Dana Blankenhorn

When Bipartisanship?

I called it the Nixon Thesis of Conflict for a reason.

The Republican governing assumptions of the last 40 years, which dominated Americans' thoughts throughout that time,  held that Democrats were illegitimate. They were "soft on communism, or "soft on hippies," they were "tax and spend" or they were "Defeatocrats."

As the era ground on Republicans even refused to call the Democratic Party by its right name. They called it the Democrat Party, and they did this deliberately. They did it because they did not respect the legitimacy of anyone calling themselves a Democrat.

So why is anyone surprised that, in the wake of the President's election, Republicans have kept to the same line? In the face of the Obama Thesis of Consensus most Republicans, from the rank-and-file up to party leaders, have not moved an inch in the Democratic Party's direction.

To Republicans, from the hoariest milblogger to the highest-ranking candidate, compromise is akin to surrender. To them politics is war, and war is all hell, and if you didn't know that what are you doing in it?

Despite this, the President's attempts to find compromise are significant and important.

They are important in terms of setting the course of the future. He will find no one to negotiate with in the present Republican Party. That party must change, and change in many painful ways, before it can rejoin the process of governance.

But it will. It will just take time.

Obama's Lincoln

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 7 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Every crisis President adopts Abraham Lincoln as their personal political savior.

The first Roosevelt wore a ring with a lock his his hair, the second hired a Lincoln biographer to write his speeches. Nixon talked to Lincoln's portrait.

What these Presidents were looking for from Lincoln was strength. Lincoln was hated in his time, both north and south. His own Republican partisans distrusted him as weak, and many southerners still consider him a war criminal.

Barack Obama has identified heavily with Lincoln. You may joke he's got the lobes for it. Both are long and lanky Illinoisians who seemed to come from nowhere at a time of crisis. For most that's all they see.

Today, in the Capitol Rotunda, the President revealed which of the many Lincolns of our imagination he is talking about.

The reconciler:

In the war's final weeks, aboard Grant's flagship, The River Queen, President Lincoln was asked what was to be done with the rebel armies once General Lee surrendered. With victory at hand, Lincoln could have sought revenge. He could have forced the South to pay a steep price for their rebellion. But despite all the bloodshed and all the misery that each side had exacted upon the other, and despite his absolute certainty in the rightness of the cause of ending slavery, no Confederate soldier was to be punished, Lincoln ordered. They were to be treated, as he put it, "liberally all round."

Note that the President did not quote any of the man's great speeches, just an off-hand comment that spoke to what the country most needed, a true peace of the heart.

The Biggest Danger in Health Care

Ignorance.

Blind, philistine pig ignorance is rampant among Americans on health care subjects, the product of a generation which (thanks to government's refusing to help) has had to make do when it comes to personal health.

Now that we seem to have the political will to change, ignorance is threatening to undo it all.

Take the subject of vaccines.

A vaccine is generally a weakened form of an actual disease. By its nature it carries risks, but these are offset by benefits. If we know that 1 child in 1,000 will die from a disease, but 1 in 1 million may be harmed by the vaccine, it's pretty obvious what you should do, right?

But Deirdre Imus (who is it that puts microphones in front of these ignoramuses?) says no. Vaccines are all a plot. They're trying to kill us. Just say no.

This kind of idiocy kills people. It kills little kids. We have a rising epidemic in measles, mumps and rubella (german measles) because stupid parents are listening to a-holes like Imus and refusing to immunize their kids. There's a whole industry devoted to this kind of ignorant resistance.

Even after it has been shown that the originator of this pile of shit, Andrew Wakefield (a gastroenterologist, not an immunologist, not an expert on infectious diseases of any kind), made up the only "scientific" study showing a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, using kids hand-picked by lawyers looking to score on the backs of worried parents, it goes on.

There is an entire industry dedicated to resisting vaccines and letting innocents die. We saw it in the controversy over Gardasil, which must be taken between the time a woman starts menstruating and before she starts having sexual intercourse. In other words, adolescence, preferably early adolescence, which most parents still define as childhood. Parents must consent, and many don't. As a result this form of cancer will kill thousands of women across the country 20, 30 or 40 years from now.

But the nonsense over vaccines is nothing like the nonsense over electronic medical records (EMRs).

Business is Changing Sides

There is a fascinating bidding war going on right now in American politics. Populism is rising in both political parties, and should the populists gain control of one, business will abandon it.

Or, as I said here last year, Populism is for Losers.

What has happened in the Stimulus Bill debate is that President Obama has isolated his opposition to conservative populists. Business interests are silently supportive, which the big money boys at CNBC are having trouble getting their heads around.

Thus they're playing up the President's populist move to trim executive pay. Wall Street hates that, but the rest of the business community consists of borrowers who know that if your banker is going to suck at the government teat, they're going to have to play by mama's rules.

Polls show people have chosen sides. Populists on one side, everyone else on the other. And the Republicans in Congress are going overwhelmingly with the populists. Exx-cellent.

Fighting the War at Home

I had not thought before how the current era is a reversal of the FDR era.

We've had the war. Now are we going to fight the peace?

It may well be true, as Joseph Stiglitz believes, that the Iraq War cost us $3 trillion. We know we put $1 trillion into the actual fight. Figure another $1 trillion in a phony real estate bubble, another $1 trillion of Confederate Money used to cover it all up, and you get to $3 trillion pretty quick.

War first, Depression after.

There was fear this would happen after World War II, and it was a background character in the film The Best Years of our Lives. What prevented that Depression was new demand, driven by the GI Bill and the Marshall Plan. It was summed up in a speech by Frederic March, playing sergeant-banker Al Stephenson:

There are some who say that the old bank is suffering from hardening of the arteries and of the heart. I refuse to listen to such radical talk. I say that our bank is alive, it's, it's generous, it's, it's human, and we're going to have such a line of customers seeking and getting small loans that people will think we're gambling with the depositors' money. And we will be. We'll be gambling on the future of this country.

Point is Republicans have always rejected the idea of stimulating demand, unless they could kill people with what resulted. Without the Cold War they would have crucified Truman, and the Baby Boom boom would not have happened.

It's amazing to me that the same people who thought nothing about laying out $1 trillion to kill people, and who ignored the theft of another $1 trillion covering it up, who called all this patriotic and ideologically sound, are now so uniformly condemning the President's efforts to stimulate demand and fight the war at home.

So let's be clear about this money. Let's be clear about where it comes from, where it's going, and what our choices are.

Fire Rahm

The Obama Administration is supposed to be all about team. It's supposed to be about broadening the coalition, delivering a consensus, and moving forward with honesty and transparency.

So why is it being run by a hack out of the Red-Blue Bush-Clinton wars?

Rahm Emanuel has already proven his incompetence to this President. If the Chief of Staff is in charge of vetting cabinet nominees, how did he not catch Daschle, Killifer or all the conflicts-of-interest they implied? Why is it that the stimulus is getting all the stimulus taken out of it? If it's all about team, why was Howard Dean kicked to the curb?

I understand that the President needs a ruthless pol in his White House who makes the trains run on time, a bad cop to his good cop. But if Rahm playing the President's game or Rahm's?

In most Administrations there is an outside game and an inside game. Most need compromise in order to breathe, and accomodation. But the biggest failures of Lincoln and Roosevelt came from their acceptance of this.

• Lincoln brought in a corrupt Pennsylvania Democrat as his first Secretary of War, and nearly lost the war in the process.
• Roosevelt listened to Republican bankers who told him to back off the New Deal, and nearly destroyed himself in the process.

Obama is falling behind the national mood and the reason is Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel's background was in Clinton's compromises, which were necessary at that time, swimming as he was against the Republican tide. But that tide is gone, it has in fact reversed,and when you lean against a collapsed wall you fall down, too.

Notice that I'm not arguing that Emanuel is corrupt or a dark force, as many in the Netroots are. I am arguing that his politics, and political style, are obsolete and not appropriate to the moment. His instincts are strengthening your enemies, and change always has enemies. 

The Influence Game

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 6 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Since the birth of the Republic media and politics have been one.

When the President quoted Washington at his Inauguration, he was in fact quoting pamphleteer Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense and The Crisis made him the Springsteen of that time:

"America, in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words; with hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come; let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations."

The American media went from pamphlets to penny papers, from books to urban newspapers, from radio to TV, and politicians always followed. The wisest cultivated the new media, the most devious also excoriated the old.

We are again in the midst of such a media transformation. We are moving from an age dominated by TV (well, cable) to one dominated by the Internet. This has many implications. Depth over drama, transparency over control, an end to the concept of journalists as gatekeepers to one in which we're enablers, using links to empower our work rather than acting-out.

And so we come again to the threat of newspapers to go out of business, unless they're given financial control over the Internets.

News Industry Threatens Suicide, Blogger Offers Rope

Having failed for 15 years to build a compelling business model (because it looked at the whole thing backwards) newspapers are now threatening to commit seppuku unless we are all forced to grovel at their feet and pay them for their drivel.

News of this final insult comes in an LA Times column from Tim Rutten, quoting New York Times editor Bill Keller.

Here's the idea and see if you can spot the flaw.

The existing players in the news industry get an antitrust exemption, like baseball. Then they all get together in a Trust that can charge people for accessing their crap and get away with it. They'll make you pay because otherwise you will know nothing. Even the Google will have to pay.

Think of it. Bloggers won't know about anything, and won't be able to link to it, unless they pay. Readers won't know about traffic accidents, or city council meetings, or the workings of their legislatures, unless they pay whatever the Trust tells them they must to keep fatties like Rutten in skittles and beer.

What do I have to say in response? Oh please do it. Please, please, please.

The Third Bank of the United States

In all the talk over bank bailouts an obvious and very American solution is being ignored.

A Bank of the United States. 

The original Bank was proposed in 1791 by Alexander (10-spot) Hamilton. It fulfilled many roles the Federal Reserve now fills. A second bank, chartered in 1816, was closed by Andrew Jackson to much political rejoicing – and the country promptly fell into a deep Depression.

The purpose of the Third Bank of the United States would be to re-start the banking system. We could capitalize it with the current TARP funds and then start making loans. All kinds of loans, the kinds of credit facilities good businesses need to keep operating, to make payroll, buy inventory, all that. And the bank would charge a market rate – maybe just .01% less to bring business in the door.

To make clear that this bank stands mid-way between government control and Wall Street greed, I suggest we put it where the first two banks were -- Philadelphia.

Once the new bank was operating you could let the existing banks fail. Instead of buying their worst assets you could buy their best, and add these to the bank, increasing its value. Later, as normal business began returning, you could spin out these assets at a substantial profit.

As with the other U.S. Banks, the new bank would exist for a limited period of time, 20 years, to allow for an orderly and profitable liquidation. It would not hold tax receipts – the Federal Reserve would continue to manage the system as a whole – and the new bank would be regulated by the Fed as well.

War Against Oil Still Being Fought

If you turn on the TV or listen to the mainstream media these days you would think that the War Against Oil was a one-time boom that is now going bust.

All eyes are said to be on the stimulus package, looking for cash to invest. Supposedly. Meanwhile our enemies in this war, like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, are laughing themselves silly. America needs oil "like air, like oxygen to live, to survive.” You can almost hear the Bond villain laughter.

But this is not the reality. America is already the world's largest producer of wind energy, and will soon be number one in solar as well. Investors in the space remain optimistic. Some communities are starting to pay people who produce energy at their homes or offices.

It's true that the enemy is powerful, but its power is diminishing. The fact that oil prices are holding near the $50 level is good news. Everyone now knows that oil remains a permanent check on economic growth -- that as growth returns oil prices will go up and take away any gains. This is leading to a growing determination, especially in this country, to rid ourselves of this dependence once and for all.

The best way to guarantee continued success is by changing the business model. A carbon tax would do that. In the short run it would work better than a price floor -- if all industrialized countries adopt it. That's a danger for both proposals, and it's the main reason this Congress is unlikely to adopt it. (Instead we'll go with cap-and-trade, which is a short-term fix.)