Has the “Big Tent” Gotten Too Big?

Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg wrote in their post-election recap this morning that Barack Obama overcame “powerful economic headwinds, a lock-step resistance to his agenda by Republicans in Congress and an unprecedented torrent of advertising” on his path to electoral victory. To political pros on both the left and right, it is certainly noteworthy that the country voted as convincingly as it did to reelect the president after the past four years of frustration and sluggishness. But for his part, Obama once again showed himself to be a gifted campaigner, overcoming not only the shortcomings of his first term in office but also a spirited fight from his opposition and his own woes at the debate podium. Optimism about the economy is now on the rise, though perhaps not as a direct consequence of the policies that the Obama administration has pursued or the ones it championed during the campaign.

For the Republican party, as for the New York Yankees, the focus now shifts to questions about what needs to change. Mitt Romney ran a long and often thoughtful campaign, though at times he seemed hampered by the pull of extremism from within his own party. Pundits may look back at the Republican primary season, for instance, and argue that Romney’s pull to the right was too hard for him to recover towards the center in time for the general election. The Obama campaign certainly fashioned effective rhetoric out of the ideological inconsistencies between Romney as Massachusetts Governor, Republican Primary Candidate, and Republican Presidential Nominee. And, though perhaps to a lesser extent, comments made by the likes of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock later in the campaign did not help the cause, nor did the apparent iciness between Romney and conservative darling Chris Christie in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

Much apart from the Tea Party fervor that roused the base during 2009 and 2010, however, Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, presented a subtly new direction for the Republican Party, particularly in the waning months of the campaign. Romney presented a tax plan that, although never fully articulated, proceeded from sound economic theory and was thought by many analysts to be a good recipe for short-term growth. During the third debate, Romney distanced himself from the neoconservatism that drove Bush-era policy and showed a willingness to strategically limit America’s role in world affairs. Both Romney and Ryan demonstrated an ability to balance concerns about the national debt against concerns about the looming fiscal cliff. They even, at times, gave hints of a more hands-off attitude towards social issues, marking out an important distinction — though one that hasn’t been popular with the base — between personal values and policymaking.

During the 2000 election and even more so during the 2004 election, the Republican party thrived on its “big tent” constituency. George W. Bush won those elections with votes that cut across racial, demographic, and socioeconomic lines, and just as Obama did in 2008, he owned nearly all the swing states. But one question that must now be on the minds of Republican strategists is whether that big tent, which gave Bush and Cheney the White House for eight years, has gotten too big. At one point or another during the primary season, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum each seemed like serious contenders for the Republican nomination for president, their limited credentials and alarming ideas notwithstanding. That the nomination eventually went to a candidate with a more moderate background and superior command of the issues may say something about the underlying geology of the party, despite what the foliage on the surface has at times suggested.

Mitt Romney’s quest for the White House is over, but Paul Ryan, at the spry age of 42, has emerged as a clear party leader along with the headstrong and plainspoken governor of New Jersey. If this writer had to make an absurdly early prediction about the 2016 Republican ticket, it would contain those two men. Which invites the question, is the Republican party returning to the north once more, both ideologically and geographically? Is it jettisoning the deep social conservatism of the south, the neoconservatism of the early aughts, and the ignorant histrionics of the Tea Party in favor of some combination of fiscal pragmatism, social liberalism, and domestic nation-building?

A 2016 Republican ticket premised on the belief that climate change is real, gay marriage is tolerable, and budget deficits are sometimes okay, might be considered a late entrance into the realm of reality but would nonetheless present a stiff challenge to the Democrats. The question then is whether party leaders can root out the voices — which, for the time being, are many — that would seek to prevent that shift.

Why I Voted for Barack Obama

It mainly comes down to social (and socioeconomic) issues for me. I believe that women should have reproductive rights and autonomy. I believe that gays should enjoy civil and legal equality. I believe that the healthcare system should perform much better than it currently does, and that it should serve a much broader section of the populace. I believe that climate change is real, that it has been caused at least in part by human activity, that it poses hardcore problems for economic development both here and abroad (many of which may not manifest for decades), and that it needs to be proactively dealt with by people who grasp its reality and gravity.

I believe that rape is a crime and that pregnancy results from biological processes, not from the alleged will of the mother or a divine being.

In terms of economic and tax policy, it is less clear for me. Mitt Romney, for better or worse, never completely articulated his tax plan during the campaign. It seems conceivable to me that as president he would lower rates and cap deductions, as he proposed, and that that would provide a solid short-term boost to the economy and bring down unemployment. How that would affect the deficit in the short term is unclear, and how it would affect economic performance in the long term is equally unclear. I’ve been pleased, however, to hear that both candidates understand and acknowledge the perils of the fiscal cliff.

Barack Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the wealthy seems motivated by political rhetoric and poorly supported by economic theory. I don’t in fact think that the Obama plan would provide as significant a boost to the economy in the short term as the Romney plan would, although in the long term I think it is more prudent and equitable. Whatever the case, analysts have predicted that job and economic growth will be much stronger over the next four years than during the past four. Much of that has to do with monetary policy and the business cycle, however, not necessarily with who is sitting in the White House, and if nothing else that’s a necessary reminder of the government’s limited power to control the economy.

I believe that the government should invest in education, scientific research, and defense. I believe government should redistribute resources to the working poor, the elderly, and the destitute (the “47 percent”) — as it has done through the tax code and a plethora of social programs for the better part of the 20th century. I do not believe that lowering tax rates makes up for slashing public investment and reducing assistance to the needy.

I believe in capitalism but I believe that the government should regulate markets. Free markets are critical to a modern, industrialized nation, but only if they work properly and fairly and under the rule of law. I believe that the government should promote competition, champion legal and useful market activity, and clamp down on activity that is illegal and/or needlessly imperils the economic well-being of the nation.

I believe that government (especially the executive branch) should do everything in its power to prevent economic collapse (inasmuch as this is a recurring possibility in a capitalist economy), and I believe that the Obama-led government has in fact prevented collapse on not one but several occasions over the past four years.

Lastly, I believe in the individual, but I also believe that no individual has ever done anything great entirely on his own. I believe this country is built on the concept of groups of people working together — families, towns, companies, states. I believe that we’d be wise  to remember that we did not build everything ourselves, and that we must stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us and work arm in arm with those beside us. This has long been the creed of our military and there is no reason it should not also be the creed of our nation.

I believe that we face a challenging road ahead, and I believe that Barack Obama is the better candidate to face these challenges and promote the goals and principles that are most important to me, and that is why I voted for him.

Obama’s Job Approval and Election Polling Numbers Don’t Add Up

Andrew Sullivan points out the strange numbers mismatch:

When Obama was kicking Romney’s ass in July and August, he was in negative approval territory (red). Since September, he has made a comeback in approval even as he has lost the edge to Romney nationwide. I don’t know quite what to make of this. It used to be the case that Obama’s edge was in personal favorability, not approval ratings. But Romney’s net favorables are now the same as or slightly ahead of Obama’s.

Are Americans saying they appreciate the clean-up that Obama has achieved but now want a new start? Or is this a sign of a recovery in the economy which will eventually show up in the result on election day? Or do voters approve of Obama’s record more now but like Romney as a person and so it all evens out into a dead heat?

I think there’s some significance to the fact that Romney has been the stronger and more energetic — if ruder — candidate during the debates. Polling sometimes reflects rational responses to stated policy positions, but it can also reflect the electorate’s feelings about candidates’ personalities (which are admittedly much harder to tie to objective criteria).

If you think back to July and August, both Obama and Romney were making lots of public appearances and giving speeches back then, but they didn’t come together in the combative format of a debate until earlier this month. And it was jarring for a broad range of people, I’d say, to see the way Obama was tossed around during that conversation.

The presidency isn’t simply about technocratically crafting and implementing policy. Negotiating with adversaries and bonding with allies — both domestically and abroad — is still a big part of the job. And I think for a wide swathe of voters, Obama showed some serious vulnerability on this “interpersonal” front during the first debate, suggesting that it might be a problem that has plagued him over the past few years. Lyndon Johnson, by contrast, wasn’t nearly the scholar or policy expert that Obama is, but he had a way with people. He knew how to roll up his sleeves and duke it out. As did Reagan and Clinton — and even GWB to some extent. American voters want to be charmed by their president, and Obama, for all his brilliance, often displays a remoteness that looks and feels like weakness.

Whether this is a reasonable grounds for deciding how to vote is up for debate. I do think it’s worth thinking about how Obama might perform in a combative discussion with Putin or Hugo Chavez given his performance against the comparatively mild Mitt Romney. I also think it’s relevant that Obama has, rather objectively, not been very effective at winning the negotiations that have arisen over the last few years in the context of legislative battles, foreign affairs, and so on. He has, like all great professors, been great at declaring his agenda, declaring his values, and showing himself to be open to compromise and conversation, but some people are — perhaps rightly — turned off by how much he struggles to control the conversation and get his way when placed into a more combative rhetorical environment.

I would guess therefore that there are center-left and middle-of-the-road undecideds out there who appreciate Obama’s agenda and much of what he’s tried to do, but harbor genuine concerns about his ability to get tough with tough people. Given that those types abound in the Republican Congress and on the world stage, Obama’s interpersonal ability might be a more reasonable electoral question than you’d initially think.

Tax Deductions as Payment for Tax Breaks

Joshua Green at Businessweek lays out some figures for Mitt Romney’s proposal to pay for tax cuts by “closing loopholes” and removing deductions:

The risk in providing more clarity about his proposals is that Romney, already reeling from negative ads about his Bain Capital tenure and tax returns, will open himself up to further attacks. Take tax deductions, an obvious source of savings. The government gives up more in deductions (about $1.1 trillion) than it collects ($1 trillion). The costliest ones are also the most popular with the middle class: charitable giving ($47 billion), mortgage interest ($89 billion), retirement savings ($118 billion), and employer-provided health insurance ($131 billion).

There’s been plenty of speculation about why Romney has been so vague about his tax plan, but I think this pretty clearly shows why. He can’t come out and say that he wants to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy by removing deductions that favor the middle class. That would alienate the middle class. But he also can’t propose a plan that would blow up the deficit. That would alienate conservatives. Since Romney can’t afford to fall out of line with either of these groups, his team has arrived at the calculation that it’s best to not give too much away about the tax plan and let people focus instead on optimistic gestures to tax cuts and deficit reduction.

Omission is sometimes an effective political strategy, but in this case it has added a thick stench of incoherence to Romney’s plan, which has itself begun to hurt him in the polls. It’s not an enviable position to have to choose between sound policy and sound politicking, but that’s where Romney is right now. Cutting taxes for the wealthy and making up the difference by leaning on the middle class could in theory be a sound way to achieve modest growth and deficit reduction. But instead of explaining how and why the middle class would bear certain burdens under his plan, he has just talked about tax cuts and deficit neutrality in the abstract, making it difficult to understand where the lost revenue would be made up.

One thing that’s true in modern politics is that talking about tax cuts and the middle class in the same sentence is dangerous no matter which side of the aisle you’re on. Obama has comprehended that truth by talking often about taxing the rich, whereas Romney has talked about tax cuts for the rich. That’s what sets them apart. But Romney and Obama both realize that whatever else they do, they must omit any discussion about taxing the middle class, despite the longstanding reality that the middle class has to pay taxes and it’s really just a question of how much they pay.

The key difference is that Obama can get away with not talking about taxing the middle class more than Romney can, because he’s already talked quite a bit about revenue-producing tax hikes on the rich. But it’s regrettable that this is the debate we’re getting when we should be focusing more on how much to tax the middle class and what to do with the money. Polling has shown that it’s not politically wise to broach that issue, though, so instead it seems we’re just going to have an endless ideological battle about how to tax the rich.

The Irony of Barack Obama’s Legacy

It might be premature to start talking about the legacy of a president who, according to polls, stands a decent chance at reelection this fall. But in a sense, we’ve been talking about Barack Obama’s legacy since at least the summer of 2007, well before he was elected president. I’m working my way through a great new essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the September issue of The Atlantic, and here’s one of the more historically aware statements on Obama’s legacy that I’ve seen recently:

The irony of Barack Obama is this: he has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being “clean” (as Joe Biden once labeled him)—and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches. This irony is rooted in the greater ironies of the country he leads. For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government. In warring against that paradox, African Americans have historically been restricted to the realm of protest and agitation. But when President Barack Obama pledged to “get to the bottom of exactly what happened,” he was not protesting or agitating. He was not appealing to federal power—he was employing it. The power was black—and, in certain quarters, was received as such.

It’s convenient to think that racial tension in this country has dissipated over the last half-century through the arrival of progressive social legislation and cultural change. But what’s more likely, as Coates suggests, is that new laws and customs have just sublimated racism into publicly acceptable political preferences; it’s not that racism is dead, it’s just that racists nowadays have more legitimate ways to object to people and policies they don’t like, and in a somewhat perverse sense, to defend their views with even greater authority.

This is why it’s important to see Barack Obama in the context of the longstanding division within the black community over whether it’s better to object to the system or master the system. Coates may be right that blacks have typically leaned — or been pushed — towards “protest and agitation” against a system that has never favored them, but there are plenty of people within the black community who have questioned the wisdom of that approach. Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Michael Steele, and Herman Cain stand out as recent examples, but clearly they have all rejected “protest and agitation” by embracing political conservatism, which is still largely unpalatable to the vast majority of American blacks.

Seen against this backdrop, Barack Obama becomes the nascent model of an American black man who is neither a protestor nor a conservative, but rather a socially established, politically pragmatic liberal. He is, in other words, a conceptual compromise between diametrically opposed philosophies within the black community.  That’s not to say that his presidency has been good for black people living in America today, or that he has lived up to the hype, but if you take the longer historical view it’s worth understanding that he represents a new — and perhaps still emerging — type within the black community.

The key question then is whether such a compromised type can effect change in ways that the black community may still need. In comparison to black agitators of the 20th century, perhaps not, but then again perhaps it is time to move beyond the concept of a “black community” as something that is separate from mainstream society. By most measures, Barack Obama has done far less to further any distinctly black or liberal agenda than to show blacks how to be successful and mainstream without completely selling out on values that they feel they must remain committed to. That is a win in certain ways, of course, it’s just that there is a huge difference between remaining conceptually or rhetorically committed to values, on the one hand, and actually pushing those values deeper into the fabric of society, on the other. That is where many liberals — not just black liberals –have been disappointed by Obama’s presidency.

The Paradox of an “Atrocity Prevention” Doctrine

Philip Gourevitch writes in this week’s New Yorker about President Obama’s careful avoidance of a “rigid foreign-policy doctrine,” and one of the points that emerges from the piece is that an “atrocity prevention” doctrine really isn’t much of a doctrine at all. Taking a stance against atrocities per se is the morally right thing to do, of course, but it’s also a negligible strategic move: no major western power would ever take a pro-atrocity stance on foreign policy, and moreover, political disagreements over how to conduct foreign policy tend to settle out to differences of opinion about how to define atrocities and which ones ought to take precedence. This is true on the domestic stage, as evidenced by McCain, Lieberman and the other hawks’ loud lobbying for more decisive action in Syria. It’s even more true on the international stage, where Israel’s interests are notably at odds with those of China and Russia.

A doctrine of any sort, but particularly one of foreign policy, needs to have some kind of goal-oriented driver in order to be a doctrine. This was the perversely appealing quality of the Bush Doctrine, which said that countries harboring terrorists and posing some kind of security threat to the U.S. amounted to an atrocity worthy of prevention, often via preemptive military action. Reasonable people can disagree over whether that was a justifiable stance by the standards of international law and basic morality, but there can’t be any disagreement over whether it was a doctrine. In the case of Bush’s foreign policy, there were a litany of mishaps, undesirable outcomes, and downright failures, and on that front it might be argued that Obama’s foreign policy has had a better overall track record: the wrapping up of two wars, the removal of America’s top enemy and many of its lesser ones, and effective support roles in Libya, Uganda and elsewhere. But operational success and strategic clarity are not the same thing, nor do they strictly imply each other, and enduring truth about American foreign policy is that solid strategy doesn’t always produce operational success, nor does operational success lead to strategic clarity.

On the doctrine front, Elie Wiesel has his preferences about which atrocities we ought to try to prevent, Dick Cheney and George Bush have theirs, and President Obama, I would suppose, doesn’t fully see eye to eye with any of them. But I don’t see how that supports a conclusion that President Obama and/or Elie Wiesel are atrocity preventionists while Cheney and Bush are not. It’s just that the disparity in operational success between Obama and Bush-Cheney, which is significant, must be brought to bear on judgments about the strategic clarity of their foreign policy doctrines with a greater degree of nuance. It’s possible, that is, to have a hazy strategy about atrocities, wars, terrorists, uprisings, rebellions, and so on, but to still have a reasonably high rate of operational success. That would be true of Obama’s foreign policy, and the inverse would be true of Bush’s.

This might have all turned out to be semantics under a different set of circumstances, but the case of Syria has turned out to pose a terribly real predicament for the Obama administration. Atrocities have surely taken place in Syria — Gourevitch writes that “The United Nations estimates that Assad’s men have now killed some ten thousand Syrians and tortured or imprisoned many more” — but if Obama’s foreign policy doctrine were really one of pure atrocity prevention, he would have already launched an air war against Syria, at the least. Quite possibly, the reason the U.S. has yet to act decisively in any respect is that shorting out the Annan-Assad negotiation, angering China and/or Russia, and stoking the flames of the Iran-Israel standoff could lead to a far more atrocious situation than what is currently gripping the region, and that would be on our hands to clean up.

Working to establish legal and humanitarian sanctions and accepting that the U.S. “cannot control every event” may not give the president, who has proven himself to be quite objective-oriented in foreign policy, much of a sense of satisfaction; certainly, it can’t compare to the feeling of killing Osama bin Laden and ending two wars. But such is the paradox of trying to prevent atrocities on the international stage; sometimes the greatest atrocities are prevented by measured inaction.

A President in Love

A lot of details about Barack Obama’s past girlfriends, twenty-something love life, and early encounters with poetry have been coming out over the past day or so, and while I think the hyper-intellectual love letters are nostalgic and sweet, what intrigues me more is the vision of Obama’s political worldview taking form. Take this note, for example, which he wrote to girlfriend, Alex McNear, in the summer of 1982:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

A certain kind of conservatism that he respects more than bourgeois liberalism? This sounds strikingly familiar to the Obama we have known as president. He doesn’t say precisely which kind of conservatism he respects more, or why, but it’s clear he holds a certain level of contempt for protest-happy, sign-waving liberals who don’t have any real skin in the game of political discourse, and also that he respects the virtue of humility enough that he is not prepared to totally write off conservatism. Bourgeois liberals have their ideals, for sure, but they aren’t grounded in the “social reality/order” of their time in the way that Eliot was, or that conservatism broadly was, or that Obama felt he was, perhaps. So what is it precisely about Eliot that Obama respects? Is it merely that he’s grounded? Is that he accepts the ambivalence between order and chaos, purity and brutality? Is it that he remains stoic in the face of these intractable dualities?

These are questions that must have been difficult for the young Obama. Having come from humble, almost hardscrabble roots, and then having been suddenly thrust into the bourgeois, urban whirlwind of Columbia University in his early twenties, all the while trying to sort out his racial, political, class, and intellectual identity, he nonetheless grapples with these issues with a profound degree of sensitivity and introspection — qualities that persist in him to this day. And what appears to be taking form in this letter is his taste for ambivalent pragmatism, an intellectual and moral disposition that has also characterized a great deal of his political career. He is not an ideologue, not a zealot, not willing to commit, for better or worse, to any of the extremes of social order, politics, or even sexuality (notably, there is no mention about race here). But that doesn’t mean that he denies the existence — indeed the permanence — of those extremes and the tenuous prospect of standing between them. Contrary to the notion that ambivalence is weakness, Obama wants to believe that resisting the centrifugal pull of extremism is what gives a person strength.

Where Obama appears to part ways with Eliot is in his rejection of “deep fatalism.” Obama has always revealed himself in political life to be an optimist — sometimes, it must be said, without the level of grounding that his base would appreciate — and this has perhaps allowed him to avoid being swooped up into a reactionary mindset. Curiously, he says he shares a fatalism with the western tradition, but this, I think, is less a personal embrace of fatalism than a historical awareness of how fatalism enabled the rise nazism and fascism in the west during the twentieth century. Fatalism is the evil, rotted outcome of ambivalence, whereas optimism is the good, strong, progressive outcome. Don’t be surprised at Eliot’s “irreconcilable ambivalence,” Obama implores, as if to say, “don’t be surprised at me.”

Special Operations and the American Mission

A really nice piece from Daniel Klaidman at Newsweek describes last week’s Somali SEAL raid that rescued two aid workers:

The Somali raid, for all of its Hollywood drama, is only one of hundreds of daring missions conducted by elite U.S. commandos in recent years. Navy SEALs and other special operators, with the encouragement of President Obama, have become a primary weapon in “denied areas” like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Their ability to go after terrorists, pirates, or other criminals with stealth, precision, and lethal force is in line with Obama’s basic approach to the shadow wars. From the earliest days of his administration he began pushing his generals to pursue missions that were surgical and narrowly tailored to clearly defined objectives—whether rescuing hostages or protecting well-defined American interests. What he did not want to do was open up new fronts in the war on terror or get drawn into fighting local insurgencies around the world.

One has to think that President Obama has helped to usher in a new operational template in the post-post-9/11 era. It is not just a matter of focusing in on narrow objectives, using precise tactical maneuvers, and striking with great force and timing — for all of which the military deserves credit. Mr. Obama also deserves a great deal of credit for committing to special operations as the centerpiece of the American military mission. After the drawdown in Afghanistan next year, these types of operations are going to become even more front and center, and will be an important way of subduing an increasingly fractured set of enemies and also of demonstrating to our friends and foes around the world what our underlying moral convictions are.

The American military is an awe-inspiring force, but as we have seen since 9/11, it is ultimately up to politicians (presidents, really) to decide whether or not that force will be deployed for good. Successes like these show our tax dollars going to good use.

Dumb Coups

Yesterday’s Boehner-Bachmann rally outside the Capitol was largely a rehash of the teabagger bacchanal back on September 12th. A large, angry, incomprehensibly white crowd toting signs portraying the president as witch-doctor, nazi, communist, and African Muslim marched around the building where, for some three months now, the Congress has been engaged in a bitter battle over whether and how to do something about the healthcare problem in this country. For added flavor, this time around there could be seen in the crowd such images as a machine gun pointed at the president’s head and a photograph of burnt Jewish corpses piled high at the Dachau extermination camp, clearly intimating that “Obamacare” would produce similar results.

Starting with the colorful town hall meetings at the end of the summer and carrying through to the rally yesterday, what began as a serious debate on the nuts and bolts of health care reform – and perhaps also the necessity of health care reform – has turned into an ugly slugfest between the radical right wing of the Republican party and…(you complete the sentence). The point is, in the past months it has become difficult for even the most attentive minds to nail down exactly who or what the teabagging movement is polemicizing against; President Obama, the Democrats, the working poor, the uninsured, illegal immigrants, Congress, government? Surely these few would have to be included on the list of entities that teabaggers identify as their targets, but to isolate one above the others seems a task for the foolhardy.

It is an understatement to say that the opposition to healthcare reform has failed to find a focal point in the matrix of public reason. Instead, perhaps for reasons both intentional and unconscious, vocal rightists have used the few vaguely progressive policy proposals of the Obama administration as a springboard to launch a furious national outcry over latent right-wing fears about social justice, property redistribution, race relations, and the role of government; in short, the very issues that will shape the discourse of any functional 21st century democracy. However, what began in late summer as a quasi-populist movement of dissenters has now taken into its ranks prominent members of the government, and the civic and historical ramifications of that are truly frightening. With usual hubris, Michele Bachmann announced to the crowd of demonstrators, some of whom had traveled all through the night to be there, that she had called this “press conference” and doggonit they had shown up! Behind her stood but a few congressional compadres who seemed ready at a moment’s notice to jettison their suits and ties and jump into the crowd.

Never mind the ensuing spectacle, which included John Boehner attributing a passage from the Declaration of Independence to the Preamble to the Constitution, or Bachmann’s insinuation that the Democrats’ bill was bad because it was too long to read, or the fiendish chanting of “Kill this Bill,” or Eric Cantor’s Bobby Jindal impression. By now we know that the cardinal values of the Republican leadership include prideful ignorance, stupidity and charmlessness. What we were still uncertain of, but got an answer to yesterday I believe, was the question of whether members of the U.S. Congress would condone an overtly racist people’s campaign that has refused to make a substantive contribution to the public debate and regards government itself as a pest.

Like another Republican woman with inviting looks and an irritating north country drawl, Ms. Bachmann has become a poster girl for a movement urgently trying to strip down government, and by extension, the body she works for. There is something shallow and promiscuous about this, not just from Bachmann’s point of view but from the broader point of view of the movement she represents.

Given the troubles this country now faces – severe economic insecurity, two seemingly endless wars in the Middle East, massive debt – it is perfectly reasonable to have a debate about health care; about whether a public option is the best formula, about how to finance it, about whether to tackle the problem now, about whether we should have done it twenty years ago. But the Republican party has given into its radical wing’s appetite for the quick, the carnal and the primitive and in doing so it has arrogantly brushed aside the chance to take part in this important discussion. That is behavior unbecoming of a political party in this country.

There is another point worth noting. Contrary to the tea party doctrine, a real difference exists between limited government and lack of government. The former is rooted in the still evolving philosophies of libertarianism, political conservatism and European liberalism, all of which are legitimate, if perhaps problematic, theories of governance. But there is the point – they are theories of governance, not justifications for non-government. The suggestion that government is the problem, which emanates from Reagan neoconservatism, may be in part just rhetoric aimed at promoting a kind of radical libertarianism. That is fine. But the suggestion that government is unnecessary, or that government ought not do anything, which has been gaining support among the tea party crowd, moves categorically past even the most ambitious neoliberal prescriptions to an implicit denial of the necessity of the political union that is the United States.

I would be the first person to tell you about the importance of dissent and public demonstration in a democracy. I have myself engaged in it, and like most reasonable people, I am not offended by people with whom I disagree engaging in it. It is part of the necessary and inevitable back and forth – the modus vivendi, as Rawls called it – of democratic life. But, when dissent summarily dismisses content-based issues in favor of railing against government, and invokes racist, classist, and historically inappropriate imagery towards that end, then it fails to be dissent. Of course, there is something terribly awry in all of this: an engaged, dissenting Republican party would likely be a boon to the overall health care debate. Instead all we have is Boehner-Bachmann, and thank God it’s pronounced “BAY-ner” or else some Freudian analysis might really be in order.

The Trouble with Medicare

If you lived during the 1960s, or the Reagan 80s, or the Republican insurrection of the 1990s, then you know how bizarre it is that the people who are now lying down on the tracks for Medicare are the Republicans. Ronald Reagan, who is openly revered by current party leaders as the ideological godfather, made a thirty-year career out of fighting Medicare and brought notable characters along with him. In 1961, while serving as spokesman for General Electric and before his real entrance into politics, Reagan cut a spoken-word track entitled, “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine.” In that gentle masculine voice that rocked a generation, he warned that if we didn’t kill Medicare, we would “spend our sunset years telling our children and grandchildren what it once was like in America when men were free.”

George H.W. Bush and Barry Goldwater chimed in with similar comments in 1964, the year before Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Social Security Act – and thereby Medicare – into law. Bush called it “socialized medicine” and Goldwater “rationing.” Sound familiar? Nearly twenty-five years later, at the end of Reagan’s presidency, Republicans were still lambasting Medicare. The fervor continued well into the 1990s when presidential contender Bob Dole proudly declared during the 1996 campaign that he had been one of the 12 congressmen to vote against Medicare in 1965.

It is fair to say that prior to President Obama’s taking office, the Republican resentment of Medicare ran long and deep. It lasted nearly 50 years, from the very inception of a plan for government-run, single-payer health coverage in the early 1960s to the Obama administration’s call for broad reform earlier this year. And criticisms against it were marked by every rhetorical method ranging from Reagan’s suave dishonesty to Bush and Goldwater’s shallow Soviet allusions, Gingrich’s hubris and Dole’s resume-thumping.

Now, however, Medicare is the Alamo for congressional Republicans. As evidenced by the disastrous hearings in the Senate Finance Committee last week, in which two public option amendments proposed by Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Jay Rockefeller were struck down, Republicans and even conservative Democrats are feeling the pinch to vote against anything that might conceivably pose a threat to Medicare beneficiaries. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), when pressed by Schumer over the fact that Medicare is government-run and yet virtually all Republicans support it, responded that Medicare is wonderful but “the government is a predator.” This stance, which is shared by the majority of Grassley’s party colleagues, probably has Reagan rolling in his grave.

How did this change happen, and why? For one thing, Medicare has been a boon to senior citizens in America. Despite its financial woes, which ought to be addressed, and its need for closer auditing of claims to root out fraud, Medicare has provided older people with very good medical coverage and advantages at a relatively low cost when compared to so-called “market insurance” options. This is a fact that Republicans would like us to quickly look past. While they openly acknowledge the singular value of Medicare, they know it hurts their position for opponents to be pointing out that it is run by the government. In this tightrope act, the incoherence of the Republican position becomes plain as day; they want to preserve free-market health insurance and Medicare – a government-run, single-payer health care system that is more public than the “public option” – at the expense of any reform that would expand coverage.

It doesn’t make any sense to want to protect a government coverage system from another government coverage system. It makes even less sense for the party of Reagan to be in this predicament at all. But there are three important factors that help to explain why, contrary to all reason, the Republicans have sided with Medicare in this debate.

The first is the geriatric lobby – old people on Medicare and loving it. This sounds like a joke but it is not. Old people in this country tend to have an above-average amount of free time in which to take advantage of their Medicare benefits, organize to discuss among themselves the importance of their medical care, and drown their congressmen and senators in phone calls and petitions. Putting politics aside, Medicare has – and has always had – a pretty favorable rating among the people who are on it. Obama’s plan to reform health care by cutting costs from Medicare (something, ahem, Reagan would do), has seniors scared that cut costs will translate into cut services, which is a definite possibility. There would, of course, not be any death panels or secret euthanasia program, as some have suggested, but there might be a little less care for Medicare beneficiaries. What is ironic, is that the sincere apprehension about this possibility is an instructive metric of just how much people who are on Medicare like it. Imagine that.

The second factor is the insurance lobby, which stands to see a lot of its profits lost if the government institutes a viable public option to supplement its current programs. The media has been rather complacent about reporting on the fact that many members of Congress who have played active roles in the health care debate thus far receive – or have received – generous campaign contributions from insurance companies. While it is true that members of both parties have received these contributions, the Republican recipients have seemed generally more swayed by them. Thus, it is not hard to see how these recipients would use their influence on Capitol Hill to fight for the interests that keep their campaigns financially afloat. The fight is hardly a fair one; some reports say there are six insurance lobbyists in Washington for every member of Congress. Insofar as the insurance industry has converted certain members of Congress into their legislative mouthpieces, the Republican talk of the importance of Medicare may really just be a way of hiding from the American people what’s really going on: a massive offensive by the health insurance companies to quash any government reform package that will force them to reduce their rates.

The third factor, and probably the most crucial, is that the Republicans don’t want to see Obama succeed. LBJ signed Medicare into law and gained immortality (we’re still talking about him, aren’t we?). A second major wave of successful health care reform by a democratic president would be more of a loss for the Republicans than a victory for the Democrats. That is because it would raise serious questions about the Republican Party’s commitment to the public good, which is already in some doubt. This is a high-stakes game for the Republicans, though, because, in their characteristic approach, they have not come to the table with any proposal of their own. All they have offered is hyperbole and groundless rejection. If Obama and the Democrats are able to overcome this obstacle and pass a successful public option anyway, it will make the Republicans look old, stubborn, ineffectual, and lazy.

Whatever the case, conservatives ought to have a long, hard think about this issue before resorting to the Cold War catchphrases. Times have changed, the Reagan paradigm is obsolete, and the value of Medicare has been widely acknowledged. Libertarians who fear too much government intrusion should recall the founding words of their faith – “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – each of which bears a direct link to notions of choice and well-being. Health may be a matter of chance, but health care is a right, and that is the unequivocal consensus in the western, industrialized, democratic world. When this country finally acknowledges that via the passage of strong legislation, our children may look back on 2009 or 2010 the way our parents look back on 1965.