SILENT NIGHT

SILENT NIGHT

"And so this is Christmas. And what have we done?"

John Lennon's question hangs in the air this frustrating year.  

For liberals, the answer is "Not nearly enough."  For the conservatives, it is "Way too much."   For the putative guy or gal on the street, it is "Would the both of you please get a life."

Bemoaning the supposedly never satisfied "professional left,"  the Obama Administration has trotted out its litany of accomplishments as the year closes -- health care reform, financial regulatory reform, a wind down in Iraq, analysis (at least) on Afghanistan, a second stimulus, the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," Elena Kagan and the soon to be passed START Treaty.   This has been book ended by a number of ostensibly conservative columnists like David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer praising the President for compromising on extending W's tax cuts and governing "to the center," the always touted sweet spot of American politics.

This is a more than fair list. 

American federalism requires any would be reformer to navigate his way through a minefield of competing regional and ideological interests.  The consequence is that progress is generally incremental and always messy.  The attacks on Obama, from the nutty birthers to the angrier Tea Partiers, are not particularly different from what was visited upon FDR in the '30s, the civil rights activists in the '50s, or LBJ's attempts at a Great Society in the '60s.  Put simply, going to a rally (or tuning into Limbaugh) and calling this reasonably progressive President a socialist or a communist is obviously the screamer's right and may make him (or her) feel good.

But it is not remotely original.

Nor is it particularly accurate.

Whatever else may be said of the reforms wrought by Obama, socialism they are not.  The health care reform jettisoned a proposed public option in favor of an individual mandate and delayed the advent of state based insurance exchanges and the elimination of exclusions for pre-existing conditions until 2014.  This will allow the insurance companies to pare their rolls and raise their rates long before these de facto monopolists ever have to worry about the competition exchanges are supposed to create.  Similarly, on the financial front, the elimination of proprietary trading by Wall Street's enormously conflicted investment bankers carries with it six loopholes through which creative lawyers will easily steer the Goldman Saches of the world.  My favorite is that the ban does not extend to foreign entities, more or less inviting the creation of off shore repositories for all that proprietary money.

The problem, therefore, is not socialism. 

It is ineffectiveness.

And that is what has the progressives worried.

The fact that Obama was able to wrestle a second stimulus from the GOP by agreeing to extend the Bush tax cuts for two years is a testament to his political abilities.  Whether that second stimulus comes to pass, however, is an entirely separate question for which the answer is in serious doubt.  To stimulate, the payroll tax cuts, small business tax breaks and extended unemployment compensation payments must actually create a net increase in demand  (there will be no increase whatsoever from preserving the Bush era tax rates, which are the rates everyone is already paying).  Once the GOP takes over in the House, however, they will beat the drum on deficit reduction and the conservatives in the Senate will help them along.  If they cut enough elsewhere. and they certainly want to, they can  suck any of the incremental gains created by Obama's eleventh hour tax compromise right out of the economy.  The only thing that could stop them then would be an Obama veto.

Which Brooks and Krauthammer won't report as governing "to the center."

So, we have a health care reform that gives insurance companies two years to stack the deck, a financial regulatory reform that invites investment banks back to business as usual, and a tax cut compromise that continues to explode the deficit with no real guarantee that its good parts will create their intended results.  It is great that we are ending the unmitigated hypocrisy that allowed gays and lesbians to die for their country so long as they never told us who they slept with.  And I am counting on Elena Kagan.

But I still do not have a good answer for John Lennon.

THE TESTOSTERONE GAP

THE TESTOSTERONE GAP

Maybe it was just a matter of time.

For the past week,Sharron Angle has been garnering national headlines with her sexist challenge that Harry Reid "man up." The Nevada GOP Senate nominee has told enthralled crowds that her opponent Harry Reid's problem is an accountability one. She blames him for failing to take responsibility for the anemic recovery, an insufficiently patriotic appreciation of the success of the surge in Iraq, and whatever problems may befall the Social Security trust fund some years down the road. When he quite properly demurs, she'll have none of that.

"Man up, Harry Reid," cries the Tea Party temptress.

"Shut up, Ms. Angle," say I.

Roughly a quarter century since the beginning of the modern equal rights movement for women, and two years after Hillary Clinton put those 18 million cracks in the ultimate glass ceiling, it has come to this. The powerful Senate majority leader, whose unsung expertise in herding cats created the only sixty vote Senate majority on the only system wide health care reform bill ever to pass the US Congress, suffers from . . .

How else to put it . . .

A testosterone gap.

This would be silly and somewhat amusing if it weren't so fundamentally sad.

The economic challenges we now face are daunting. And the policies that led to those challenges have hardly been kept secret. The Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath was the product of the combined effects of deregulation on Wall Street and shrinking incomes on Main Street. Finance capital ran amok as (conservative) government let Wall Street seize the productivity gains of the computer age with products that gave alchemy new meaning -- securitized sub-prime mortgages backed up by derivative instruments that allowed the inevitable crash to course like a rampant virus through the entire economy.

At the same time, Main Street's incomes shrank given the unmitigated wage arbitrage practiced by corporate behemoths who outsourced our manufacturing base to poorly paid day laborers in Asia, while tepid (conservative) laws made it virtually impossible to organize wage laborers into collective bargaining units to do for them what unions did for workers in the wake of the New Deal.

Before that New Deal began, those who suffered the highest rate of poverty in America were the aged. Social Security ended that problem. And had Sharron Angle's predecessors in the Grand Old Party listened to Bill Clinton in the late '90s, and used that Democratic President's surplus to "save Social Security first," the trust fund would have no long term solvency problem today.

They, of course, didn't.

Instead, led by Newt Gingrich, who was also out in Nevada this week stumping for Sharron Angle, the GOP gave the bulk of the surplus to the rich and then proceeded to run up record deficits with unpaid for wars and unfinanced benefits to Big Pharma. Meanwhile, Wall Street's greed-is-good-guys created two finance bubbles -- first in internet stocks and then in the real estate market -- and now want us all to forgive them for the very painful hangover.

None of this matters in Sharron Angle's invented world of Tea Party anger and extreme right wing denial. Her party is responsible for about 7/8ths of the existing deficit and all of the current recession. Neither she nor it have proposed a single new idea designed to combat the anemic recovery. Their mantra of tax cuts for the rich and government spending cuts for the rest is as old as it is useless. The rich don't need and won't spend the marginal taxes they will otherwise pay once W's tax break albatross is partially lifted from America's neck. And spending cuts in recessions and depressions are ludicrous. They make things worse, not better.

Bereft of ideas, Sharron Angle has been reduced to a mirror image of that sexist male who for years substituted his own prejudicial fantasy for fact. We all know him. Girls couldn't play with the boys. Women couldn't work with the men. Separate, and never equal, the boys who traded size jokes in schoolyards became the CEOs who reinforced that glass ceiling with steel. As Sharron Angle would no doubt understand, those guys really knew how to "man up."

Harry Reid doesn't need another ounce of testosterone.

Just six more years in the Senate.

For our sake.

Not his.

IT'S THEIR PARTY

IT'S THEIR PARTY The big news this week is the multiple victories wrought by so-called Tea Party candidates in Republican primaries in Delaware and New York. In the former the GOP stole general election defeat from the jaws of almost certain victory by casting aside Rep. Mike Castle in favor of Christine O'Donnell as their nominee to run for the US Senate, and in the latter the nomination of Carl Paladino virtually guaranteed the election of Andrew Cuomo as New York's next Governor. In both states the fortunes of the Democrats were sagging. Castle was favored to win fairly easily in Delaware and was central to any GOP takeover of the Senate. And though New York's endorsed Republican Party candidate, former Rep. Rick Lazio, was not remotely favored to beat Cuomo this fall, Paladino's nomination makes that more or less impossible and may substantially damage GOP under ticket prospects as well. This, moreover, is a bit of a political hat trick here in New York inasmuch as the under ticket of state Senate and Assembly incumbents -- the substantial majority of which are Democrats -- is almost universally despised. As a Democrat, of course, I should be happy. Perhaps even send the Tea Party a thank you note. But I am not. And I won't. And here's why. The country is in desperate need of moderate Republicans, nowhere more so than here in New York. As was made clear in this year's debates on health care and financial reform, the GOP's steady drift to the far and fringe right has made progress on policy virtually impossible. Though the 2010 health care bill was almost a carbon copy of what Republicans themselves proposed as an alternative to HillaryCare in 1994, the GOP en masse opposed the 2010 version. There was no prospect for any public option so long as Democrats attempted to fashion a filibuster proof margin on the bill. And once the public option was eliminated, there really was no prospect for cost control, a private insurance based model having been made the base line for any bill and the competitive pricing pressure that would have been created by the public option having been eliminated. The GOP similarly opposed the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act even though the Democrats had jettisoned from it a host of measures to which Wall Street objected. Left on the cutting room floor, for example, was the resurrection of some form of Glass-Steagall (separating commercial and investment banks, or, as it were, investors from speculators), as well as any outright ban on proprietary trading by banks for their own accounts (which creates enormous conflicts of interest, with large houses like Goldman ultimately on both sides of ostensibly arms length market bets). Financial reform, therefore, much like health care reform, has turned out to be largely an effort in shoring up the very entities which led us to near economic death in the first place. We now require banks to have far larger capital reserves (a good thing). But we have done very little to stop them from engaging in some of the practices that helped generate the financial collapse in the first place. And we did nothing to free up credit now, reduce the on going risk of foreclosure (which is real for many), or grant real relief to those now underwater. My somewhat counter-intuitive view is that a House with 20-30 GOP moderates and a Senate with 10 of the same would have made these results impossible, essentially because there would have been a group of truly swing voters in play that would have changed both the Democrats' initial "asks" and the final form of any compromise. On health care, although you wouldn't know it from the rhetoric that turns any Democratic legislative proposal into this era's version of Marxist dialectic, the public option was a compromise. True lefties favored some form of single payer or Medicare for all, and the right wing's plan was essentially limited to killing suits for medical malpractice (either by capping damages awards or creating specialized health care courts where medical experts determine liability and damages). The middle ground between these poles was the public option, offering the choice of enrollment in a public Medicare-like plan to any who wanted it, which in turn would have created real competition with the private insurers and thus helped keep a lid on costs. If there had been real GOP moderates in play, the Democrats might have started with single payer and then fallen back on the public option. Instead, they made the public option their starting point. Unfortunately, however, you can't sell the public option as the compromise it was meant to be if as a practical matter there is nothing on the table to the left of it. There wasn't. And so what we got was health care reform circa the pre-Gingrich 1994 Republican revolution, and none of the post-Gingrich Republicans voted for it anyway. Something similar happened on Dodd-Frank. Wall Streeters sharpened their knives and made sure that virtually nothing about the inherent structure of 2008 finance was changed in 2010, and in response Democrats in Congress kept compromising the regulatory measures that would have changed that structure by taking them off the table. At the end, what you got was some mild regulatory oversight coupled with capital reserve reform, but nothing more. Speculative trading will be curbed a bit. But the major players will still be on both sides of the market, and "too big to fail" will have been rejected only until the next implosion requires a reprise of the measures taken in late 2008. In contrast, a Democratic bill that started with separating the commercial and investment banks a la the New Deal, in a Congress with 20 GOP House members and 10 GOP Senators in play, could easily have led to a compromise that ended the heavily conflicted practice of proprietary trading and took the wind out of the speculative sails fueling Wall Street's greatest abuses. Alas, it was not to be. Instead, the Grand Old Party has morped into the Tea Party, an amalgam of the very angry and the apparently inept. Paladino in New York tells us he is "mad as hell" and I believe him. In fact, his madness may be clinical as he proposes to "seize" Ground Zero so as to prevent the (non) Ground Zero Mosque, a trick that uses the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to gut the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Welcome to Carl's Constitution. Where the Bill of Rights is at war with itself. For her part, O'Donnell in Delaware parades as a lower 48 version of Sarah Palin, oblivious to her obvious deficiencies (e.g., non-payment of taxes) as she promises to cut spending and "take back the country." Given that spending cuts in a near Depression are the last thing any sound economist advocates, her plan can only make it more difficult to pay the mortgage on which she has apparently defaulted. Or refund the campaign contributions she used in a prior race to pay her personal expenses. It's their party. You can cry if you want to.

ON MOSQUES AND MADISON

ON MOSQUES AND MADISON

St. Peter's is the oldest Catholic Church in New York City. It is located on Barclay Street in lower Manhattan, a block from Ground Zero.

The church was founded in 1840 and is iconic for New York Catholics as the place where Mother (now St.) Elizabeth Seton converted to Catholicism. The church property includes a narrow strip on its western border, fronting the appropriately named Church Street. And here stands another iconic memorial, the steel cross which was among the remnants of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The cross was "consecrated" shortly after it was discovered and now awaits its final resting place at Ground Zero alongside the Church located a block away.

Though there were Muslim victims among the thousands of innocents slaughtered on 9/11, none of their families or friends complained when the cross went up at St.Peter's. It was not perceived as insensitive to them or their fellow believers, nor was it said to inappropriately inject an element of division into the planned memorial.

No politicians complained either.

Now, some New Yorkers want to build an Islamic Cultural Center on Park Place in lower Manhattan. The owners bought the land and have obtained zoning approval for the Center. The site is between West Broadway and Church Street, about equidistant from City Hall and Ground Zero. It is not, however, being labeled the "City Hall Mosque." Though even closer to the lower boundary of Tribeca, it is also not being called the "Tribeca Mosque." Rather, in a fit of geographic invention, it is now lampooned as the "Ground Zero Mosque."

Lots of politicians are complaining. Lest any side seize the moral high ground, the complaining is unfortunately bipartisan. For the GOP, the yellers are led by Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and a host of Congressman and candidates. For the Democrats, the Senate Majority Leader has weighed in against the so-called mosque, saying it should be built elsewhere, as has New York's Democratic Governor. The President appeared to initially favor the Center but now has equivocated, claiming that his defense of the "right" to build it did not necessarily constitute an endorsement of the "wisdom" in building it.

Many of the families of the victims of 9/11 are also apoplectic with anger, indeed rage.

Where to begin?

Let's start with the families. In my book, they get a pass. They are victims themselves. And entitled to be as angry as they want at whoever and whatever appears to them to be insensitive. They are not ipso facto racists or intolerant, anymore than the legion of South Boston Irish protesting busing in the '70s were racists. The Irish cared about their kids and did not want them going to lousy schools. The 9/11 families care about their memories, which is all the terrorists left them with after slaughtering their loved ones.

So the families get a pass.

But no one else does.

Not Newt . . . or Sarah . . . or Sen. Harry Reid . . . or New York Governor David Paterson. Not even Barack.

They all should know better.

To begin, this is America, not Saudi Arabia. When Newt Gingrich bellowed that a mosque should be built at Ground Zero when a church is built in Saudi Arabia, my jaw dropped. The whole idea behind our "shining City on the Hill," to quote Ronald Reagan, is that we are different. The values of religious tolerance and pluralism that inform our First Amendment in particular and our entire culture in general obviously fall on deaf ears in Riyadh.

And I do not want to be "like them."

So, Newt, no thanks. I'd rather see a thousand mosques in lower Manhattan if the price I have to pay to keep one out is waiting for a church to be built in Saudi Arabia. And curiously, until Newt made his comment, I thought he agreed. He is, after all, of the party that decidedly rejects the notion that any of our constitutional liberties should be informed by foreign practices or customs. The right wing loudly decries any attempts to pour content into the notion of American due process by embracing the European Convention on Human Rights or the progressive social mores of our western brethren. But they now appear to have lost their analytic nerve. Or at least Newt has.

Because he wants to read our First Amendment through the prism of Saudi intolerance.

Newt's constitutional ignorance, however, may be trumped by the Democrats' transparent political cowardice. So many are running for cover, it is now taking on the look of a stampede. Granted, the right wing has done what it has always been very good at doing -- finding and exploiting a wedge issue shortly before the season of electioneering kicks off in earnest. The "Ground Zero Mosque," which for the (irrelevant) record is not at Ground Zero and is not just or even primarily a mosque, is simply this year's version of the Willie Horton ad -- designed to divide and conquer as it appeals to both our basest fears and our sometimes visceral intolerance for "the other."

The Democratic defense, echoing the President's apparent volte face, is that a Constitutional right to undertake any course of action is distinct from the utility or propriety of doing so. This distinction between rights and wisdom, however, is too cute by half. Religious freedom in America is fundamental. And it is paramount. Well intentioned sensitivity to the feelings of those offended by another's practice, or place of practice, is never a sufficient basis for limiting that freedom.

Among America's elites, the only profile in courage last week was Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He did not insist that we compromise basic rights. Or that we ignore all we have hitherto held sacred. He eschewed any phony distinction between rights and wisdom because he knew that the rights bequeathed by James Madison, among them religious freedom, are our wisest inheritance.

He came out four square for the Islamic Cultural Center.

"This is America," said Mayor Bloomberg.

Case closed.

DEPRESSION . . . AND THE NEW MATH

DEPRESSION . . . AND THE NEW MATH 

We have avoided the fate now for more than eighty years. 

Back then, when my parents were infants and my grandmother a wannabe flapper (she loved to party a Friday and Saturday night away), before Keynes was a soothsayer and the government went counter cyclical, before unions and the Democrats were powerful, and before the words "secure" and "middle class" could be mentioned in the same sentence, we called it by its proper name -- depression. 

Now it's just a disease. 

Which is a shame. 

Because, for want of a little honesty, we are framing the national debate in ways that can only make things worse. We are on the verge of turning our euphemistically named "Great Recession" into a depression. And we are doing it with an alarming amount of historical and empirical ignorance. 

Start with the facts. The government tells us unemployment has been running at between 9 and 10% for the last year or so. This is flatly wrong. The real rate is between 15 and 20%. In the '30s, before government statistics became an exercise in spin, the rate was north of 25%. We are not quite there today. But we are far closer to that than we admit. 

There really is no basis for this statistical fiction. For some reason, the government counts you as unemployed once you lose your job but stops counting you as unemployed once, having lost your job, you stop looking for the next one. This can occur six months out or a year out. But, generally speaking, it does occur. People in their mid-40s or 50s tend to give up after a thousand resumes have been sent out and rejected. This, of course, is no reason to stop counting them as unemployed. 

They have no jobs. 

Other than mailing resumes out by the dozens. 

The government apparently assumes that if you have stopped looking for a job, you either do not want one or do not need one. Though silly (indeed, somewhat stupid), it's predictable given our prejudices. We live in a country where every individual is presumed to go as far as his or her innate ability will take them. You just have to try. In a transparently phony syllogism, the government reasons that, if you are unemployed for too long, you must not be trying very hard. Or at least not hard enough to be counted anymore. 

So, a real 15 to 20% unemployment rate becomes a 9% rate. 

And the worse things are, the better they look. 

If it all stopped there, we might be able to survive this type of scoring error. Maybe it would even be . . . useful. Sort of like the weekend golfer (this is not autobiographical) who turns an atrocious 8 into a 7 or a 6, maybe because his friend turned that missed five foot putt into the gift of a "gimme." Indeed, in the handicapping system used throughout the world of golf, designed to allow players at all levels to compete with each other, there is an upper limit placed on the strokes that can be taken on any one hole, regardless of how many times the weekend hacker flails away. Everyone feels better and enjoys the game. 

But this is not golf. Or a game. And the uncounted don't feel any better for having been told they can no longer be deemed what in fact they are. 

Which is unemployed. 

Nor are we doing the scorekeepers (i.e., the government) any good either. In fact, to the contrary. For in assuming away roughly a third to half of the real unemployed on the basis of questionable assumptions about human behavior, we are allowing ourselves to pursue flawed "solutions" based on equally questionable assumptions. And the current obsession with deficits must be Exhibit A on any list of those flaws. 

Right now, deficits are not the problem, pace the world's bondholders and credit markets. You cannot combat a Great Recession or would be Depression by cutting spending. It did not work in 1937, when conservatives made Roosevelt lose his New Deal nerve in trying to balance the budget; in fact, it just led to a second mini-Depression in 1938. It would not have worked in 2008. And it probably will not work today. Anemic recoveries (which is what we are in right now) can turn into recessions, and ultimately into depressions, when consumer spending plummets (usually because of joblessness) and products go wanting for buyers. Everyone loses, including prior lenders whose notes are rendered worthless (or much less). Governments borrow and spend at these times to staunch any hemorrhage. 

Given our real 15 plus percent unemployment rate, we are by no means out of the recessionary woods into which we sank in 2008. And we won't get out by listening to the deficit hawks. Obama's current approach is measured. It concedes that deficits have to be tackled in the future, properly excoriates the prior Administration for having needlessly run them up on unpaid-for wars, tax cuts and the prescription drug benefit to Big Pharma, but continues to favor stimulus in the short term. 

The only people singing a different song are Republicans. In state houses, where no one has a choice because states can't deficit spend, this makes for easy political virtue as the GOP Governors Christie (New Jersey) and McDonnell (Virginia), along with various GOP gubernatorial candidates like Whitman (California)and Lazio (New York), rail against spending what we do not have (usually on teachers, never on overpaid right fielders; and if you think the government or we taxpayers are not subsidizing those right fielders, think again, 'cause there's a whole lot of tax subsidy built into all those new ball parks that have sprung up over the last twenty years). 

But, in truth, it's a false virtue. 

Because things could have been and still can be worse. 

To the extent the states have a problem, and they do, we should bring back revenue sharing. We should also stop criticizing the first stimulus bill for having included all those so-called "one shots" that states used to keep cops and teachers on the job in 2008 and much of 2009. Those "one shots" helped improve things in the short term. 

The GOP should also stop attacking public sector unions. If their wages go down, that exacerbates the problem as well. It's no answer to point out that public sector employees in unions have better wage, health or pension benefits than their private sector counterparts. They do, but this is because we have allowed the private sector to savage employees for thirty years with low wages and enormous de facto cuts in pension and health benefits, a phenomenon properly labelled the "Great Risk Shift" by Jacob Hacker. The fact is, had that not occurred, a portion of the enormous productivity gains of the last thirty years would have gone into the pockets of the middle class, making them far more prepared to weather the storm of 2008. 

As for the larger national economy, we should continue Obama's measured approach. If we get out of Iraq, start to grow the economy, and avoid a double dip for the rest of 2010 and into 2011, we can survive and then set the stage to prosper. With health care reform on the books and financial reform coming, we may even begin to redress the terrible imbalances that have threatened salaried workers in the private sector, helping them regain the purchasing power lost in those risk shifting years. 

The bondholders and credit markets will still complain. 

But at least they are being counted.

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM, THEN AND NOW

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM, THEN AND NOW 

Marco Rubio is a first generation son of Cuban immigrants running for the US Senate in Florida. He is mounting a conservative primary challenge to Republican Charlie Crist, the current Governor also now running for the Senate, and spoke earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) convention in Washington, D.C. According to reports, he brought the (conservative) house down with an impassioned defense of "American exceptionalism" and a stiletto like assault on the Obama Administration's ostensible refusal to honor it. 

Too bad. 

Because "exceptionalism" is pretty dangerous when rendered, as it often is, in a maelstrom of historical inaccuracy. 

And also because, if there is such an animal and it is valid, Barack Obama -- not Marco Rubio, the latest poster child for CPAC -- is its best current manifestation. 

There is a school of history that travels under the name of American exceptionalism. One of its biggest proponents was John Patrick Diggins, now deceased but formerly a History Professor at the CUNY Graduate school here in New York City. Years ago, Diggins wrote a book entitled On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundation of American History. In it, Diggins carefully laid out the foundational claims of the school of exceptionalism. It is, put simply, a laudatory version of the well settled notion that the United States was a set of ideas before it became a nation or a culture, and that the founding ideas of equality, representative democracy and individual rights were unique as a matter of government in the annals of history. 

So far, so good. 

There is nothing wrong with the notion that we created something fundamentally different from what hitherto existed or that our experiment in self-governance was and remains a noble undertaking. There is a problem, however, or at least the beginnings of one, when you turn that fundamental difference into one of kind as opposed to degree. It takes a lot of ignorance, or hubris (which is often the same thing), to forget Magna Carta, or the steady development of English common law in the centuries prior to 1776, or for that matter the Enlightenment, as one marches to the tune of American exceptionalism. Yet, as an indisputable matter of historical fact, it is impossible to envision the American experiment without those necessary precursors. 

Monarchy only became unfashionable after knowledge was deemed a product of human experiment and investigation rather than divine right or inspiration, and you can't get there without Newton, Bacon, Descartes, Berkeley and Hume -- pre-1776 Europeans all. When Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence that certain truths were "self-evident," he was reflecting the fundamental sea change in philosophy that had occurred earlier, a change from the notion that we had to look beyond ourselves and our world to discover what we were about. The "Creator" may have "endowed" us with certain inalienable rights, but it was in the final analysis an endowment that was deemed inherent, not a gift that was reclaimable by the Almighty on a moment's notice. 

In short, the world became about us, not Him. 

The same was true with Lincoln. He changed our understanding of the American Constitution by reading it through the prism of the Declaration of Independence and that self evident truth of equality. He did not get that truth from a church or a theology. He got it from the same Enlightenment Jefferson himself had fashioned it out of. And then, as the experiment moved forward, millions flocked to our shores to share in that truth. 

Marco Rubio is a child of today's flockers. His parents escaped Cuba, a nation built on a system that embraces the precise opposite of what the Enlightenment discovered. Marxism always was as ignorant of human nature and as absolutist in its teleological world view as the medievalists who insisted that man was bound to follow the dictates of divinely created monarchies. 

 Unfortunately, however, the right wing today often touts its own claims to divine right. Just listen to them talk about gays or abortion or immigrants who do not speak English. They treat the first two as divinely forbidden and the last with a contempt that ignores the fact that the vast majority of immigrants in the 19th century were not any more fluent in our supposed native tongue than those who show up today.

Language may not appear to be the vehicle through which divine right keeps the quotidian masses at bay, but it often is. For centuries prior to Vatican II, the Catholic Church spoke only in Latin in part to insure that its "truths" could only be transmitted through the insights of a special class and were not generally available to the people as a whole, there to be discussed, debated and perhaps refuted. America rejected that notion in principle. Jefferson's endowed man had inalienable rights. To be heard was one of them. To be heard only in English was not. 

Rubio is one of the screamers now claiming that Obama denies American exceptionalism. That is flatly false. Obama does not deny exceptionalism, he properly understands it. And Rubio does not. Exceptionalism never denied the notion that policy should be based on empirical evidence rather than divinely asserted faith. In fact, it was founded on that notion. We cannot truly know what God intends about health care or taxes or national defense. So we might want to either leave God out of those debates, or at the very least admit that there is no Moses coming down from the mountain with ten point plans on these issues. 

Exceptionalism also was never at odds with government regulation or social largesse. In fact, the economic opportunity Americans have steadily sought and often found in their aggressive "pursuit" of Jeffersonian "happiness" -- another founding idea that is part of American exceptionalism -- was regularly facilitated by government, whether via the land grants of the Homestead Act in the 1860s, the management of the railroads by the ICC at the turn of the last century, the regulation of securities markets in the 1930s, or the high tech product spin offs made possible by research done by NASA and the Defense Department in the last half century. 

Obama's current effort to refashion the regulatory architecture in order to save finance capital from its worst self is in that tradition. So was his successful effort at reforming the health care system, which had become as irrational circa 2010 as America's railroads (with their different grades of track depending on who owned what and who built them) were in the 1890s. 

The Rubios and right wingers appear not to accept that tradition. 

Maybe some day they will. 

If so . . .

That will be exceptional.

JUST SAY NO

JUST SAY NO

 

Nancy Reagan is apparently being channelled throughout the nation's capital, especially among the Republicans. 

As you may recall, during her time in the White House, the former first lady made one of her signature initiatives the "Just Say No" campaign to combat the nation's drug problem. Mrs. Reagan claimed that the best anti-drug program was refusal by the would be user. So, when America's teens walked into their various Friday and Saturday night soirees and were offered a hit off the proverbial but ever present joint, they were supposed to rise up in unison with a two letter response -- No. 

The campaign did not work very well. Teens being . . . well, teens . . . couldn't quite get to "No" en masse. Either peer pressure, or existing addiction, or the more widespread "maybe I'll try it just once" approach left "No", if not dead in the water, at least on life support. The crack cocaine epidemic still swept through the cities and cocaine itself was featured at the hippest parties among the so-called cooler (and richer) set. There was that famous scene in Crocodile Dundee where the Australian back countryman, Mick Dundee, having rescued the yuppie reporter from certain death in the outback, returns to New York with the reporter to sample high society only to come upon a party animal in an upper East Side kitchen bent over a bowel of coke, snorting away. Thinking the poor fellow has a head cold and is only trying to inhale the steam from a bowel of boiled water, the ever-solicitous Mick puts a dish towel over the snorter's head just to improve the intake. 

No one in the movie said "No." 

And neither did America's kids. 

Not even the then kid who is today President. 

Nevertheless, though "No" does not seem to work very well, it is today making a massive comeback. Among the Grand Old Party -- which is neither "grand" nor "old" (historically at least) nor even much of a "party" these days, riven as it is by Tea-Party types insisting on right wing conformity -- "No" is the watchword on health care, the stimulus, deficit reduction and pretty much anything else proposed by the Obama Administration. 

Scott Brown, the newly elected Senator from Massachusetts who will serve the remaining two years of Ted Kennedy's term (you can't call it "Teddy's Senate seat," says Scott, "because it's the people's seat," says Scott again, even though the "people" now calling it "Teddy's seat" are all Fox commentators bragging about what an upset was wrought in wresting from the Democrats the seat "once held by Ted Kennedy"), said "Yes" to universal health care when Republican Mitt Romney proposed it for Massachusetts but now says "No". Apparently what was good enough for Massachusetts is not good enough for the rest of us. 

Republicans who were enthusiastic about "pay-go" budget rules in the '90s as exactly the sort of legislative discipline needed to curb deficit spending are now opposed to them. Even that earmark killer John McCain now says it was a bad idea -- fewer earmarks to kill, I guess, if we can't borrow to fund those bridges to nowhere. Any new stimulus is, of course, a definite "No." In fact, even the one they all voted for when Bush was President is being re-cast as some sort of out of body experience no good Republican can even remember voting for. 

It's just one big orgy of negativity in DC. 

And now comes the news that "abstinence only" education will make a comeback itself in the war against teen pregnancy. 

That's right. There is a new study out from a group at the University of Pennsylvania. According to news reports, the researchers found that, among the sixth and seventh graders -- basically 11 and 12 year olds -- studied, 33% who went through the abstinence program started having sex within two years, compared with 52% who were just taught safe sex. I can't figure out what happened with the other 15%. 

The study is being trumpeted as a major breakthrough, though I have my doubts. In order to make sure they were testing the efficacy of abstinence education, the researchers made sure that only it could be taught to one control group and that only safe sex could be taught to another control group. Apparently when you combined the educative approaches and taught both, the rate of those who had sex during the next two years (42%) was in the middle of the two groups -- in other words, higher than the abstinence only group but lower than the safe sex group. 

Here is the problem. The curriculum, apparently for all of the groups, included discussion about HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. So the abstinence only kids were given a primer on AIDS, as were the safe sex kids and the combined approach kids. But, somewhat obviously I fear, if you tell a bunch of 11 and 12 year olds that they can die from having sex and then tell them that the "only" way to avoid that fate is to abstain, it's not surprising that 67% will get the message (the other 33% either were asleep or knew they were being lied to). If you tell them you can have safe sex and not die, less will obviously abstain. 

This study will be catnip to the anti-condom crowd. And that is the really bad news. The objective in educating kids on the use of condoms is not to get them to avoid or delay having sex. It's to impress upon them the need to practice safe sex when they have sex, whenever that turns out to be. I am a father of a 21 year old boy and a 19 year old girl. I told them both to abstain, and from what I have been told by their stepmother(who is able to obtain the classified information to which I am never privy), they did not have sex at 13 or 14 nor even shortly thereafter. But I also told them that condoms were a must, which I am guessing may have more to do with their good health right now than my abstinence speech a decade ago. 

Just Say No is not a substitute. It's not even a solution.

Not on health care. 

Not on the deficit. 

And not on teen pregnancy. 

But the right wing won't get that message. With them, it's just . . . 

Here we "No" again.