I listened to a Martin Luther King service in DC featuring President Obama as guest speaker. I dislike the meddling of churches in politics and vice-versa. Here, he's been going over his usual talking points about political issues like health care and the issue of insurance companies dropping patients, e.g., exhausting benefit caps for catastrophic conditions. (There are reasons for that, of course. The government could offer to assume catastrophic risk; the issue between conservatives and progressives is how to handle that catastrophic risk; the progressives are operating in a stealth manner to achieve a de facto singer-payer system by expanding government market share already about 46%, e.g., increasing income eligibility for Medicaid.) Perhaps the blending of politics into religion is more of a factor in minority communities, such as the infamous Rev. Jeremiah Wright sermons ("God damn America").
I tend to prefer a separation between politics and religion. I often poke fun at notoriously nuanced Democrats as John Kerry ("I voted for...before I voted against...") I do make a less strident approach to the separation of church and state; I make a distinction in the nature and extent of religious expression and the context. Thus, for instance, I don't mind factually based discussions of belief systems, deistic references on currency or in pledges, public displays of religious symbols (the Nativity) or moral precepts (the Ten Commandments) or brief, nonsectarian prayers at special events. On the other hand, I objected when I attended my goddaughter's public high school graduation (on the grounds of the Air Force Academy) and a female student speaker spent her alloted time giving a testimony to her belief in Jesus Christ. (I was the only one in the extended family attending, including my folks, whom felt that way, but I suspect their reaction would have been much different if it had been a Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist student testifying.)
Obama did his usual formula of trite insights and packaged sound bites. I was heartened by his discussion of discussion of hard work and discipline, except for two elements. First, he went out of his way to note he wasn't speaking just to African Americans in that regard (although he didn't make that reference elsewhere in his speech, speaking to minority concerns). Second, he pointedly doesn't make individual work and responsibility the primary consideration; he merely asserts that the people should not rely on government to resolve ALL of their problems--just SOME of them. This distinction is fundamentally unacceptable to a conservative.
Do Dems Really Believe Their Spin Heading into the Fall Election?
The spin from the Dems on this year's mid-term election is that speculation on GOP gains is overstated--in fact, they note that GOP retirements are running ahead of Dem retirements or defections. This is somewhat misleading. First, given the fact that Dems have strong majorities in both houses of Congress defections should be minimal. Second, the pattern of defections are telling. For instance, the recent Alabama defection involves a long-time Democratic-held seat in Huntsville; some of the Republican seats openings are due to the members seeking other, higher positions, e.g., House members (Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Mike Castle (R-DE) are going for Obama and Biden's former Senate seats and are running tied or ahead in those races, and others were announced some time back, e.g., Voinovich (OH-R) and Martinez (FL-R)
So far, I haven't heard any predict less than a pickup of 3 Senate seats and 20 House seats for the GOP. And the Dems should hardly be complacent; even CNN (not Rasmussen, which progressives regard as tilted towards conservatives) is showing the generic ballot advantage for the GOP by 3 points--when in fact this time last years the GOP was in free fall and the Dems ahead by a huge margin.
Should the Republicans be complacent? No. I think the Democrats have the burden of leadership under trying times; in 2006, the Democrats were running against a 4-year tenure of GOP leadership in the Congress and the White House, including a mismanaged Hurricane Katrina and a deteriorating position in Iraq. In 2008, the GOP, although no longer in control of Congress, was scapegoated for the economic tsunami, and in times of economic uncertainty, voters often look for reassurance in terms of government aid. The Democrats were not running on fiscal conservative grounds (other than to point out the GOP itself hadn't balanced the budget in the interim); they were simply arguing to the American people to give them a shot at national leadership to deal with the tough problems, including entitlement solvency. I do think that the Republicans have the Democrats boxed in on their 2009 record; it's going to be very difficult for the Dems to explain their preoccupation for months with climate change and health care while the unemployment record was stuck at roughly 10% over the last half of the year.
But the point is, even in the conservative base, there is distrust of the Republican incumbents. Many of us fiscal conservatives have been furious at the Bush Administration deficit and spending (including expansion of Medicare benefits without sufficient reserves), among the most expansionary since LBJ; whereas the GOP House had started off as reformist in 1995, a dozen years later it was business as usual with incumbents bent on political survival. This discontent with the GOP leadership has been seen in generic splits of conservatives between the GOP and the Tea Party movement. The main issue I have with the Tea Party movement is the lack of a cohesive positive legislative agenda. Even Barack Obama will pay lip service to cutting the deficit (which takes chutzpah with a $1.8T deficit). It reminds me of the Robert Redford movie, The Candidate, when Redford's character, after winning the election, says, "What do we do now?"
The GOP, heading into this fall's election, needs to do more than promise to put Obama and the wild spending Democrats on a fiscal diet. We know that the Democrats will bring bring into the mix (as Martha Coakley has done in the Massachusetts special election to fill Kennedy's seat) their mighty weapon of Bush-bashing. (Those poor Democrats; they know Bush hasn't been on the ballot since 2004, and even though Bush-bashing hasn't helped Obama's approval numbers nor helped the Dems retain the governor seats in Virginia and New Jersey, they still think the American people won't hold them responsible for blowing their strongest position in decades.)
In particular, the GOP should be motivated by a few things, besides a new generational Contract with America. First, they need to focus on "bread-and-butter" issues, in particular, a pro-business growth agenda. Second, they are open to legitimate bipartisan cooperation on major issues. Third, they need to focus like a laser beam on tax-and-spending reform. On tax reform, we need to move towards a fairer, simpler tax scheme. We have a tax schema where nearly half the population does not share in the cost burden of the federal government. The system is really TOO progressive and redistributionist. On the other hand, we have a system that taxes nominal (versus real) savings and investment gains. On the spending side, we need a focus on streamlining operations (e.g., removing redundancy, combining operations and locations, flattening the government hierarchy, better resource utilization across government, simplifying workflows, etc.), and reforming government employment (we cannot expand government at the time revenues are falling and giving pay and/or retirement benefits over and beyond what people are making in the private sector)
The degree to which the Republicans provide a positive, constructive agenda and a willingness to actually deliver on Obama's disingenuous promise of a post-partisan Washington, I think will determine the magnitude of success this fall. Of course, the GOP will want to hold Obama and his Congressional cronies accountable for their corrupt deal making with special interest groups, e.g., a multi-year exemption on taxing union Cadillac health plans (while people paying for their own health insurance have no tax break) and of course the way that bondholders of GM and Chrysler were ripped off in favor of lower-standing union interests. But the GOP needs to realize that after the election, even under the GOP's most optimistic scenario this fall, the Democrats in the Senate will still have the ability to filibuster and Obama will still wield the veto.
Bonus Video: CNN's Anderson Cooper in Haiti: A Rescue
Political Cartoon
Chip Bok is harpooning the California Governator's complaint about the the state's payback of revenue sent to Washington. He doesn't identify the Congressman filing the motion to strike the logical implication of this line of reasoning (i.e., limited federal government), but you can bet it was a progressive Democrat.
Musical Interlude: Simon & Garfunkel, "For Emily Whenever I May Find Her"
One of the first LP's I ever purchased was Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits; I had already heard most of the songs dozens of times, but one unfamiliar song which immediately stood out was Art's angelic interpretation of "For Emily". The song came to mind because I haven't seen my beautiful niece Emily in a while.
