Obama Might Not Know What a "Sista Souljah Moment" Is

For those too young to remember, Bill Clinton created the eponymous "Sista Souljah moment" when he criticized the rapper and political activist in June 1992 for some intemperate comments she had made about race relations in the U.S. (Those comments were made in the context of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which in turn were sparked when four white police officers -- who had been captured on videotape administering a savage beating to African-American Rodney King -- were acquitted of wrongdoing.)

Clinton's criticism of Sista Souljah, previously seen as a fellow traveler of the perceived-to-be (but not really) liberal Bill Clinton, earned him some backlash from Jesse Jackson and other black Democratic activists but it solidified his position among more moderate, white Democrats and helped make him more palatable to independents and Republicans. After Clinton won the 1992 election with a plurality, political pundits and observers came to think of his "Sista Souljah moment" as a very canny piece of electioneering. Ever since, having a "Sista Souljah moment" has become almost a rite of passage for high-profile Democratic politicians.

I'm wondering, now, if this is what President Obama thinks he is doing by putting potential Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts on the table in these debt ceiling negotiations. Maybe he thinks that by "standing up to the liberals" in his party -- you know, the people who still believe The New Deal is a good deal -- he will gain some mainstream credibility going into 2012.

I certainly hope not. The thing about Clinton's Sista Souljah moment is that when he did it -- and this is important -- Clinton wasn't doing anything substantive. Criticizing a hip-hop DJ for a few fiery sentences is not the same thing as cutting benefits for seniors and the poor. It was a piece of political theater meant to ally concerns by the more racially apprehensive members of society -- it cost Clinton nothing.

But cutting entitlements is going to cost Obama plenty. If you thought Democrats didn't show up to vote in 2010, see how many show up to vote after Obama and the Congressional Dems eviscerate the programs liberal voters care most about. I really hope Obama truly is as smart as his backers claim and that this is just more 11th-Dimensional chess and a feint and a ploy and that he is not serious. Because God help him -- God help us all -- if he is.

Are Republicans Simply Incapable of Agreeing on the Debt Ceiling?

We're getting down to the short strokes now on the debt ceiling negotiations, and I'm trying to put together a fairly longish post about those negotiations for publication sometime later today (hopefully).

In the meantime, I just read Nate Silver's New York Times article Why the Republicans Resist Compromise and I urge everyone else to do so as well.

Although focused mostly on the GOP's political chances in next year's presidential election, Silver has crunched the numbers and discovered -- unsurprisingly -- that the Republican party has been thoroughly taken over by its most conservative (read Tea Bagger) members. In addition to discussing what this means for Michele Bachmann's likelihood of winning the Republican nomination, Silver's article has this chilling passage that relates to the ongoing debt ceiling negotations:

This is why Republicans find it difficult to compromise on something like the debt ceiling, even when it might seem they have substantial incentive to do so. Republicans are still fairly unpopoular -- only about 40 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the party, which is barely better than their standing in 2006 or 2008, (although Democrats have become significantly less popular since then). As long as conservative Republicans are much more likely to vote than anyone else, the party can fare well despite that unpopularity, as it obviously did in 2010. But it means that Republican members of Congress have a mandate to remain steadfast to the conservatives who are responsible for electing them.

(emphasis added)

I've long believed that the Big Money Boyz would eventually call the Republicans onto the carpet and explain the facts of life to them: the debt ceiling absolutely has to be raised, or interest rates will skyrocket and the Creditor Class (the Big Money Boyz) will find the value of their bond portfolios dropping like a stone. I kind of assumed that all this Republican posturing over the debt ceiling and demanding huge spending cuts in entitlement programs was just a show for the rubes back home.

But Silver's article has got me wondering whether the Republican Congress Critters -- whom I've never thought to be very bright -- can be reasoned with or even threatened by the Big Money Boyz. Most people can't conceive of causal relationships more intricate than 1 cause = 1 effect. If the Republican freshmen understand in their bones that it was the ultra-conservative Tea Baggers who put them into office, then they may not be able to also comprehend that crashing the economy could be much, much worse for them personally than disappointing their lobotomized supporters will be.

And if they can't understand that, then their willingness to do the reasonable thing goes out the window.

And the deadline looms nearer.

GOP and African-Americans: Is This a Joke?

UPDATED BELOW

It's no secret that Republicans have an extremely difficult time connecting with African-American voters. Probably this has to do with the fact that starting with Nixon's "Southern Strategy" in the late 1960's, continuing through George Bush I's infamous Willie Horton ad until today with Fox News suggesting that President Obama has a problem with white women, the Republicans have made a habit out of sowing racial division to scoop up more white votes.

But they want you to know that they're decent people and, as this tea partier puts it, "[T]he worst thing you can call a decent person is a racist."

That's true, and so you have to understand that if there's two things that Conservatives really, really hate it's being called a racist, and black people.

Sorry, but -- seriously -- the Republicans and the interest groups to which they kowtow certainly seem to go out of their way to make jokes like that easier.

For example, there is an evangelical group out of Iowa called Family Leader that has put together yet another pledge it is demanding all the GOP Presidential aspirants sign. The pledge largely consists of your run-of-the-mill "pro-family" language -- stay faithful to your spouse, don't divorce, affirm that sexual orientation is a choice and not genetically determined -- but there is one aspect of it that seems batshit insane: acknowledge that black people were better off being kept as slaves.

Well, okay . . . that might be a slight exaggeration. So I'll let the National Journal describe it:

In arguing that the institution of marriage is under assault, Family Leader contends that by one measure African-American families were in better shape during slavery than now: African-American children were more likely to be raised in a two-parent household in 1860 than if they were born today, as the group put it, "after the election of USA's first African-American president."

Just . . . Wow. The mind boggles. Family Leader is insisting that all Republican presidential candidates sign a pledge acknowledging that African-American children were better off being raised in two-parent households as slaves.

Needless to say, Michele Bachmann signed it immediately.

UPDATE: Well that didn't take along. Amid all the furor about this "misconstrued lanugage," Family Leader has dropped the pro-slavery language from its pledge. Michele Bachmann claims -- and this is not a joke -- that she signed the pledge without reading it. So, y'know . . . vote for her.

Conservative Sinecures Undermine Our Democracy

I found this excellent piece at the Wits and Vinegar blog arguing that we may be seeing something new with modern GOP state rule: the dismantling of our economic society by entirely unchecked greed. Wits and Vinegar suggests that - bad as things are now - we would be fooling ourselves if we allow ourselves to believe that at some point this dismantling will end out of at least a sense of self-preservation. It really is a very good post, and I urge you to click over and read it in its entirety.

There was one bit, though, that I did disagree with, and it was the suggestion that the Republican governors at the forefront of this dismantling don't realize that they are merely dupes and tools of their corporate paymasters:

[A]ll of these governors are similar, as are people like Paul Ryan -- they are under the assumption that they actually have a political future. It serves the interest of their major backers to have them harbor this delusion, but in reality they are in office only until the people have another chance to oust them for destroying the middle class. They are there to ram through ALEC authored legistlation, bust unions and leave the public education in this country so broken that it will take generations to repair. They care nothing for the long-term cost of such destructive action. Like George W. Bush before them, you have someone who is just egomaniacal enough to think they have what it takes to lead, and deluded enough to think that they are "in touch" and "on the right side of history." My ass. Sorry boys.

While I don't doubt Wits and Vinegar is spot on in her description of these men as egomanical and deluded, I would not go so far as to suggest they are unwitting dupes of their right-wing political backers. Having achieved the governorship in their respective states, they realize they don't have any political future after this -- they just don't care.

Liberals have spent the past decade or more bemoaning the fact that Conservatives have been playing long-ball and have stolen a march on us by creating, funding and supporting a web of right-wing think tanks whose only purpose is to think up and popularize policies and supporting rationales pushing right-wing interests. It seems to have escaped most of us that - in addition to providing a steady drumbeat of Conservative agitprop and policy prescriptions ready to be rolled out the moment Conservatives held power again -- these think tanks also helped to blunt the only power American voters have when their elected officials go to far: the power of the ballot box.

For example, nothing would please me more than to see Scott Walker recalled from office next year for having gone way too far in his entirely unnecessary "scorch the earth" war against Wisconsin's public employee unions. But the damage will have been done nevertheless, and Scott Walker will never have to want. His financial backers will get him a board job at one of these think tanks, a sinecure with a friendly university, and set him up with a lucrative position in some lobbying firm. Scott Walker is going to be just fine for the rest of his days.

Post-politics cushions for rabid right-wingers have become SOP now, further weakening our representative democracy. Why fear the will of the voters if -- once you are out of office -- you can really cash in? The fear that voters would kick them out of office was once the only way to ensure that elected officials didn't go too far in service of their paymasters, but Right-Wing Welfare has largely undermined that protection.

I think Walker and the rest (like the odious Rick Scott who isn't even waiting to leave before cashing in) know this, I think it is at least an implicit part of the deal the Koch Brothers, et al. made with them: destroy the unions, destroy the social safety net, destroy the regulations that vex us, and we will make sure that you are set for life.

I think they know exactly what they are doing, and what they can look forward to. They embrace it.

And Speaking of Robert A. Heinlein Getting it Wrong . . . .

I cross-posted yesterday's entry over at The Great Orange Satan and had to explain to at least one person who commented that I actually do like most of Robert A. Heinlein's work.  But Hey! when RAH got things wrong he really got things wrong.

The first of Heinlein's "Howard Families" stories, Methuselah's Children, originally published in 1941 when Heinlein was only about 34, introduced readers not only to Lazarus Long but also to the entire Howard Families concept.  Essentially, the premise was that a man named Ira Howard got amazingly wealthy during the California Gold Rush of the mid-1800's but died in his 40's of old age.  You see, Heinlein explained, back in the 1800's the average lifespan was only about 38 or so and therefore - even with all his wealth -- poor Ira was dying in his 40's.  Ira Howard deeply resented this, and so created a foundation for the purpose of persuading people with extraordinarily long-lived ancestors (all four grandparents had to be alive at the time of marriage) to marry each other.  It was a program of selective breeding intended to extend human longevity.

Now, even as a kid I knew something was wrong about this.  Sure, I knew that average lifespans had been increasing for years, but I also was pretty sure that nobody in the 1800's died of old age when they were only 40.  It took me a while to reconcile these facts, but I eventually worked out that "average life span" doesn't mean how long individual people could expect to live, it only denoted how long a generic baby born into a society was expected to live.  This statistic was heavily skewed by the high rates of infant mortality and the then fatal nature of many childhood illnesses, but -- generally speaking -- once an individual reached adulthood the promised Biblical span of "three score and ten" was at least within his or her reach.

The sad thing is that this erroneous thinking -- something that I, as a child, could eventually put together -- still informs a large part of our Social Security discourse.  It's even sadder now that we are getting reports that Social Security benefits may be on the table as part of the "Grand Bargain" that President Obama seems to be negotiating with the Republicans in order to get them to raise the nation's debt limit and not crash the world economy.

I'm sure many people remember Alan Simpson's outright embarrassing interview with the HuffPost's Ryan Grim:

HuffPost suggested to Simpson during a telephone interview that his claim about life expectancy was misleading because his data include people who died in childhood of diseases that are now largely preventable. Incorporating such early deaths skews the average life expectancy number downward, making it appear as if people live dramatically longer today than they did half a century ago. According to the Social Security Administration's actuaries, women who lived to 65 in 1940 had a life expectancy of 79.7 years and men were expected to live 77.7 years. 

"If that is the case -- and I don’t think it is -- then that means they put in peanuts," said Simpson.
Simpson speculated that the data presented to him by HuffPost had been furnished by "the Catfood Commission people" -- a reference to progressive critics of the deficit commission who gave the president's panel that label. 

Told that the data came directly from the Social Security Administration, Simpson continued to insist it was inaccurate, while misstating the nature of a statistical average: "If you’re telling me that a guy who got to be 65 in 1940 -- that all of them lived to be 77 -- that is just not correct. Just because a guy gets to be 65, he’s gonna live to be 77? Hell, that’s my genre. That’s not true," said Simpson, who will turn 80 in September. 

Understanding life expectancy rates at age 65 in 1940 is central to understanding Social Security itself. If the very nature of the population has changed dramatically since the program's creation, it stands to reason that the program itself requires dramatic changes: Means testing, creating private accounts and further upping the retirement age for the program have all been proposed by its opponents. 

But if the population is largely similar today, then only modest changes would be needed to maintain Social Security. Critics of the program therefore have an incentive to dramatize life-expectancy stats. 

But those dramatic claims aren't buttressed by the data: A man who turned 65 in 2010 has a life expectancy of 83.1 -- barely five years more than he had in 1940. Women have increased their life expectancy at roughly the same rate. Since 1940, the retirement age for drawing Social Security benefits has been lifted from 65 to 67, meaning that people are receiving a net of only three extra years of benefits than they were 70 years ago.

I really don't mean to pick on Heinlein; I actually consider myself something of a fan.  But at least when Heinlein got stuff like this wrong it just meant you had to ignore a little backstory to read what was still a pretty good science-fiction yarn.  But Alan Simpson is one of the leading proponents of Social Security reform, and every time he opens his mouth about this sort of stuff he misinforms a large swath of the American people who think what he is saying makes sense.  (Believe me . . . I've had my share of discussions trying to convince others that just because "average life span" may have increased dramatically, that doesn't necessarily mean that people are living dramatically longer.)

Allowing someone as ignorant about our Social Security program as is Alan Simpson to help set the terms of our national debate over Social Security is just pathetic, and only adds weight to those calling for Social Security benefits to be shredded.  Regardless of what Obama's real game plan regarding Social Security "reform" he deserves to be excoriated for that alone.

Thomas Jefferson vs. Lazarus Long

A great deal has been written both in the blogosphere and in the mainstream press about the GOP’s recent adventures in restricting American citizens from exercising their fundamental right to vote.  Of course, the GOP has for years raised phantom charges of “voter fraud” to justify things like requiring voters to present photo IDs before voting . . . despite the fact no evidence of any significant (or even insignificant) voter fraud has ever been presented.  As Bill Maher once pointed out, “We’re America, we don’t vote.  What’s next, you’re gonna pass a law to prevent people from wrongfully showing up for jury duty?”

 

But with the Republican tsunami of 2010 – especially in state races – and as very nicely summarized in this diary by The Troubadour, they’ve since cranked their efforts to restrict voting rights up to Eleven.  And all of these efforts, of course, work to the Republicans’ electoral advantage because all of these measures tend to have the most restrictive impact on minorities, the poor, and college students – you know, groups most likely to vote for a Democrat.

But I’m fairly convinced that this isn’t the only reason the GOP has embraced these vote restriction measures as fervently as they have.  Oh sure, obtaining an electoral advantage by denying your opponent’s supporters the right to vote is nice, but it’s especially nice for the GOP because the Conservative mindset doesn’t believe in democracy.  Instead, the Conservative mindset holds that only the “right sort of people” should be allowed to vote and – coincidentally enough – if you are someone who doesn’t feel like voting for the Conservatives then you, my friend, are not the “right sort of people.”

GOP Has Been Openly Scamming Dems for 30 Years Now

Last Thursday Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick sparked some commentary in the liberal blogosphere by penning a Washington Post op-ed in which he described attending his 25^th college reunion back in 2003.  The reunion also was attended by Grover Norquist, the GOP’s chief “no new taxes” enforcer and hatchetman, who apparently made some statements about how the Republicans intended to maintain a de facto permanent Republican majority in the federal government.

What surprised and saddened me is that Norquist’s statements 8 years ago would cause even the slightest stir today.  Republicans have been pulling the scam Norquist described then for more than 30 years.  What is more, they have been telling us that this is the scam they have been pulling.  Have we just failed to pay attention?