Category Archives: Obama, Barack

Barack Obama…for state senate!

Back when I was in college (Carnegie Mellon class of 2000), a friend who was attending the University of Chicago gave me a placard that was posted hither and thither on Chicago’s South Side: a dorky-faced guy with a ridiculously toothy grin smiling out at us. It read

“Barack Obama

for state senate”

My buddy Josh and I thought this was hilarious. Over the years, we turned the guy on the placard into a superhero. We’d be studying for one hard exam or another and would say to one another, “You know who could ace the piss out of this test right now?” The other would respond, “Barack Obama!” to which the first would respond, inevitably, “…for state senate!” Or we’d be at the gym: “Man, these weights are tough! … Know who could lift them without breaking a sweat?” “Barack Obama!” “…for state senate!“

The years go by. It’s 2004. There’s a dude up on the stage at the Democratic National Convention who’s making everyone ask, “Why do I have to vote for Kerry? Why can’t I vote for this guy?” Josh and I called one another: “Uh … dude, do you see who’s on stage right now?” It was surreal.

It’s still surreal. Every few months it occurs to me afresh that Josh and I were making this obscure local politician the punchline of a joke probably a decade before he became president of the United States. Bizarre.

Vindication, then and now

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On the elevator up to work today, I saw a headline that Obama says he’ll be vindicated for the choices he’s made on health care and financial reform.

To review: President Bush starts an unnecessary war in which thousands of Americans die and we literally detonate $3 trillion. Obama picks up a financial crisis that started on Bush’s watch, then helps to push through health reform that will cover 30 million of the country’s least fortunate while reducing the long-term deficit.

Now then: which of these two would you guess has to worry about how history will view him?

One little note on Scott Brown, Martha Coakley, and health reform

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This election has me more miserable than I really want to go into, so let me just say this:

Yes, Brown’s election means that a lot of filibusters down the line are possible. But what people are really flailing all around about now is that health reform, in particular, might be filibustered to death.

Now then. If that’s what people are actually concerned about (let me be really fucking clear that that’s what I’m concerned about), then we could have dodged the bullet on this long ago. Obama and Senate Democrats tried to play nice with Republicans for a long while. That failed. It led to months of delay. If we’re essentially into conference-committee territory now, we could have been in conference-committee territory months ago. By the time Scott Brown’s miserable ass got sworn into Congress, we could have long since had health reform that people aren’t embarrassed about.

Lots of people, myself included, have railed against Senate procedure causing everything to get slowed down. But the fact is that health reform was and is an unforced error. The threat of a filibuster cannot explain why Democrats took so long to get the job done.

For shame, President Obama

Call me naïve, but I think we're going to win this thing

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The GOP is going over the top in its anti-universal-health-care jihad, with Sarah Palin asserting that

my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care.

Everyone can see that this is nonsense. Everyone can see, moreover, the rank hypocrisy of asserting that the GOP stands up for “the most precious members of our society, our children and our seniors.” They have opposed every means of defending those children and those seniors for nearly half a century. They opposed Medicare under LBJ, and they opposed S-CHIP at the end of Bush’s tenure. They have opposed every practical measure for helping these “precious” people. It’s time for them to give up the charade.

But back to Palin’s insanity. I could be crazy, but I can’t see us losing to this kind of “argument.” I just can’t see the history books in 30 years telling us that we lost the health-care battle under Obama because the public was scared into believing that the president would send them to a “death panel.” We’re past the era when the spectre of “Communism” could scare the American people. I think better of my fellow-citizens than that.

When the history books write about this era, it might turn out that we lost for other reasons. Or maybe we didn’t lose outright, but we lost because the Senate is a decrepit institution that gives undue weight to small, conservative states; that institution may produce a health bill that tries to placate conservatives and ends up helping too few Americans. I just can’t see, though, that we’d lose to outright GOP paranoia. For all its flaws, my country has moved past that.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, we may have feared for a time that we’d lose because Barack Obama is black. Lots of people talked about the “Bradley effect” — that people say they’ll vote for a black man, then don’t do so when they’re face to face with a ballot. It didn’t amount to anything; the right man won. I can’t say that I’m always so sure about my fellow-Americans, of course: I’m sure all of us — on either side of the political spectrum — think periodically that everyone we know is smart, but that everyone else is a knuckle-dragging mouth-breather. But I have faith that the country as a whole is generally moving in the right direction. The direction we’re moving in just won’t allow Palin’s brand of hate speech to get any traction.

They’re desperate, and they know they’ve lost the debate. If they thought they could win the debate, they’d be arguing honestly. They’d be telling us that while they really do wish every American were insured, they don’t believe that government is the way to guarantee universal coverage. Instead they need to scrape the bottom of the barrel and scare old people into thinking that we’ll euthanize them. This is a party that’s throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks.

What we’re seeing is the end of the 2008 campaign all over again. Back then it was the GOP stirring up rage and hatred among its base, to the point that McCain had to reassure one of his supporters that Obama is not an Arab.

It’s natural to fear now that we’ll lose to the fanatics, because they’re passionate and we’re not mobilizing hard enough against them, just as it was natural to fear then that the racists would tip the presidential campaign. When you’re caught up in the heat of the moment, it’s hard to see the big picture; it’s hard for me, right now, to pull myself up out of 24-hour coverage of the debate. But ask yourself: do you really think this is a country where barbarians like Palin could swing the debate? I don’t. If it is such a country, may god have mercy on us.

Steven Pearlstein put it really well the other day:

Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society — whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.

If health reform is to be anyone’s Waterloo, let it be theirs.

Looking for a roommate

Quoting Rahm Emanuel as though you get what he means

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I understand that politics is a complicated business, and that getting actual votes in your pocket involves making compromises that might piss off people on all sides. So I’m not quite as ready as a lot of my friends are to write off the Obama administration just yet.

At the same time, I think there’s a tendency to read strategic brilliance into every one of Rahm Emanuel’s utterances, even if it’s not at all clear what he means. Take this phrase, which a few articles have quoted:

It is not an accident that Emanuel, on a range of issues, tells aides: “The only nonnegotiable principle here is success. Everything else is negotiable.”

(See it quoted also in “Taking The Hill”.)

What does that even mean? How do you define success if you’re not measuring it relative to some goal? In the case of universal health care, would Emanuel count it as a success if they got the votes to expand coverage to only a million more people, when at least 40 million are uninsured? It seems clear to me that Emanuel is just being clever; yet journalists seem to be taking it as a profound oracular pronouncement.

Now we have the right to dream

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I am far too overwhelmed by Obama’s election to write very much. I was too overwhelmed last night, too: I expected to be in tears, speaking in tongues on the floor. As it happened, I was just dumbstruck in front of the television. And like Cosma, I expected Obama to be shot at any minute. (A coworker claims that there was a glass wall right in front of Obama, which he says you could see periodically on camera. Did anyone else see this? I did not.)

Work starts today. For the first time in my memory, I believe that government can do positive things in the lives of Americans. Not only that, it wants to do positive things for Americans. It is not committed to the doctrine “that that Government is best which is most indifferent.” The American people not only elected a wildly charismatic leader; they rejected the entire ideology of the Republican party. (If you believe that Reverend Wright, Sarah Palin and so forth explain McCain’s loss, you still haven’t explained why voters tossed the GOP out of the Senate.)

Now is our moment. Obama has given us license to dream again, and it’s time to dream big. In the next few days, I’m going to write up my own statement of progressive principles, post it here, ask for feedback, then send it on to President-elect Obama. Surely he’ll receive millions of similar letters. Who cares? Let’s tell him the world we want. Then let’s go get it.

P.S.: Googling confirms the bulletproof-glass bit.

Powell's Obama endorsement

Doing anything to get elected

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I guess this shouldn’t come as a shock to me, but John McCain is doing anything he can to get elected. The Bill Ayers thing is the latest, and it’s the best example. Here’s conservative columnist David Frum:

But Bill Ayers? Does anybody really seriously believe that Barack Obama is a secret left-wing radical? And if not, then what is this fuss and fury supposed to show? It’s like Ronald Reagan’s opponents trying to beat him by pointing out that Birchers once supported him.

Here’s Ross Douthat:

I’m pretty sure that’s a losing message. And unless there’s some way I haven’t thought of to link the Weather Underground to the global stock market, or the subprime mess, or the cost of health care, or anything else that’s actually high on the voting public’s list of priorities, this “gloves off, dammit!” strategy will only serve to confirm the public’s perception that John McCain – and the ticket he heads, and the party he leads – are completely, utterly, and hopelessly out of touch.

(Both links via George Packer.)

McCain can’t possibly believe that Obama is a bomb-throwing radical. There’s simply no way that he can think Ayers is relevant to Obama’s candidacy. You just have to conclude that he’ll say whatever he needs to say to get elected. I imagine him giving Obama a pat on the back after the campaign is all over, shrugging and saying, “It’s just business.”

Tonight he threw another item against the wall to see if it would stick: that Obama was in the pocket of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

Meanwhile, they were getting all kinds of money in campaign contributions. Sen. Obama was the second highest recipient of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac money in history — in history.

The “second highest” bit appears to be true. But McCain must know that Fannie and Freddie had basically nothing to do with the subprime crisis:

[T]hey didn’t do any subprime lending, because they can’t: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn’t meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.

So it’s saying whatever he can to get elected. Whatever sucks about my guy, I think I can confidently say that he’s not that much of a bastard. It’s the sign of a discredited, intellectually bankrupt party that this is the only game they still know how to play.