The news that Democrats have just selected Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi to continue as House Minority Leader has led a number of commentators to note her continuing unpopularity. Blogger Nate Silver, for instance, recently came up with a column titled "Is Pelosi America's Most Unpopular Politician?"
There is no denying that Ms. Pelosi is very, very unpopular. This is old news, and relatively boring stuff.
What is more interesting is exploring how Ms. Pelosi became one of the least-like politicians in America.
"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
- Mark Twain
As I settled in this afternoon awaiting a coming ice storm (the first of these just missed us last night) and curious about what's going on in Egypt where around 2 million people were demonstrating today for Hosni Mubarak's resignation (in a speech this afternoon he said he would not run for reelection and would be out of office by the Fall... as you might guess, this does not seem good enough for the demonstrators who want him out now) I wondered what was happening on C-Span 2.
I thought I'd watch the Senate debate the FAA Funding Bill and what do you think happened? Senate Republicans have attempted to repeal last year's sweeping health care law via an amendment to a FAA funding, proposed by the beloved Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) Not since the Earth's creation some 6000+ years ago, when men and dinosaurs peaceably shared the world, have I heard such idiocy.
This is the last part of three posts analyzing the Democratic Party's struggles during the 1920s, when it lost three consecutive presidential elections by landslide margins. This will focus upon the 1928 presidential election, when the Democratic Party began to change into what it is today.
The 1928 Presidential Election
The 1928 presidential election marked the beginning of a great shift in American politics. It was when the Democratic Party started changing from a minority and fundamentally conservative organization into the party that would nominate Senator Barack Obama for president.
I give the speech a B+. It reads much better than Obama delivered it. He didn't show much passion, but that's okay. There's not a whole lot to get excited about these days. Besides, with all the fake civility on display in the House Chamber last night - with Republicans having to shelve their annual "Snidely Whiplash" routines - there was no negative energy for Obama to feed off. (Where's Joe "You lie!" Wilson when you need him?)
Still, it was an effective political speech. The White House strategy for the next two years is simple: The president always wants to look like the most reasonable person in the room. That shouldn't be very difficult. Republicans are having a much harder time than I thought they would controlling their lunatics. Everyone on that side of the aisle is either a member of the Tea Party or scared to death of them. (Within the GOP, to be perceived as rational is extremely risky. Remember Saddam Hussein's old Ba'ath Party meetings? Where people were constantly getting dragged out to be shot? That's the Republican Caucus!)
Barack Obama is never going to be as partisan or ideological as I think a Democratic president needs to be. (I'm just thankful he didn't throw Social Security under the bus last night, as many feared he would.) But politically, both he and the Democratic Party appear to be in decent shape today.
We have been talking a lot about Social Security these past few weeks, even to the point where I've missed out on talking about things that I also wanted to bring to the table, particularly the effort to reform Senate rules.
We'll make up for that today with a conversation that bears upon both of those issues, and a lot of others besides, by getting back to one of the fundamentals in a very real way...and today's fundamental involves the question of whether it's a good idea to keep pushing for what you want, even if it seems pointless at the time.
To put it another way: when it comes to this Administration and this Congress and trying to influence policy...if Elvis has already left the building, what's the point?
This is the second part of three posts analyzing the Democratic Party's struggles during the 1920s, when it lost three consecutive presidential elections by landslide margins. This will focus upon the 1920 and 1924 presidential election, when white ethnic immigrants abandoned the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party of the early twentieth century was composed of two bases (both of which no longer vote Democratic). These were Southern whites and immigrant, often Catholic, whites from places such as Ireland and Italy. Southern whites voted Democratic due to the memory of the Civil War and could be reliably whipped up with race-baiting appeals. Immigrant ethnic whites, on the other hand, saw the Democratic Party as a vehicle of defense against the dominant, Republican-voting WASP majority in the Northeast and Midwest.
The two groups had precious little in common, save distrust of the dominant Republican Party. One of the constituencies would often only lukewarmly support the national Democratic candidate (this was usually the immigrant camp, because without Southern whites the Democratic Party was nothing).
In 1920, ethnic whites walked out of the Democratic Party.
This is the first part of three posts analyzing the Democratic Party's struggles during the 1920s, when it lost three consecutive presidential elections by landslide margins.
The biggest presidential landslides are two elections you've probably never heard of: the 1920 presidential election, and the 1924 presidential election.
With his powerful speech in Tucson, his legislative wins in the lame-duck session, and a modest increase in his poll numbers, President Obama certainly is politically stronger than he was in the immediate aftermath of the 2010 election. The conventional wisdom in D.C. already has begun to shift, and with Republicans toning down their rhetoric because of the Gabrielle Giffords tragedy, the next couple of months may be a period of relative calm for the President. But there is danger ahead if the he gets too comfortable.
The biggest danger is if the White House allows itself to be sucked into that ever tempting D.C. conventional wisdom. Having the David Bs (Broder and Brooks) of the world love you feels really good when you read The Washington Post and The New York Times every morning, but if unemployment doesn't start going down, housing prices don't start going back up, and seniors have no more confidence in Obama's willingness to fight for them than they have so far, the political climate in November 2012 isn't going to be any better for the President and his fellow Democrats than it was in November 2010. Cutting a deal to resolve the debt ceiling issue that hurts the middle class will make Broder and Brooks applaud, but it will do nothing to help Obama's re-election results. On the other hand, this moment of relative political calm could give Obama some leverage going into the next few months. The kind of brinksmanship the Republicans want to pursue on the debt ceiling will not look good for them if Obama continues to look more statesmanlike. The real question now is how Obama decides to position himself in terms of the big moments ahead. The White House needs to stay focused like a laser beam on the working and middle-class Americans who have taken the biggest hits economically over the last five years. These folks, who rejected Bush's policies in the 2006 elections, took a gamble on this new guy, Barack Obama, and his promise to change America in 2008, and then either didn't vote or went back to the Republicans in 2010.
The first big question is how the President will frame the choices ahead in his State of the Union. He has a chance to change the political dialogue from an obsession with retrenchment and deficit cuts to a focus on how life will get better for the middle class. There is nothing wrong with showing how he is going to take on the special interests by cutting the parts of the budget they love the best -- padded no-bid government contracts, corporate subsidies, and off-shore tax loopholes -- but Obama has to reorient the Washington discussion back to a focus on policies that will improve life for working families and retirees. The questions Washington should be debating are: how do we create more jobs; how do we get wages to start rising again; how do we lessen escalating inflation for daily necessities like gasoline, utilities, groceries, college tuition, and health care; how do we make sure seniors and those close to retirement have enough retirement income to live above the level of grinding poverty; and how do we stabilize the housing market, slow down the tidal wave of foreclosures, and get home prices to actually start rising again. Those are the issues Washington should be obsessing about instead of theoretical discussions about the size of government. Obama's State of the Union should be first and foremost about those issues.
The second big question going forward is how the President will choose to position himself in negotiations with House Republicans on the debt ceiling. Is he going to, in his own words, allow more hostage takings? Is he going to again let our country's middle class and our fragile economy be held prisoner by allowing the Republicans to set the terms of the debate? The President needs to be far more aggressive this time around than he chose to be in the tax-cut negotiations. He needs to be clear that he is not going to haggle over the government's good standing on the debt issue, that he expects and demands that Republicans do the right thing in regards to the debt ceiling, and that he won't allow Social Security or other programs seniors and the middle class depend on to be compromised.
The Republicans actually understand how catastrophic reneging on our country's debt obligations would be. Eric Cantor already has acknowledged that the debt ceiling must be raised. Republicans can only force the President to give ground on Social Security, Medicare, and other key issues if he allows it by showing weakness as a negotiator. If Obama does give in on the huge issues affecting middle-class workers and retirees, he will have no one to blame but himself if those workers and retirees desert him again at election time. But if -- like Bill Clinton in 1995 -- he shows himself to be a strong negotiator on the issues key swing voters care about, he will put the Republicans in an electoral hole they will have a very tough time climbing out of.
The SOTU and the debt ceiling fight offer the President big opportunities to reframe the national political debate into one about which party will fight hardest for the American middle class. That should be the complete focus for Obama in the coming months. If it is, he can enter the spring and summer in commanding position for his re-election campaign.
(A preview of coming attractions. Quite a bit more about Social Security to come between now & the State of the Union - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
There have been many unlikely things that have happened this past month or so: some of them appearing as legislation, some of them appearing in the form of Republicans who set new records for running away from the words they used to get elected-and some of them appearing in the markets, where, believe it or not, many Europeans finds themselves wishing for our economic situation right about now.
There are even improbable sports stories: our frequently hapless Seattle Seahawks, the only team to ever make the NFL Playoffs with a losing record, are today preparing to knock the Chicago Bears out of their bid to play in the Super Bowl, having crushed the defending holders of the Lombardi Trophy just last week before the 12th Man in Seattle.
But as improbable as all that is, the one thing I never thought I would see is Barack Obama getting into a political argument with himself over Social Security-and then losing the argument.
Even more improbably, it looks like there's just about a week left for him to come to a decision...and it looks like you're going to have to help him make up his mind.
It is about time for the 112th House to come back into session, and the first thing on the agenda appears to be an effort to take away any healthcare reform that have been passed by this Administration.
Next comes an effort to slash Social Security and Medicare, an effort to reverse financial reforms, and proposals to "slash" spending-but only on domestic discretionary items.
If the House majority had its way there would be no restrictions on offshore drilling, no rules designed to prevent climate change-in fact, few if any environmental protections at all...and all of this is intended to bring to life the philosophy that government, for all intents and purposes, should just go away and leave us all alone.
I don't buy into that kind of thinking-not even a little bit-and today we're going to look around the world and see if we can't figure out why.
This is the last part of a series of posts analyzing the swing state Colorado.
Conclusions
Colorado is much like the previous state analyzed in this series: Virginia. Both states were seen until recently as Republican strongholds and rightfully so; President George W. Bush handily won both states in 2004 and 2000.
Yet in 2004, both states showed signs of shifting Democratic. Virginia barely moved Democratic even as the South swung heavily against Senator John Kerry. As for Colorado - it actually shifted 3.7% more Democratic, against the national tide. Indeed, in 2004 Mr. Kerry performed better in Colorado than he did in Florida.
For the environmental community, this coming year offers a chance to regroup, rethink and regrow. Two years ago, it seemed possible that politicians would make progress on climate change issues-that a Democratic Congress would pass a cap-and-trade bill, that a Democratic president would lead the international community toward agreement on emissions standards. And so for two years environmentalists cultivated plans that ultimately came to naught.
What comes next? What comes now? It's clear that looking to Washington for environmental leadership is futile. But looking elsewhere might lead to more fertile ground.
Our new leaders
On Wednesday, the 112th Congress began, and Republicans took over the House. They are not going to tackle environmental legislation. This past election launched a host of climate deniers into office, and even members of Congress inclined to more reasonable environmental views, like Rep. Fred Upton, now chair of the House Energy and Commerce committee, have tacked towards the right. Whereas once Upton recognized the need for action on climate change and reducing carbon emissions, recently he has been pushing back against the Environmental Protection Agency's impending carbon regulations and questioning whether carbon emissions are a problem at all.
"It's worth remembering that Upton was once considered among the most moderate members of the GOP on the issue," writes Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones. "No longer."
Good riddance
The climate bill is really, truly, dead, and it's not coming back. But as Dave Roberts and Thomas Pitilli illustrate in Grist's graphic account of the bill's demise recalls, by the time it reached the Senate, the bill was already riddled with compromises.
And so perhaps it's not such bad news that there's space now to rethink how progressives should approach environmental and energy issues.
"It's refreshing to shake the Etch-a-Sketch. You get to draw a new picture. The energy debate needs a new picture," policy analyst Jason Grumet said last month, as Grist reports.
Already, in The Washington Monthly, Jeffrey Leonard, the CEO of the Global Environmental Fund, is pitching an idea that played no part in the discussions of the past two years. He writes:
If President Obama wants to set us on a path to a sustainable energy future-and a green one, too-he should propose a very simple solution to the current mess: eliminate all energy subsidies. Yes, eliminate them all-for oil, coal, gas, nuclear, ethanol, even for wind and solar. ... Because wind, solar, and other green energy sources get only the tiniest sliver of the overall subsidy pie, they'll have a competitive advantage in the long term if all subsidies, including the huge ones for fossil fuels, are eliminated.
No impact? No sweat
Federal policies aren't the only part of the picture that can be re-drawn. Even as Congress failed to act on climate change, an ever-increasing number of Americans decided to make changes to decrease their impact on the environment.
Colin Beavan committed more dramatically than most: his No Impact Man project required that he switch to a zero-waste life style. This year, he partnered with Yes! Magazine for No Impact Week, which asks participants to engage in an 8-day "carbon cleanse," in which they try out low-impact living. Yes! is publishing the chronicles of participants' ups and downs with the experiment: Deb Seymour found it empowering to give up her right to shop; Grace Porter missed her bus stop and had to walk two miles to school; Aran Seaman found a local site where he could compost food scraps.
The long view
Perhaps, for some of the participants, No Impact Week will continue on after eight days. After Seaman participated last year, he gave up his car in favor of biking and public transportation.
On the surface, giving up a convenience like that can seem like a sacrifice. But it needn't be. Janisse Ray writes in Orion Magazine about her decision to give up plane travel for environmental reasons. Instead, she now travels long distances by train, and that comes with its own pleasures:
Through the long night the train rocks down the rails, stopping in Charleston, Rocky Mount, Richmond, and other marvelous southern places. People get on and off. Across the aisle a woman is traveling with two children I learn are her son, aged twelve, and her granddaughter, ten months. In South Carolina we pick up a woman come from burying her father. He had wanted to go home, she says. She drinks periodically from a small bottle of wine buried in the pocket of her black overcoat. The train is not crowded, and I have two seats to myself.
Our true leaders
Ultimately, though, sweeping environmental changes will require leadership and societal changes. American politicians may have abdicated that responsibility for now, but others are still fighting. In In These Times, Robert Hirschfield writes of Subhas Dutta, who's building a green movement in India.
"The environmental issue is the issue of today. The political parties, all of them, have let us down," Dutta says. "We want to be part of the decision-making process on the state and national levels. The struggle for the environment has to be fought politically."
One person who understood that was Judy Bonds, the anti-mountaintop removal mining activist, who died this week of cancer. Grist, Change.org, and Mother Jones all have remembrances; at Change.org, Phil Aroneanu shared "a beautiful elegy to Judy from her friend and colleague Vernon Haltom:"
I can't count the number of times someone told me they got involved because they heard Judy speak, either at their university, at a rally, or in a documentary. Years ago she envisioned a "thousand hillbilly march" in Washington, DC. In 2010, that dream became a reality as thousands marched on the White House for Appalachia Rising....While we grieve, let's remember what she said, "Fight harder."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
This is the fourth part of a series of posts analyzing the swing state Colorado. It will focus on the complex territory that constitutes the Democratic base in Colorado. The last part can be found here.
Democratic Colorado
In American politics, the Democratic base is almost always more complex than the Republican base, a fact which is largely due to complex historical factors. Democrats wield a large and heterogeneous coalition - one which often splinters based on one difference or another. The Republican base is more cohesive.
The same is true for Colorado. Republican Colorado generally consists of rural white Colorado and parts of suburban white Colorado. Democratic Colorado is more difficult to characterize.
A look into President Barack Obama's strongest counties provides some insight:
We have been following the story of Betsie Gallardo lately, she being the woman that, due to a medical decision, was being starved to death in a Florida prison.
She has inoperable cancer, her death is imminent, and her mother was working hard to make it possible for Betsie to die at home with some dignity.
As we reported just a couple days ago, half the battle was already won, as the Florida Department of Corrections had agreed to place her in a hospital so that she could again go back on nutritional support.
On January 5th, the Florida Parole Commission voted to allow her to end her life at home-and that means you spoke out, made a difference, and achieved a complete victory for the effort.
But even as we celebrate that victory, I think we should take a moment to realize that there is a bigger lesson here: the lesson that the fights over "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT), benefits for 9/11 first responders (the Zadroga Bill), and Betsie Gallardo's imminent release are all actually pointing us to a political strategy that works, over and over, if we are willing to understand the wisdom that's been laid before us.
STATE BLOGS
