Alan Grayson (D) Orlando

How do you get everything you ever asked for as a political party - popular president, significant majority in the House, a majority a hair away from achieving critical mass in the Senate - and then find every excuse in the book for not being able to do what you want?

This healthcare bill fight has been so predictable you would think the Democrats own the trademark rights to the term "political failure".

Even though the reality is that we are very close to seeing some kind of healthcare bill hit the president's desk, the perception that the Democrats are fighting an uphill battle against an opposition whose forces are weak and tattered is the one that predominates political discussions.

Setting aside the differences in rhetoric for a minute, the one thing you know about a Republican is, even if he is outnumbered a hundred to one, he will try to dominate the situation, as if to rule is his birthright. If he is only outnumbered ten to one, he will start proclaiming victory immediately, as if by force of will alone he will negate the mathematical inequality staring him in the face.

Representative Alan Grayson from Florida has had enough. I know he doesn't read this blog or others like it, but he has done the very thing I and countless other bloggers have been trumpeting for weeks - he has simplified the complexities of the healthcare debate down to a few words the general public can get its arms around.

He did not dance around the issues.

He did not come up with a legal sounding rebuttal to the opposition that left enough wiggle room for him to deny it all later.

And he damn sure didn't consult his pollster to determine how this might make his approval rating or his reelection numbers fluctuate.

He boiled down the Republican opposition to ANY healthcare overhaul to simple, direct, visceral terms - the kind Democrats normally shy away from. The kind the Republicans normally come up with in their sleep.

"The Republicans have a backup plan in case you do get sick ... This is what the Republicans want you to do. "If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly."

Rep. Alan Grayson, Tuesday from the floor of the House of Representatives

Can this lone brawler inspire the rest of the Democratic crybabies?


America has made polio a disease found only in history books. Put men on the moon. We can even get our money out of the bank in the middle of the night after its staff has gone home by simply sticking a card in a machine.

We can do this. The Democrats can do this.

Are the Democrats waiting for perfect conditions? 75 or 80 Democratic senators and 300 or more Democratic members of the House? The way they look right now, I doubt if even those gargantuan majorities would be enough.

Maybe there are too many lawyers in the Democratic Party, including the president, who are prone to do that thing that lawyers instinctively do when they open their mouths - try not to get boxed into a corner.

Advocating for a client, ladies and gentlemen, is different than fighting for your constituents.

Quit playing to George Will and George Stephanopoulos - the Peorias around the country get their soundbites via Youtube just like everybody else does these days, and those websites with the weird names that slice and dice the news up into bits of entertainment, to be endlessly re-emailed, replayed and repeated.

The Democrats need to paint themselves into a corner on this one - they need to paint themselves into a corner and dare anyone to try and get them out of it.

Sean Yoes, the host of the AFRO First Edition talk show I appear on from time to time at WEAA, shot me an email a couple of days ago asking for my thoughts on the recent dust up between Obama and New York Governor David Paterson. The political brouhaha between them ensued when a White House emissary allegedly sent word to Governor Paterson to stay out of the 2010 governor's race. You can read the article Yoes ended up writing, titled "Should WH Stay Out of Paterson's Way?", at Black America Web.

But back to the day I originally got the email - later that night I asked S. what she thought about the Obama/Paterson situation. "Obama needs to leave Paterson alone," she said. "Really, he needs to quit sticking his hand into so many things."

I talked with a buddy of mine from New York yesterday. "When did this happen?" he asked.

It was when I spoke to my buddy from Alabama that we got a little deeper into it. "Who gives a damn about a black president telling a black governor not to run? Its all about the politics. The president has no choice but to do what he did."

"You know," I said, "Paterson makes me think of Kwame Kilpatrick. His daddy was a long time state assemblyman from Harlem, the same way Kilpatrick's momma was a congresswoman. You would think the two of them would know better. Actually, now that I'm really thinking about it, you could ask the same thing about Jessie Jackson Jr., Harold Ford Jr. - who else am I missing? - all of these guys had head starts on this thing and look what happens?"

My buddy from Alabama answered before I stopped talking.

"They think they're white."

"Really?"

"Privileged black kids like them never dealt with the same stuff average black kids did."

It was an interesting way to look at it, especially coming from someone whose own African American mother was the mayor of his hometown.

I thought about some of my old associates who qualified as spoiled children of South Carolina's black political elite, people I frequently socialized with back when I was growing up, and the otherworldliness they exuded when we talked about getting into jobs or out of legal problems, as if there was a permanent red carpet rolling along in front of them, smoothing out the little bumps life presents when you least expect them.

To look at Paterson's recent actions and then juxtapose them with his extraordinary confessions during his first days in office was to see the mannerisms and the actions of some of these long lost friends come to life.

My man Sean goes into the technical aspects of the political calculations in his article. Personally, I understand where Obama is coming from. And since I'm not a journalist, and won't ever need to get a quote from anybody in Paterson's administration, I can say this - too many of our black politicians like Paterson have been raised to do anything but work. Even so, I think that the execution of sending the message to Paterson was too sloppily done for it to be coming from the White House.

How come the DNC didn't weigh in on this instead, with the White House's intentions deep in the background?

Paterson's blind arrogance is not a reference to his sightlessness - but it is a deliberately pointed description of his administration, as far as the internet and the New York Times tells me, seems so intent on serving Paterson's agenda rather than his constituents, almost every New York state resident wants him gone.

The president may not feel that this could happen to him, but as I listened to all the people I asked about the Obama/Paterson debacle the last couple of days, all of who are die hard Obama supporters, I sensed a certain amount of "Obama fatigue" setting in, a sentiment that his "be everywhere at once" strategy is not helping lately.

I'm no foreign policy expert...

...in fact, I know next to nothing about what kinds of policies we have regarding individual nations with whom we are either allies or enemies.

But after watching parts of the G-20 summit, and the reactions by our esteemed political gabfest regulars, I am convinced that a seasoned kindergarten teacher could do as good a job as the so called "experts" when it comes to understanding the motivations behind the actions of our rivals.

Because if you look at the proceedings in Pittsburgh dispassionately, what you see is the same scuffling for attention that five year olds do when they are on the playground.

Now we see everybody under the sun howling about Iran gaining the power to arm their very own nuclear weapons. I thought our own president, Mr. Barack Obama himself, who, at the very same G-20 summit where all of the news about a secret reactor in Iran began to come out, said that "no one nation should try to dominate another nation."

"Responsibility and leadership in the 21st century demand more. In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional division between nations of the south and north makes no sense in an interconnected world. Nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long gone Cold War."

President Barack Obama
Address to United Nations General Assembly

Why do we say these things when we really don't mean them?

Because if I'm the ruler of Iran - not Ahmadinejad, but the people he answers to - and believe that my national sovereignty is as valid as any other country's ability to decide its own fate, then I'd probably tell the UN Security Council to go jump off a cliff.

In many ways, it is analogous to the "family meeting" concept that caught on in the 80's, where everybody in the household got together to discuss major issues affecting the entire family. Who had the veto power in those meetings? The parents - the people who were paying for the very room in which the meeting was held.

I'd much rather have my president tell it like it really is - that we get all the say so because we are paying the lion's share of the United Nation's bill with some of the money we've borrowed from the Chinese; that we'd really like to quit building these nuclear weapons because they cost too damn much, but we don't have the muscle to make India, Pakistan, North Korea or Russia give theirs up; that we consider the nukes in France and the United Kingdom to be the same as being located behind our borders; and that we give Israel a pass, mostly for having the moxie to claim an official policy of "nuclear ambiguity" with a straight face when we all know they've got them.

I won't be holding my breath waiting for anything like this to ever happen.

As a communication tool between sovereign nations, the United Nations was a good idea, but the pomp and circumstance and posturing that passes for diplomacy has gotten in the way almost since the beginning.

And if you stop a minute, and think about the facts that are involved - if you take a long, long look at the picture of the little boy in the picture above, who was burned to a crisp in Nagasaki, Japan in 1945 - the only country I can think of that has ever used nuclear weapons in a wartime conflict is...

...the United States of America.

Last week, before rolling out to my hometown of Orangeburg, SC, I did another radio interview with Sean Yoes, who is the host of "The WEAA/AFRO First Edition", an hour-long political talk show on Baltimore's WEAA-FM (88.9 FM), which airs Sunday nights at 8 p.m.

You can click this link and push the "Listen Live" button at the top of the page to hear the show.

This week was a shorter segment. We talked specifically about how President Barack Obama has handled the realities of being an African American commander-in-chief amid the heightened racial tensions across the country.

Is Barack Obama more like W.E.B. DuBois or Booker T. Washingon?  Find out what Sean Yoes and I think tonight on the show.

As always, it was fun. Check it out if you have a chance.