I was talking to my physicist uncle one day about radio transmission, about sidebands and superheterodynes, and things like that, and that lead into a discussion about signal processing, and how they used to do in the old days, when you couldn't get a computer to do all the little things digitally.
Well, in any signal you got noise, static, and that of course fouls up the quality. You need to be contributing as little from your end as possible. So, essentially, you would run the signal through an analog filter that would cut out part of the signal, to keep that noise down. Just one problem: if you got too aggressive in cutting out the noise, you'd lose your desired signal as well.
The filter would become the signal. I think I remarked to him that day, and he agreed, that this was not unlike what had happened with the GOP. But today, I would say if people are under the impression that Obama is not a liberal or a progressive, that the GOP's filter, it's unwillingness to pass any signal but the one that fights its ideology, is the main reason.
Congress is the filter on the President. Just listen to his State of the Union address, his Win the Future proposals. While the President avoided proposals that might increase the deficit, he still pushed forward with any number of proposals whose main idea was to directly employ people, directly fund research and other things. To me, it sounded like the President was trying to push politically for an agenda of Keynesian stimulus, of increased government spending on job-creating initiatives, and keep it under the Republican's anti-Washington, anti-spending filter.
But nope, Congress wasn't going for it. Congress filtered out even that, and then forced two confrontations, in the hopes of imposing long term spending cuts.
With the insane GOP House majority in place, with Mitch McConnell deliberately strangling the President's agenda in the Senate, how is a stimulus bill or even a reorganization of the government towards encouraging and creating jobs our way suppsoed to get through?
It's not. That's the point of what they're doing, especially as it concerns our reaction.
Obama is, in many ways, a Keynesian. He may not be a purist on that count, he may be willing to stimulate things by other means, but I think it would be unwise to forget that when Obama got into office, he immediately had passed and delivered to him only the greatest bundling of Keynesian Stimulus that this nation had seen in decades. Never mind what our ideal was, just consider that Obama did that, managed that, and got more than double his value from that.
Look what the Republicans did in response to that. They first bashed it where ever it went, ridiculing it as ineffective before it even started, claiming it failed from day one, claiming it was corrupt and full of earmarks, claiming that it was out of control spending, instead of a one-time stimulus. Republicans started stomping on it from the start, and haven't let up on it since, regardless of the millions of jobs, the significant points of growth and unemployment reduction it achieved.
Even as the President pushed the Stimulus through Congress, he had to bargain to get it past conservative Democrats and to get the necessary number of votes on it to get past the Republican filibuster. He had to bargain to get the votes of the Maine Republicans, and Arlen Specter's. Even the filter was difficult to get past, especially with Al Franken held up for half of that year, and Specter not yet converted.
Remember what happened with Specter? Remember how we got to the supposedly filibuster-proof sixty? The reaction against him and his bipartisanship was so strong, they literally forced him out of the party for it. The Main Republicans probably didn't get mere gentle reminders, either.
So, from that point forward, much of the output of the house simply was filtered out of the signal. God knows how much liberal legislation went up in smoke. What reached the President's desk, by necessity, was often watered down, often full of concessions not just to Republicans, but conservative Democrats as well. Even with sixty votes, the things we got passed were at least diluted by the Congresscritters we needed to pass them.
Those assuming the President to be conservative, anti-Keynesian, or whatever, are failing to consider that anything that he signs would have to go through that kind of broken-down Congress first, so even before the Republicans took, the house, the President, if he preferred to govern towards the left, would still have to accept more rightward legislation in order to get something passed. The filter would still be shaping the signal.
And now? Well, with this Congress sitting on budgets, even sitting on the Debt ceiling, and vital legislation stalled on the GOP's account, the Republican's filtering of the signal is even stronger.
Here is my basic argument: Obama, like Clinton, will govern more to the left if there is a Congress in place that will allow him to do so. It may not be all the way to the left as you would prefer it, but he would pass things no Republican would allow to pass, at least none that can keep their jobs these days.
I hear people talking about letting this President go down to defeat, with the same "What difference does it it make?" sort of rhetoric we heard in 2000. We found out it made a big difference. If a Republican had been elected, the outcomes of nearly every major event for the last three years would have been decidedly different. The President would have been a filter on the Democratic Congress, and an amplifier on the Republican House we have now.
If we kept Obama as leader, but substituted a more liberal Congress, we would once again see more liberal initiatives passed. We would once again be avoiding the silly and dangerous Republican stunts. We might even get a second stimulus package out of it, or something like the programs Obama proposed earlier in this year.
The better we defeat the Republicans, the more Obama's tendencies, which had him proposing and passing a Keynesian stimulus, would shine through, the better we could encourage him.
We won't help matters, though, by confusing Obama's sentiments, Obama's principles with those of all the Conservative and Republican filters he has to get his signals through. We'll only serve the purposes of the Republican leaders who have deliberately blocked just about everything of his agenda that they could, in part to prevent the changes they don't like, and in part to frustrate us with, and alienate us from Democrats forced to make compromises with them to move things forward.
Remove the filters, keep the signal. Elect Keynesians to Congress, keep a Keynesian in the White House.