrats regain power the failed school policies will continue. I believe this because EVEN NOW that the policies have been in place for half a century and been exposed as disasters, we still can’t get Democrats to more than occassionally talk about reforms. Is Pelosi for rigorous school testing? Please. Is Pelosi for school vouchers? I think not. Is Pelosi for any systemic reform? No. She is for throwing more money at the teacher’s unions. She is for the ‘public’ mirror image of corporate welfare. She doesn’t require better outcomes, just more money. We already spend as much money as almost any country in the world on primary and secondary education. This isn’t the 1970s where educators could claim they didn’t have enough money coming in.
“There are actual candidates, actual elected officials, actual records, and actual policy positions to go off.”
Sure. But I know for a fact you are aware of my thoughts on them. Head-in-the-sand Social Security and Medicare policy (even more so than the pathetic Republicans). A desire for governmental control of the medical community. ‘Fair Trade’ policies which are actually protectionist (though thank God we are finally at the point where you can’t be obviously against free trade). Stupidly attacking the pharmacuetical companies at every turn and exhibiting not even the slightest understanding about how medicinal research works. Dean’s stupid comments about stock options which were pitch perfect for a party that doesn’t understand how investing works. A philosophy on the courts which basically does away with the need for Constitutional amendments. (Not your philosophy on the courts, the philosophy of Democratic leaders and Congressmen). Kowtowing to the teacher’s union to the extent that even common-sense reforms like testing take decades to implement. An affirmative action policy which helps foster racism.
There are all sorts of specifics. I’ve been writing on this board for more than two years. Surely you have seen me talk about some of the above?
“The main problem with the local districts is the funding model.”
This is 100% untrue in California. The funding goes to the state and back to the districts on a per-pupil basis.
“I, like many Democrats who appear not in your storyline, and who seem to appear, if not invisible, at least very tiny and obscure, to the point of not being worth mentioning, in your eyes, was all for various varieties of “welfare reform” by the Eighties.”
Why did these things not get reformed in the 1980s when Democrats controlled both Houses? I suspect it is because the Democrat support for such reform is a lot smaller than you are suggesting.
“New York has never been able to push through useful school reform though the last attempt was I believe in 1999….”
I was waiting to see if you’d catch that Katherine’s assertion about NYC’s education system, while presently accurate, describes the system that’s only been in place, in fact, since 2002. But the Mayor has direct control of the Board of Ed, and appointing the Chancellor now, and full control and responsibility. What further reform do you think Mayor Bloomberg is ignoring because of his enthrallment by Democratic teacher unions (presumably the UFT and AFT, more than the NEA)?
Perhaps this might be helpful reading. Or not.
Did I mention that my mother spent most of her life employed by the NYC Board of Education, as a teacher? (Her last few years were as head oft he reading program at Erasamus High School in Brooklyn.) Oceanville-Brownsville, and UFT/Board of Ed politics were constant diners at our dinners in my childhood. This didn’t make me a fan of either organization, particularly; I’m strongly pro-union in the sense of supporting good and sound and sensible unions, and defending the rights of people to form meaningful and useful unions easily, but I’m hardly uncognizant of the flaws and problems of failing or corrupt unions, or their general tendency, like that of any other large organization with turf to defend, to fall into rigidity; it’s not as if I believe unions are always right, or always make the best decisions for their members, just to note.
As for current education issues–testing and vouchers are both resisted by Democrats at every stage and at every level of goverment.
For what many of us consider to be good and sufficient reasons. School is not an assembly line, and education is more than factoids and specific skill sets.
Public education is part of what made this country great. On something like gay marriage, conservatives say that we must respect the traditions of the past, because they support our way of life in ways that might not be obvious, even to them.
But when it comes to schooling, we have a system that has worked not perfectly, not always very well, but has helped make us the richest country in the world. So the conservative attitude is, let’s not try to fix it, let’s not move carefully, let’s just trash it and start over again. (The remarks of Bill Bennett have been linked above.) All of a sudden respect for the past is just lip service. What’s up with that?
If you don’t like Bush stubbornly sticking it out in Iraq for two years I can’t imagine why you think clinging to the programs which helped solidfy a permanent underclass for almost 50 years is laudable.
Let’s not forget that welfare was effective in dealing with the short-term problem that it was designed to address, and its problems only became evident over time. Iraq solved a problem that didn’t exist at all, and some of us saw it as a lunatic idea right from the get-go.
And today it is the Republican take from the poor, give to the rich policies that are solidifying the underclass.
“A desire for governmental control of the medical community.”
I think that’s fairly hard to defend, although one is informed of this “desire” non-stop by the right, of course. It’s on par with the assertion by some on the left that Republican voters or most politicans have a desire for fascism.
A desire to see people have affordable, and where they can’t afford it, and it’s not for extreme treatments, free, medical care doesn’t translate in the slightest into a desire for “governmental control of the medical community.” This is, I reluctantly say given my respect for you, one of the few near-loony things I’ve ever seen you say; it’s extremely right-wing boilerplate, and I’m sure you don’t see it as up there with claiming there’s a conspiracy to make America communist by flouridating water, but it’s not far distant, in reality.
You’re for education vouchers, right? And perhaps housing vouchers? If so, what’s wrong with giving everyone below a certain income level medical vouchers good for all medical care that isn’t highly experimental, say? Would that be “governmental control of the medical community”?
To the extent that it’s still a problem in other cities, it represents a local problem that politicians in other areas should not have to have a voice in, especially as part of some kind of litmus test to decide if Democrats are worthy of voting for yet.
One can underline this point by noting that the US is the only major OECD country (I’m pretty sure) that does not have a nationwide education policy. This link points to the ramification of that
Compared to other countries, the United States spends the same amount per-student as France, less than Sweden and Canada, and more then Japan and West Germany. However, there is much range within the states. Alaska, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, for example all spend more than Sweden and Germany. Mississippi spends about as much as the countries who spend the least: Japan, Australia, Spain, and Hungary.
And taking a look at the countries ranking and their educational achievement makes one realize that money is not all there is.
Finally, a meta-level comment, this pattern of a huge laundry list of sweeping complaints, followed hand to hand fighting over the details of individual assertions and invocations of previous posts might make for interesting blood sport, but it is not necessarily must read ObWi.
“If so, what’s wrong with giving everyone below a certain income level medical vouchers good for all medical care that isn’t highly experimental, say? Would that be “governmental control of the medical community”?”
I have absolutely no problem with the idea of medical vouchers for non-experimental medical care for poor people.
Unless you are arguing against local control, which no one really is, the bankruptcy of say, the corrupt and incompetent Democratic machine in D.C. local government is not a good argument for voting for the corrupt and incompetent G.O.P. machine running the national government. It is neither surprising nor instructive that liberals are politically powerful in liberal big cities. But I doubt very much that there’s a strong correlation between a place’s ideology, or the strength of its teachers’ unions, and the state of its schools. The strongest correlation with student performance is the parents’ education level and income and level of interest. Not to say that good teachers don’t matter, but some teachers have harder jobs than others. Teachers in poor schools have harder jobs that pay worse and receive worse benefits than teachers in rich schools. I don’t think cutting their funding on a district-wide level is going to help. I don’t think any education plan which merely encourages teachers to stay out of the wrong sort of schools and schools to stay away from the wrong sort of students is going to work. I think Kerry’s education plan was much better than Bush’s.
You will probably argue that it never could have passed, like you argue that NCLB could never have passed under a Democratic president. Well, I can’t disprove counterfactuals for which your only evidence is what happened 20 years ago and a general assumption that Democrats are bad, nor can I undo what the Democratic party did to lose you forever when I was in elementary school or junior high. If that’s what it takes to get your vote it can’t be done.
You say if they were people like me it would be different, but I could easily have voted against the welfare reform bill in 1996, and I would probably vote against vouchers now, and I would oppose purging Barbara Boxer and Ted Kennedy from the party. If those are enough evidence of some corruption that outweighs everything else, it applies to me too.
You’re not making any defenses of the Republicans’ policies, only attacks on the Democrats’, and most of those are 10-20 years out of date. You say the party still holds the same philosophy, but what’s your evidence for it? And if we’re getting into corrupt philosophies, then isn’t the torture question relevant in a way that goes beyond the number of people affected?
To me this is a pretty accurate description of the Bush administration, the GOP leadership of Congress, and the right-wing part of the media:
That’s by Orwell. I think it’s a pretty accurate description of the reaction of the GOP leadership, the right wing press, and the President’s staunchest supporters on the torture issue. To me this indicates a deeper philosophical problem than a naive belief, held for too long but eventually abandoned, in the power of government spending to solve all problems.
“I have absolutely no problem with the idea of medical vouchers for non-experimental medical care for poor people.”
Okay, we can go for that together, although I’d like to clarify whether you otherwise feel a need for any other mandated limitations or caps? That is, I said “medical vouchers good for all medical care that isn’t highly experimental,” and you rephrased to eliminate the “all,” so I’d like to clarify that part.
Moving on from that point of agreement, is a single-payer insurance plan “governmental control of the medical community”?
And are you sensibly backing down from the claim that Democrats “desire governmental control of the medical community,” then?
Regardless, while we can all argue pros and cons of various ways of doing healthcare, would anyone here be unwilling to join in a campaign to see that U.S. policy becomes giving all people under a certain income/asset level medical vouchers that cover, from birth to death (subject to sliding-scale changes as income/assets change, of course), all non-highly-experimental medical treatment as far superior to any system we’ve ever had? Is there any inherent reason this couldn’t be a bi-partisan cause (other than the basic problems in the system, of course)?
“That’s by Orwell.”
By remarkable coincidence, Jim Henley posted the same link today.
🙂
“Compared to other countries, the United States spends the same amount per-student as France, less than Sweden and Canada, and more then Japan and West Germany. However, there is much range within the states. Alaska, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York, for example all spend more than Sweden and Germany. Mississippi spends about as much as the countries who spend the least: Japan, Australia, Spain, and Hungary.”
So the lowest spending states spend as much as Japan and Australia while the highest spending states spend as much as anyone? Is this an argument for or against the idea that we need to spend a lot more money on education rather than trying to get more effective programs for the vast amounts we already spend?
“Moving on from that point of agreement, is a single-payer insurance plan “governmental control of the medical community”?
A single-payer insurance plan is going to attempt to control prices. I’m not for that and yes it would tend toward governmental control of the medical community.
BTW unless I’m totally misunderstanding where you are coming from, medical voucher isn’t the same as insurance at all. ‘Voucher’ suggests a fixed amount.
yeah Gary I was remiss, ht to Jim Henley on that.
Is this an argument for or against the idea that we need to spend a lot more money on education rather than trying to get more effective programs for the vast amounts we already spend?
No, it is an datapoint suggesting that the whole question of good education policy in the US is not something that can be thrown up as a litmus test for the policies of one party. And while I applaud when people who are unmarried and childless (as I believe you are) take an interest in education, your usage of education and NCLB seems less motivated by a true concern for the subject, especially when it doesn’t seem to be included in your original comment on your problems with the Democratic party, except as a deeply obnoxious throwaway line about how torture only impacts a few people, but education is worse, and people who complain about it (presumably Katherine is the main target) is hypocritical for writing about one and not the other.
Of course, if there is another way of reading the following,
Torture is a horrible evil commited on a few people–condemning tens of thousands of black children to awful schools so that they can’t learn while your party then deepens racial divides by crying racism when they don’t do well–that strikes me as corrupting the heart of America every bit as much as what you choose to write about.
I am prepared to be corrected.
I appreciate that you tried to calm things down by claiming that if Katherine were a candidate, you’d be more willing to support the Dems, so I’m hoping that, rather than what you wrote originally, represents your true feelings, but if you don’t like being ganged up on by angry liberals, then you should really take more care in tossing stuff like that out.
Katherine, I don’t understand why you think it is wrong to talk about what Democrats do when they are actually in power. The fact that they aren’t actually in power right this second doesn’t mean that everything I’ve ever seen them do suddenly becomes irrelevant. And they are in power in some places, and they are in fact doing the types of things that worry me when they are in power. See the California legislature.
Democrats had nearly uninterrupted control of the nation’s legislature for decades–and well after it was obvious that welfare and housing development as actually practiced had horrific consequences. If they were interested in reform, why the heck didn’t they do anything then? Even in the 1990s welfare reform in the took place DESPITE congressional Democrats not because of them. And the mid-1990s Democrats aren’t all that different from the 2005 Democrats. Hell, why didn’t the Democrats enact welfare reform in 1992 or 1993 if they were so changed? I’m not going back to the 1950s to see crazy Democrat ideas about school, and trade, and medicine. I’m going back to THIS generation of Democrat leaders.
For the most part Democrats have been in control of public schools for at least 50 years. In the 70s they complained they couldn’t get enough money, but now we spend as much as anyone. School strategies are testable every 12 years. If the non-accountable teachers strategy was going to work we would have seen it work by now. Democrats in control of the schools have tried everything except testing. And there is very little evidence that they want testing now. If you are willing to judge Republicans on 6 years, I can’t understand the blithe lack of judgment on 50+ years of established and ongoing failure.
“‘Voucher’ suggests a fixed amount.”
Which is why I was entirely specific in excluding that possibility by specifying ” “medical vouchers good for all medical care that isn’t highly experimental.” I assume “all” is not an unclear term.
Mind, a fixed amount above zero is better than the present fixed amount of zero, but I’d prefer to leave to doctors the decisions as to what treatments patients should be given, rather than either leave the decision to politicians, or to simply say “well, you could live with the following treatment that will cost X under any standard insurance plan, but it’s over the $4000 a year we can afford for you, so sorry, you have to die.” Or be crippled, or paralyzed, or blinded, or have your heart damaged, or any of the infinite number of possibilities our bodies are subject to if we consider health care purely capitalistically, just as we might, perhaps, advocate that our families should be treated on a similar basis (relationships are all bought and sold on the market: isn’t the market the only valid way to measure value? No? Yes?)
I do establish limits, mind, by excluding non-highly-experimental treatment, and I’m certainly not willing to hold out for a never-to-come perfect/most-generous system that isn’t either affordable or politically practical, while waiting with our present system of offering so many millions of people little or no alternative beyond charity and emergency rooms, or bankruptcy. As I said, any amount is better than no amount.
Just out of curiosity, if you feel the best methodology would be to establish a dollar limitation per person for health-care-for-the-poor, how would you structure that? Everyone gets the same figure? A point system? Some other method? If everyone gets the same, what sort of cap do you think reasonable?
I never said it was hypocritical. I certainly did not mean to imply that it was hypocritical. People talk about the things that are important to them at the time. I think katherine’s focus on stopping torture is completely laudable and I do in fact laud it.
Your insinuation that I’m not really concerned about education is completely wrong. Education is one of things that concerns me most. I just find the subject horribly depressing becuase I know that it won’t change so long as the teacher’s unions control the education process. My mother was a teacher and a school board member and I spent some high school and early college years tutoring the children of immigrants in San Jose to read in English. I later did incidental work in the “Friends of Farm Drive” program in San Jose which was also dedicated to focusing on primary education. If I could change only one thing in the United States, I would try to have a more accountably successful public school system. I’m not unconcerned–I just don’t believe change is on the way enough to bother talking about it much.
“…and well after it was obvious that welfare and housing development as actually practiced had horrific consequences.”
One thing that bothers me, Sebastian, and I’d have gotten to this sooner if you’d responded to a couple of the questions I’ve asked you earlier today that you’ve passed by (as is your right, of course), is that while I’ve briefly discussed and acknowledged such points as that unions are flawed organizations, with tendencies towards rigidity, and occasional declines — the temptations are always there, just as they are for malfeasance in any organization — into corruption, and I’ve acknowledged such points as that the post-Great Society welfare system was wretched, and full of incentives to be trapped into a long-term immobile dependency, and such point as that government control of them medical community would be, loosely speaking, bad, I’ve not noticed you acknowledging any such possible points as that despite the flaws of unions, they’re incredibly necessary in strong cases, and incredibly useful in weak cases, to defend the rights of ordinary little people against the iniquities of powerful employers, or the point that for all the flaws of the “welfare” programs of the New Deal, they more or less saved the country from revolution until the economic engine of WWII took over, or the point that for all the flaws of the “welfare” programs of the Great Society, they lifted millions of people out of the sort of terminal poverty, starvation, and disease, endemic in America when Robert Kennedy publically investigated it, and so on and so forth.
In other words, sure, you have some valid points hither, thither, and yon, within limits, and I think most sensible Democrats can or do agree with you to varying degrees on many. But, well, we could be specific by getting back to my query to you about the superior virtues of Republican welfare policies of the Thirties, Forties, Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, and today. I assume that since you’re so deeply concerned about the problematic aspects of Democratic policies, that you must be prepared to support the implicit corallary that Republican policies were and are superior. So, please, if you could be so kind as to discuss them, perhaps?
The sentence wasn’t clear to me, and I’m not sure I get it even now. A $50,000 voucher which can be spent for all medical care that isn’t highly experimental is a limitation on which types of things the $50,000 voucher can be spent on. A $5,000 voucher for all schools that meet the minimum requirements is a limitation on which schools you can go to. Vouchers involve monetary amounts, they aren’t blank checks. I don’t understand why you call it a ‘voucher’ if there isn’t an amount attached. That isn’t a voucher.
And they wouldn’t be about legislatures deciding where to spend the money. I’m quite certain doctors would be involved in it. I’m also quite certain we would see massive fraud similar to the current Medicare fraud issue if we weren’t really careful about how it was administered.
I also don’t see your point about emergency rooms. People go to emergency rooms now. A voucher system would be better for routine things. Routine things wouldn’t end up going through the emergency room. Certain extraordinary things probably still would. So what? I don’t expect the voucher solution to solve all possible medical problems. I am certain socialized medicine can’t provide the current rate of medical advances. There are balances to be had all over the place.
I haven’t done the research to figure out what sort of cap would be reasonable. But I would suggest that the middle class ought to be buying their own insurance if we are to avoid the kind of government takeover (and public-school like ‘success’) of medicine.
As others have said, one can be in favor of significant change without feeling that the particular offered change is a good one. I used to be in favor of vouchers, and I still would be given tight scrutiny, but the experience of fraud among charter schools makes me deeply skeptical, and there’s nobody on the Republican side in power talking oversight that takes that kind of thing into mind. I believe very strongly in the merits of testing to well-constructed tests, but I think NLCB is a terrible piece of legislation and believe to be constructed with the same spirit shown in Bennett’s remarks quoted above – to make it impossible for public schools to continue. I have great respect for quality private education and for the merits of home schooling, but I don’t see them as a replacement for the public system.
I don’t think a Democratic president and congress would have delivered that ghastly Medicare bill, nor a lot of other handouts to big business. Instead, I think they would have produced things with a fair amount of waste and irrelevancy but that also delivered more for less cost, since this is the legacy of the Clinton administration, and would have done so with overall fiscal soundness, ditto.
But even doing nothing strikes me as an improvement over what we’ve actually gotten on basically every front this administration.
Gary, are you conflating teacher’s unions with manufacturing unions? Because I’m not willing to conceed that they are even remotely similar cases. Teacher’s unions have all the flaws of a manufacturing union and very few of the counter-balancing good points (safety for example).
As for: “or the point that for all the flaws of the “welfare” programs of the New Deal, they more or less saved the country from revolution until the economic engine of WWII took over”, I’m not certain that is true, but even if it is it does nothing to explain why Democrats were unable to reform it in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and why they were so resistant to reform in the 1990s. Welfare was supposed to be a temporary stopgap measure. That is how it functioned in the 1930s. It was obviously not functioning that way in the 1960s and beyond. An unwillingness to try to fix problems which were evident for at least 30 years–including from modern Democrats in the 1990s is not good. Democrats had at least 30 years where they could have avoided the more drastic changes which later took place. They didn’t care enough to do so when they actually held power–as recently as 1993. Since many of those same people are important in the Democratic party now, I don’t see why I should think they would suddenly want change if they gained power now.
I don’t believe I’m advocating a return to the 1930s. But then again, despite recent rhetorical flourishes to the contrary from Joshua Marshall, neither is the modern Republican party.
“I don’t think a Democratic president and congress would have delivered that ghastly Medicare bill, nor a lot of other handouts to big business. Instead, I think they would have produced things with a fair amount of waste and irrelevancy but that also delivered more for less cost, since this is the legacy of the Clinton administration, and would have done so with overall fiscal soundness, ditto.”
I am quite certain you are wrong about Medicare. The main Congressional Democrat complaint when debate was actually occurring was that the Medicare fix was too small. Clinton administration ‘soundness’ was founded on the dot-com bubble and slashing the military (the large majority of his vaunted government shrinkage was merely laying off people in the military). I’m not impressed. I’m not impressed with Bush’s spending free-for-all either, mind you.
“I don’t understand why you call it a ‘voucher’ if there isn’t an amount attached. That isn’t a voucher.”
I was trying to duck past language issues to try to a) clarify my understanding of your preferences; and b) see what points we might be able to agree upon. I don’t see the defining element of a “voucher” being “fixed amount” — if a voucher is refilled every year, is it no longer a voucher? How about every six months? — if the amount changes, does that, too, make it no longer a “voucher,” and so on — but if you do, I’m perfectly willing to use another term.
“I’m also quite certain we would see massive fraud similar to the current Medicare fraud issue if we weren’t really careful about how it was administered.”
That’s always a concern. It’s not a sufficient reason, of course, to let people suffer and die simply because they’re poor. (I also suspect that society gets a lot of payback from investing in health care for the poor insofar as we wind up with vastly more productive, healthier, citizens able to contribute their tax dollars than we had before, and fewer people simply being negative economic contributors, but I don’t know any actual specific economics of this, and am unsure whether I want to give the economic issue greater weight than the moral issue when discussing health care, although I do agree that the economic issue obviously cannot be excluded.)
“I also don’t see your point about emergency rooms. People go to emergency rooms now. A voucher system would be better for routine things.”
I’m not sure how clear you are on the limitations of emergency rooms. They’re pretty much a near-arbitrary roll of the dice, depending upon which one you go to, and when, and generally in all but emergency cases requiring emergency care, you are apt to simply be turned away, or, at the least, wind up waiting 18 hours or more.
Also, if you do actually get seen, you tend to wind up with bills ranging from a mere few hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is actually non-trivial for some poor people, it turns out.
Vouchers, or refillable debit cards, or blank checks, or whatever, for the government, on the other hand, would, in my mind, implicitly establish reasonably sure access to reasonably prompt treatment for any non-trivial medical problem, including preventative care, but also including any and all non “routine” surgeries, although I’m probably unclear what precisely you mean by “routine.”
“Routine things wouldn’t end up going through the emergency room. Certain extraordinary things probably still would. So what?”
Well, that would be a life-changing, um, change for tens of millions of people, Sebastian. That’s a pretty big answer to the “so what” question, in my book. It would mean tens of millions of people getting actual treatment, rather than making it almost impossible to get. This seems vaguely important to me.
“I don’t expect the voucher solution to solve all possible medical problems.”
And, strangely, neither do I. I merely expect it to vastly improve the lives of tens of millions of Americans who this very moment have no health insurance. Pretty trivial, perhaps, but possibly not.
“There are balances to be had all over the place.”
Quite so.
Yes, but from what I can tell of you ‘balance’ it pretty much turns into a takeover of the medical system. The next step in your proposed system is for the government to mandate prices on the procedures. Do you expect that not to happen? If not, why not? Then we see the Medicare problem of doctors refusing to treat under Medicare because it doesn’t pay their expenses. Then what? You either get a government take-over, or you have gained a huge drain on resources. Your system isn’t a trade off at all.
I think you misunderstand. It would be life-changing for millions to be able to use routine care. Extraordinary care might still end up in emergency rooms. That makes it the same as now for them, not worse for them. But it makes it better for lots of other people, not the same or worse. It also doesn’t lead to the dramatic decline of medical advancement–a rather important thing in my book.
“Democrats have been in control of the public schools for 50 years” is just silly. They are in control of it when they win local and to a lesser extent state elections, and when they lose those elections they aren’t. Is it Democrats trying to require high school teachers to teach intelligent design or teaching falsehoods to students in “abstinence only” classes? Is it bleeding heart liberals who decided to make school funding depend so heavily on property values in the area?
And as far as what Democrats would do if they were in power, “in power” is a much bigger difference in executive elections than legislative elections. A legislator proposes bills, votes for or against proposed bills, tries to convince other legislators to do the same, votes for against the confirmation of appointments, for and against wars, holds hearings, etc. etc. whether his party is in the majority or in the minority. There are more opportunities for corruption if you’re in the majority but that seems to be universal–and if being in the majority breeds corruption, then the length of time one has power and the lack of limits on one’s power also breed corruption. And of course, even if power always corrupts, it corrupts some people more than others. What took the Democrats fifty years of House control to accomplish, DeLay & pals managed to surpass in ten years.
If you think the best determination of what Democrats will do if they take control of Congress in 2006 is what they did from 1970-1992, if you think that it outweighs the bills and investigations they support and oppose today, there is nothing at all the Democrats in Congress can do to convince you to vote for them.
There also seems to be very little the Republicans in Congress can do to convince you to vote against them, because again, you are not arguing in favor of anything they’ve done or are doing, just against the Democrats.
When it comes to a Presidential election, you are dealing with individuals, and it makes much more sense to deal with their individual characteristics and records and positions than with those of the last President from the same political party, except to the extent that the same people who served in the last administration will serve in this one.
I’m also not sure why the executive and legislative branches are considered completely irrelevant to each other. Bill Clinton was a popular Democratic president for eight years and still has a great deal of power within the party–much more than Jim Wright or George Mitchell or Tom Foley or Dick Gephardt whichever Congressional bogeyman you’re invoking, because you won’t give any names.
Also, I note that a lot of the Democrats’ sins in your mind are omissions: failure to fix welfare, or housing, or what have you.
It’s hard to pass bills, even in power. Inertia is powerful. Lack of success isn’t necessarily proof of lack of effort. And in general, I think the problems that politicians fail to solve, the things they don’t do tells you less about them then the things they do.
And I repeat, I don’t need to get into the torture issue. As far as I’m concerned a vote against the 1996 welfare reform bill is a lot more defensible than a vote for Bush’s Medicare drug benefit, bankruptcy bill, estate tax repeal, energy bill….and, of course, the bills I name were supported by just about every Republican in Congress and signed by the President, whereas the 1996 bill had slightly more Democratic votes for or against in the Senate (I didn’t find the House roll call) and was signed by a Democratic president.
LJ: And taking a look at the countries ranking and their educational achievement makes one realize that money is not all there is.
And comparing New York and Mississippi makes one realize it ain’t just chopped liver either. (As a lifelong NYer I may be prejudiced on relative school quality.) As Katherine says, around here the best schools are in the rich suburbs, because they attract the best teachers, because they pay a good wage. (Not to say they can’t get better, or more cost-effective, or both.)
Finally, a meta-level comment, this pattern of a huge laundry list of sweeping complaints, followed hand to hand fighting over the details of individual assertions and invocations of previous posts might make for interesting blood sport, but it is not necessarily must read ObWi.
I did have qualms about this. I mean, Katherine asked a serious question and Sebastian gave a serious answer, the product of a lot of thought, and we jump all over him for this and that detail. I actually have a lot of respect for Sebastian and Slarti and Charles, who keep coming here exposing themselves and their ideas despite the push-back they get.
(Then I reflect that what they get here is not nearly as bad as the abuse and ad hominems I get over at Redstate, and I click the Post button anyway.)
But it works both ways. I think they turn out better work now than they did a couple of years ago when I first became aware of them. And I credit the “blood-sport” aspect of ObWi for it, at least in part. Maybe I’m all wet — wouldn’t be the first time — but ObWi is not just for the readers.
Sebastian: some comments, offered not in the spirit of piling on, but of ‘here’s how it struck me at the time; a possibly useful data point’.
Communism: I have heard people talk about Democrats believing in ‘moral equivalence’, but I have not met any of these democrats, except for a few undergraduates (and I don’t hold undergraduates against either party. Lucky, since while I don’t normally hold with trying to tie people in knots intellectually, on occasion conservative students have tried to show me the error of my ways (note: I don’t tell them my ways unless they ask, and we go over, in detail, the fact that they want to know, and I am not trying to indoctrinate them), and those who stick to their guns end up unable to justify taxation for the sake of national defense. I don’t hold that against conservatism.) Everyone else, though, was quite clear about the awfulness of the USSR.
I did, and do, think two things that might be described as ‘not thinking it was worth fighting against Communism’. First, it was not worth going to war with the USSR, not because it was not very bad, but because the consequences seemed likely to be even worse — i.e., thermonuclear war and the destruction of the planet. Second, it was not worth supporting the participants in Latin American civil wars. The reason for this was that my problem with Communism was that it was brutal to its people, but alas so were the people Reagan was supporting, and I couldn’t see why it was worth supporting one bunch of thugs against another. I still don’t. — It was precisely this ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’ thinking that had Reagan supporting Saddam Hussein; I also opposed that, on the same grounds.
To my mind, this was about opposing two specific things, not about opposing fighting Communism, or any other sort of tyranny, more generally.
Housing policy: This I actually know a fair amount about, since my sister worked in managing and developing low-income housing for quite a while during the 80s and 90s, and through her I knew and hung out with housing policy types. I don’t know what you’re referring to as the disastrous policies that Democrats clung to. If it’s the huge housing projects, those were mostly built before the inauguration of the Section 8 program in 1974, and by the time my sister got into low-income housing, were uniformly viewed as a complete disaster. No one, but no one, had a good word to say about them. The only thing that delayed their all being dynamited at once was the question where all the people would go, and the costs to strapped municipal governments of trying to come up with answers to that question. But nothing anyone I ever heard of was doing took these as anything other than a horrible cautionary tale.
By that time, more or less everyone I encountered accepted the following ideas, and all disagreements were about which variant of them to go for. (1) The government needed to be involved somehow, since it was not economically feasible to create unsubsidized housing at prices affordable by the poor. (2) This involvement should not consist of government owning or managing housing, but rather some form of subsidy. (3) Subsidies should go only to families (section 8 vouchers) or (some people thought, though never as a replacement for family vouchers) to the developers of mixed-income developments, some of whose units would be set aside for low-income families while others were sold/rented at market rates. Concentrations of poverty were widely viewed as disastrous. (4) It would be best for low-income people to own, rather than renting, their homes, but this was hard to achieve. (5) Any program should work within the market.
The 80s were a period of real experimentation by local people working through Community Development Corporations and similar groups. They were not a particularly good period for federal policy. But this was largely because HUD, under Reagan, was a complete nightmare (I forget how many of its senior administrators were later indicted, but it was a bunch.) Everyone who could leave did, and so there was a lot more energy on the local level (which is where all the Dems were anyways, since of course they were not going to get jobs under Reagan.)
The 90s saw a lot of the lessons of the 80s taken up by the federal government. Housing policy was basically completely revamped under Clinton. So I’m not sure I see the ‘clinging to the same old failed policies’ story here.
Welfare: This is also something I know a little about, since I audited some courses on welfare policy while in grad school (and, of course, helped a bunch of people get on welfare while working at the battered women’s shelter.) First off, I think it’s wrong to say that the results of welfare were disastrous. They were quite good for most people, and disastrous for a few. Specifically: the majority (and it was a sizable majority) of people who got AFDC stayed on it for a relatively short time — a year or two. For them, it worked as intended: it got them through a rough patch. The battered women I knew were like this: they had left everything and had to start their lives over from scratch, and for the ones with kids, AFDC was absolutely essential to them. It was the difference between being able to leave a husband who regularly hospitalizes you and not being able to leave him, for women without independent means. But they had no intention of staying on it, and (as far as I know) most did not.
There was, however, a minority who stayed on welfare for a lot longer. Everyone knew that this was a bad, bad thing; the question was what to do about it. And the sticking point was the kids. It’s one thing to say that (non-disabled) adults should only get welfare for a limited period of time and then sink or swim; it’s another altogether to say that kids should pay the price for their parents’ mistakes or bad luck.
There seemed to be three main options: (a) continue as before, supporting parents and kids; (b) time-limit welfare, so that people can get it for a certain amount of time, and then they and their children are cut off; (c) separate the parents and kids. (Newt Gingrich proposed putting them all in orphanages. This would have been a horrible idea, but I remember thinking: at least he sees the problem.) (a) had obvious problems, but so did (b): specifically, the problem of kids being left with nothing at all because of their parents’ bad luck or bad choices. There was, I thought, no way around this choice, unless we really were prepared to go the horrible orphanage route.
Now: in order to make (b) really work, it seemed to me, one needed to put certain things in place. Subsidized child care, for starters: it’s very, very hard to make a go of working if you have to spend most of your paycheck on child care. Better public transportation would help people in the inner cities, whence jobs had fled. In the absence of these things, people would be a lot less likely to be able to keep their jobs.
But the Republicans, while clearly interested in (b) above, didn’t show any willingness to enact any of these measures. It really seemed to be: toss people off the roles, and if they can’t manage to keep a job that they have to spend two hours each way commuting to by bus, while juggling some bizarre jury-rigged system of people watching their kids, which could fall apart at any moment, then too bad.
For that reason, while I would in a heartbeat have supported welfare reform that involved childcare vouchers, I didn’t support welfare reform at the time. I still think that we have not so much solved the problems AFDC created for long-term welfare recipients as knocked them off our collective radar screens.
But it’s not entirely fair, I think, to say that we thought the existing programs were fine. We really didn’t. We favored reform that would cost more money but (we thought) had a better chance of actually breaking the cycle of poverty and preventing the costs of welfare reform from being taken out not only on parents but also on their kids. We were very worried that families would end up homeless. (Some of us still are.) We also thought that at least some of the problems of welfare could be ameliorated by efforts to enable people to move out of places where poverty was concentrated (back to housing policy again.) But really no one thought that the existing programs were just dandy, nor were we opposed to changing them. (Remember: Clinton ran and won on a pledge to end welfare as we know it.)
As I said: not trying to pile on; just to provide a different perspective. Thanks for yours.
“Everyone else, though, was quite clear about the awfulness of the USSR.”
I’ll speak up this much for Sebastian on this point: I’ve had plenty of friends over the years — smart, educated, people on the left — who were, to varying degrees, quite muddy about many aspects of the awfulness of the Soviet Union, or in outright denial about some or even many aspects.
Some would plead guilty to Soviet domestic repression, but felt that in international policy, both sides were more or less morally equivalent; some felt that the U.S. clearly came up shorter, since the U.S. supported endless fascist genocidal right-wing dictators, whereas the Soviet Union, flawed and self-interested as it might be, was still supporting the liberation of colonial people from the long exploitation of capitalist imperialism.
Others would plead to Stalin’s crimes, but regarded Lenin as largely either innocent or excusable, and felt that by the Kruschev era, things were basically pretty decent in the Soviet sphere, and even clearly better than in ours in certain area, such as in employment, health care, economic security, and such (you can still hear plenty of the same points about Cuba today).
I recall extremely well how after Moscow On The Hudson (1984) came out on videotape, and I was watching it with my extremely bright, very well-read, employed-in-the-publishing-industry roommate and friend became furious with what a lying piece of right-wing American propaganda the film was, since it was crammed with nothing but lies about how unhappy Soviet citizens were, when in fact they were largely all quite happy with the system, and well fed and well treated and well cared for, and only a few crazy fanatics ever “defected” and usually only because Westerners bribed them, or they were greedy famous artists who sought the corrupt riches of the west.
We ended up arguing for many hours, and several days, and I never made the slightest dent in what everyone knew was the truth. And, indeed, a fair number of our friends agreed (note: he was five years younger than me, but most of our mutual friends ranged from my age to a decade or so older).
I could name another very old friend, a well-known blogger, who last I looked will still argue passionately on how the U.S. was primarily responsible for the Cold War, endlessly provocative, and the U.S.S.R. was merely largely reactive at worst. Come to think of it, I could name another well-known blogger who will argue this, although we’re only online acquaintances with mutual friends.
I’ve also had a fair number of outright communist friends over the years, of various flavors and sects; I can still point you to a handful today; quite brilliant people, and still entirely prepared to explain for hour upon hour what the virtues of Stalin or Trotsky or Mao or one American communist party or another are.
So. Datapoint, for what it’s worth.
Oh, and trivial point.
“First, it was not worth going to war with the USSR, not because it was not very bad, but because the consequences seemed likely to be even worse — i.e., thermonuclear war and the destruction of the planet.”
This sort of usage or claim always annoys me. The horrors of even small thermonuclear war, let alone a couple of full exchanges of U.S./Soviet nukes during the later Cold War would have been far and away more almost unimaginably horrible that we don’t have to start using wild language like “the destruction of the planet.” The planet, if every nuke available in, say, 1989, had been set off, would survive very nicely indeed, and so would plenty of life. Endless life would end up flourishing, and the planet would trundle on, with less notice taken than that of an almost infinite number of ancient meteor strikes.
Humans, not so good (although a not insignificant numbers, certainly millions, would, in fact, survive and continue, although “flourish” isn’t the first word to spring to mind). But that’s not what’s under discussion when crazed hyperbole such as “the destruction of the planet” is used. I kinda hate it when people use unnecessary crazy exaggeration, whether for rhetoric’s sake, or genuine lack of knowledge of the actual scale of damage. (The “destruction of the planet” sort specifically bugs me because I grew up hearing it all my life, throughout the pop culture, of course; really, “near-destruction of the human race” seems quite sufficiently bad to me; no need to puff up our abilities several orders beyond what they are.)
On the other hand, regarding everything else Hilzoy said in her most recent comment above, particularly on welfare: what Hilzoy said, with bells on.
Hilzoy, your post with its comments on housing and welfare policy reminds me of something I meant to touch on: how much of what I thought I knew, from my libertarian days, turns out to be a mixture of outright wrong information and horribly out of date data.
On the right, I can point to (for instance) the pervasive fear of crime and the attendant openings for racism that never catches up with the reality of declining crime rates, or the disparaging of youth’s morality that doesn’t take into account declining teen pregnancy and such. I used to argue confidently about health care outcomes as justifying something like the US’s system until it finally became clear to me that the data just plain don’t, and so it goes, issue after issue. Likewise when it comes to which presidents proposed balanced budgets, and…well, the list goes on and on.
“if you think that it outweighs the bills and investigations they support and oppose today….”
What bills supported by Pelosi am I outweiging? There was no comprehensive Democratic bill to reform welfare that would have passed if only a few Rebuplicans had defected in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980, or 1990s. There is no such bill now. There is no good Democratic bill on education that I should feel compelled to support or horrified that 6 Republican Senators aren’t voting for it and there never has been. HUD has been an ugly disaster for decades, and no one (including Republicans) has ever had the balls to fix it.
“But it’s not entirely fair, I think, to say that we thought the existing programs were fine. We really didn’t. We favored reform that would cost more money but (we thought) had a better chance of actually breaking the cycle of poverty and preventing the costs of welfare reform from being taken out not only on parents but also on their kids.”
If that were true, why did welfare refom pass only after the Republican takeover of Congress? Where was welfare reform in 1992? It wasn’t anywhere. If ‘we’ is individual Democrats, of course. If ‘we’ is Democrats in Congress, why did they leave it alone?
“Remember: Clinton ran and won on a pledge to end welfare as we know it.”
But when was that? Only after it was clear that Republicans had turned that into a winning issue and that Democrats had almost completely lost Congress over it. Clinton was very savvy, but I don’t think that translates at all into the rest of Congressional Democrats. They fought it tooth and nail.
Same thing with HUD. If it really was such a well known disaster, why did the Democrats do nothing?
Same thing with education. If they were really for testing (but “done right”), why didn’t they pass it in 1992 or 1993? They didn’t want testing. They still don’t want testing.
Hell, where is the Democratic testing proposal now? Where is the proposal, supported by a vast majority of Democrats, which would pass if only I could convince 15-20 Republican Representatives and 7 Republican Senators to vote for it? It doesn’t exist.
If you think I should vote for Democrats, and if you are convinced they have changed, show me the bills that are strongly supported by the Democratic caucus and which would appeal to me.
They don’t exist because the Democratic caucus hasn’t changed as much as you are saying.
Sebastian: the Democrats did do a lot on housing. They changed policy considerably; they also did a lot to change HUD, although that was internal to the agency and had more to do with restoring morale after an awful period.
Why no welfare reform earlier? Well, if memory serves, Clinton was trying to reform health care. And there’s a very good reason to do them in that order: one of the various disincentives to going off welfare was that one lost Medicaid, and removing that disincentive before reforming welfare was crucial. (Instead, we did CHIPS.)
I mean, it would be nice to live in a world in which one could realistically try to reform both health care and welfare at the same time, but it’s not ours.
Gary: point taken. I have always assumed that since my Swedish Social Democrat relatives, who really were serious socialists (as well as being serious democrats) were under no illusions about the USSR, and the comparative merits of us and them, I only had to worry about the nutty fringes to the left of them, but if not, not. I then amend my remarks to read: lots of people were under no such illusions.
Actually, before I go looking for bills on housing, it might be good to know exactly what you think is wrong with it. Our current housing policy is built around Section 8 vouchers, which are given to families to allow them to rent housing wherever they want. It’s a market-based voucher system, which I think works fine.
There’s also Hope VI, which gives grants for various purposes. It pays for the demolition of really bad public housing projects, and to rehab others into mixed-income developments. This is a very good thing as far as reducing concentrations of poverty goes, and since the grants are competitive (quite competitive, actually), there;s real quality control.
I think that both of these are good programs. Democrats are currently trying to keep the administration from cutting it, and from turning it into a block-grant program.
In the last sentence, ‘it’ is Section 8.
“I then amend my remarks to read: lots of people were under no such illusions.”
To that: absolutely, yes.
“Our current housing policy is built around Section 8 vouchers, which are given to families to allow them to rent housing wherever they want. It’s a market-based voucher system, which I think works fine.”
I only know a smattering about housing policy, but “works fine” strikes me as clearly overly strong. “Basically good idea that could work fine with refinement” is closer to the mark, as I understand it.
The main flaws, in my distinctly limited understanding, include considerable practical limits of the numbers of landlords willing to put up with the low-profit margin of much Section 8 payment/housing, and the sometimes troublesome tenants, and thus a strong limitation on what’s available as Section 8 housing in any given area, and overly-limited choice for Section 8 recipients, as well as generally poor-quality housing with problematic landlords. Some of the landlords who do do Section 8 seem somewhat comparable, at times, to Medicaid mills, or nursing homes in the biz for the payments-per-body.
But, as I say, my present understanding and knowledge is quite limited. I’m sure that simply throwing more money into Section 8 isn’t a cure-all for inadequate low-cost housing, but it does seem quite possible to me — and here I’m just being a classic liberal, gol-ah-lee — that throwing more money into wouldn’t be entirely wasted and might be helpful. I’m entirely open to more info and views on this.
Digression: watching SNL season premiere, with opening press conference of “President Bush.” “Where’s the money going to come from to pay for all this? Why, er, from where money comes from, of course….”
“As you know, Blitz, when this tragedy started, I was on my normal six-week vacation, like every American takes….”
Funny stuff.
“I then amend my remarks to read: lots of people were under no such illusions.”
Sure but they were Republicans. 😉
I don’t really mean that one, just a joke before bed. Have a good night all.
Your insinuation that I’m not really concerned about education is completely wrong.
I apologize. However, accepting that is the case, the following:
I’m not unconcerned–I just don’t believe change is on the way enough to bother talking about it much.
is a bit bizarre when one considers that you give the impression (at least to me) of accusing the Democrats of causing the problems and the liberals on this board for doing precisely what you say you have done. (i.e. not bother talking about it for whatever reason). I promise you, having taught in the secondary systems of three different countries, the main reason I don’t talk about it is that I might bore everyone with anecdotes. And that would truly be cruel, even to Republicans…
Seb: “Sure but they were Republicans. ;)”
— In an extended sense, sure.
I think I count 188 posts and not one direct defense of the policies, competence, character, etc. of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Hastert, DeLay, Blount, Frist and friends. Am I missing one somewhere?
“…not one direct defense of the policies, competence, character, etc. of….”
Well, they’re not very good, but at least they’re not Democrats, you know. So thank goodness for that!
😉
I am certain socialized medicine can’t provide the current rate of medical advances.
Why not?
“not one direct defense of the policies, competence, character, etc. of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld”
Having just spent a sleepless night watching Pollock and Closer back to back, and looking forward to tonight’s episode of Rome, I feel cynical or magnanimous enough to defend almost anyone. But Bushco aren’t even thugs, they aren’t bookkeepers, they are blah. Frat boy pleasures, adolescent ambitions.
I read the whole Obama thread over at Yglesias, reeking of exhausted snark and 14th round missed punches, and spent some time thinking about racism in the South, my home for the last twenty years. Damfino. But I spect even the secret Klan meetings are ritualistic and passionless, holding on to hate as a last nostalgic grasp at a fading identity.
Everything is just so godawful dreary sometimes. Maybe I can close another pointless, futile thread. I make a habit of it. Good morning, world. F**k all. 🙂
A desperate attempt to cheer bob up. Bipartisan. Trying to solve real problems with honest solutions. Though one might just off themselves when they realise that they have just grown nostalgic for James Baker.
“I am certain socialized medicine can’t provide the current rate of medical advances.
Why not?”
Because research on each successful products has to pay for the research on tens of unsuccessful products. Governments like to pay much less than that.
You can also witness that empirically most of the medical advances come from the US, and a majority of the large drug companies which are owned by Europeans are actually doing their research with US resources (people) in the US. Research is a risky proposition, so if it doesn’t pay well people will invest in other things.
I like more about Obama’a post than I dislike. This article, on the other hand, makes me want to bang my head against the wall repeatedly:
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And the whole article reads at once as if the author has been brainwashed by Clinton’s campaign manager, and as if the author was trying to convince me to oppose her in the primary.
Because research on each successful products has to pay for the research on tens of unsuccessful products. Governments like to pay much less than that.
That is a theory. But aren’t there much more factors involved? Conditions set by government (prohibition of stem cell research), financial circumstances for researchers (how much of their wage are they allowed to keep, is there a maximumwage) to attract the best, possibilities of long-term research because there is less drive for a profitable product, etc.
You can also witness that empirically most of the medical advances come from the US, and a majority of the large drug companies which are owned by Europeans are actually doing their research with US resources (people) in the US. Research is a risky proposition, so if it doesn’t pay well people will invest in other things.
You first say that government will pay less, and than say that people will only invest if the ROI is big enough (which means the investor is more leading than the researcher I think, and thus might lead to less freedom to exploit all the options because a fast result is necessary).
And are you sure about the medical advancements? Or is it an assumption? And do more breakthroughs come from private institutions or from government subsidized ones? I don’t know much about medical research and if I try a fast google I end up with advertisements from all sorts of universities and companies, so I do not have any figures.
But I visited lots of American infertility boards when we were heading for IVF’s, assuming that the States were most advanced. Learning more about it I found that it was actually “invented” by the Brits, the biggest later breakthrough (ICSI) was “invented” by the Belgians and the procedures used in the States were less desirable (IMHO) than the ones used in the Netherlands. After the first year I stopped visiting the American forums because of that. However the Americans on the boards were very anxious about European procedures and drugs, because they were all convinced (as I had been before I researched) that the States were ahead.
This is an example, an anecdote, so I don’t know wether it is commonplace or not. I do know that when I read about big projects (genecharting, stamcells, aids research) I often hear about competition between the US, the Brits, the French, the Canedians. So I don’t really know wether the breakthroughs or the research are all from the States.
I’d also think that with socialized health care the group that can afford the treatment or the drugs is bigger and more reliable, and thus the research is more likely to lead to profitable results. But that is only a hypothesis.
This is not an “anti US” post or anything, I am really curious about the results of socialized medicine on research, since I am in favor of both 😉
Katherine, want to beat your head against the wall? Go read this – “The War Against Tom DeLay” in the NYT.
Sebastian: Because research on each successful products has to pay for the research on tens of unsuccessful products. Governments like to pay much less than that.
Actually, no. If you talk to researchers, you’ll find that the breakthrough research – the really new ideas – tends to come from government-funded research, because governments can afford to pay for bluesky “out there” research with no thought of it eventually needing to turn a profit: just the presumption that if you keep funding people to do pure research, that’s how knowledge is advanced.
What you’re talking about is how commercial companies develop profitable products – which is a secondary or tertiary kind of research. Profitable products, commercially available, are usually derived from secondary research (what follows on from primary research, pure discovery, is the secondary research, working out the details). Commercial companies virtually never fund primary research – I honestly can’t think of an example, though I’ll accept one if you can offer it – but will sometimes fund secondary research if they think they can profit from it. Tertiary research is what happens in-house, and it’s not terribly useful in scientific terms, because too often the results are then patented and can’t be shared with the scientific community.
There are some things that commercial companies do better than governments, I wouldn’t say otherwise, but funding pure research is really not one of them.
Sebastian: what Jes said. One of the persistent complaints about pharma companies these days (I mean, among people I talk to who either do or think about biomedical research) is that the pharma companies themselves are not doing a lot of groundbreaking research. They’re putting a lot of time into coming up with various ‘me-too’ drugs that mimic popular drugs from other companies, or else allow them to extend their own patents (Prilosec/Nexium, etc.) But a lot of the research is being done outside the big companies by small start-ups that essentially act as the farm teams, and then get bought out if their products show promise.
And an awful lot of these are funded by the NIH.
Gary, it’s nice to know I’m not the only strange obsessive who was always annoyed at the excessive rhetoric employed about nuclear war. Destroying civilization along with billions of people isn’t enough–it’s got to be the destruction of the planet or (less dramatic but still false) the annihilation of all life, or (still less dramatic but not totally outside the realm of possibility) the end of the human race. Sheesh, people, google Norman Sleep and K. J. Zahnle and read what they have to say about what sort of asteroid impact it would take to sterilize the planet–something several hundred kilometers in diameter with a kinetic energy in the trillion megaton range and then stop trying to scare me with your piddling 10,000 megaton nuclear wars.
OTOH, hand, Gary, it’s possible that we’re both a little too literal-minded.
I’d be one of your lefty friends, btw, not as extreme as some of them, but I do think American foreign policy has been pretty savage. Vietnam equates to Afghanistan, and the kinds of people we’ve supported are as bad as any supported by the USSR. It’d be hard to do an accurate (or even crude) tally, but I think we’ve caused many millions of deaths overseas–Reagan’s embrace of genocidal killers and terrorists in Central America and southern Africa were just the last episodes in a 40 year long period of inexcusable barbarism. Bush’s invasion of Iraq might be a huge strategic blunder–I leave such things for others to argue. But it doesn’t really seem morally out of the ordinary for American foreign policy.
And the whole article reads at once as if the author has been brainwashed by Clinton’s campaign manager, and as if the author was trying to convince me to oppose her in the primary.
Matt Bai is a standing counterargument to the notion that the Times is in the Democrats’ back pocket. He’s been doing this sort of thing at least since his profile of Kerry last year (the one that brought us the “we’ve got to get back to the point where terrorism is a nuisance” quote).
I talk to people in the pharmaceutical field all the time. Both in academic research (at UCSD) and in corporate research (everywhere else). The characterization of both Jesurgislac and hilzoy is pretty much flatly wrong. I encourage either of you (or both) to browse Derek Lowe’s “In the Pipeline” website. Here are his articles on:
Academia vs. Industry
Me Too Drugs
Drug Prices
He is by no means flatly pro-company, but I think he generally outlines why the idea that the government is doing most of the heavy lifting is wrong.
“But a lot of the research is being done outside the big companies by small start-ups that essentially act as the farm teams, and then get bought out if their products show promise.
And an awful lot of these are funded by the NIH.”
The first part is correct, the second part isn’t unless you mean by “an awful lot” a smallish minority in terms of overall funding.
This is what a lot of people don’t get about pharma research. Lots and lots of it is done by privately-funded itty-bitty research firms. My roommate has worked for four of them in the past 5 years. Three have gone under without making it to the next phase. That is millions of dollars down the tubes just counting the places he has worked.
When a small company gets bought out by a large one, they have to provide enough money to make the risk that nine out of ten of the companies being invested in will go under without ever making a penny. If they don’t, people aren’t going to bother investing in research. They will invest in something safer–like California property.
Civil War
Yes Civil War, Even Uncivil
But maybe only virtual violence among opposing blogs, clashing by night and all.
All I have to say, for those with ears prepared to hear, is that the Mulberry trees will be in bloom in the spring, but the Oaks are intertwining their dark roots now. We must meet in Springfield sometime.
“mulberry”
bob going over my head in a poetry ref?
Sebastian, your second link for Me too drugs doesn’t work. Lowe has a category for such posts, so I’d be interested in which one you were thinking of.
Whoops, I see the other two links are to categories as well. If you could narrow down what posts you think are most on target, that would be helpful. Here’s a handful that I thought might be interesting in furthering the discussion.
Lowe notes this WaPo article, which he discusses in this post
Lowe gives Sebastian a shout out here and this post occasioned a number of other interesting ones, including
here, here, and here.
My impression, from reading Lowe, is that he would not be comfortable with claiming that Jes and Hilzoy are ‘flatly wrong’.
If we had to do them all ourselves, the cost of the drugs we make would be vastly greater than it is now. It’s like the joking arguments that chemist and pharmacologists have in industry: “Hey, you guys wouldn’t have anything to work on if it weren’t for us chemists!” “Well, you’d never know if anything worked if it weren’t for us, y’know!” Academia and industry are like that: we need each other.
That Lowe has a sense of humor about this is underlined by the post here.
Anyway, thanks for the recommendation. Always fascinating to get a look into the everyday life of another field, especially when it makes you appreciate what you actually
do
As it turned out, it was in the lab next door to mine. One of the guys had another HCl tank, a medium-sized one, which was also corroded and jammed. He went for the cylinder wrench, which he then used for the non-standard purpose of vigorously whanging the valve with strong overhand strokes. One of the other guys in the lab summed up the sound of this process as “PING. . .PING. . .PING. . .hisssssSSSSSSS oh @!?#!”
Quite so. More here and here.
Commercial companies virtually never fund primary research
The problem is that it is virtually impossible for a private company to capture all the benefits of primary research. So even if the investment is socially desirable, in the sense that the value of the results justifies the cost, it often will not be attractive to a private company, because the company bears all the costs, but does not obtain all the benefits.
That’s a pretty standard argument for government-funded research. I think it’s sound.
“bob going over my head in a poetry ref?”
It was a bad joke reference to Miller/Libby correspondence.
…
Heck I thought I ended this thread last night.
…
Oldman says Prepare for the Coup
I don’t how this thread evolved or devolved into whatever mutation is closest, but it was originally about civil discourse, and these links threatening violence mat be relevant. But I am bored with civility. Need I make historical references to stuff like John Brown, Civil War, draft riots, the Garfield assassination, labor massacres, lynchings, Palmer raids, veterans marching on DC and being machine-gunned by MacArthur, 30s labor violence, HUAC, the constant bloodshed I grew up in during the sixties…
…to try and suggest that if there isn’t actual violence on the edges and margins of American politics one side ain’t doing politics right?
OMIGOD What did Bob just say? You heard me. Politics is serious as death, and if calling your enemies and sometime allies nasty names is off the table you probably really don’t give a good goldarn about nuthin. Politics is war by other means. Obama can do himself, upside down and sideways.
I know this is a tangent by now, but if the conservative contingent could front a mainpage post about what is wrong with the teachers’ unions, I’d be grateful.
(The unprovoked comments of complete strangers about teachers’ unions have, after all, been one of the reasons why I’ve shied away from going into public school teaching–who would want to embrace a loathed profession?)
IME — and I’m not at all saying this is true of the ObWi posters, just people I’ve interacted with elsewhere — a large portion of hatred towards teachers’ unions boils down to this (and I’ll be deliberately overgeneral here):
* People think teaching is a hell of a lot easier than it is.
* People — especially politicians, but parents as well — think they understand the various subjects better than they actually do.
* People want standards to exist in the abstract, but don’t want their children to suffer the consequences of failing to meet them.
* When these things inevitably collide, the unions end up taking the blame (at the K12 level). [At the college level and beyond, the scapegoat can be anything from foreign accents to “liberal academia”.] In some cases, they really are to blame; in many, IME, they are not.
I’ll save further exposition until that mainpage post, but I’d be interested to know whether this tracks with other educators’ experiences.
Btw, Sebastian, in one of our innumerable head-buttings on education I could’ve sworn you had talked about “your kids”‘ experiences in the California educational system. At the time I assumed you meant your biological children; was that right, or were you referring to the children you’d tutored (as you mentioned above)?
The “Me-too” threads aren’t ridiculously long, but if you only want to read 4, I suggest “Claritin and Clarinex” for an example of a real ‘me-too’, “Innovation and Its Discontents” for a broad overview of the issue, “Me-Too Part Two”, and “An Economist Who Gets It”.
In the Academia vs. Industry Catagory I reccomend:
How It Really Works
Stuart Schreiber on Stuart Schreiber
A Real Can O’Worms
On Drug Prices you should read them all, but this quote from “The Dismal Science of Drug Prices” is especially important:
I personally know at least 8 people who have spent their entire work-life in the lab. Not one has seen a drug they worked on go to market. Those salaries are why drug prices are high. The failures absolutely have to be paid for with the successes.
See also “The Pricing Weapon” for the fact that he isn’t always pro-industry.
“More on Prices, High or Otherwise” is excellent.
“One of Us Is Hallucinating” is good, though some of the links which made it really good have rotted.
See also:
“Preach it Brother”
“Check Please” for the scary problem of cancer drugs now that we now there isn’t such a thing as a disease called “cancer”
and “Brazil Pulls Out the Pin”
At no point does he suggest the NIH is useless. But he certainly doesn’t go for the idea that drug companies are just leeches off the system or the idea that the NIH could just take over and discover new drugs.
Anarch, since I don’t have biological children it must have been the kids I tutored. Unless I was talking about ‘our kids’ in some sort of American sense. But I don’t really remember what you are talking about. It doesn’t sound like something I would say, but who knows? Maybe my siblings? My siblings’ kids?
Thanks, will check those out. I would note that:
But he certainly doesn’t go for the idea that drug companies are just leeches off the system or the idea that the NIH could just take over and discover new drugs.
I don’t think Jes or Hilzoy said anything like this, though they can correct me if I’m wrong. In fact, the point Jes makes, is that
There are some things that commercial companies do better than governments, I wouldn’t say otherwise, but funding pure research is really not one of them.
Lowe seems to be in agreement with this.
But his point remains that it is the drug companies that do the majority of the heavy lifting in turning theory into therapy. Which gets back to my point which was: “I am certain socialized medicine can’t provide the current rate of medical advances.”
Sebastian: Which gets back to my point which was: “I am certain socialized medicine can’t provide the current rate of medical advances.”
Which certainty sounds awfully like a statement of faith to me. However, there’s a shortcut: here’s a list of the the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine since the prize was first awarded in 1901. 23 winners in the past 10 years: show, if you can, that the majority of the winners got the prize for research that was not government-funded in any way.
That wouldn’t actually prove or disprove what Sebastian is claiming. Just for the record. Government research funding != socialized medicine.
That wouldn’t actually prove or disprove what Sebastian is claiming.
Nothing could: that’s what makes it a statement of faith.
Well, then your “shortcut” isn’t much of a shortcut to any point anyone was actually trying to make, so one wonders why you brought it up.
But if you want to list all the actual in-use therapeutic treatments that have arisen solely from socialized medicine systems in the last several decades, you’re free to do that as well. I’d be interested in seeing what they are.
I got hung up on the term socialized medicine, which I took to be health care, but (I think) means government based research into drugs, though Phil says it doesn’t. I started to google some things, but now I’m not sure how we are defining the terms. Just what is our agreed upon definition for socialized medicine?
As I said, I started to google, and so I will share this link, entitled “The French pharmaceutical industry in turmoil”, but I think the “turmoil” is due to an overzealous translation. Gave me a smile at least.
Katherine, I agree completely, which is why I’d like to point out this:
is sort of a case in point of how maybe we fail to understand each other because we simply didn’t read very well. I’d guess I’ve voted other than R 15-20% of the time. And I don’t draw the line at Harris, because it all depends on who the opponent is. Hopefully Harris will be defeated in the primary, anyway.
If you’re asking what all my weighting factors are when considering who gets my vote, I’m not sure that I’m prepared to do a quantitative analysis. And then there’s:
Maybe, depends on who’s running. If it’s Joe Lieberman vs. Tom Delay, I can tell you exactly how I’m going to vote. If it’s Feingold vs. McCain, less clear.
I plead guilty to that it’s not the most important thing in the world to me. Also to that I’m not a single-issue voter. Finally, I plead a certain amount of political inertia: for me, it does take some time and thought to change the course of thought that’s developed over the last 40-odd years. Just go back a year and a half and see what I was writing back then; do you see some change? But: given another crack at Kerry vs. Bush, I’m not yet at a point where I’d go back and change it. You asked for honesty, there it is. If you’re asking for a reasoned, detailed explanation why the torture thing didn’t do it for me and still may not do it for me, I’m not sure I can explain it.
Lastly, for now, don’t sell the Cynthia McKinney/Michael Moore/Howard Dean factor short. It’s not them quite so much as the the widespread approval at their antics. It drives people like me away. There are probably people who claim to speak for the Right who have an analogous effect on the left-leaning swing voter.
LJ, I’m taking socialized medicine to mean a system in which the government is the single-payer source of health insurance and basic health care costs for all people in the system, with the option for individuals to buy supplementary insurance as they wish. Government pharma and other medical research funding is a separate issue as far as I can tell or care.
Phil: the “short-cut” was a result of hasty editing: I was initially trying to say something like for Sebastian to prove his point would require incredible amounts of statistical analysis of data of medical research and funding, which Sebastian had not cited and which I wasn’t even sure existed. Then it occurred to me that it probably wasn’t even possible to prove Sebastian’s initial point, because it was basically faith-based. Sebastian has faith that “socialized medicine” – whatever he means by that – is bad. However, it would be possible to take the short-cut of looking at Nobel Prize laureates and tracking down their funding, which I was fairly sure would probably go to prove my point, here.
But if you want to list all the actual in-use therapeutic treatments that have arisen solely from socialized medicine systems in the last several decades, you’re free to do that as well.
*shrug* Unlike Sebastian, I’m not building a religious-like faith on “socialized medicine” – either positive or negative. Pure research will always be funded by governments (or sometimes charities); and not by corporations: tertiary research, seeking the precise formula that can be used to cure* (or, if you’re a corporation, which can be patented and marketed as a cure**) may be carried out by corporations, or by doctors working in teaching/research hospitals funded by government or charity.
If you care to check out the last 23 Nobel Prizewinners, you will find that some of them were working in “socialized medicine” – NHS teaching/research hospitals. Others were working in government and charity funded research programs in universities. I didn’t find any who were working for corporations, but I didn’t look at all 23: I was inviting Sebastian to do that, so that he could provide data to back up his assertion. If he wanted to. Faith, after all, doesn’t need data.
*where “to cure” is a catch-all verb for all medical benefits
**where “a cure” is a catch-all noun for all medical benefits
Slarti: But: given another crack at Kerry vs. Bush, I’m not yet at a point where I’d go back and change it. You asked for honesty, there it is.
So, can you explain what would lead you to make that decision – even knowing what you know now? What positive aspects of Bush’s administration mean you firmly – still – prefer him to Kerry?
(I was initially going to write something much more sarcastic, but didn’t suppose that my sarcasm would lead you to write a detailed front page post about your positive feelings about Bush’s accomplishments between 2000-2005 that lead you to believe he is the best choice for President. And I am actually interested to know.)
(So anxious to know, in fact, that I voluntarily forego all sarcastic responses should you write that front page post on the positive accomplishments of the Bush administration that lead you to believe, even now, that they are the best possible choice for a second term.)
“Nothing could: that’s what makes it a statement of faith.”
Way to respond to Derek Lowe’s discussions of price and how research is actually turned into therapy in the real world. If only I had pointed that out as evidence perhaps there could have been a discussion. Sheesh.
Thanks, Phil, but your != notation was quite clear. I guess I’m asking Sebastian, since he was the one who first used the term. It wouldn’t be the first time that I got my terms all confused.
However, I am predicting that this topic is going to die out when we start talking about this. I love this take on her, which links to this Q&A. And watching everyone at Redstate go apoplectic makes me wonder if the conservative Republicans are going to filibuster.
Way to respond to Derek Lowe’s discussions of price and how research is actually turned into therapy in the real world.
I wasn’t responding to Derek Lowe’s discussions, I was responding to your statement of faith: “I am certain socialized medicine can’t provide the current rate of medical advances.”
LJ, I keep looking at Meiers, then looking at this story, then looking back at Meiers.
Is there some reason the President wants to sacrifice his promise to nominate someone in the Scalia/Thomas mold, pissing off his biggest supporters, just to make sure he has his personal lawyer on the Supreme Court? Am I thinking small?
Jesurgislac, you believe that the discussion of price and private research is somehow not connected to the question of ‘socialized’?
Oops, make that “Miers”.
Sebastian, school vouchers are an issue that I don’t know much about, and if they’re really important to you then I’d like to see what you have to say in support of them. As far as I can tell, this issue has only been discussed a couple times in comments, here and here, so why not do a post on the main page about it at some point? If you did a series of posts on education (teachers unions, vouchers, testing, etc.), I think that a lot of readers would be interested.
I’m mostly interested in the pragmatic, empirical questions about vouchers. Have the kind of school voucher programs that you’d like to see ever been used in any sizeable territory, anywhere in the world? If so, do they work? What are the effects of the voucher programs that have been tried? Do they help the kids who use them? Do they hurt the kids left behind? Do public schools improve due to competition? Are there any effects beyond the selection effects of who chooses to use the vouchers and who doesn’t? Looking forward, would it be possible to institute a voucher program at the state or local level? If vouchers are a Republican issue, why not proceed by having some Republican states adopt vouchers? I would think that a Chesterton conservative would prefer to start with smaller programs and build up to a nationwide policy.
I have similar questions about high stakes testing.
I’d be interested in seeing answers to these questions, either in a new post, in the comments here, or somewhere else if someone can provide a link. Of course, I know that it’s up to you whether you want to answer these questions – I’m not in any position to tell you what to research. I think that a new post would be best, though, since I bet there will be debate about the answers (plus, more people will see it).
I am disappointed at the state of education in America, and I’m open to programs that can improve it. But I’m not convinced the vouchers (and high stakes testing) are going to bring about big improvements in education, and I’m concerned that they could make some problems worse. I think that a lot of Democrats are in the same position as me, and you’d see more support for these programs if they saw that these programs were worth supporting. The theoretical justifications of these programs do not push Democrats’ buttons, which puts the burden of empirical proof, in our minds, on the programs’ supporters.
Sebastian: Jesurgislac, you believe that the discussion of price and private research is somehow not connected to the question of ‘socialized’?
You may be using a definition of “socialized medicine” that doesn’t match how I’d use it. Phil’s definition looks like how I understand the term, but you seem to be using it to mean “any government funding of any medical-related research”.
LJ, I’m taking socialized medicine to mean a system in which the government is the single-payer source of health insurance and basic health care costs for all people in the system
So Australia has ‘socialized medicine *and* this years nobel price for medicine?
I assumed that Sebastian met that socialized medicine is a system in which every citizen has health insurance, at least partly financed by government.
I also notice that Sebastian only seems to talk about the pharmaceutical industry, or am I misinterpreting? Are we talking about all aspects of medicine? And when we say *succesful*, do we mean fincancially or do we measure the number of people that can be helped, or do we talk about the impact the medical treatment has?
Sebastian ment, not met of course…
“…to try and suggest that if there isn’t actual violence on the edges and margins of American politics one side ain’t doing politics right?”
You can suggest it all you want, Bob, but it’s not a vision of our country that I want to live in. I expect your response may be along the lines that I only have a choice of either that, or living under fascism, and we could argue that, but I’m not going to agree that violence is an ideal of our democracy, that we’re not doing it right without violence, no. Sorry.
“Lastly, for now, don’t sell the Cynthia McKinney/Michael Moore/Howard Dean factor short.”
Slart, the only one there that remotely matters is Howard Dean (certainly someone who claimed the irrelevance of Grover Nordquist to Republican politics isn’t in a good position to insist that McKenney or Moore are significant influences in the Democratic Party, I’m afraid), and I’m still bemused by the piece of cardboard put forth as Dean by the right. Have you examined his record as governor, rather than the mockery and attacks upon him from the right once he became a presidential candidate? What do you think of the actual facts of his record? Can you discuss them for a paragraph or so, please, so we understand what in his record might subject him to scorn? What were his radical leftist notions on, say, balancing the budget, or abortion, or anything else?
dutchmarbel: “Sebastian ment, not met of course…”
dm – I’m guessing maybe “meant,” no?
tnxs Xanax. I hate writing English 😉
re: socialized medicine. gee, nice use of neutral, non-value-laden terms.
there are proposals circulating for various forms of a single-payer system. The goal of these proposals is to eliminate the inefficiencies inherent in employer-provided insurance (like the whole pre-existing condition problem, among others).
It is likely that the govt as insurer would look to reduce overall costs by negotiating bulk prices for medicines. So what? In a single-payer system, pharma companies would save billions in advertising/marketing. If the pharma companies are willing to make the deal in an arms-length transaction, then there probably isn’t a societal cost out there.
the concern arises, obviously, that the govt would use its clout to negotiate “unfair” discounts, where “unfair” means that society as a whole bears a cost in new medicines not being discovered.
but this issue is far more complex than a snap assertion of “socialized” medicine. For one, the other Western countries have done a very nice job of shifting the cost of discovering new medicines onto US medication consumers and US taxpayers. gee, thanks. What precisely is the WTO for?
Second, the current system is not necessarily the most socially efficient. For example, the current system apparently allows european medication consumers to free-ride on US medication consumers and taxpayers. Other industries that have very high barriers to entry and very low marginal costs (like producers of electricity) operate under supervision of state public utilities commissions. Perhaps an internation pharmaceutical utility commission would be a better way of financing the development of medications.
Perhaps a PhUC is not the way to go. (the pronunciation of the acronym alone would kill the idea.) Perhaps nationalizing drug development is the best solution (unlikely).
but the assertion that the existing system is the best possible system isn’t just wrong, it’s silly.
It is likely that the govt as insurer would look to reduce overall costs by negotiating bulk prices for medicines.
One of the most interesting things (to me) was the point made, either in a link or a trackback to Lowe’s blog about how the US system acts to subsidize the rest of the world’s medicine, which is why reimportation is such a problem. As a beneficiary of this, it would go against my interests to argue that the US health care system needs fixing, so count me in the just say no to socialized medicine column ;^)
On a side note, The terum PhUC brings to mind the late James McCawley, who published some papers written under the pseudonym of Quang Phuc Dong, affiliated with the South Hanoi Institute of Technology and the Free University of Quebec. One of his papers is here, entitled “English Sentences without Overt Grammatical Subjects” Very funny, but not at all work friendly.
So you say, but I disagree. I think the degree to which the deranged are greeted with applause is also important. To me, I mean.
Great, thanks for that. Did you want to know what I think, or did you want to take this opportunity to once again beat me over the head with that? Because if it’s the latter, I’m done here. Feel free to continue, only solo.
If his record as governor was an issue with me, I would have brought it up. No, I’m thinking that Howard Dean is entirely too much like Cynthia McKinney in the derangement department to be given even more power. There’s plenty of that out there on the Internets, Gary, beginning with this. The article isn’t even important, what is important is the quote by Dean at the start. But I’m not going to do your Googling for you, Gary, please take a little time and look for the many, many stupid and insulting things that have dropped from the mouth of Howard Dean. There’s plenty out there; enjoy.
Lastly, for now, don’t sell the Cynthia McKinney/Michael Moore/Howard Dean factor short. It’s not them quite so much as the the widespread approval at their antics. It drives people like me away. There are probably people who claim to speak for the Right who have an analogous effect on the left-leaning swing voter.
You mean besides the President, the Senate Majority Leader, the defrocked House Majority Leader, and a few other nonentities who somehow snuck into leadership positions in the Executive and Legislative branches?
No, DaveL.
Slarti: No, DaveL..
In your view, then, there are no others besides the President, the Senate Majority Leader, the defrocked House Majority Leader, and others in leadership positions in the Executive and Legislative branches, “who claim to speak for the Right and who have an analogous effect on the left-leaning swing voter” to Cynthia McKinney/Michael Moore/Howard Dean?
I think you must be wrong about that.
Slarti: No, DaveL..
In your view, then, there are no others besides the President, the Senate Majority Leader, the defrocked House Majority Leader, and others in leadership positions in the Executive and Legislative branches, “who claim to speak for the Right and who have an analogous effect on the left-leaning swing voter” to Cynthia McKinney/Michael Moore/Howard Dean?
I think you must be wrong about that.
No, Jesurgislac. If DaveL has a specific point to make, he’s free to do so at any time. I simply answered his question: no, I didn’t mean that. If the question had been something different, possibly with examples, I might have answered differently.
For example, if he’d pointed out how the head of the RNC had said something remotely resembling “I hate the Democrats and everything they stand for”, I might tend to think there was a point, there.
And I’m not saying there’s no point there at all. I absolutely hated it that Tom Delay was House Majority Leader. Bill Frist has pulled a couple of stupid, boneheaded stunts, but those guys are not people I voted into office, and they certainly don’t speak for me, and I clearly don’t agree with them. Howard Dean, on the other hand, is The Man of the Democratic Party.
Howard Dean, on the other hand, is The Man of the Democratic Party.
He is? If Howard Dean is “The Man of the Democratic Party” – even though most Democrats did not vote him into office – how is it that George W. Bush is not “The Man of the Republican Party” – even if the elections that put him into office were, as I have frequently said, highly dubious?
Jesurgislac, I have absolutely no aspiration that I’ll convince you that my opinions are correct, so tell me why I ought to bother explaining.
Slartibartfast: Jesurgislac, I have absolutely no aspiration that I’ll convince you that my opinions are correct, so tell me why I ought to bother explaining.
I guess if I were asked to defend the policies of the people you helped vote into office, I’d dodge the question, too.
Slarti, I’m actually just trying to figure out, from your classically-ambiguous response to DaveL, what your opinions are.
You said: There are probably people who claim to speak for the Right who have an analogous effect on the left-leaning swing voter.
DaveL offered, as examples of people who “claim to speak for the Right”, You mean the President, the Senate Majority Leader, the defrocked House Majority Leader, and a few other nonentities who somehow snuck into leadership positions in the Executive and Legislative branches?
You responded No, DaveL – which, as a literal response to DaveL’s specific examples of “people who claim to speak for the Right” would mean no, there are no others besides the examples DaveL gave.
Since George W. Bush, currently President of the US, whom I was certainly under the impression that you had voted for in November 2004, was among those examples, I’m just further confused by your claim that “those guys are not people I voted into office, and they certainly don’t speak for me, and I clearly don’t agree with them”.
No, edddie, I’m thinking that Jesurgislac has shown herself to be incapable of holding up her half of an honest discussion, so my incentive to participate is pretty low. If you don’t know what this is all about, see here and here. I’ve had enough.
I did vote for Bush, of course, and if you can come out with an “I hate Democrats” uttered by George, please do.
If you don’t know what this is all about
Specifically, Slartibartfast objects to the facts raised by me in this comment. Actually, he also objects to my referencing of the facts.
Slarti,
Add me to the list who cannot parse your statement:
“Lastly, for now, don’t sell the Cynthia McKinney/Michael Moore/Howard Dean factor short. It’s not them quite so much as the the widespread approval at their antics. It drives people like me away. There are probably people who claim to speak for the Right who have an analogous effect on the left-leaning swing voter.”
Do you believe Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are equivalent figures to Michael Moore? If not, why not? If so, would you agree that they have bashed Democrats more, and in more incendiary ways, than Moore has? If not, why not? Do you believe that their efforts do not meet widespread approval by Republicans? If no, why not?
Please then perform similar comparisons between Cynthia McKinney and Bob Barr and Bob Dornan, and then between Howard Dean and Newt Gingrich and Bill Bennett.
Bill Frist has pulled a couple of stupid, boneheaded stunts, but those guys are not people I voted into office, and they certainly don’t speak for me, and I clearly don’t agree with them. Howard Dean, on the other hand, is The Man of the Democratic Party.
Slarti, with all due respect, that’s nuts. I suppose if I were looking for a description of my current political views, “left-leaning swing voter” would be a decent summation. And I am reasonably confident that I’m as deeply disgusted by George W. Bush and Tom DeLay–Frist, admittedly, is merely a below-average politician–as you are by Cynthia McKinney, Howard Dean, or Michael Moore. Somehow it seems relevant to me that the Republican Party has disgusting people running the country, while the Democratic Party has them bloviating from the fringes.
I don’t think any of this is particularly difficult to figure out from my comment, which causes your disappearance into a cloud of ink to look more like trying to avoid a difficult argument than merely meeting snark with snark.
No, I think Coulter and Limbaugh are representative of what’s wrong with media politics, while Moore (and his audience) represents an erosion of sanity. Without the audience, Moore wouldn’t be worthy of mention. But I’m glad you brought Moore up, because Howard Dean is a lunatic of the same stripe, at least publicly and occasionally.
I really don’t want to get into this much detail, but it depends on what’s incendiary to you. If casual, unevidenced assertions that the President conspired with the Saudis to murder a couple of thousand Americans has an equivalent on the Republican talk-radio circuit, maybe there is an equivalence of sorts.
Counterquestion: how many conservatives have you run into on the blogosphere that take Limbaugh and Coulter at face value? Or even are neutral in their approval?
Exercise left for the student. Gary asked me my opinion, this is it. Feel free to perform endless dissection and critique on it.
Gary asked me my opinion, this is it. Feel free to perform endless dissection and critique on it.
I think what we’re trying to say is that you’re talking about tribal identification (“I’m not like those people”) rather than sensible opinion. Some of us have changed our partisan leanings based on the performance of the current Republican Party. You might too, if you could get past the tribalism and take a realistic look at what’s going on.
If you think that no change has taken place, Dave, or that no further change is possible, you haven’t been paying attention. Not that I expect people to keep track of these things, but they have gotten a certain amount of mention in this very thread.
“No, I think Coulter and Limbaugh are representative of what’s wrong with media politics, while Moore (and his audience) represents an erosion of sanity. Without the audience, Moore wouldn’t be worthy of mention. But I’m glad you brought Moore up, because Howard Dean is a lunatic of the same stripe, at least publicly and occasionally.”
I did not follow this at all. Are you saying Moore is in a different business than Limbaugh and Coulter? That isn’t the way it looks to me. All seem to provide political opinions to a mass market, whether through movies, talk radio or bestselling books. If you think otherwise, please distinguish them. BTW, I did not bring Moore up, you did.
“If casual, unevidenced assertions that the President conspired with the Saudis to murder a couple of thousand Americans has an equivalent on the Republican talk-radio circuit, maybe there is an equivalence of sorts.”
I’ll take this as a yes, and let you find the multitude of evidence of equivalent statements with respect to the last Democratic president.
“Counterquestion: how many conservatives have you run into on the blogosphere that take Limbaugh and Coulter at face value? Or even are neutral in their approval?”
In the blogosphere, both have fans, especially among the Redstate/Free Republic crowd. On the other hand, Rush’s weekly radio audience is approximately the same number as the total number of viewers of Farenheit 911 in theatres, while both Moore’s and Coulter’s books sell approximately equally well.
Really? The chairman of the RNC suggested that Clinton had engineered the WTC attacks? I’m going to need a cite on that, I’m afraid.
Slarti, I’m suggesting the opposite: that change has taken place and that the “tribal identification” element is maybe the last and hardest to change. Or at least it was for me. If I come across as flippant on this, I don’t mean to be. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for Democrats in 2000 because of some of the same kinds of stuff you’re pointing to. I’ve concluded for myself that it’s very, very hard to change your default setting when it’s a matter of not especially liking either side and having to decide which is least worst. I guess the bottom line for me is that I agree empirically that the antics of the McKinneys of the world have an undue impact on people like you (or me), but I think the Republican Party is so far gone at this point that it should be getting easier to get past that kind of stuff.
Funny, I didn’t see in your statement anything about the RNC Chairman. Nor to my knowledge is Dean a player on the talk radio circuit. Nor was the World Trade Center mentioned. Are you deliberately trying to move goalposts, or is that merely an accident?
DTM, is it your contention that Dean didn’t say anything of the kind? You don’t have to go all that far upthread to see my mention of it, so I can only conclude you didn’t make it that far.
Dave, I think we’re approximately in the same place.
Slarti,
The exchange which you responded to went as follows:
“”If casual, unevidenced assertions that the President conspired with the Saudis to murder a couple of thousand Americans has an equivalent on the Republican talk-radio circuit, maybe there is an equivalence of sorts.”
I’ll take this as a yes, and let you find the multitude of evidence of equivalent statements with respect to the last Democratic president.”
I see nothing about Dean there, and since going back to prior statements this was part of a comparison of Moore and Limbaugh and Coulter. I see a reference to the talk radio circuit. I see nothing with respect to the World Trade Center specifically.
In my first post, I specifically compared Dean to Gingrich and Bennett, and would stand by that comparison.
DTM, is it your contention that Dean didn’t say anything of the kind?
You know, this is reminding me of the Donna Brazile conversation. (Note: I’m doing commentary, rather than attempting to convince you of anything. I’m not going to have a particularly strong argument, just a clash of prejudices.) With Donna Brazile, her “let us die (or down. I listened to it and could be convinced either way)” comment wasn’t directly referring to race — she was talking about the people left in New Orleans. To think of that as racially inflammatory, you have to put words in her mouth — she might have been conceptualizing it on a class basis, for example. So the more you think of someone as likely to make racially inflammatory statements, the more racially inflammatory statements you see them make, and you end up confirming your own position.
Again, with the Dean quote you linked above: your reading of it isn’t insane, but it’s not how I’d read it. Dean saying that an interesting theory is that possibly the Saudis warned Bush looked to you like an accusation that Bush conspired to bring the towers down — it looked to me like an accusation (well, to the extent that calling something an ‘interesting theory’ is an accusation) that Bush had some intelligence from the Saudis that he really should have acted on, and didn’t. You think that Dean’s a loony hothead, and so you’re going to take the loony hotheaded reading of everything he says. Someone who doesn’t think he’s a loony hothead literally doesn’t read him saying the same things you think he’s saying. I’m not claiming to have proved you in error here, just pointing out that if you are in error, it’s a self-reinforcing one.
Fair enough, as long as you keep in mind how popular Newt was with the left-of-center set.
LB, good point. Dean didn’t say Bush conspired with the Saudis, and it was wrong of me to say so. What he did say was no prizewinner, but…ok, that’s it for me today.
how many conservatives have you run into on the blogosphere that take Limbaugh and Coulter at face value?
Since Cheney went immediately to Limbaugh and Hannity (I think) to defend Miers, that number may be greater than you think.
LB makes precisely the same point that I would make here. I’m wondering if Slarti knows what the entire context of the quote was (I don’t want to suggest that he doesn’t care, but the fact that he’s citing it from a Krauthammer column doesn’t fill me with confidence). Dean finished up by saying (at the 43 minute mark)
But the trouble is, by suppressing that kind of information, you lead to those kinds of theories, whether they have any truth to them or not, and eventually they get repeated as fact. So I think the President is taking a great risk by suppressing the clear, the key information that needs to go to the Kean commission.
This is precisely the sort of thing that you seem to give Bill Bennett a pass on (I would note that the support you gave to Delong’s take was superceded by this post) and it is worthwhile to note that both Bennett and Dean were on call-in shows and Dean was responding to a call about the Kean commission and the suppression of evidence. If his point was to show the variety of theories that sprout up (and do note that when he relates the Saudi theory, he laughs), then you need to defend Dean the same way you do Bennett. As for me, I feel the same way about both of them, that the comments point to some deeply disturbing problems in the zeitgeist. However, I don’t advocate dragging Bennett by his heels around Washington, and I don’t think that Dean should be totally dismissed from public discourse for voicing this thought.
“Dean saying that an interesting theory is that possibly the Saudis warned Bush looked to you like an accusation that Bush conspired to bring the towers down”
It is an interesting theory that being born under an astrological sign can influence your character.
Seb, you shouldn’t dis Nancy Reagan like that.
Seb, you shouldn’t dis Nancy Reagan like that.
I wrote a lengthy, hopefully well-reasoned response and the blog ate it. Summarized: please link me to Dean’s correction of his misuse of “interesting” and “theory”, and also some explanation of how his hatred of Republicans and everything they stand for ought to attract the swing voter.
Bennett I have no brief for, but I have smaller brief for the various flavors of stupidity that followed his comments.
And that’s it for me.
I wrote a lengthy, hopefully well-reasoned response and the blog ate it. Summarized: please link me to Dean’s correction of his misuse of “interesting” and “theory”Could have been worse, you could have double posted like I did.
Of course, if you want to hear Dean’s correction, just keep listening to the segment, because immediately after he says what he said, the host asks him
Rehm: Do you think President Bush knew in advance?
Howard Dean: No.
I would have thought such a laconic and succinct response would be admired by you. Though you seem to be moving to the hyperbolic with the notion of Dean ‘hating’ the Republicans.
And I’m only hitting the post button one time, promise…
Sorry, I can’t; it’s blocked. This weekend, I’ll do it if I can get to it. Underwhelming retraction, though.
It’s not hyperbole if it fell right out of Dean’s mouth, is it? If so, I better update my dictionary.
The response I thought Dean made wasn’t on the show (I pulled it from a post that seemed to have the transcript, but was actualy just restating what they took to be the gist) So I guess Dean hasn’t shown enough remorse in making a correction for something he apparently doesn’t think that he said and therefore deserves to be cast out from the company of all men and anyone who claims that there might be another reading also shouldn’t be allowed to participate in the public discourse. Thank god he didn’t get the nomination and go on to defeat George Bush because who knows how terrible our world would be. A greater power is definitely watching over us…
Correction in the sense of “I was mistaken in the content of what I said” or correction in the sense of “I’m trying to avoid the political cost of what I said”?
Correction in the sense of “I was mistaken in the content of what I said” or correction in the sense of “I’m trying to avoid the political cost of what I said”?
SH: Did you mean to post this comment here, or to the “For Once, Virtue Triumphs!” post?
Just for Slarti, a new Howard Dean outrage .
“Did you mean to post this comment here, or to the “For Once, Virtue Triumphs!” post?”
Yes. Absolutely. 🙂
I, for one, find all the hurt feelings over Dean’s comments endlessly entertaining. The Republican party is corrupt to the core. A liar, torture apologist, and all-around incompetent for a president, a power-mad House leader up on money laundering and conspiracy charges, a Senate leader charged with financial misconduct, cronyism of lethal proportions, political payback prioritized above intelligence gathering, votes bought with irresponsible tax cuts while the federal budget is turned into little more than a massive corporate feed-trough with the tab charged to the national credit card for future generations to pay off. And lets not even bring up the revolting slime mold of the Jack Abramoff scandal, which has its tendrils oozing all over the party (not to Sebastian: this is what apophasis looks like). But if anyone actually expresses antipathy toward the modern Republican Party, folks’ panties get all in a bunch.
Like Dean, I, too, hate the rotten-to-the-core Republican party. Not Republican voters, per se (and it is quite clear that Dean didn’t mean the voters, either, unless you think he was praising voters’ discipline), but the worse-than-worthless organization. It is turning our domestic policy into a cesspool of corruption and our foreign policy into a monstrosity of torture and unwarranted aggression. Folks like McCain and Graham do some good things, but they are only beginning to make up for their irresponsible support for this administration, and their power within their own party has been pretty limited. It’s not enough, having twice handed a drunk driver the keys to the car, to then come out firmly against the practice of plowing a car through a crowd of pedestrians. It is clear to me that nearly all the participants in the Republican coalition have sacrificed some pretty important principles to get their tip-top priorities on the agenda. For the religious right, they tolerate graft in order to end the so-called holocaust of abortion (now they find themselves getting up with fleas, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to offer them any bug spray). For the fiscal conservatives, what’s a little torture, theocracy, and, oh yes, graft, so long as they get their tax cuts? Now they are gagging on the highway bill, the medicare bill, etc. The only ones who haven’t sold some part of their souls for majority rule are the ones who never had a soul to begin with, and they appear to be the ones who have floated to the top of this particular pit of muck. But shame on Dean for saying mean things about this sorry lot of mud-encrusted, ethically compromised opportunists.
“the ones who never had a soul to begin with, and they appear to be the ones who have floated to the top”
Souls
are denser than iridium,
heavier than the sum
of Saddam’s gold bars,
denser than neutron stars,
denser than black holes.
Or Yeats:
Why should I be dismayed
Though flame had burned the whole
World, as it were a coal,
Now I have seen it weighed
Against a soul?
Good rant there, Gromit.
Incidentally, has anybody read _Lanark_, praised here?
I once tried but didn’t get into it.