Dana Blankenhorn

Run Against The Oilagarchs

The "enthusiasm gap" is as great today as it was 40 years ago, when the anti-war movement was at its height, when Nixon seemed surrounded by enemies, when his cause seemed most hopeless.

He had tried everything he could think of to accommodate the left. He supported creation of the EPA, OSHA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission. But it meant nothing to his enemies, and his friends were turning on him as a result.

So what happened? He won a virtual draw in the 1970 elections, with highlight races like James Buckley (right) winning a minority victory in New York and Bill Brock knocking off Al Gore Sr. balanced against losses elsewhere. (It is easier to score gains when you start with a minority, as Nixon did.)

And he learned not to accommodate. He would never again appear so liberal to his own base, and would try henceforth to feed them more than rhetoric.

The Core of the Issue

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 35 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Every political crisis in American history is, in fact, a sign of economic transformation.

Today's transformation is the move from energy defined by resources to energy defined by devices, by technology.

There is plenty of energy around -- from the Sun, from the ground, from the wind, from the air all around us. All we need do is harness and deliver it. This will trnasform all our financial, political and international relationships, so those who depend on the old relationships are fighting back with everything they have.

It's not about mosques or gay marriage or anything else we seem to worry about. All these issues are means to an end. They are pushed by, and products of, the financial strength of the oil power. Follow the money and this becomes obvious.

An Opportunity Agenda

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 33 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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This is the point in any crisis Presidency when the ghouls come out.

The problems haven't been solved. The President seems to be moving too slowly. He's trapped between his need to be the old AntiThesis (Clinton the Triangulator in this case) and the old fading Thesis (Bushism) still practiced in the Capitol. His own troops are dejected. Change is hard.

What turned things around for all past crisis leaders was, simply, an agenda. Setting a course against the true enemy, in defiance of political assumptions, is the test of leadership.

In the current case, that agenda is simple.

The War Against Oil.

As I've said before, a climate bill isn't really a climate bill. It's really a jobs bill. It's also, right now, the hardest bill to get through the Congress. Republicans won't touch it, and many Democrats are wary as well.

The argument is over stimulus. The question should not be how much, but what the stimulus does. A stimulus that doesn't take us in a useful direction is mindless spending. Whether that's in the form of government aid or tax cuts, it's equally mindless.

We need a stimulus that creates stuff.

The last depression was ended by World War II. Republicans love to say that. They don't like to admit that the war was fought at a deficit, although it was. But we don't have to build bombs to win this war. We can win it with plowshares.

But we first have to declare it.

Sheikhs of America

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 31 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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What may appear to journalists, or even historians, to be an ideological war usually turns out, in America, to be a choice between economic interests.

In our time the choice is on the title of this blog. It's a choice between energy defined by resources, which come out of the ground, or by devices that harness the energy all around us.

A new Thesis is born when the crisis leader turns definitively toward the new economy, explicitly rejecting the old. And it's brought on by the old economy seizing political power in an attempt to hang on against the new.

In other words the fight of our time is not between left and right, liberal and conservative, Democratic or Republican. It's between devices (the alternative energy of windmills, solar cells, tidal energy, and geothermal) and resources (coal, oil, natural gas). The former should define wealth, not the latter. And it's the climate bill that matters, nothing else. 

The current situation can be seen in the graph above from the Environmental Law Institute. We're subsidizing resources. We're choosing oil, coal and gas over other forms of energy, through the instrument of government. This is what the President must change if he is to seize the crisis of our time and put our economy on a sustainable path.

The Big Dog

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 27 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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One of the recurring patterns of our political history is that the weapons of the previous antithesis must be relied upon to push forward a new thesis, even though the thesis and antithesis have no relation to one another.

Some examples:

• Lincoln was a Whig. He was a great admirer of Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser. Yet his thesis, of union, seemed to be the opposite of what Clay stood for.
• Teddy Roosevelt was a Mugwump. The Mugwumps were "big chiefs," influential and powerful men, who coalesced around Grover Cleveland to fight the corruption of the 1880s. His chief opponents were always other Republicans.
• Franklin Roosevelt identified with Wilsonism. Wilson combined Bryan's populism with an aggressive foreign policy, all supposedly in the name of principle.
• Nixon was Eisenhower's vice president. Eisenhower was the antithesis to the New Deal, accepting its premises but promising a kinder, gentler, more business-friendly version.

The Blitz of the Gulf and the War Against Oil

What has happened in the Gulf, what continues to happen, is not Barack Obama's Katrina. Nor is it anyone else's. It's not Pearl Harbor, nor is it 9-11.

What it's most comparable to, in terms of American history, is the London Blitz.

(I don't like using AP or even linking to them, but the picture on this page, by the APs Charles Riedel, is becoming the Iwa Jima Flag-on-Mount-Sirabachi moment in this disaster, so I've thumbnailed it. Historians know that an earlier group's arrival on that mountain, with a smaller flag, was the real deal to the men fighting there, and the second flag was put up for show. Yet it's that one we remember. As we'll remember Riedel's Laughing Gull. I entirely agree with AOL's Matt Mendolson on that.)

For most Americans the Gulf is distant. This can be hard to believe but it's true. Even here in Atlanta, where I live, the impacts for now are slight. My neighbor won't be heading to Destin any time soon. Beyond that life remains normal.

This is how America was during the Blitz. It was something happening elsewhere and to other people. What most today have forgotten is that, for many Americans of that time, this was highly desirable. War was highly controversial.

What President Roosevelt did, what Barack Obama needs to do, was to mold public opinion, slowly, toward a war footing. The movies which appeared and were green-lighted in 1940 were not all propaganda pieces, as they would become in the succeeding years. But many did take the gathering darkness as their subtext. And in that era, movies were the dominant medium.

Today the Internet is the dominant medium. It is a medium that is very difficult to dominate. Anything with the taint of propaganda is taken with a grain of salt. Yet, as we see time-and-time again in the Middle East, propaganda gets through.

It gets through when the target is clear and the aim is simple. The Administration's problem lies in its targeting.

The oil is not the enemy. Even BP is not the enemy. The enemy is the system that makes this eternal search for oil necessary, and that makes it the path of least resistance for BP's profit.

I'm not naive enough to think that we can flip a switch and create a world of bullet trains and windmills.  But I'm unwilling to accept the inevitability of oil, and all the bloodshed and destruction that entails.

What has people down right now is just this, the idea that we have no choice but to drill and fight, fight and drill, in order to continue our way of life. That's why the President's approval ratings are down so far, I believe, because his sights are set too low.

Raising those sights means creating a political environment in which an energy bill that moves incentives decisively from carbon to renewables is seen as patriotic, as a jobs bill, and as simple common sense, so that any opposition is seen as unpatriotic. In the face of Big Oil the President has been acting as Chamberlain at Munich, pushing back slowly hoping for "peace in our time."

He needs to become Churchill, not against BP but against the system that made this disaster inevitable. 

Rush to the Left

Here is something no one has told you before.

All the political energy of 2010 is a rush to the left.

Wall Street and Washington lobbyists like Dick Armey thought they could contain the Tea Party, and channel it to their corporatist ends, but they are having less luck with that than BP is having with the oil spill.

People like Rand Paul and Sarah Palin, whatever their strengths and weaknesses might be on governing, are actually leftist radicals who aim to transform both business and government, who have no patience for conserving business as usual.

The difference between them and the Netroots is their choice of weapon. Ideology. It's a blunt instrument that, unlike reform, usually destroys those who wield it.

Both Paul and Palin define the change they want to see in terms of absolutes. Government must not do this. Government must do that. Always, immutable. Once and for all. It's either in the Constitution or must be placed there, so boundaries can be drawn no one will ever be able to cross. It is a childlike leftism, right out of the 1930s.

I don't think the above description is unfair to either of them, or to their supporters. But the idea of immutability, of permanence, of absolute, is  a radical notion to most Americans. It is a faith in words rather than a faith in man, and it's gaining traction because man is fallible -- whether they're at Goldman Sachs, BP, or behind a desk in the White House.

Or course some faith in absolutism always appears in America at times of great stress. The difference is that, in the past, right-wing demagogues did put their faith in people, that is the right people. It is what drove the Wallace legions in the Nixon era, it's what drove the Populists early last century, it's what drove the South, not just against Lincoln but under Andrew Jackson. Its roots are deep within Jeffersonism, in organized distrust of any large institution, and a naive faith in a world that does not exist.

The utopia of Paul and Palin never  existed. That is, when words were interpreted as they now wish we were not a more perfect union. It didn't exist 50 years ago, in America's suburbs. It did not exist 110 years ago on the Populists' farms, nor did it exist 160 years ago in the antebellum South. It didn't exist because it denied full humanity to blacks and women and immigrants and gays. Their utopia was everyone else's dystopia. Their freedom was everyone else's oppression.

The 1898 Game

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 7 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The cycles of American history are important because they can show us where we are, and let us know that our reactions to events are not as unique as they appear.

Our history has been marked, so far, by six generational crises from which we managed to escape, and which defined all who went through them:

1. The 1800 Crisis, about the limits of our democracy and adherence to those limits.
2. The 1828 Crisis, a new balance between sections and the myth of "the people."
3. The 1860 Crisis, about Union, slavery, and the nature of our economy.
4. The 1896 Crisis, about balancing power between business and government.
5. The 1932 Crisis, about rescuing the economy and unity.
6. The 1968 Crisis, about culture, global war, and values.

The 2008 Crisis has much in common with the 1896 and 1932 crises, in that our problems are primarily economic. But it also has much in common with 1860 and 1968, in that our people seem culturally divided. (History is viewed like a picture on Google Earth -- everything below appears compressed and one-dimensional.)

There should no longer be doubt that 2008 was important, in the same way that our other crisis years were important. The assumptions of the past era had collapsed, our problems seemed ready to bury us, and we were ready to hear a new story about ourselves.

But we are now two years past that crisis. We have reached its center, its core. We are in the middle of cultural, economic and literal war, a time that tries mens' souls and has people wondering aloud whether this path is, indeed the right one.

Now is the time for heroes.

Year of Renewal

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 52 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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There is a natural respiration to American politics.

A new leader wants the bad news to come out early in the term, so there is time for recovery before the next election.

This is how Ronald Reagan won re-election overwhelmingly. This is how Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole. Hard times are followed by good times.

In the present case green shoots are already apparent. The Republican opposition dismisses this and focuses on the deficit they did so much to create. But ask some Tea Party asshat whether we should have gone into Iraq or whether we should not have cut taxes eight years ago. If deficits matter, they matter. If deficits don't, they don't. To Republicans they only matter when Democrats are doing borrowing. They know the power of money and fear it when it's in the other side's hand.

The present issue is what any business does when it's in a hole. You either pull back and hope you can increase your profit margin, or you can invest anew in hopes that new profit, and bigger sales, will make the old debt look smaller.

Guess which course winning businesses take?

Piece Work

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 46 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Here is the difference between a political campaign and running an American government.

In a campaign you have a platform. That platform includes many different parts. They are an integrated whole.

But once you start governing you have to separate the pieces. Anything requiring Congressional action must be passed separately. Thus Presidents are told to concentrate on doing just one big thing.

A great economic plan, jammed through Congress by a narrow majority, has been the instrument of choice for a generation now. Reagan used it, Clinton used it, Bush used it. This set the table for everything else they did, or tried to do.

This was not possible with President Obama. There were just too many things that have to be done. His stimulus plan, while massive, only turned the nose of the airplane up and kept it from crashing to the ground. It was not what he was about, not what we voted him in for.

The actual Obama program consists of two other pieces of legislation. Call them the labor bill and the jobs bill.