Today, Obama struck back at his critics on the left, chastising those who would hold up legislation that would improve people’s lives due to naive or sanctimonious idealism.

Of course, Obama is right that compromise is often necessary and that measures that could improve people’s lives should not be held up because they aren’t ideal.  But that doesn’t mean that every compromise or concession is warranted.  While it’s impossible to prove counterfactuals and say what tactics or messages could have won what policy victories, I can’t escape the conclusion that progressives should have gotten more out of the last two years.  The Obama administration and its defenders are correct that, looked at out of context, the accomplishments of the past two years — health care reform, the stimulus, student loan reform, financial regulatory reform — are impressive, and surpass the two other post-Great Society Democratic administrations.  But if you compare the achievements of the Obama administration to what one would expect from “Generic Democratic President X with 60 votes in the Senate and an 80-vote majority in the House,” the record becomes much less impressive.  With those majorities, the failure to deliver on key campaign promises that a majority of the country supports, like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal and ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, is hard to defend.  And Obama promised to be more than “Generic Democratic President X.”

At a more abstract level, progressive disappointment, or at least my own disappointment as a progressive, comes from how quickly the promise of November 2008 vanished.  In 2008, Republican policies had proven to be a failure, and over two elections the country had overwhelmingly turned away from the Republicans and given power to the Democrats and a man who was promising to change everything and who the other side was promising us was a socialist.  And yet, for the past two years we’ve been scratching and clawing, and often losing, for policies that aren’t even that progressive.  I don’t want to downplay the importance of health care reform — it’s an incredibly important law that will improve millions of lives.  But as Ezra Klein demonstrated last month, Obama’s “radical socialist” health care bill is the product of decades of liberal retrenchment on health care.  Thirty-five years ago, leaders in the Democratic Party made a serious effort to guarantee full employment in the United States.   This week, it took capitulating on tax cuts for the wealthy to win a temporary extension of unemployment benefits during one of the worst labor markets this country has seen.

Over the weekend I had a conversation with my sister about her frustrations as a working mother and a paper she was writing on Sweden’s policy towards child care.  We agreed that the United States needs to do much more — through policies like paid maternity leave and subsidized child care — to make it easier for working families to raise children and allow men and women to share equally in the benefits of family and work.  But if what passes for a progressive party in this country, led by its greatest champion in 40 years, can’t bring itself to enact even popular policies that serve progressive aims of equality and fairness, it’s hard to imagine anyone asking us to fundamentally reconsider our views on work, family, and gender equality any time soon.

-AR

-AR

Apple is apparently harping back to that time in advertising with their new, headless iPad ads that only feature white people. They’ve eschewed the cool, sometimes race-ambiguous iPod silhouette ads of old, and are instead making ads that look like they are set in a Pottery Barn catalog.

I screen captured these images from ads and tutorials on the Apple website. Check out how white and upper class all these iPad users are!

Oh hello Long-sleeve T-shirt man. Is that an Old Navy tee? As if! Try Eddie Bauer. Compliments on the home – what is that, a granite counter top? Love the white-framed painting of abstract whiteness on your white walls there, too. I bet when the sky isn’t totally white you get beautiful views out of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

This has to be a joke. So T-shirt man just plops the ol’ iPad down on his thousand-dollar blue jeans, kicks up his suede (or whatever) shoes and starts to read the New York Times? With a latte, no doubt. But does he read the story about Obama critiquing Wall Street excesses? Oh no, he’s like, What’s this about kayaking in paradise now?

Look! There’s the latte! What is this fancy-jeans person reading, you ask? Oh, only True Compass: A Memoir by Edward Kennedy. This is starting to feel like an ad put together by the people at Stuff White People Like.

Here is my favorite transition. You think, why is this Ann Taylor dress/J Crew flats woman looking at a picture of this little foreign child? Does she want to adopt him or something? (And how does she keep her white table so white when she keeps putting her feet on it like that?)

Nope – she doesn’t care about that kid at all – she was just thinking about going to Paris, like all rich white people! Such as this gentleman, of the dress shirt and the immaculate wood floors.

This family budget was calculated before the family bought a bunch of iPads and had to add a little 1% pie sliver for “unnecessary shit.” As a side note, look how much this family spends on insurance! I know it’s hard to see, but ‘insurance’ is that massive blue portion. Hence their fascination with Edward Kennedy and health care reform, no doubt.

Oh no! Somebody forgot to put arugula on the grocery list. Although maybe fresh spinach and flat-leaf parsley (is that what it says?) are adequate substitutes. And who buys things like toothpaste and fabric softener at the grocery store? Rich people. In fact, who buys fabric softener? Someone who doesn’t have to lug all their detergents and such two blocks to the laundromat, that’s who.

I guess it’s no surprise that an expensive product that has no real purpose except as a lap accessory would be marketed to wealthy white people. But do they have to be so obnoxious about it?

-AS

One annoying species of meritless hypocrisy charges are those that involve neutral categories being treated as something you either favor or oppose.  For instance, both left and right have been hurling charges of hypocrisy at each other for taking different stances on the anti-war protests of the Bush years and the Tea Parties of the past year.  “Whatever happened to dissent being patriotic?”  But nobody is claiming that the Tea Partiers have no right to protest.  Rather, the Tea Partiers are criticized because they are 1) wrong on the merits, 2) using violent, racist, and homophobic rhetoric, and 3) displaying a level of hysteria and fear of the president so detached from reality as to suggest that it is at least in part motivated by a certain characteristic that makes our current president unique from all of his predecessors.  (And in case anyone got lost in the run-on end to that sentence, yes, I’m calling them racist.)  By criticizing the Tea Parties for these reasons, I am not preventing myself from taking to the streets and denouncing the president next time someone takes us to war for illegitimate reasons.

A prime example of a surface-level hypocrisy charge that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny is this post from “The Corner,” in which the tragic Jonah Goldberg endorses a reader’s condemnation of liberals for invoking the Constitution in opposing the Patriot Act but dismissing concerns that the health care bill is unconstitutional.  The argument has some superficial appeal:  liberals loved the Constitution when Bush was making laws, but now that it’s Obama they don’t care!  But with any knowledge of history and consideration of context, it’s obvious that the difference between liberal reactions to the Patriot Act and the health care bill (and conservative reactions, for that matter) is not a change in opinion over the importance of the Constitution, but rather a difference of opinion in how the Constitution applies in a given situation.  Liberals have long interpreted the Constitution to give strong protections to civil liberties while giving the government wide discretion to regulate economic matters.  The different reactions to the Patriot Act and the health care bill are perfectly consistent with such an interpretation.

-AR

Personally, I think I got the better of this exchange, but that might just be because that’s what the chip that George Soros implanted in my brain wants me to think.  One thing I will say for Mr. Been:  he’s definitely been paying attention when Glenn Beck breaks out the chalkboard.

-AR

The first part of this argument ignores decades of Supreme Court precedent giving an expansive interpretation to the Commerce Clause.  The second part is only a concern if you accept the Glenn Beck view that our elected representatives are pawns of an insidious progressive movement hell bent on taking over every aspect of our lives, rather than sensible, self-interested people trying to balance doing the right thing for the country with the desire to get re-elected.  Worrying about extreme implications of allowing the individual mandate to stand misses that Congress could pass all kinds of ridiculous legislation under its clearly enumerated powers.  For instance, Congress has the power to levy income taxes, and could pass a nationwide income tax of 90% on all brackets.  Combining the fears of health care opponents cited above, under the power to regulate interstate commerce, Congress could pass a law that no one call sell an automobile to a person not wearing a hat.  We’re fine with Congress having those powers in theory, because we have enough faith in republican democracy that we don’t expect our leaders to take actions that both don’t serve the public good and will harm their prospects of being re-elected.

The slippery slope argument ignores two checks that will remain against Congress passing ridiculous laws even if the individual mandate is found to be constitutional.  One is other constitutional doctrines, such as substantive due process, which the Supreme Court could use to strike down any law that was truly irrational or invidious.  The other is the democratic process.  Opponents of health care reform are outraged that Congress passed the bill even though polls showed a majority of the country opposed to it.  The worry is that we are now in a “tyranny of the majority,” where whoever controls Congress runs roughshod over the public will.  Slippery slope fears would be more justified if that characterization were accurate, but it ignores that Democrats won the last two election cycles campaigning largely on a promise to reform our health care system, and polls have continued to show that the public trusts Democrats more on the issue of health care than Republicans even as it started turning against the President’s plan.  While part of Congressional Democrats’ motivation was to do the right thing whatever the cost, the party was also partly motivated by the knowledge that opposition to the health care bill has been based largely on misinformation and a belief that between now and November Democratic candidates will be able to explain the new law to the public and turn it from an electoral liability to a benefit.  Whether they are right or wrong in that calculation, that is exactly what republican democracy is all about.

-AR

Both halves of Rep. Nunes “totalitarian tactics justify hate speech” rationale are incorrect.  For one, a democratically elected legislature passing a piece of legislation by majority vote is not a “totalitarian tactic.”  And even if the Democrats’ behavior was illegitimate, it would not justify racist or homophobic hatred.

The absurdity of Rep. Nunes statement is made clear by the fact that one of targets of the slurs was Congressman John Lewis of Georgia.  Rep. Lewis knows something about actual totalitarian tactics.  In the face of  the actual totalitarianism of the Jim Crow south, John Lewis, Martin Luther King, and the rest of the Civil Rights movement sang hymns, preached non-violence, and responded with protests based in peace and love.  In face of the fictional [totalitarianism/fascism/socialism/whatever the hell they want to call it] of Barack Obama, the Tea Party crowd has held a series of protests marked by hatred and violent rhetoric.  I’ve never had fewer doubts that I’m on the right side.

-AR

Of course, ignorance of the beliefs of the founders is nothing new in Texas, at least if former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey is any indication.  When asked why he was basing opposition to the “government takeover” of health care on the Federalist Papers when their principal author, Alexander Hamilton, “was widely regarded then and now as an advocate of a strong central government,” Armey replied:  “Widely regarded by whom?  Today’s modern ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case in fact about Hamilton.”

Armey’s comment that “I just doubt that was the case”  is telling, and makes the Texas effort even more disturbing.  The Republican take on the founders isn’t based on an alternate reading of history.  It’s not based on any reading at all, but rather an unwavering faith that our history conforms with their current political aims.

Right-wing nutcase extraordinaire Rep. Steve King of Iowa (even more here!) combined the efforts to lie about the past and present, both exaggerating the implications of the health care bill and downplaying the oppression under Communist regimes by calling for a “Velvet Revolution” to respond to the Democrats’ health care efforts.  This is not the first time that Republicans, apparently unaware that one of the features of democracy is that sometimes your side loses, have compared themselves to victims of totalitarianism.

But perhaps the most disturbing Republican take on history last week came from Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia, who said that if health care reform passes, people’s “free insurance cards” (whatever the hell that means) will be as worthless as Confederate currency after “the Great War of Yankee Aggression.”  Really?!?  Still?

But I suppose that, even in the context of an intense, often race-based hysteria caused by the election of our first black president, I shouldn’t be too concerned about an elected official trying to undermine the legitimacy of the Civil War.  I mean, it’s not like Republican leaders are running ads imploring good God-fearing Americans to take the country back from scary black men.

-AR

What does this have to do with anything of actual importance? I feel like the past months of following the health care debate have been a condensed version of my experience as a Pirates fan. Every time a new package or compromise or new procedural avenue is announced, I convince myself that it’s the one that’s going to get the bill through. And every time, thus far, I’ve been disappointed. So with the White House house announcing that “this is the week!” and the House and Senate having a tentative agreement on how to get the bill through, my reaction is both to celebrate “here we go!” and to lament “here we go again. . .”

In one way, the Democrats inability to pass a health care bill is a lot sadder than the Pirates inability to put together a winning season. (OK, in two ways: whereas passing a health care bill involves giving millions of people access to medical care, the Pirates having a winning season involves winning some baseball games.) While the Pirates’ losing records are consistent with the lack of talent, poor management, and low payrolls they’ve had over the past two decades, the Democrats have failed to pass a health care bill despite large majorities in both houses of Congress. Despite the fact that Republicans have used every procedural tool at their disposal to block legislation since they’ve been in the minority, and despite the fact that Republicans used every tool they could to pass legislation when they were in the majority, Democrats have, to this point, been unwilling to push the limits of the rules so that a simple majority vote could pass the bill. So while there’s a lot to be encouraged by in Harry Reid’s recent “get tough” letter to Mitch McConnell, it also has a “what took you so long?!?” quality.

McConnell, for his part, calls Democratic efforts to pass the bill by majority vote “a raw exercise of legislative power.” I’m not sure exactly what work the word “raw” does in that sentence, but passing a piece of legislation is no doubt an exercise of legislative power. Which is, you know, kind of an appropriate thing for the legislative branch to do.

-AR

With those skeptical expectations in mind, I was pleased with the President’s address.  On policy, there wasn’t much in the way of new announcements, good or bad.  While the spending freeze is a political stunt with disastrous policy consequences (as people far smarter than myself and some guy named Barack Obama have pointed out), we knew it was coming for a few days.  And aside from that, there wasn’t the kind of movement to the right that I had feared.  President Obama seemed to be relaunching, rather than abandoning, the major goals he set for himself when he took office.

The best parts of the speech were those when the President called out the irresponsibility and obtructionism of Republicans.   My favorite passage was:

And if the Republican leadership is going to insist that 60 votes in the Senate are required to do any business at all in this town — a supermajority — then the responsibility to govern is now yours as well.  Just saying no to everything may be good short-term politics, but it’s not leadership.  We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions.   So let’s show the American people that we can do it together.

For the past year, the Administration and the Democratic leadership has been trying pass major initiatives by playing along with the arcane rules of the Senate and the disgraceful manipulation of those by the Republican leadership.  They have dutifully tried to cobble together 60 votes on every bill and waited patiently as important posts remain unfilled due to anonymous holds and demands for cloture.  Last night, the President finally called out this non-sense in the highest profile forum available to him.

I’m not sure anything will change after last night’s speech.  I certainly don’t expect Mitch McConnell to be shamed by the President’s words and actually allow the country to be governed.  But it was a smart and necessary move by the President, and probably the best speech he could have given under the circumstances.  The country and progressives needed to be reassured that the President remains committed to real change on big issues, while Republicans need to be forced to at least publicly defend their scorched earth approach to legislating.

-AR