Year: 2009

by

Some Thoughts on President Obama’s First Month

I realize I’ve been neglecting my blog recently, but my excuse is that I had the flu last week.  I know that having a flu shot is supposed to prevent this, but as the nurse practitioner said, “It probably made a 5 to 7 day event into a 3 to 5 day one.”  Didn’t make me feel better, but at least I only missed 3 days of work.  Have to be there to help the City of Boston spend the stimulus bucks, you know.

So, how is the new President – and he is new even though it seems forever already – doing?  As Eugene Robinson wrote in the Washington Post on February 17

This is a presidency on steroids. Barack Obama’s executive actions alone would be enough for any new administration’s first month: decreeing an end to torture and the Guantanamo prison, extending health insurance to more children, reversing Bush-era policies on family planning. That the White House also managed to push through Congress a spending bill of unprecedented size and scope — designed both to provide an economic stimulus and reorder the nation’s priorities — is little short of astonishing.

I do wish that the Recovery Act (aka Stimulus Bill) had fewer tax cuts and more infrastruture, education, and arts money, but as Chris Hayes wrote in The Nation

Whatever its shortcomings, there is a lot of good stuff in the bill. As just one example: my parents were visiting this weekend and the whole time my dad, who works in public health in poor neighborhoods, was receiving promising updates on  his blackberry about just how much potential funding there would be for some of their programs.

As I said, there is money to spend.  So what of the Republican argument that taking the money means that there will be the expectation that programs – which the states can’t afford – will continue after the two years of the Recovery Act?  The main point of contention seems to be extention of unemployment benefits.  I’m afraid I don’t undertand the argument.  Hopefully in two years, other parts of the Recovery Act will have created jobs and there will no longer be a need to have massive unemployment benefits.

I have to admit that I worry about the Obama administration’s reluctance to consider prosecuting Bush administration officials.  I worry that we will somehow backslide on things like extraordinary rendition and the right of the prisoners to come to trial.  But then I am reassured by articles like Alexander Zaitchik’s recent post on AlterNet titled 5 Great Progressive Moves by Obama You Might Have Missed.  Zaitchik lists high speed rail funding, arms control, review of faith-based initiatives, broadband, and a reform minded drug czar.

Beyond all these concrete actions is political savvy.  I believe that Obama’s getting out of Washington to sell the Recovery Act and explain it to ordinary people in a setting where people were not pre-screened for their political views, was a smart move and may have saved it as Congress saw the reactions of those in the audience.  While it didn’t get any Republican votes, I think it helped with some of the Blue Dog Democrats.  We also saw his attempts to be bipartisan which were rebuffed by the Republicans.  As Chris Hayes points out

On the politics side of the ledger, Ben Smith notes Obama’s emphasis on the tax cuts in the bill. I’m not necessarily a fan, though politically it’s true that every single Republican member of congress can now be accused of “Voting against the biggest tax cut in history” come next election.” Clearly, this hasn’t escaped the White House’s notice.

by

So Where is Howard?

Howard Dean, former head of the Democratic National Committee and inventor of the 50-states strategy, still does not have a job in the Obama administration.  I’m not the only one asking what’s going on.

Alexander Zaitchik has a post on Alter-net headlined “Is Howard Dean Getting Screwed and Why?” 

Given the debt Obama clearly owes to Dean — as well as the personal respect the president is known to hold for him — many Dean netroots loyalists are confused as to why their man was not chosen to head the Health and Human Services Department, given his experience and interest in health care reform (Dean was a doctor before entering politics, and enacted major health care reforms as governor of Vermont).

OK.  Howard may not have the best relationship with some members of Congress (heard or read somewhere that Rahm Emmanuel didn’t like him) and maybe he wouldn’t be the right person to move health care reform, but how about making him Surgeon General? 

We haven’t heard about Dr. Gupta for a while now.  (And I say, thank godness.)  Howard Dean may not be a doctor on TV, but it seems to me that his personality is well suited to the chief doctor role.  I like the idea of Howard in the C. Everett Koop role. 

Can we start a campaign for Howard Dean as Surgeon General?

by

Two Birthdays

Two hundred years ago on February 12, two extraordinary men were born.  One on the American frontier and the other in England.  Besides their day of birth, what do Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin have in common?  Quite a bit it seems. 

Both men were family men who loved and cared for their childen.  Olivia Judson writes about Darwin

At the same time, he was a humane, gentle, decent man, a loving husband and father, and a loyal friend. Judging by his letters, he was also sometimes quite funny. He was, in other words, one of those rare beings, as likeable as he was impressive.

For example, after his marriage, Darwin worked at home, and his children (of the 10 he fathered, seven survived to adulthood) remembered playing in his study. Later, one of his sons recounted how, after an argument, his father came up to his room, sat on his bed, and apologized for losing his temper. And although often painted as a recluse, Darwin served as a local magistrate, meting out justice in his dining room.

Darwin is best known for the theory of evolution while Lincoln is known for his own political evolution.  Again, Judson on Darwin

The “Origin,” of course, is what he is best known for. This volume, colossal in scope yet minutely detailed, laid the foundations of modern biology. Here, Darwin presented extensive and compelling evidence that all living beings — including humans — have evolved from a common ancestor, and that natural selection is the chief force driving evolutionary change.

Eric Foner writes this about Lincoln in The Nation

Until well into the Civil War, Lincoln was not an advocate of immediate abolition. But he was well aware of the abolitionists’ significance in creating public sentiment hostile to slavery. Every schoolboy, Lincoln noted in 1858, recognized the names of William Wilberforce and Granville Sharpe, leaders of the earlier struggle to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade, “but who can now name a single man who labored to retard it?” On issue after issue–abolition in the nation’s capital, wartime emancipation, enlisting black soldiers, amending the Constitution to abolish slavery, allowing some blacks to vote–Lincoln came to occupy positions the abolitionists had first staked out. The destruction of slavery during the war offers an example, as relevant today as in Lincoln’s time, of how the combination of an engaged social movement and an enlightened leader can produce progressive social change.

Finally, both Darwin and Lincoln opposed slavery.  First, Judson on Darwin

Moreover, while many of his contemporaries approved of slavery, Darwin did not. He came from a family of ardent abolitionists, and he was revolted by what he saw in slave countries: “Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal …. It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.”

And Lincoln, while not initally supporting immediate abolition did oppose slavery

“I have always hated slavery,” Lincoln once declared, “I think as much as any abolitionist.” He spoke of slavery as a “monstrous injustice,” a cancer that threatened the lifeblood of the American nation.

So let’s wish them both a very happy birthday!

by

Flora Crater

Flora Crater, a long time activist and friend has died at 94.  Her obituary in the Richmond Times-Dispatch began

Flora Marina Trimmer Crater was born in an era of male-only voting and racial segregation. Before her death Sunday at age 94, she was able to vote for a woman for president in a national primary and help elect the first black president.

She founded and led Crater’s Raiders, a group of us who worked for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in Virginia in 1972.  I remember using my lunch hour to stand vigil around the perimeter of the Virginia Capitol grounds. 

Also in 1972, she and I were McGovern delegates to the Democratic National Convention.  I remember that many of the union men were supporting Humphrey and were disappointed that McGovern was nominated.  Despite, or maybe because of, that disappointment, many of them joined the women in the delegation in supporting the vice-presidential nomination of Frances “Sissy” Farenthold.  I remember one of them saying to me, “We are doing it for Flora.”

I haven’t seen her since I left Virginia fifteen years ago, but she was someone I looked up to and learned a great deal from Flora.  I also remember her sense of humor and her gentleness which covered an iron will to gain equal rights for women and for all people.

by

Lessons from FDR

Tony Badger had an interesting article in the January 26 print edition of the Nation which I have just finished reading.  The history lesson and the review of the politics FDR had to deal with are instructive, but the lessons he draws for President Obama are to the point and worth noting.

First, in an economic emergency, however distasteful it may be, you have to bail out the bankers and corporations. Second, any economic recovery package has to be bold–to create jobs, you have to spend a lot. Third, infrastructure investment works–as the New Deal’s public works programs showed in highways, education, cheap electrical power and flood control. Fourth, while you do not have to postpone much-needed reforms, you don’t have to get all your reforms passed at once. Finally, you cannot expect a recovery program, no matter how well prepared, to sail through unchallenged. You have to be nimble enough to accept some of the things Congress will insist on that you may not like. But there may be new and unexpected crises that can, as in 1933, offer opportunities to a president willing to take them.

Badger is the author of the new book FDR: the first one hundred days which I have not read yet, but I believe I heard or read somewhere that Barack Obama was reading it.

by

Republican Stimulus

I have Chris Matthew’s Hardball playing in the background.  He is interviewing two Republicans are still pushing business tax cuts and the same old Republican agenda.  One of them wanted to know what the money for the arts will do to create jobs. The answer is every musical or theatical production, every symphony orchestra, every movie employs people other than the artists.  Look at the jobs created- and the lasting contribution made –  by the art projects funded by FDR.  Arts money can also be used to maintain arts programs in the schools – which will employ teachers.  Jobs.

The whole “this is a Democrat bill” drives me nuts.  Didn’t the Republicans lose the election?  Luckily Paul Krugman had some advice in his column from January 26:

…So as a public service, let me try to debunk some of the major antistimulus arguments that have already surfaced. Any time you hear someone reciting one of these arguments, write him or her off as a dishonest flack.

First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.

It’s as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch. (The actual cost of a free school lunch, by the way, is $2.57.)

The true cost per job of the Obama plan will probably be closer to $100,000 than $275,000 — and the net cost will be as little as $60,000 once you take into account the fact that a stronger economy means higher tax receipts.

Next, write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.

Today Bob Herbert calls the Republican arguments “The Same Old Song“:

What’s up with the Republicans? Have they no sense that their policies have sent the country hurtling down the road to ruin? Are they so divorced from reality that in their delusionary state they honestly believe we need more of their tax cuts for the rich and their other forms of plutocratic irresponsibility, the very things that got us to this deplorable state?

The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama’s effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.

My favorite line of the Herbert column is

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?

Tax cuts.

They need to go into rehab.

by

Where is the Center?

There has been a lot of chatter about Barack Obama “moving to the center” or “governing from the center”.   Victor Navasky wrote in a Comment  for the Nation reacting to all the pundits saying that Obama’s Cabinet appointments and Inaugural Address showed he was moving to the center:

First, as our friend and backer Paul Newman used to remind us, The Nation was valuable because it helps define where the center is. The center can shift. When Obama added to his ritualistic description of America as “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus” a new category–“nonbelievers”–it was almost unbelievable, as he quickly helped redefine where the center was.

Second, based on what we know about Obama–his books, his initial intuitive stand against the war in Iraq, his Senate voting record, his campaign, his inaugural speech–I don’t believe it. At most, he seems to me a liberal wolf in centrist sheep’s clothing.

And finally, faced with the ever-more-dire economic crisis, his commitment to a Keynes-based economic stimulus and renewed regulatory rigor (see his inaugural reference to not letting the market “spin out of control”) suggests that, at a minimum, he flunked Centrism 101.

As Navasky (and Paul Newman) both know, the center moves.

Michael Tomasky writing in the Guardian (the whole piece is very interesting by the way) points out

Now we are in the age of Barack Obama. Now it’s conservatism that has broken down and contracted into a narrow ideology. And Obama’s project is nothing less than to revive this pre-1970s conception of liberalism as an ongoing civic project to which all contribute and from which all benefit. It was there in his inaugural speech when he spoke of “the price and the promise of citizenship”, and it’s present in his early proposals. The stimulus package that he began negotiating with congressional leaders last week is an audacious experiment along these lines. Let’s invest these billions together, he is saying, and in time the investments will bear fruit and benefit everyone.

I’m hoping that Navasky and Tomasky are right.  I’m hoping that just because John McCain is now whining about not liking the Recovery and Reinvestment bill, President Obama and the Congress will not cave.  When I heard McCain I started screaming at the radio, “But you lost!”

by

“Racing Odysseus”

Racing Odysseus: A college president becomes a freshman again is the story of one semester Roger H. Martin spends at my alma mater, St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD.(Class of ’69).  I have conflicting feelings about both about what he did and how he did it, but I’m happy for his conclusion about the value of a St. John’s education.

Mr. Martin was 61 when he began his adventure.  The same age I am now.  Last summer Bob and I returned to read the Iliad with 5 seminars over 4 days.  It was exhilarating and exhausting. So I have some sympathy for him and understand maybe why he limited himself, but I was disappointed that Mr. Martin seems to have only attended one lab session and no Greek or math tutorials.  At least, that is all he wrote about. He basically went to Seminar, maybe  lecture (he wrote about only one on Homecoming Weekend) and rowed.  So as a book about a peer surviving cancer and looking for new challenges both intellectually and physically, it is a good and interesting book.  Mr. Martin did not, however, become a freshman and did not really experience the St. John’s program.  He experienced one semester of seminar and some extra-curricular activities.

St. John’s College (Annapolis and Santa Fe) is the Great Books school.  Everyone reads pretty much the same books (the list does change and evolve – more women  and non-dead white male writers have been added since my time which is good) and studies the same Greek and French, math, science, and music.  It is a very small school with small classes – there is nowhere to hide if you aren’t prepared.  It is difficult to keep up and absorb everything and looking back, much of my time seems wasted.  One wonderful thing about St. John’s is that when one goes back as Bob and I did last summer and is in a seminar with alumni from many different classes rereading something we had all read before, there is an automatic common bond.

I’d be interested to talk to Chris Nelson (President of St. John’s) about what the deal was.  Mr. Martin did not talk in seminar and I gather that was part of the deal.  But he didn’t seem to know about the Freshman Chorus requirement until the very end.  Did Mr. Martin go to lecture every Friday night?   While he mentions a fellow student talking about Euclid in seminar, it is not clear he ever went to class.  Mr. Martin does capture the seminar experience pretty well including the fact that some night, seminar is horrible.

Mr. Martin mentions several times the analytical and leadership skills that students develop there.  I got one of my first professional jobs because the person interviewing me was fascinated by the school and the idea that there was actually a place where student have to learn to think for themselves.  As I tell people who are thinking about St. John’s:  for the right person, St. John’s is the right place – not the perfect place, but the right place. 

I hope Mr. Martin’s book serves as an introduction to some student who enrolls or more likely serves the purpose that the once famous Saturday Review article served for me.  My father read the article and told me and my sister that if we could get in, he would send us.  I took the challenge and have never regretted not going to a more conventional college.

by

State Quarters

Yesterday Bob from FortRight brought me home a present.  It was the last quarter I needed to complete my collection of state quarters – the one from Hawaii!  I started collecting in 1999 and have circulated coins only.  None of this buying mint copies.  We found all of mine in change.

Have you noticed that President Obama is from Hawaii and got elected the year the state quarter was issued?  Pretty cool.

by

Making Change

There is a new sheriff in town and his name is Barack Obama.  I think he made that clear yesterday when he told the Republican Congressional leaders (after listening to their laundry list of what was wrong with his Recovery Act proposal), “I won.”

So far President Obama seems to listen to lots of points of view and then make a decision.  I saw an interview with General Powell recently in which he described Obama’s leadership style:  Lots of internal discussion and disagreement.  Then Obama makes a decision and the drama is over.  At least this is what happened during the Transition and the campaign.  There is no reason not to think this will continue.  So “no drama Obama” seems to apply only to what we see in public and there are lots of dissenting voices before decisions are made.  There is nothing like former President Bush’s  (I love writing that!) way of decision making.  In one of his exit interview, Bush was asked if he called people like General Powell before he made a decision after 9/11 and he basically said, “no.  I knew what they thought.”  I can’t imagine this happening with President Obama.  A change.

People can quibble about whether he’s going far enough to end torture and certainly whether his immediate waiver of this lobbying executive order for a former Raytheon lobbyist was a good thing, but I say, so far so good.

I am on the side of those who would like to see prosecutions of those who ordered torture.  But I think (I hope) I see the tactic.  Don’t come out and say you are going to prosecute before Congressional investigations are completed and before there are reports about what Justice, Defense, the NSA and CIA find in internal memos.  Collect the evidence first.

David Sirota wrote

Cut through the meaningless platitudes describing our new president as a post-partisan, post-racial pragmatist, and you find an inspiring leader who organized us around optimism. Then consider that leader’s behavior since the election, and you run into that nagging speck of doubt. His less-than-inspiring Cabinet appointments, his support of Bush’s Wall Street bailout, his embrace of nonsensical corporate tax cuts – these moves raise questions about whether Obama is willing to differentiate between his two campaign themes: hope and change.

While both those things have lately been in short supply, the distance between them on policy is the gulf separating ambition and realization. Hope is a bill peppered with “may” – the word that merely asks banks or polluters to regulate themselves. Change is a statute teeming with “shall” – a term forcing its targets to comply. Hope is telegenic glamour, winning smiles, and poignant one-liners. Change is all the grinding work and uncomfortable confrontations that come with challenging power and enacting transformative laws.

The reason so many cried this week is because we can finally glimpse that change in the distance. And yet, those pangs of concern linger. They don’t undermine the euphoria or diminish Obama’s promise. But they do recognize that we worry about hope’s mirage – and pray there are no illusions this time.

Amen.