The 111th Congress: maligned yet productive in 2009

Norman Ornstein has a nice piece over at The Washington Post discussing Congress's accomplishments over this past year (yes, accomplishments). It's easy to discredit the quantity and quality of legislation passed in the current awful political climate. However, Ornstein notes:

• The stimulus package
• Expansion of health insurance for children
• TARP funds oversight
• FDA regulation of tobacco
• Land conservation law
• A credit card holder's "bill of rights"
  
• Defense procurement reform
• The relatively speedy House has passed even more bills, including cap-and-trade and financial regulatory reform.
• Both chambers of Congress also passed significant health care reform bills.
  

I would add that Congress has done an effective, if inefficient, job of supporting unemployment programs with federal cash

Now, certainly people can take issue with the quality of this legislation, but the Congress has been active and impressive, especially given its ponderous nature in general and its functioning as the most partisan Congress ever. It's unfortunate that these accomplishments get lost in the hyperbolic discourse of political "debate" in this country, but it doesn't make the accomplishments any less impressive.

The Obama administration and the Dems have failed to sell their successes, both in the general and specific. This is a critical failure with regard to the public - both in its interest and their own.

Pollack on passing health care reform, cont'd

Pollack follows up his open letter to congressional Democrats with this post:

If the House and Senate bills are abandoned, we may (eventually) win Medicaid expansions for people who need help, expanded tax credits for people who cannot afford coverage, and other measures to cover the uninsured. We may even see more stringent regulation of health underwriting and other toxic practices in the insurance industry.

We will not soon see serious delivery reforms or cost-control measures. Whether the issue is high-cost insurance plans, bundled payments, comparative effectiveness research, overpayments to medical device makers, drug companies, specialists, and Medicare Advantage plans, there will be very limited political will to match what is in the current bills.

We will not be able to get these things because we will fracture the political coalition required to enact these painful measures, because the operative lesson of last summer will be that death panel demagoguery trumps real policy argument, and because there are fewer policy levers and fewer political incentives to address these difficulties outside a comprehensive bill.

Last Friday, I and others pled with anxious House members to step up in passing comprehensive reform. Senators: Now I am pleading with you.

President Obama: Now is the time for you to step up, too. Some in your administration are starting to send good signals. Others remain unduly tentative. Fight for this thing as if your legacy is on the line--because it is. I believe you have about 48 hours to fix this up. [emphasis is mine]

In its entirety. Not sure I agree 100% here, but close enough. PTFB.

Breaking down the health care breakdown

Although health care reform is not dead,* there is clear panic in the Democratic ranks, crowing in Republican circles, and annoyance at politics as usual from enlightened independents.

Over at The Hill, Jeffrey Young provides an excellent, concise breakdown of the 10 reasons why health care reform is a toxic political asset for the Democrats. He cites poor leadership (Obama), stonewalling (GOP), poor messaging (Dems), extrinsic factors (the economy, stupid), distasteful backroom deals (the so-called Cornhusker Kickback and Louisiana Purchase) and general Democratic soilage on timing, legislation, and politics.

*I would add a big, fat #11: political will (cojones). Growing a pair is the only way for the Dems to salvage HCR.

What year is this?

Smallifying Too Big to Fail

Karl Denninger really likes what POTUS had to say yesterday about financial reform.

You should, too. If properly implemented, President Obama's proposal will go a long way towards mitigating the systemic risk that "too big to fail" financial institutions pose to our economy. No single institution should be TBTF. Shrink the morbidly obese oligarchs. There will still be plenty of profit to keep them all fat and giggly without relying on the taxpayer to fund high-risk speculative soilage the next time around.

Update: A nuanced look at financial reform from Jason Zweig over at the WSJ.

Has Obama sold out to Wall Street? Matt Taibbi thinks so

Reading this article will make you furious. In a recent article for Rolling Stone , titled "Obama's Big Sellout," Matt Taibbi eviscerates the Obama White House, saying that President Obama has . . . more

On Obama's Accomplishments

Pretty good article by Jacob Weisberg over at Slate about Obama's accomplishments thus far; POTUS is oft ridiculed for having accomplished nothing.

President Obama to hold jobs summit in December

	This Thursday President Obama announced plans to hold a jobs summit in December , in direct response to an unemployment rate at 10.2% ( this non-government estimate puts real unemployment around 22% . . . more

President Obama's speech at Fort Hood Memorial Service (full text and video)

	President Obama gave a moving speech yesterday as a eulogy to the 13 US Army soldiers who lost their lives in the Fort Hood shootings on November 5th. You can watch the memorial service video here (Obama's . . . more

President Obama to sign unemployment benefits extension bill HR 3548 into law today

	President Obama is scheduled today to put his signature to HR 3548, the unemployment extension bill that's been struggling to make its way out of Congress for over a month. Thousands of unemployed . . . more

Rio de Janeiro wins Olympics bid for 2016

Despite the best efforts of President Obama, Rio de Janeiro will host the Summer Olympics in 2016. Rio de Janeiro beat out Obama's hometown of Chicago, Madrid, and Tokyo to claim the honors for 2016. . . . more

Goldman Sachs was Obama's No. 1 private contributor

Michael Moore appeared on The Colbert Report recently to tout his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story . In an interview with Stephen Colbert, Moore stated that Goldman Sachs was the no. 1 private . . . more

+1, -1

Obama's score today:

+1: chairing resolution on nukes

-1: maintaining systemically fatal "too big to fail" policy

Kanye West Interrupts Obama's Speech

Check out this clip showing the rude Kanye West as he interrupts Obama's speech to the joint session of Congress (with the help of some clever and timely video and audio editing). Enjoy: . . . more

Changing the Conversation

President Obama is planning to make a speech to a joint session of Congress next Wed, September 9th. Thus far the effort at health care reform has suffered from a failure of leadership from the Oval Office, and the open dialogue about this complex issue that I had so naively hoped for has devolved into the typical polarization of American politics, with disinformation, confusion, outrageous claims, and dangerous hyperbole taking the place of intelligent, reasonable discussion.

Obama was hands off at the beginning of this process, putting the legislative onus on Congress. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that strategy has failed miserably. Echoing Nate's thoughts on the matter, I agree that Obama needs to deliver a major address to the nation to firmly establish what his administration stands for, dispelling incorrect notions and actually sell a plan to the American people, which certainly hasn't happened over the last few months.

I look forward to having POTUS take the helm again. It remains to be seen whether he can steer us out of this storm.

I don't care what your politics are,

this is a pretty cool photo:

And the winner of the "Understatement of the Year" award goes to...

Bobby Gates!

Initial Reactions

Wow. He knocked that one out of the park. Positive, reassuring, calm, measured, intelligent, inclusive, inspirational - this is a goddamn President.

The Obama Code

Via FiveThirtyEight, a thoughtful piece from George Lakoff, professor of linguistics and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, on what he terms the "Obama Code," which is the President's dual system of communication and morality. Lakoff lays out his claim in seven parts:

1) Value Over Programs
2) Progressive Values Are American Values
3) Biconceptualism and the New Bipartisanship
4) Protection and Empowerment
5) Morality and Economics Fit Together
6) Systemic Causation and Systemic Risk
7) Contested Concepts and Patriotic Language

The article is worth a read. It's a decent length but Lakoff is fairly concise in his points. I liked how he framed Obama's values as fundamental "American" rather than "progressive" values:

Obama has consistently maintained that what I, in my writings, have called “progressive” values are fundamental American values. From his perspective, he is not a progressive; he is just an American. That is a crucial intellectual move.

Those empathy-based moral values are the opposite of the conservative focus on individual responsibility without social responsibility. They make it intolerable to tolerate a president who is The Decider—who gets to decide without caring about or listening to anybody. Empathy-based values are opposed to the pure self-interest of a laissez-faire “free market,” which assumes that greed is good and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone’s interests. They oppose a purely self-interested view of America in foreign policy. Obama’s foreign policy is empathy-based, concerned with people as well as states—with poverty, education, disease, water, the rights of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and so on around the world.

I really liked his treatment of patriotic language in #7:

In his second inaugural, George W. Bush used “freedom,” “free,” and “liberty” over and over—first, with its common meaning, then shifting to its conservative meaning: defending “freedom” as including domestic spying, torture and rendition, denial of habeus corpus, invading a country that posed no threat to us, a “free market” based on greed and short-term profits for the wealthy, denying sex education and access to women’s health facilities, denying health care to the poor, and leading to the killing and maiming of innocent civilians in Iraq by the hundreds of thousands, all in the name of “freedom.” It was anything but a progressive’s view of freedom—and anything but the view intended in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

“Freedom” will no longer mean what George W. Bush meant by it. Guantanamo will be closed, torture outlawed, the market regulated. Obama’s inaugural address was filled with framings of patriotic concepts to fit those ideals. Not just the concept of freedom, but also equality, prosperity, unity, security, interests, challenges, courage, purpose, loyalty, patriotism, virtue, character, and grace. Look at these words in his inaugural address and you will see how Obama has situated their meaning within his view of fundamental American values: empathy, social and well as personal responsibility, improving yourself and your country. We can expect further reclaiming of patriotic language throughout his administration.

Economics as morality - this was perhaps the most important section to me, encapsulating what I had been feeling on some subconscious level but had not formally conceptualized until I read Lakoff's take on it:

5. Morality and Economics Fit Together

Crises are times of opportunity. Budgets are moral statements. President Obama has put these ideas together. His economic program is a moral program and conversely. Why the quartet of leading economic issues—education, energy, health, banking? Because they are at the heart of government’s moral mission of protection and empowerment, and correspondingly, they are what is needed to act on empathy, social and personal responsibility, and making the future better. The economic crisis is also an opportunity. It requires him to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the right things to do.

Lakoff gets a bit over-the-top anti-conservative towards the end - I'm heartily unconvinced that Limbaugh and his ilk will necessarily destroy the world - but on the whole he makes some excellent points. Commenter Mr. E. actually has a great response to Lakoff's life-or-death call to combat the ultra-conservative media machine:

I liked the linguistic analysis. I am not particularly convinced by the need for a call to action to create a response to the Republican media machine. What he envisions would be nice, but recent history and demographics belie its necessity. The Dems won big in 2006 and 2008. Any reader of this blog knows that all lines point to continued Republican losses in 2010 and beyond, unless the Republicans do the unlikely and change direction, away from their shrinking base.
The movement conservatives attacking the moderate Republicans make it more likely that those seats will flip to Democrats. If Snowe, Collins or Specter lose in primary challenges to more conservative Republicans, Pennsylvania and Maine are more likely to vote for a Democrat. With a commanding lead in the House and an increase of just 3-4 in the Senate, the Republicans will become both more shrill and more irrelevant. The current group will not wake up and become more pragmatic, they will scream louder, and be quicker to wield their long knives. Instituting a firing squad while circling the wagons creates a circular firing squad.
So long as Obama and Republicans continue their current trajectories, the message gets out, even against the tide of the conservative media

It's worth reading the entire thing.

Obama's Golden Trumpet

Jonathan Raban has an excellent analysis of the President's inaugural address.

Hat tip to BRhé for the link.

And Now It Begins

Congratulations, Mr. President.

Now - the hard part.

Here's to the next four years.