GOP

Democrats Need To Rally Around the Issue of Income Inequality in America (December 23, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

teeter_totter_1_Percent

In late 2011, when the promising Occupy Wall Street protests began to fizzle out – a combination of government/police intervention and an internal lack of organized leadership, my heart sank. The movement, which began in Zuccotti Park, ground zero of New York City’s Wall Street financial district, deserved much more than a historical footnote, the status of a fleeting trend.

Most of us outside the one percent sphere of privilege don’t need data to reinforce the certainty that things have gone downhill for the middle class, beginning long before the 2008 onset of the Great Recession. We are being squeezed every possible way: mass unemployment, stagnant wages for those lucky enough to have jobs, depreciated home values, skyrocketing household debt and college tuition prices, rising property taxes. You name it and it hurts. Meanwhile we’ve been forced to sit on our hands and watch as no one responsible for the loss of our 401ks and property is prosecuted and even worse, Wall Street salaries remain 5.2 times higher than that of the average New Yorker. I won’t even get into wages outside the Big Apple or executive pay. It’s too depressing.

Inequality and the divisions between the have and have nots is not a new conversation. Every relevant civilization throughout history has struggled with these tensions. I beganto be of the opinion that in order to have any real traction, the dialogue had to mature. Rather than a simple “us vs. them” discourse, I felt like Democratic leadership ought to challenge itself a bit more. Because frankly, it’s not only the GOP that has lurched to the right. In an effort to begin winning elections again after the drubbings of the 1980s, the left made a great “moderate” leap to the center, bringing some economically disastrous policies with them.

This is one of the themes of New York Times columnist Bill Keller’s December 22 Op-Ed, “Inequality for Dummies.” In it, he writes: “Inequality is in. The president, you have probably heard, has declared income inequality to be ‘the defining challenge of our time…’ Liberals of a more centrist bent — notably the former Clintonites at the Third Way think tank — have refused to join the chorus and been lashed by fellow Democrats for their blasphemy.”

As sick as we might all be of partisan infighting, this is a battle we need to have. This isn’t a pointless test of ideological purity to source a base pleasing candidate. As much fun as it’s been to watch the Republican Party look for its way with all the grace and finesse of a blind rhinoceros, it can’t be that we got into our current situation because of the wretched ideas and decision making of one party alone. 11 months before the 2014 midterm elections, and nearly three years before the 2016 Presidential contest, seems like a fine time for the Democratic Party to ask itself a few critical questions. Do we want to continue letting the GOP set the agenda (and anyone who thinks the most recent budget compromise wasn’t a near-complete victory for the conservative platform, just isn’t paying attention), or do we want to be a little bit more proactive about restoring the American Dream?

Keller goes on to write, “The alarming thing is not inequality per se, but immobility. It’s not just that we have too many poor people, but that they are stranded in poverty with long odds against getting out. The rich (and their children) stay rich, the poor (and their children) stay poor…

A stratified society in which the bottom and top are mostly locked in place is not just morally offensive; it is unstable. Recessions are more frequent in such countries.”

Is it any coincidence that every year since Bill Clinton left office, including the Bush terms, rife with deregulation, outsourcing and bursting bubbles of several varieties (which liberals, let’s be entirely honest, were causes championed by the Clinton administration as well), has felt like one continuous recession?

I caution my fellow lefties: Let’s not be afraid to take a good look at ourselves, our history. We can and should do better to create policies that might begin to redress these spiraling socioeconomic ills. After all this is the season of reflection and we have been, at minimum, G.O.P enablers. Accessory to the destruction of the middle class is still a crime.

Have Decades of GOP Deregulation & Safety Net Gutting Made Depression the New Normal? (November 18, 2013)

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great-depression

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is never afraid to ask the tough questions. Though his Times blog bears the name “The Conscience of Liberal,” the title is sort of an unfortunate misnomer. Krugman’s esteemed reputation was fostered by a decidedly nonpartisan, common sense approach to policy evaluation. It is more a sign of the times that his Keynesian monetary philosophy has earned him the liberal firebrand label. It’s not that Krugman has moved to the left over the course of his career. It’s more that politicians, the media and other economy wonks have veered so far rightward.

I also appreciate that Krugman is an agitator, failing to be complacent about the status quo while accepting situations as “the way things are.” Thank goodness because we live in an era of such whitewashed talking points, of corporate media ownership and blurred lines between church and state that feed each other symbiotically.  It’s a real challenge to stumble across any real, independent thinkers.

This week, Krugman is at it again, acting as the proverbial thorn in the side of the “deficit scolds” he sees it as his civic duty to expose. In an early Monday morning column entitled, “A Permanent Slump?,” he wonders, “what if the world we’ve been living in for the past five years is the new normal? What if depression-like conditions are on track to persist, not for another year or two, but for decades?”

If it is indeed the case that the anemic job and economic growth we’ve experienced in recent years (and, as Krugman rightly points out, well precedes the late-2008 housing and stock market collapses) is now standard operating procedure, we have to go further. We must ask ourselves what’s changed? Why does it seem the robust glory days of the American middle class are behind us, and why should we accept this as so?

Krugman begins with a rather empirical observation about the undistinguished trap of modern economics. He notes, “the evidence suggests that we have become an economy whose normal state is one of mild depression, whose brief episodes of prosperity occur only thanks to bubbles and unsustainable borrowing.”  Thus he ties the latter Bush II “boom years” not to genuine expansion, but rather the disingenuous fraud perpetrated by record household debt and criminally destructive mortgage lending.

Slower post-Boomer population growth, which has led to reduced demand for infrastructure, products and services is offered as an unavoidable accessory to the economy’s stagnation, as well as “persistent trade deficits, which emerged in the 1980s and since then have fluctuated but never gone away.”

All common sense as pertains to the “why?” and I’m sure that even most right-wing economists would find little with which to quibble thus far. But then Krugman transcends the talking point laziness afflicting most GOP think tanks and dares to ask “what?” we can do to upend this trap.

“Central bankers [including the Fed] need to stop talking about ‘exit strategies.’ Easy money should, and probably will, be with us for a very long time. This, in turn, means we can forget all those scare stories about government debt…if our economy has a persistent tendency toward depression, we’re going to be living under the looking-glass rules of depression economics — in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly, in which attempts to save more (including attempts to reduce budget deficits) make everyone worse off — for a long time.”

And this is where he goes in for the kill vis a vis Republican policymakers and the cowardly, election cycle-focused Democrats afraid to contradict them:

“I know that many people just hate this kind of talk. It offends their sense of rightness, indeed their sense of morality. Economics is supposed to be about making hard choices (at other people’s expense, naturally). It’s not supposed to be about persuading people to spend more.”

Ironically, the “spend more” doctrine was championed by George W. Bush after the atrocities of 9/11, rightfully so, in order to stave off a panic-induced economic contraction.  The then-President offered up tax rebates and broadly encouraged Americans to use the funds to stimulate the economy, rather than save or pay down household debt. I offer this example not to champion the overall deficit-busting proclivities of Bush, but rather to hearken back to a time, just a little over a decade ago, when Republican economic policy went further than robbing the lower and middle classes to give gifts to the rich, all while performing Jedi mind tricks in an effort to convince the struggling that these actions were in their best interest.

For years now, the modern GOP has tried to leverage the Federal deficit, combined with “these are unusual times” rhetoric to try to wrench the social safety net out from under us, and delay job-creation spending to provide relief to the long-term unemployed. Only, as Paul Krugman demonstrates, these are not unusual times and current policy, if left unchecked, will only worsen the decline of hardworking American prospects.

That’s exactly what the one percent is hoping.  If we let these tactics continue to succeed as they have, shame on all of us.

GOP Already Grasping at 2016 Straws with References to Hillary Clinton’s Age (July 2, 2013)

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hillary-bored

Latter-day Republican Party patron saint Ronald Reagan was 69 years old when he was elected President in 1980, and 73 when he successfully sought a second term in 1984. President George H. W. Bush was 68 when trounced at the polls by young, upstart William J. Clinton in 1992.

Former Kansas Senator and Majority Leader Bob Dole had logged 73 years on the planet by the 1996 Presidential campaign, which saw him fail to unseat an incumbent Clinton. Today, at nearly 90 years of age, Dole remains a relevant voice of reason, challenging his party mates to reengage common sense reality. In May of this year, Dole famously told Fox News that the the GOP should be “closed for repairs” while it assembles a party platform standing for more than fractious negativity.

In 2008, Arizona Senator and Republican Presidential nominee John McCain, then 72 years of age, was rumored to have considered a unique offer to the American public. For the price of one victorious election, the elder statesman pondered resolving concerns about his age with a commitment to just one term in the Oval Office.

As the right continues to awkwardly flounder in its attempts to connect with mainstream voters, Americans are being treated to the latest in a seemingly endless string of political ironies. The party of old white men, keenly anticipating another electoral drubbing in 2016, have resorted to attacking presumed Democratic front runner Hillary Rodham Clinton on the basis of her maturity.

In a recent New York Times article entitled, Republicans Paint Clinton as Old News for 2016 Presidential Election, writer Jonathan Martin observed, “At a conservative conference earlier in the year, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, ridiculed the 2016 Democratic field as ‘a rerun of The Golden Girls,’ referring to Mrs. Clinton and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is 70.” It is worth noting that the hapless Senate Minority Leader is himself 71 years of age.

To quote protagonist Meredith Grey of the long-running ABC drama Grey’s Anatomy: seriously? Is this the best that the GOP can do before Hillary officially tosses her hat in the proverbial ring?

Matt K. Lewis of The Week wrote a companion piece to the Times article, aptly titled Why Republicans should shut up about Hillary Clinton’s age. Among a number of cogent perceptions, Lewis declares, “The cult of youth, of course, is silly. Age can bring wisdom, and youth often equals ignorance.” Let’s zero in on the last part of the second sentence. I will take the poise, experience and cool intellect of a seasoned Clinton over the ignorant hubris of a Paul Ryan, Rand Paul or Marco Rubio anyday.

Ryan’s ongoing quest to win the serious policy wonk award has been undone repeatedly by his blanket disregard for anyone but millionaires – not to mention those 2012 campaign workout photos (egads). Rand Paul’s approach to female reproductive rights reads like this: “I think there should be some self-examination from the administration on the idea that you favor a woman’s right to an abortion, but you don’t favor a woman or a man’s right to choose what kind of light bulb, what kind of dishwasher, what kind of washing machine.” And Marco Rubio has plenty to sort out before he could ever be considered a palatable candidate, such as how the grandson of an undocumented Cuban immigrant can align himself with today’s Republican Party in the first place.

According to polls conducted in early June, Hillary Clinton’s favorability rating with American voters stands at 58 percent. This is down from a December 2012 high of 70 percent, before the GOP enjoyed their weak Benghazi scandal feast. But with Clinton currently out of political office, and the famously short term imprint of the national news cycle, experts expect those numbers to climb back steadily.

If I were a Republican strategist, I’d be worried too. A field of anemic males versus one-half of one of the most formidable couples in political history is a daunting prospect. But instead of resorting to disingenuous, hypocritical, agist barbs, why don’t you boys go out and find yourselves a platform? Expecting to gain traction with “Hillary is old! Na na na boo boo!” fully explains your present state of voter alienation.

Even the GOP Doesn’t Care What Rick Santorum Has to Say Anymore (April 9, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Rick Santorum Convention

Let us hearken back to the heady days of 2006, gentle readers, when former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum was universally considered a political punchline. That is the year the rejected lawmaker lost his re-election bid to Democrat Bob Casey by 18 overall points, struggling to connect with such obvious constituencies as conservative Catholics. The Washington Post ran a piece in early 2012 that characterized the defeat as such: “Santorum was left for dead rather early by the national Republican Party, which stopped running ads on his behalf a few weeks before the election because he appeared to be a lost cause.”

Unwilling to stay buried and sensing an opportunity to reclaim the political zeitgeist in the wake of the post-2008 Presidential election, Santorum once again foisted himself upon the nation as a shockingly credible candidate during the 2012 Republican primaries. What changed? The ascension of the Tea Party movement, which left a reshaped GOP with the impression that there was no such thing as a view too reactionary. Amongst a clown car’s worth of preposterous suitors that included Michele Bachman, Herman Cain and the also-back-from-banishment Newt Gingrich, Santorum managed to capture 11 primaries and caucuses, receiving over three million votes.

Unfortunately this brush with success erroneously convinced Santorum that his opinions and platforms are the stuff of mainstream, despite the wholesale rejection of his brand of neoconservativism in November 2012. Mitt Romney’s failure to connect with independent voters after shaking the Etch A Sketch, the frustration in divesting himself of the right wing albatross of orthodoxy hung about his neck, should have settled the question once and for all about the palatability of Tea Party values.

It seems that a number of Republicans, in an acceptance of Darwinian theory that would make members of the Westboro Baptist Church weep, have gotten the message. Notice the near-instantaneous party pivot on the subject of immigration overhaul and the reversal of Senators Rob Portman and Mark Kirk, who now favor marriage equality for same-sex couples.

Crackpots such as Rick Santorum, whose socially conservative views run the gamut from opposition to LGBTQ civil rights, rejection of a woman’s right to choose and a 1950s objection to the birth control pill, have once again assumed their rightful place (pun most certainly intended) on the political and cultural fringes.

So will someone please tell Santorum to shut up now? It’s over. A piece from writer Billy Hallowell, appearing on The Blaze website this week, bears the title Rick Santorum’s Dire Warning on Gay Marriage. Completely oblivious to the irony of the public’s double rejection of his policies (2006, 2012), Santorum nonetheless paints himself as a modern day Cassandra, predicting the collapse of the GOP if it does repent of its recent moves toward the social center.

Here is a summation of the failed politician’s advice to current GOP office holders: “I think you’re going to see the same stories written now and it’s not going to happen. The Republican party’s not going to change on this issue. In my opinion it would be suicidal if it did…Just because some of those things happen to be popular right now doesn’t mean the Republican party should follow suit.”

Did Santorum take the blue pill? It is precisely because the right has failed to move with the times and accept the changing demographics of the nation, that a slow, deliberate suicide has been evident. I personally don’t mind. Whatever finishes off this pathetic, extremist epoch in our two-party system so we can return to the checks and balances that once made our nation forward-thinking, is welcome. Increasingly, I am beginning to suspect that a growing number of Republicans feel the same.

So were I a member of GOP leadership, I’d be in search of chloroform and a dirty rag right about now. Is anyone still listening to this man? For a newly congenial Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s sake, the party of no-come-maybe, let’s hope not.

The Lessons Roger Ebert’s Life Has for the GOP (April 7, 2013)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

roger-ebert

It’s been a busy news week inside Washington and out. In the sports world, we have the coaching abuse scandal presently rocking the Rutgers University campus and reverberating across the State of New Jersey. In the national political realm, we await two important decisions from the Supreme Court related to marriage equality and its application toward our LGBTQ citizenry, even as Obama’s opponents continue grasping for novel ways to attack the POTUS. Did you hear the one about the President calling California litigator Kamala Harris “the best-looking attorney general” as part of laudatory remarks about her skills and professionalism? Were you offended? Me neither.

But for lovers of film, and most especially, residents of Chicago, the dominant narrative of the week was the retreat of celebrated film critic Roger Ebert. It was only Tuesday that the icon took to his blog to announce a “leave of presence,” a step away from the weekly demands of his column for the Chicago Sun-Times. The theory was that the decision would allow Ebert to focus on battling a resurgent cancer. Before we had time to adjust to his reduced presence, Ebert died just two days later, leaving a legion of admirers bereft.

Although the Pulitzer Prize winner was not a political figure, that didn’t stop him from sharing his civic views early and often, most recently in the active Twitter feed that offered Ebert his tenth act on the pop cultural stage. Many of these tweets contained solid  advice for elected officials on both sides of the political aisle. On March 10, 2012, concerned about he President’s debate performance against opponent Mitt Romney, he volunteered, “Obama needs to use the ‘Bush’ word. #debate.” Cycling back to the previous Presidential contest, Ebert sent this piece of wit across the Internet: “Facebook’s 420-character limit proves doable with @SarahPalinUSA’s policy statements.”

But beyond this clear and incisive commentary, there are many ways in which Ebert’s philosophies serve as a blueprint for course correction that the hopelessly adrift GOP so badly requires. I’m serious. Hear me out.

Let’s take Ebert’s imprint on the World Wide Web as just one example. In a very real way, blogging and social media restored the critic’s voice after he had lost it, and much of his jaw, to a battle with thyroid and salivary gland cancer. It is important to remember that the man was 70 years old and began his career when “status updates” meant pulling out the electric typewriter and mailing the finished product via USPS. Ebert, rather than running scared from New Media, used it to share his topical musings and promote his brand. This sort of nimble adaptability separated Ebert from the Caucasian, graying male peers that still represent the bulk of the GOP’s membership. Consider RNC Chairman Reince Preibus’ recent post-election “autopsy” report, which indicts the party for its failure to connect with youth voters and other demographics, on the ground as well as on the Web. The GOP’s stiff fear of change continues to be an albatross around the neck that never weighed down Ebert, as diversely popular at the time of his death as he had ever been.

Another lesson from Ebert’s life to which today’s Republican Party would be wise to attend is perhaps the toughest one of all or today’s Grand Old Party to grasp. Collaborating with rivals can produce epic greatness. You hear me, John Boehner? Ebert famously said that when he was originally asked to co-anchor the popular show that eventually became At the Movies with his contemporary, Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel, he had little inclination to team up with “the most hated guy in my life.” Imagine all we would have missed had Ebert not reconsidered. Taking a page from Abraham Lincoln’s formula for greatness, Ebert was self-aware and gracious enough to comprehend that butting heads with adversaries produces the need to consider and articulate one’s viewpoint in ways that surrounding oneself with sycophants cannot.

And when you find yourself backed into a corner, overcome by the growing awareness that your position is no longer tenable, it’s even ok to change it! Imagine that! Check out this excerpt from the critic’s Wikipedia page:

“Ebert revisited and sometimes revised his opinions. After ranking E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial third on his 1982 list, it was the only movie from that year to appear on his later ‘Best Films of the 1980s’ list (where it also ranked third). He made similar revaluations of 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, and 1985’s Ran.”

You too, Republican party members, can take your place in a thinking culture constantly re-evaluating its viewpoints, co-opting that which makes sense while discarding that which doesn’t. You just have to want it. It is not necessary to cling to discarded dogmas from yesterday out of a cowardly fear that you can’t win a primary. Who knows? People might even respect you for having a mind of your own. Consider the possibilities.

As a nation, we will miss Roger Ebert for many reasons. But not insignificant among them are the dedication to learning and growth, the lack of arrogance and the genuine humility that allowed us to feel as though we knew him personally. An increasingly tone deaf and detached GOP could learn much from his example.