Watching Live at the White House is a gas (go Susan!). But I would pay real money, I mean real money, to see Barack Obama dance do the Pee Wee Herman dance to "Tequila." I bet he could do it, too!
Duncan Black of course picks up on Yglesias's complaint about the heartbreak of ACNE -- Acute Cable News Excitability -- Syndrome. Atrios makes the point that congressional staffs watch this stuff all the time, even though the rest of the country doesn't. Taken in that perspective, doesn't that make cable daytime news essentially lobbying? Wouldn't it then be subject to campaign finance laws?
I link approvingly to Matt Yglesias's reflections on returning to a domestic cable news media environment after an extended stay abroad with CNN International and BBC. I had a similar experience last week when my father was visiting from Panama. Like Matt, my Dad the Ex-Pat only has CNN International and BBC. I work days and so hardly ever watch cable news except for Rachel Maddow.
Like Matt, both of us were shocked and appalled by the daytime "programming" on the Cable "News." It's every bit as bad as you might fear. In fact it's worse. CNN's programming philosophy is "BE VERY SCARED RIGHT NOW!" which I can only assume is aimed at a senior citizen demographic. Wolf Blitzer is a MORON. Every segment he does focuses on "what should the American people be afraid of RIGHT NOW!" My God, I can't believe that not too many years ago CNN had Bernie Shaw, Mike Sesto and Judy Woodruff. Fox of course is unspeakable. And MSNBC? Sharper than CNN, but still incredibly shallow and vapid. And no context. Chris Matthews has on 2 no-names debating whether Israel will attack Iran soon or sooner. No debate, no context, no discussion of why Israel might NOT attack Iran, why the U.S. may not WANT Israel to attack Iran. Nothing. Just Matthews grabbing another chance to make predictions. Does anyone retrospectively check his batting average? And of course the political discussions are the narcissistic, self-referential pidgins of cliquey teenagers. They talk to themselves about themselves with self-insight of developmentally arrested adolescents.
Hence my new catchphrase ACNE -- Acute Cable News Excitability: the perfectly natural irritability caused by the non-stop nonsense of daytime cable news. The question is, how do we cure it? I applaud President Obama's constant criticism of "news cycles" and propaganda masquerading as news. But how do you REALLY stop a self-feeding monster so useful to lobbyists, pressure groups, cranks and congress critters? This is a serious question, I think, for the future of the republic. I think the answer has to lie in the total lack of viewership that Matt mentions. What do you think?
Another example of the Republican leadership bragging about their willful ignorance of their constituents' plight, this time from Texas governor Rick Haircut...sorry, Perry. He is right, of course, that Texas has faired better than many states -- relatively high oil prices have buoyed its energy economy, and it managed to avoid the worst of the housing bubble (for which I am envious). Nevertheless, it also has unemployment that, at 8%, is very high relative to its past performance. And I know from direct personal knowledge, as well as cold hard facts, that Texas has one of the worst social safety nets in the country. A social safety net that Gov. Haircut Perry has been eager to make unreliable at every turn in his zeal to cut taxes in one of the least taxed states in the country.
Unlike Steve Benen, I'm not convinced Perry's recession gaffe will cost him the election. His rival in the GOP primary, Sen. Hutchison, will inevitably be pulled to the right by the primary Base voters. It's more likely they'll end up in a "recession, what recession" contest. And the chances of Texas Democrats fielding a promising candidate are never worth betting the farm on. Finally, Haircut Perry is a pretty talented politician, as well as a talented pretty politcian.
But the "recession" crack provides another data point of Republican leadership pleased as punch with their status and condition and insensitive to others. Perry is all up in arms about the threat to Texas sovereignty posed by federal stimulus funds, but he's positively jocular about whether this here phantom recession has adversely impacted any of the people who might actually vote for him in the coming year.
Rachel Maddow had a great segment last night on the generally abysmal health status indicators for the great state of South Carolina. What was best about the piece was its actual discussion of HEALTH (or lack of same) of a state's population, coupled with a question about whether the behavior of that state's political leadership is acting to improve or hinder their constituents' health status. Rachel mentions the high rate of deadly strokes in South Carolina, which is a great opportunity to introduce this outstanding graphic North Carolina Stroke Care Collaborative.
Now, the point of this post is NOT to denigrate South Carolinians, Southerners in general, or people who suffer strokes. The fact is that health status in this country is STUNNINGLY varied, with lots of communities facing health status challenges that would shock those of us living a comfortable 21st century life. My own South Side of Chicago, of which I am a proud resident, has hopitalization rates for people in the prime of their lives that are twice those of Illinois in general. Before you ask, those excess hospitalizations are NOT all for gunshot violence; instead, my neighbors are hospitalized for conditions like ashtma, heart failure and high blood pressure -- conditions that we are fully capable of managing WITHOUT hospitalization, but don't manage for large segments of the populace. Rather, this post, like Ms. Maddow's segment, is to ask whether South Carolina's political leadership considers the state's relative poor health when doing things like opposing stimulus funding or health care reform.
Now, it's easy to argue that Joe Wilson, Jim DeMint, Lindsey Graham and Mark Sanford do care about the poor health of their constituents, but it's more important for them personally to score political points by opposing ANY effort by the Obama administration and the Congress to help South Carolina. You can argue these guys can have the best of both worlds: personally oppose things like health care reform to win cred with the Base, while knowing the legislation will pass and benefit their state regardless. But even that hypothesis begs the question -- why does it please their Base to oppose beneficial legislation? How do these guys rationalize doing and saying things that seem so detrimental to their constituents?
I'm not an expert on South Carolina nor a psychologist, but I grew up in the South and I now live in a community fraught with highly charged issues of race and poverty. As in a previous post, I would say the behaviors of South Carolina pols and the Base to whom they pander reflect the old attitudes about race and poverty: that poverty and low social standing are ordained from on high and/or a reflection of poor moral character. In this worldview, wealth is a sign of virtue, not good fortune, and poverty is a sign of laziness and moral failing.
Adding in race makes it even easier to exploit South Carolina's challenges for politcal gain. The Nixon/Reagan Southern Strategy successfully pitted insecure whites against non-white groups. The clear message of that stategy? The government is going to take what little you have (jobs, health insurance) away from you and give it to the dark-skinned people who voted for the Democrats. We continue to see EXACTLY that mentality among the Teabaggers, who are not a generally affluent bunch and express very clear fears that they shouldn't pay for lazy black people's health insurance. The reality, of course, is that it's the wealthy elite that should and could help pay for the health insurance. But the time-honored Southern Strategy divides and conquers the least well-off in our society in order to maintain the political and economic power of a small elite.
It's hard not to view Sanford, Wilson, Graham and DeMint as the wealthy elite of a still-impoverished state, pitting it's vulnerable populations against each other to maintain their priveleged status. In their worldview, South Carolina's poor health status is not a bug, but a feature, a feature demonstating the divine natural order of things, a feature that above all else enables them to preserve their positions of privelege and influence.
The inestimable Atrios laments the lack of awareness or acknowledgement among the press about the severity and difficulty of the recession. It's something I've pondered for awhile, too. I vividly remember the coverage of the thousands of people who lined up to apply for jobs at the then-new Chicago Sheraton Hotel in 1992. In the 1960s, the press played a critical role in surfacing what was then the greatest income inequality and poverty in generations (today's conditions have far eclipsed those). Contrast the silence on economic suffering with the attention lavished on the crypto-racist teabaggers, people whose primary political philosophy is "I've got mine, get yer own!"
Part of the reason is the success of the press, of course. The newsmedia has become an elite institution, something it wasn't in the early years of television and radio. The media elite are increasingly well-educated and well-paid, two things that tend to insulate you from the sufferening of the less fortunate.
But even worse, I think we see in the current media insensitivity the real lasting impact of the Reagan years. Reagan's chief domestic policy was "if you're poor, it's your fault." Worse, he demonized people needing public assistance as "cadillac-driving welfare queens." Under Reagan, Bush, Clinton, the Republican Congress, and W, poverty again became a moral failing, a convenient reason not to care about poverty and its deletrious effects on individuals and society. Johnathan Chait's masterful takedown of Ayn Rand and her "philosophy" makes the same point. If there's one trait the Teabaggers all share, it's a fierce defensiveness of their own status and success (even if it's very marginal in absolute terms) coupled with a violent refusal to help out the less fortunate, successful and pulled-together among us.
Most of the current news media came of age in Reagan's time, and no matter what they think their personal politics are, they demonstrate the same judgemental selfishness that Rand glorified and Reagan popularized in the way they cover and don't cover our current economic calamity. Before he dies, Tom Brokaw should write a tome on his successors in the media and title it "The Most Selfish Generation."
As great as the President's speech was last night, I think THIS is the real game changer:
It's a game changer because it brings the lunatic fringe lies of the deathers into the halls of Congress and into the face of the President. That affront to decorum in their own clubhouse is exactly the sort of thing the Villagers hate most.
Perhaps I'm not the first to point this out, but there is an earlier precedent for the behavior of the elderly amongst the Tea Bag protesters. It is the response to the 1988 Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act (MCCA). I was just entering the health care finance field at the time, and remember it fairly well. Here's a link to a great post-mortem:
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/9/3/75.pdf
The Act, like all modern health legislation, was fairly complex, and the result of a deal between the Reagan Administration and Congressional Democrats, particularly the storied Claude Pepper of Florida. But the MCCA tried to do 2 big things: prevent catastrophic illness from bankrupting those seniors (mainly low income) that didn't have add-on insurance to supplement Medicare (supplements that at the time were a common retirement perk). The second was to cover prescription drugs, which even in the 1980s were a significant source of financial hardship for lower-income seniors.
The political problem with MCCA was that it was paid for not by an increase in the Medicare tax (paid by all working adults), but by a tax on higher-income retirees and Medicare beneficiaries. So, Medicare beneficiaries with good incomes (and likely good supplemental plans) were going to have to pay more to provide poorer Medicare beneficiaries with a comparable amount of coverage. That's what sent the elderly into a tizzy. The most memorable event was then House Ways and Means Committee Chair Dan Rostenkowski being chased down the street by angry seniors and taking refuge in his car while the angry seniors attacked it. While the wealthy seniors may have had a legitimate beef, then as now there was a LOT of misinformation and lack of understanding about MCCA. Misinformation that was intensified and exploited by interest groups. Sound familiar?
What does all this have to do with current health reform efforts and the backlash to them? My takeaway is that the elderly are going to be a real obstacle to ANY reform plan. It's ironic, given Medicare's position as a cornerstone of progressive politics in this country. But too many elderly are risk-averse, tax-averse, and ill-informed. They have theirs and don't much care if the rest of us get ours. You see this in municipalities where the elderly repeatedly vote against taxes to support local schools. You see this in polls showing that people 65 and over are the most concerned about health care reform having a NEGATIVE impact on their personal benefits. It's why the anti-reform groups have ginned up the "euthanasia" stories and the like. Given the history of the MCCA, and Obama's relatively weak vote from the elderly in 2008, it would seem that reform proponents have a substantial vulnerability in this population segment. I think they need to act quickly to neutralize the senior citizen paranoia. Throw the gray panthers some nice juicy bones in the legislation and promote it heavily in channels that preferentially reach the elderly (like the network news). It's the only way to neutralize this large bloc of opposition that has an impressive track record of derailing past reform efforts.
Building on Mr. Kurtz's post about the outrageous Georgia Rep, it's worth noting that cap-and-trade is exhibit A, conclusive proof in the case of the Republican party's lurch into lunacy.
I'm just old enough to remember when policies like cap-and-trade were quintessentially conservative. As an econ undergrad in the 1980s, cap-and-trade was the leading light in a suite of then radical, new, market-based regulatory ideas propounded by right-of-center economists. These new market-based approaches, they argued, would achieve superior amelioration of environmental problems without the heavy-handed inefficiencies of the "command-and-control" limits embraced by liberals in the 1970s. During my undergrad years, and the the years after, there was a decent debate about the policy and economic merits of the competing approaches to regulation. I imagine someone with Lexis Nexis could even find historical documents (Galaxy Quest!) of elected Republicans advocating cap-and-trade approaches as a conservative alternative to old-fashioned, unfair "liberalism."
Fast forward to 2009, and I confess I still find myself amazed that the conservative policy won the argument. No less a liberal lion than Henry Waxman is the champion of this market-based approach to controlling carbon emissions. The new liberal president speaks sincerely of his understanding of and appreciation of the benefits of markets in economics and policy. Organizations like the Sierra Club, that 25 years ago would have treated cap-and-trade suspiciously, now whole-heartedly endorse it. Self-avowed, card carrying liberals like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein (my heroes) unself-consciously trumpet this formerly conservative approach to environmental policy. So, the Republicans won, right? Champagne corks are popping in John Boehner's office and the AEI executive suite, right?
Ironically, while their proposals were winning in the marketplace of ideas, the Republican party has abandoned the field of competition and retreated into an extremism that would probably shock even the 1964 edition of Barry Goldwater. Where you might have seen someone like Jack Kemp endorsing cap-and-trade as a sexy new idea 25 years ago, now the very same policy approach is crazy communism to today's Republicans. The policy hasn't changed, but the Republican party sure has. What was once a center-right party looking for innovative new ideas (like cap-and-trade), it is now a right-of-everyone-but-the-lunatics rump, mistrustful of any and all public policy and clinging only to the irrational scraps that feed their hysterical, anti-scientific state of denial. Kind of sad, really.
It may be obvious to most politically savvy people, but I think it's worth highlighting the reason why Illinois politics can produce something like a Blagojevich. At the federal level, there are a whole host of laws that limit the ability of the White House or the Congress to completely politicize the federal workforce, to turn every job at every level into a patronage position. Bush has certainly done his best to undermine this separation -- notably in the "privatization" of government functions to politically connected contractors, something he could have learned from, say, the mayor's office in Chicago. But the protection of government function from the extremes of patronage still holds. And it's not an accident. It was part of a hard-fought reform movement from generations ago. Next time you complain about an impersonal bureaucrat, remember that the likely alternative is an impersonal political hack that you have to bribe.
So, the problem with Illinois at EVERY level, state, county and city, is that it has few if any laws and regulations limiting everyday government business from political influence. The federal courts have had an order limiting patronage in the City of Chicago for decades, with constant court oversight, and yet there is every evidence that the court supervision has been almost completely ineffective. Until Illinois has its own version of the Hatch Act, until its cities and counties stop handing out garbage collector jobs as political favors, until there are real limits on large campaign donations by individuals and groups, we can expect to see more Illinois governors arrested, indicted, tried and imprisoned in the future. Oh well. If you can't give them bread, give them circuses...
