Even when I'm wrong, I'm right

I am far less pessimistic about the Obama administration than many of my friends. Some have thrown up their hands and gone home. Betrayed by Obama's false start closing Gitmo, delays in improved transparency and ending the role of lobbyists in policy-making, and his baby steps taking on equal rights for gays and lesbians. Some of these folks believed that Obama had a pocket full of magic pixie dust and were convinced we'd all be living in a green-powered, multi-racial, gay-positive utopia by now. We aren't and this group is sitting in their neighborhood Starbucks now moping about it. Others are just pissed at him, annoyed by his timidity and his search for bi-partisanship with an opposition that openly admits its only goal is to see him fail. The thing I can't shake: Why can't he understand that anti-gay policies are a civil-rights problem? Violence committed against gays and lesbians is now considered a hate crime. That's a nice step forward. But why do queer Americans have to die to get federal protection?

Yet, in general, I still think the Obama administration has its heart in the right place and is playing a (perhaps overly-) safe political game that promises the achievement of many dearly hoped-for policy objectives down the road. I think it might be time to replace Rahm Emanuel, maybe after getting health insurance reform passed. Emanuel has a reputation for being a bully and an arm-twister. Good qualities in politics. But I don't think he is aspirational, to use a new-agey term. He'd be a better fit in a Hillary Clinton-led White House, where the only thing that would matter is accummulating wins, and actually accomplishing social change would be a secondary concern. We need someone who can twist arms and wants to change the world.

I still profoundly believe some things I said in my series of now discredited, overly euphoric post-election postings:

I see people turning away from a party that promised nothing and delivered less, a party that believed we owed nothing to one another and we should expect nothing from our government. I see people who want to believe that we can collectively fashion solutions to shared problems.

And:

Americans have rejected the idea that government should do nothing when a quarter of the country can’t afford health care, when our schools are failing, when Wall Street recklessly gambles away our retirement savings and our kids’ college money. We can’t sit by while a major American city disappears under flood waters we knew were coming. Government should facilitate scientific research, not suppress it. It should hold our soldiers back, until all efforts to avoid conflict have failed, and never throw them into a slow-motion massacre in pursuit of oil or to establish the validity of a new strategic blueprint.

I still think these comments are right on target. The challenge is beating back (or ignoring) nonsensical bull-shit like this week's tea-bagger march on Washington. 4,500 angry white people who got rides to D.C. on buses paid for by Republican and industry-funded astro-turf organizations does not constitute a "revolution," nor is it anything to "fear," despite what Michele Bachmann says. The overwhelming evidence - from polling and from last year's election results - is that people want responsive government.

The challenge, of course, is engaging public opinion and taking command of the debate (or debates, since we are are talking about several policy areas, from cap and trade to health insurance reform). My number one question: what good was it to build a fifty state strategy in 2008, if we are just going to let the machinery sit idle now? And related: why bring all those teenagers and college kids into the process, and mobilize unions and the poor, and then send them home after you win? I know it's bad strategy in American politics to draw your main examples from Fidel Castro's Cuba, but here goes. In 1961 Cuba mobilized a quarter of a million young people and asked them to eradicate illiteracy across the island. In one year they taught nearly a million Cubans how to read. The Cuban government (and, okay, the Communist Party) didn't ignore those young people after the literacy campaign, sending them home to get back to the business of playing Guitar Hero (or whatever the equivalent was in Kennedy-era Cuba). In fact, efforts were made to preserve their enthusiasm, to channel it, to organize the students, to turn them lose on the nation's problems. Those young literacy workers became the backbone of the revolutionary movement, and became doctors and teachers and engineers and helped transform Cuba.

Now if anyone in the Obama administration says out loud, in public, "We should be more like Castro's Cuba!", it's all over. But - pssst, Obama team - no one can hear you if you just think it, and then act accordingly. People influence people. Take the people who were energized by the Obama campaign and do something with them. So far, the Obama White House's efforts to do so are pathetic.

Republicans Resurgent?

Tuesday's election results were discouraging. But not for the reasons the Republican Party, or Fox News, or indeed most media outlets want you to believe. The results don't demonstrate the resurgence of the Republican Party. In fact, the special election to fill the vacant seat for the U.S. House of Representatives held in New York's 23rd congressional district showed how bad things are in the Republican Party. The teabagger candidate, Doug Hoffman, backed by Sarah Palin and the right-wing of her party, lost to the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens, who will be the first Democrat to occupy the seat since 1993. The Hoffman-Owens match-up was set up when Hoffman drove the Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, from the race. What happened in New York's 23rd district will happen again and again in the next few years - extreme right-wing ideologues will run in primaries, or as third party candidates, driving Republican politicians from the political process and turning off independents. The Republican party has become a species that eats its own kind. Characteristically, according to science, animals that eat their young tend to be lower order beasties. When mammals engage in cannibalism, it is usual because they are in great distress, pushed into eating their own because of scarcity or other environmental stresses. That's the case here. My last posting compared Bushies to reptiles. The rest of the party may not have descended as far down the de-evolutionary ladder, but Republicans are clearly in trouble.

What can we learn from Republican wins in the governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia, and the defeat of a same-sex marriage measure in Maine? Simple: If we don't turn out, Democrats lose. We saw a remarkable number of voters turn out a year ago to elect Barack Obama. I was part of that, participating in get out the vote efforts in Indiana - Indiana! - a state Obama just won. This year, all of these voters stayed home. In New Jersey on Tuesday, for example, fewer voters than ever turned out, and the Democratic incumbent, John Corzine, just lost. Corzine had a lot going against him - his state had to cut many services, raise some taxes, and he's a Wall Street big shot in a year Wall Street big shots aren't especially loved. But it's not like he's a black first-term Senator named Barack Hussein Obama. I mean, geez.

I admit, I was inappropriately euphoric after Obama won last year, imagining a transformed political map where Republicans, much like dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic, were left huddled in a few remaining niches, waiting for the glaciers to roll in and their kind to be eradicated forever. But Democrats aren't as relentless as ice ages. We're more like Spring in Chicago. You can't quite be sure we're here.

What happened? I think we forgot the number one lesson from Obama's victory: people influence people. And as I argued a year ago, Democrats need to build a machine that gives the professionals some work to do - both in government and elections - and then asks us to pitch in, influencing those around us and building momentum for change. Instead, what we see from all over is whining. "Obama didn't campaign for us," Democrats in New York cried. Democratic voters reported apathy because Obama hasn't transformed America with his magic. Hey folks: transformative work is done with our hands, not through magic. The difference, I think, is between the Jewish understanding that the world is saved by and through our efforts, and the hopes of messianic religions, that hope for a deity who will arrive and bring about heaven on Earth. My mother-in-law is right: we didn't elect a messiah. GET TO WORK PEOPLE! Show up at the polls. Volunteer for candidates. Donate to elections and political causes you care about. In other words: do everything you did in 2008.

The Yankees won the World Series yesterday. Yeaaaa! I lived in New York for 5 years. I love the Yankees (maybe not as much as the Indians and the White Sox, but a lot). I have friends who hate the Yankees. They despise the fact that the Yankees reload with talent every year. They complain about all the money the team has to spend. Here's what I think is going on: as Democrats, they just don't understand a team that wants to win every year, and is willing to do what is necessary to do it.