If you ask Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe, he would tell you "not well." He begins his column today like this:
NOT EVEN the stimulus bill stimulated the Republican Party into any human feeling. It heard not the screams of 4 million people losing their jobs in the last year, not the slamming doors of shuttering factories, nor the shrieks at kitchen tables from Saco to Sacramento as working Americans open their mail to see they've lost 40 percent and more on their 401ks.
Or if you prefer, the first sentence of his 3rd paragraph put it in very simply terms:
The party displayed the very obstinacy that lost it the White House.
And as we read in the news, this obstinancy is not limited to Washington, as we have seen in legislatures in California, Nebraska Kansas, and Virginia.
Jackson, who can write pointed prose as well as anyone around, reminds us of the context in which Obama gets to operate, the legacy left by Bush, who
- turned Clinton's $128 billion surplus into a $1.2 trillion deficit
- left office with a 17% approval rating on his handling of the economy
- had only 5% of Americans thinking he made progress on the economy
(87% thought we lost ground)
Of that strange 5%, Jackson writes that they
could only have been Wall Street CEOs, the Patriots' sudden star and suddenly rich Matt Cassel, and free-agent baseball pitcher C.C. Sabathia, who signed with the Yankees for $161 million over the next seven years.
It has been strange to watch and listen the past few weeks, both to Republicans in Congress and those in state legislatures, as well as their dedicated talking heads, to whom the pundits seem to pay far too much attention. I will not repeat the statistics on the imbalance on TV appearances, merely note the absurdity of listening to pundits opine that now that Obama has signed the stimulus, in some sense he owns the problem. Duh! He is the president. And he is taking what action he can, given Republican intransigence in the Congress. And as Jackson appropriately notes
A CNN poll found that only 13 percent of Americans believed the outgoing Bush "brought the kind of change the country needed." So America elected Barack Obama as the "Change We Need."
A higher percentage than that 13% thinks they have seen a UFO.
In Virginia we get a twofer - Republican House Whip Eric Cantor is from the Old Dominion. And he is quite representative of the Republican-controlled House of Delegates, which still, like their brethren on Capitol Hill, insist upon the failed ideas and philosophies which helped bring about the current world-wide economic disaster, yet whose only approach is to scream loudly for more of the same.
Here I cannot help but remember the wise words of a former highranking official in our school system, who was fond of telling teachers why they needed to be flexible, to have a Plan B. He would tell us "If the horse you are riding has died, beating it will not make it go any faster." What we see is Republicans whipping that dead carcass, ignoring the concerns of the American people, screaming louder as they still get too much TV time.
A few pundits are beginning to call the Republicans on their bologna-slicing (yes, the initials of that ARE "BS"). It is now not just Keith and Rachel and their guests like Eugene Robinson. We see meaningful pushback from the likes of Rick Sanchez of CNN and a few others. Not enough. Perhaps those pundits are realizing that the American people are listening not to them, but to a President Obama who is trying to make a difference, who reminds them that this will not be easy. Perhaps subconsciously they recall the ancient Chinese saying that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And hearing loudmouths like Rush Limbaugh saying they want the President to fail only serves to further alienate the American people, the vast majority of whom desperately want him to succeed, not because they are necessarily liberals, but because they are desperate, and he offers them hope.
Jackson can get off the appropriate one-liner, as he does several times in this column, for example:
The Republicans responded to Obama's motorcade by throwing nails in front of it.
He also notes that Obama's approval holds steadily at almost twice that of Republicans, who seem only able to badmouth America, about government's ability to create jobs, while those of ordinary people, cops, firemen, teachers and the like, are at risk as state and local governments struggle to balance budgets. And as Jackson writes of the Republicans,
they run around calling the stimulus garbage, even as maggots keep crawling out of the carcass of the last administration.
maggots keep crawling out of the carcass - what an image. And how broadly it applies, not only to economic policy, but to the ethically challenged action of lawyers like Yoo and Bybee, who may face disciplinary charges, to those now desperately arguing that we should not look back and punish the wrongs, because that would be criminalizing political differences, this from advocates of an administration that distorted the criminal justice system for political gain. Have they forgotten the US Attorney Scandal? Does the fact that an appeals court has freed Don Siegelman mean nothing to them? Or, as we learned in the Washington Post story written about by our own Jessalyn Radack, that Homeland Security spied on anti-war groups, feeding information to the state police under a Republican governor of Maryland, Bob Erlich? Or how the Bush administration tried to destroy Jessalyn because she had integrity, and as ethics advisor in Justice tried to insist on the Constitutional rights to which accused like John Walker Lindh were entitled. Think how many more maggots we have come to observe crawling from that carcass.
A carcass. A dead horse. Maggots. Appropriate imagery to describe the failed policies of the Republicans, rejected for two election cycles in a row. Jackson seems to welcome the Republican obstinacy, as he ends his column like this:
In fact, with every obstinate act, Republicans make Obama's efforts to form bipartisan agreements look brilliant. It is building capital for Obama to the point that if the time comes when Obama has to say "my way or the highway" on rebuilding highways and transit systems, he will get his way because the people will start voting out the lawmakers who bring only nails to the table, to throw at Obama's motorcade.
Perhaps on the politics Jackson is correct. I cannot welcome such obstinacy, because it only serves to further polarize a nation in desperate need, and the solutions should not be partisan, nor limited by one's political and economic philosophy. All of us should hope that the Obama administration's efforts succeed. I am on record noting how worried I am, how insufficient I believe the current stimulus to be. It is surely better than nothing. The real effects of the stimulus are almost certainly far too limited to totally turn around the economy. Yet we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It is the first step on a long journey.
Derrick Jackson is a liberal. But that does not diminish the power of his words, the perspicacity of his observations. He is involved in his community, working with inner city kids, environmental education, and Boy Scouts. He listens to ordinary people, because he is not so removed from him as are many bigger names in the media.
As a Democrat, I see the Republican obstinacy as moving down the road of self-destruction of the party as a meaningful force in American politics. Perhaps some Republicans will begin to see that their current course of action is not speaking to the concerns of the American people, and will break from the lockstep we have seen in the House of Representatives. Perhaps some more will recognize what Governors like Charlie Crist already know - they oppose the attempts of this president to save our economy at their own peril.
And as Democrats and liberals, even as we push Obama for more, we also need to realize that we should not be seen as undercutting him in his efforts to fix the nation. It was for that he was elected, it was because he offered hope when the Republicans under McCain seemed to offer only more of the same rotting carcass, from which the maggots now crawl out.
Just a thought or three for this day.
Peace.