Down the street from my hotel room here in the nation's capitol is the Capitol Building itself - otherwise known as the National Center for the Stupid, the Spineless and the Shamelessly Hypocritical.
It's strange to look out on the grand dome of the Capitol Building and contemplate the astonishing idiocy unfolding inside it while the economic plight of millions of our citizens grows increasingly desperate.
As Paul Krugman put it yesterday in his column:
The point is that a large part of Congress — large enough to block any action on jobs — cares a lot about taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population, but very little about the plight of Americans who can’t find work.
Barack Obama likes to refer to the political games that go on during an election year as "silly season," but that doesn't begin to express the profound disconnect between the reality facing the un- and under-employed and the nonsense that has been going on across the street from my hotel.
Mr. Obama needs to show more leadership, more passion and more commitment to the core values of fairness, equality and justice that got him elected president if he hopes to have anything worthwhile to do between November 2010 and November 2012.
The media, as usual, is not helping. For example, in Politico today a headline reads: Dems Still Taking Aim at Bush. In the paper version, the headline over the continuation of the story reads: Strategists Say Bush Blame Game Doesn't Push the Limit.
Here's an entire story about a "strategy" involving the "Bush Blame Game." How many unemployed people think this is a game? How many of them care about political strategy? How many of them would just like a job or maybe a little help from a government whose policies cost them their job in the first place?
It's not a game. And it's not about Democrats running only against George Bush. It's about the policies one party represents - the results of which have been all too clear - versus the policies the other party represents - the results of which are still unknown, despite the fear-mongering from the right.
What I find alarming is that the facts are so easily observable and yet they seem to have vanished from public view. The facts tell a harrowing story of how bad public policy led a nation from Point A - low unemployment, no budget deficits and a hopeful-looking future - to Point B - high unemployment, huge budget deficits and a very dismal-looking future. And those facts have names and faces and empty bank accounts and lost houses.
One can draw a straight line from Point A to Point B, and nothing on the downward trajectory of that line involves Barack Obama, the stimulus, bank bailouts, health care reform or anything else his administration has done in his brief term in office. Everything on the trajectory of that line has to do with what transpired in the halls of government and finance between the years 2000 and 2008.
That's the story the Democrats have yet to find a compelling way to tell - though President Obama took a crack at it today:
Now, we didn’t get here by accident. We got here after 10 years of an economic agenda in Washington that was pretty straightforward: You cut taxes for millionaires, you cut rules for special interests, and you cut working folks loose to fend for themselves. That was the philosophy of the last administration and their friends in Congress. If you couldn’t find a job or you couldn’t go to college, tough luck -- you’re on your own. But if you’re a Wall Street bank or an insurance company or an oil company, then you got to write your own ticket and play by your own rules. And we know how this turned out.
Fine words. They pretty much tell the story. But what good is it to say them at a DNC event? I think that's called preaching to the choir. And, if you ask me, it's too little too late.
Because, as Cesca puts it:
Unless there's some sort of mass epiphany, or unless the Democrats actually speak up and take the discourse by the horns and fight, middle class American voters in November will augment the number of Republicans (and conservadems) in Congress...[a]nd the middle class will continue to be an accomplice in its own slow-roasted homicide.
This last bit reminded me of a quote from Mark Twain that I recently came across:
Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.