Show vote

So I’m waiting for someone to come up wth a convincing reason for me to care that not one House Republican voted for the economic stimulus bill this week.

Given the circumstances, it was practically a free vote and serves mostly as a Clinton-like refrain circa 1994: We’re still relevant. Take us seriously

The Senate is going to work its magic on the bill. It probably will look very little like the one that passed the House. So House members will have another chance to squawk — and another few weeks of doom-and-gloom economic news to condition them.

Barack Obama is  most likely not quaking in his boots over the power of the House GOP to stifle his agenda. They obviously can’t. It’s big of him to make nice, but I’m sure he or his advisers understand the politics driving House members. It’s the Senate they have to worry about.

They may even have anticipated a party-line “no.” I haven’ t heard anyone in the White House complaining (not that I have an ear anywhere near that hallowed ground).

How can we forget the many token “no”votes cast against the bank bailout? It died, then it came back to life so we could beat it up again over how ineffective it’s been. If you wanted to conjure up fresh proof that government spending doesn’t seem to work, you would have done the same.

Castles made of sand

There’s this notion going around that tough times will reveal the true character of America. It’s a good bit of marketing and satisfies our desire for myth. But it’s baloney.

When you’re backed up against a wall, you learn one thing: people have a keen sense of survival and a knack for self-preservation. It’s those other times that show us what we’re made of, like those times everyone thought they could get rich buying and selling tech stocks  houses  oil futures hope?

I guess Bush will take the blame from a lot of people. But whatever else he did, he didn’t force anyone to take on a mortgage they couldn’t afford.

But didn’t he and his cronies create the climate that made all those criminal excesses possible? I suppose they might bear some responsibility, but people have to take their share of the blame occassionally.

We get the leaders that serve up what we want to believe, and we very badly wanted to believe in everlasting wealth.

It doesn’t mean we still can’t become Treasury Secretary some day, even if it means a come-down in pay.

Child abuse

It continues to intrigue me — the biblical point Obama raised in his inauguration speech on putting away childish things.

He seems to mean things like partisanship and political gamesmanship and their attendant ills, with self-righteousness and ideological rigor mortis being two of the biggest.

But those things are decidedly not childish. They are the sole province of adults (and adolescents, I might add). Name me a child who sticks to a course of action, no matter how foolish, based on some abstract philosophical notion.

Children may fixate on something and carry on like fools, but it’s generally over a concrete object, say a chocolate chip cookie, a Matchbox car or a pair of footie pajamas. I don’t see them crying over failed adherence to free-market principles or skepticism over Keynesian economics.

I guess it sounds clever to compare peculiarly adult blind spots to childish things. But it doesn’t do much to advance our political discourse when we seek to infantilize people based on what they may feel are important principles.

Or when we seek to explain away what is decidedly an adult problem as some sort of childishness that needs to be abandoned. Good luck with that.

Tried and blue

It’s easy to say we’ll miss W. after he’s gone. It’s harder to say why, however, without resorting to cliches. Here’s a feeble effort:

* We’ll miss having an obvious, high-profile target for our political self-righteousness. The comedians will survive  W’s passing. But what about the everyday blowhard writing letters to the editor?

* We’ll miss the air of superiority we felt in believing ourselves smarter than the man in the oval office. No one feels that way about Obama, at least not yet. Quite the opposite. People are placing great faith in his intellectual ability to get the country out of its current jam.

People at least knew where they stood with Bush, either with him or against him. Maybe it’s for the best that we melt the polarizing style of contemporary politics. And maybe we really are prepared to give Obama time.

But patience is a virtue best left untested. While it may be the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, our attention spans may be at their shortest since, oh, Moses shattered the ten commandments in anger at an unfaithful people.

SUV’em, SU don’t

The debate over the gas-tax holiday has gone far enough. It’s mostly a showpiece with little real-world effect (what would politics be without that sort of thing anyway?) Still, I’m willing to go along with it if we can come up with a more creative solution: force people to stop driving their SUVs and monster pickup trucks unless they’re hauling three passengers and/or a load of stuff.

Every time I venture out in my little Honda Civic, I’m surrounded by solo drivers in huge machines. It’s time for a little trade-off. I’m happy to spare those drivers some pain at the pump, but only if they’re willing to stop being the biggest, self-inflicting cause of it.

Iran: The Confidence Game

If I were Barack Obama there’s one thing I’d be worried about from last night’s debate in Philadelphia. Yes, he deflected questions about Pastor Wright and “bitter-gate” with dexterity and he was relatively forthright in addressing them. Obama’s been fairly successful at insisting on a new kind of politics that doesn’t tar people with guilt by association. It’s an admirable stand and it’s been effective.

But, to my mind (and I can’t be the only one who noticed), he seemed far less confident, and even appeared to stumble, in addressing questions about Iran.

Now, I was assembling a child’s wagon while I watched the debate, so take this with a grain of salt. But Obama’s response to the Iran question caught my attention. He didn’t seem as forthright or as together in his answer as did Hillary Clinton. Sure, there were holes in her logic (we could barely get France under the security umbrella of NATO. How will we ever convince Iran and countries like it to do anything similar?). But she at least seemed to have a coherent, well-considered position.  No one doubts John McCain will offer the same . I didn’t get the same impression from Obama from last night’s debate.

Why does this even matter? Isn’t this election about the economy, about the war in Iraq, about change, blah blah blab? I guess. But unforeseen foreign-policy crises are often what define a presidency. Hardly anyone was discussing Iraq or terrorism in 2000 but they’ve dominated the last seven years and affected practically everything else we do.

Iran might not present a crisis for the next president, but Obama’s stumble on it tells me he either isn’t thinking seriously about foreign policy or doesn’t have very good advisers on those issues. It’s one area where a short, largely domestic resume, might haunt him.

Party pooper

One of the underlying arguments in favor of Hillary Clinton is that she will be harder for the so-called “right-wing attack machine” to steamroll. But what if they threw an election and the attack machine stayed home?

John McCain is unlikely to repeat or tolerate the tactics of Bush/Rove. First, he was a victim in 2000. Second, he seems genuinely not to care for that kind of politics. It might be a personal predilection, but it also might be the result of his Senate service. The US Senate is a clubby kind of place and I don’t see McCain relishing attacks against a fellow senator, be it Clinton or Barack Obama.

Third, angry attacks risk having him look like a grumpy old man rather than a doting grandpa (putting the Wilford Brimley endorsement into context). Only the latter can peel away some of the youth vote. (Note also how the front-page story in yesterday’s New York TImes serves two purposes: McCain looks more sympathetic on the war, but he also looks younger — young enough to have a son in his early 20s).

Of course, some on the right will be trying to tear down either Democratic candidate however they can. No one seems able to muzzle Ann Coulter. I just believe (or want to believe – perhaps it’s a utopian fantasy) that McCain will make stronger stands against that sort of thing than George W. Bush ever did. That might be one reason Rush Limbaugh is still queasy.

Democrats shouldn’t try to fight the last war, especially since they lost. McCain just may kill them with kindness.

Long Division

Barack Obama is banking on the country being ready to put division behind it. But I suspect this will be a particularly divisive election year, even more so than in the past.

There is plenty to unite us, from the war to the collapsing economy. But the suffering — lost homes, lost jobs, lost lives — hasn’t been enough to bring people together for a common cause, no matter what that cause might be.

What really divides us are the solutions to all of these problems, and it isn’t clear that we’re willing to coalesce around one particular fix for any of them.

Not that Americans need much reason to be divided. We had little apparent cause to argue with each other in 2000 yet somehow ended up with a very polarizing presidency.

People just disagree on politics, not always for rational reasons. No amount of economic or military disaster is going to change that. Indeed, if disasters provoked logical responses derived from a careful reading of the evidence, human beings certainly would have learned a bit more how to handle them by now.

Brother/sister, can you spare some change?

Change is what every candidate is promising this year. Fortunately, for every one of them, change won’t be so hard to deliver after election day. Things change regardless of whether we lift a finger.

And what pol can avoid taking credit for whatever positive changes occur on his/her watch and ruing the negative? Besides, the right amount of spin can make any change look positive. You’re working longer and harder than ever? Welcome to the productivity revolution that is driving the US economy! Housing in a slump? It’s a great time to buy!