Columnist.
Here's a chunk of the problem with the proposed reconciliation of business and the Obama administration. "We're trying," the president said, in addressing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce this week, "to run the government like you run your businesses -- with better technology and faster services." Not that there's anything wrong with better technology and faster services. The reason for the non-crystalline ring of the presidential rhetoric is that neither advantage the president imputed to business really explains why business succeeds at business better than government does.
In news stories about Obamacare, the usual journalistic formulation is, "This will be," "That will be," "Citizens will," "Companies will," etc. The assumption is that you will, or he will, or whoever will, because as duly enacted and signed into law, Obamacare will -- that word again -- descend on us at a date certain. A more cautious formulation would be "would" -- the subjunctive case. Maybe, maybe not, is its meaning.
Where is this "center" nearly everyone in America wants to stand on, at least by the accounting of the commentators and political pros striving to figure out the next two years? Is it over there -- this center -- where Barack Obama has his feet planted? The jobs center, the investment and competitiveness center? The center marked by "common ground" where we all meet, have a beer or a Slurpee, and bury our hatchets for the sake of "tomorrow"? The president's re-election agenda -- and that of his new advisers -- seems to point that direction, and one can easily enough see why. The old agenda, the agenda of more and more and more government, worked until the voters took the votes away from some of the main implementers of said agenda. Obama's task for the next two years is to beckon his countrymen toward a new and, as he will constantly assure us, higher ground where all work and earn and save together.
A new Associated Press-GfK poll that shows Americans evenly divided on the Obamacare repeal is getting big play as the House opens debate on precisely that course of action. Won't it be amazing to hear Democrats argue -- in view of this spectacular turn in public opinion -- that House Republicans should now back off?
The gagging of God, so far as courts, professors and advanced theologians can accomplish it, gets slightly in the way of attempts to puzzle out the Tucson massacre. God with a gag over His metaphorical mouth was a less usual concept back when people talked more routinely than now about evil, not to mention the devil and all his works. A particular word would come up regularly in those old conversations -- sin, defined as stubborn, self-focused detachment from God, accompanied by defiance of His purposes. Sin was supposed to be bad: the more so because all were involved in it. Because all were involved, no one could tell what would happen next. Some nut might sidle into a political gathering, pull out a gun, and ...
The battle smoke lifts, the noise of past political combat dies away, and we envision at last the right role model for John Boehner as he assumes the speakership. Who else, I ask, but Nancy Pelosi? The Rose of San Francisco will not go down in speakership annals standing beside the honored likes of Henry Clay, Jack Garner and Sam Rayburn. She'll possibly go down instead as the speaker with both the hardest head and nose; unyielding in pursuit of her objectives; giving an inch to critics only when forced and then waiting patiently to snatch it back.
Top Reason (as Letterman might put it) for Loving the Establishment Media: their alacrity in back-patting-a-president-they-hated-to-be-so-hard-on. Barack Obama's new-found statesmanship during the pre-Christmas lame-duck session bids fair -- if you take the commentators at their word -- to give him his second presidential wind. Why, the lame ducks of Capitol Hill passed the president's compromise (except, of course, compromise always takes more than one party) on taxes (which measure the liberals had hated when it was announced); repealed the Clinton era "don't ask, don't tell" policy on military service by homosexuals and lesbians; ratified (with vital Republican help) a nuclear arms treaty with Russia; extended unemployment benefits; and thus allowed Obama a Christmas victory lap. Well, I mean, so as you'd suppose just from the thump-thump of the media beat.
A word about Christmas. Just a word. Having nothing to do with the so-called wars over "happy holidays" vs. "Merry Christmas" and such ephemera. The late elections -- the way they came out doesn't matter for present purposes -- provide useful context for musing on some Christmas particulars: to wit, good tidings of great joy that politicians (supply your own adjectives) don't run the world. What's Christmas about, at one level of understanding, if not the futility of the whole secular enterprise -- rules, regulations, codes, kings, and so on and so on?
The new federal health care scheme, conventionally called Obamacare, is premised on the government's right, as the government sees it, to turn the existing health care arrangement inside out and decree a new system -- as Kublai Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome. The goodness or badness of the federal approach is not the issue here -- not in the abstract terms of would-it-work. The issue is, has Congress the constitutional power to do all this? That's to say, without an amendment conferring that power. Judge Hudson says no.
The motive behind the proposed repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is, hmmm ... what, exactly? A stronger military? Better projection of American might in tight corners like Afghanistan and South Korea? Well, not precisely any of that. The whole idea of opening military enlistment to professed gays is the furtherance of the gay rights cause. It is what you might call an odd motive indeed for adoption of a military policy with mainly cultural implications.
As life in the 21st century gets loopier and loopier, the truly deranged come out of the woodwork, passing themselves off as benefactors of mankind, candidates for sainthood, etc. Maybe -- who knows -- candidates for another Pulitzer Prize: something The New York Times hardly needs, but self-inflicted moral grandeur can do odd things to you.
Sarah Palin is the best thing that's happened lately to the right and the left, both at the same time. Much of the right pays her obeisance for mobilizing the troops and smart-alecking the left -- which in turn loves her for splitting (so the left hopes) the right over her personality and track record. The best way for a conservative to incur a black eye and a "country club Republican" label is to suggest that the mother of Bristol Palin and host of "Sarah Palin's Alaska" hasn't it in her to lead the world's -- still, we hope -- leading nation.
The flap over whether to extend present tax rates for the rich finds its center in a cultural proposition: Liberals, including rich liberals, either don't like the rich or feel obliged to pretend they don't. The argument official Washington will have this month over tax rates -- Republicans on one side, President Obama on the other side -- is perhaps the oldest argument in politics. They had it 2,500 years ago in Rome: plebes vs. patricians. They'll have it 2,500 years from now (assuming no Second Coming of Christ disarranges worldly affairs). At least the language will be familiar: fat cats, plutocrats, the middle class, the poor, compassion, justice, fairness, highway robbery, grrrrrrrrr.
"Miss me yet?" ask the ubiquitous billboards and T-shirts featuring George W. Bush's cheerful countenance. It seems maybe the answer is yes. The World Series crowd cheered as the retired but reinvigorated Bush threw the first pitch of the fourth game. This week come the tour and the TV appearances connected with Bush's newly published account of his big decisions in life, from giving up booze to invading Iraq. Next week at Southern Methodist University, it's ground breaking time for the Bush Center. Not a bad comeback for a president whom his successor keeps deriding as the source of America's present problems.
Well, look, the president said, while reflecting somberly on why he got "shellacked" at the polls. Look: "If right now we had 5 percent unemployment instead of 9.6 percent unemployment, the people would have more confidence in those policy changes" -- the ones he and fellow Democrats enacted. It's the political version of the ancient hobo's lament: If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs. If we had some eggs ...
I write before the election has even been held. Wouldn't you know it? -- obliged to traffic in certainties while lacking Final Certainty. Of the most varied certainties circulating right now, among the more arresting, is that the Republicans, once ensconced in power, are going to blow it.
I didn't bother to read The Dallas Morning News' recent endorsement of Democrat Bill White for governor of Texas, partly because the piece was longer than a root canal appointment. Mainly, though, it was because the idea of NOT entrusting state government to an exponent of low taxes and relatively limited government (i.e., incumbent Rick Perry) is so detached from common sense and reality that ...
Last weekend, President Obama allowed that we voters are too scared right now to "think clearly," but let us gut up and try anyway, shall we? We really can't sort out too often the stakes in this election, including possibly the most important matter of all: whether the federal government can do anything it decides to. So first, for courage, a few slugs of Old Be Joyful; then we'll contemplate what goes on in the ObamaCare lawsuit that a federal judge in Florida said last week should proceed to trial, the perfervid arguments of the Justice Department notwithstanding.
Those of a certain age -- meaning we recall where we were when Kennedy was shot and the size of Jerry Lee Lewis' pompadour -- know the venerability of the question of how much government is too much government and how much the answers vary over time. It depends for one thing on how much government you've got when the question gets asked.
"Californians, here they come -- right back where they ... " Wait a minute, hold on, this ain't the place they mostly "started from" -- Texas, I mean; my home state. But, gosh, are "they" coming, here and elsewhere, to escapes the miseries of unemployment and high taxation in the once-Golden State?
