Tag Archives: obama

Political Grief

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There have been a couple of nights in the past week when I’ve had trouble falling asleep. I’ve been anxious.

It’s not because of anything in my personal life. It’s because of tomorrow’s Senate race in Massachusetts.

It looks like Democrat Martha Coakley is going to lose to Republican Scott Brown. The Senate seat held for 47 years by Ted Kennedy — and held before him by his brother, John F. Kennedy — is probably going to go Republican. That seat hasn’t been Republican since JFK won it in 1952.

I am deeply, deeply upset that after months and months of debate, after all the angst, after all the arm-twisting and dealmaking, after all the grief, after the reform plan has approached death’s doorstep several times since August, only to keep surviving — after everything, after decades of waiting, we have, at long last, seen the House of Representatives pass a health care reform bill; and then, miracle of miracles, we have even seen the Senate — the United States Senate, where reform bills go to die! — pass a health care reform bill; after decades of effort, we are finally on the brink of passing health care reform; and now we are going to see it all fall apart, because Ted Kennedy — Ted Kennedy, of all people, whose life’s dream was to bring health insurance to millions of Amerians, who worked tirelessly for decades to achieve this goal — was taken away from us by brain cancer.

I have actually had trouble falling asleep because of this. Because I’ve been taking it personally.

It doesn’t make sense to take it personally. The death of health care reform wouldn’t affect me materially; my own health care coverage is fine.

But this bill could bring health care to 31 million Americans. I may be in decent financial shape, but millions of Americans are not. And I want this to be a country that gives aid to its citizens when they need it. It pains me that people die in this country because they can’t afford health insurance, that people come to financial ruin in this country because they get sick.

And I admit, my feelings go beyond altruism.

The thing is, human beings are clannish. We like to divide ourselves into tribes, whether it’s in support of religions, or nations, or political parties, or sports teams, or late-night TV stars, or supernatural creatures. If Massachusetts voters send a corporatist Republican to the Senate tomorrow, I will feel like I have been personally attacked. I know this is not rational. But it’s what I will feel. I will feel like millions of Americans are jeering and laughing at me. I will feel like they hate me. I will feel like my team has lost.

(And I don’t even live in Massachusetts.)

It pains me that health care reform could die. And it angers me that 59 votes is not enough to get things done in the Senate. Jon Stewart channeled my feelings tonight on The Daily Show: the Democrats have more Senate seats than the Republicans have had since 1923; George W. Bush was able to do all the damage he did to our country without ever having a supermajority in the Senate. (By Tuesday morning, the relevant Daily Show clip should be here. Update: here it is.)

Even if Brown wins, the House can still save reform. All it has to do is pass the bill that the Senate has already passed. The fear, though, is that Democrats will be quaking in their boots after Brown wins — because that’s what Democrats do best, quake in their boots — and give up on reform for fear of being voted out by a wrathful electorate in the fall.

But the House has until the end of the 111th Congress to pass the Senate bill. It can even wait until after the November 2010 elections and then pass the bill in a lame-duck session. Hey — if the Republican-controlled House could impeach Bill Clinton in a lame-duck session after losing seats, and not even be punished for it, the Democratic-controlled House can pass health care reform in December 2010.

But again: we’re talking about Democrats. Footwear, quaking.

In this instance I’ve decided to take Dan’s advice and expect the worst. The Massachusetts Senate seat is lost, and health care reform is probably lost. The only upside I can see is that maybe, maybe, the failure of health care reform will take away some of the Republicans’ ammunition as the economy slowly improves. Clinton’s health plan failed and then the Republicans took over Congress, and then they overreached, and Clinton was re-elected two years later. Maybe the failure of health care reform will improve Obama’s re-election prospects. I would rather have an ineffective Democrat in the White House than any Republican; better a holding pattern than active harm.

So I’ve decided to let it go. There is nothing I can do about it, so getting upset is pointless. And I shouldn’t take it as a personal repudiation. I haven’t failed; Martha Coakley has failed. The voters of Massachusetts don’t even know me.

I’m still going to be upset. But I’m also going to try and chill out about it.

For my own sanity.

Obama Has Me Feeling Down

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For a while I’ve had the idea of writing a post from an alternate universe, where Hillary Clinton is president, and things are going horribly for the Democrats, and we all say, “Darn, if only we’d only elected Obama, things would be going so much better for us!”

I’m feeling down about politics again — Democrat Martha Coakley is in danger of losing her Senate race against Republican Scott Brown, in Massachusetts of all places. If Coakley loses, that leaves only 59 Democrats in the Senate, which means that health care is dead unless the House passes the Senate bill as is. (Or unless both houses get their shit together and vote on a compromise bill already. The Senate passed its bill three weeks ago! What’s taking them so long?)

In the past I’ve blamed Harry Reid for the Democrats’ problems. But I also blame Obama. Things should never have gotten to the point they did last summer, when the “death panel” rumor ran rampant. The New Yorker article on marriage equality that I linked to yesterday has a part that struck me, about Chad Griffin’s experiences working on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign:

But the Clinton “war room” remained Griffin’s model of how to make noise in the world. “Every single hour was strategic,” he recalled. “I was this little freakin’ kid hanging around watching Paul Begala and James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. They did not let the opposition gain an inch, and if it did they knocked it down with firepower.”

Can anyone describe the White House efforts at health care reform that way? No.

It’s funny. In 2008, all the anti-Obama people were saying, “Obama’s an idiot, he’s all flash and no substance, all he knows how to do is give a speech.” But in fact, that wasn’t true. I can’t remember where I read this, but there was an article in 2008 saying that Obama as a candidate actually started out really wonky and earthbound and uninspiring, and his campaign managers had to convince him to spice things up a bit, inspire people, use more poetry instead of prose. But now that he’s president, he seems to be just a policy wonk again. Candidate Obama was full of inspiration and hope, but President Obama is just boresville. He’s Calvin Coolidge.

Sometimes lately, I find myself wishing that Hillary Clinton had been elected president. But who’s to say that things would be better if she were in the White House? It’s tempting to say, “Darn, Hillary Clinton would have been a much better president than Obama! She would have kicked ass!” But there’s no way of knowing. She might have turned out to be a bad president: remember her disorganized primary campaign, her wooden speaking ability, the landing-in-Bosnia-under-fire thing. Could she have gotten health care legislation as far along as Obama has? I can just as easily see her overplaying her hand and screwing it up as I can see her intimidating the Republicans and keeping all the Democrats in line.

When we imagine that things would have been better only if things had turned out differently, it’s basically “hope” aimed in a different direction. “Regret” and “hope” are cousins. In each case, we’re imagining some alternative world where things are going much better than they are now: it’s either the future (hope) or an alternate universe (regret).

There are, of course, factors outside of Obama’s control here. If Ted Kennedy hadn’t gotten cancer, there would be no special election in Massachusetts to worry about right now. If tons of white people weren’t racist and xenophobic, there would be no Tea Party movement to deal with. But there’s a lot more Obama could have been doing these last few months other than being idealistic.

Anyway, there is nothing that I, myself, can do to change anything going on in politics right now. So I can continue to follow it and get depressed about it; or I can just ignore it, which isn’t going to happen, because I’m a politics junkie. Finally, there’s the third option, which is that I can continue to follow it and realize that there’s nothing I can do about it so there’s no point in getting depressed about it.

I will probably choose the last one.

New Yorker on Marriage Equality Lawsuit

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The New Yorker has a terrific article by Margaret Talbot on the marriage equality case, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, that began yesterday in San Francisco. It has pretty much everything you need to know about the case from soup to nuts.

I have to admit that while I was very leery of this lawsuit and thought it was a terrible idea, the more I read and think about it the more excited I am. It feels good to be going on the offensive. Ted Olson may be a Dark Lord, but in this case he’s our Dark Lord. By which I mean that he’s a top-notch lawyer, and it’s great that he’s finally using his powers for good. If there’s going to be a marriage equality case before the Supreme Court, we couldn’t have stronger legal representation.

And yes, it’s possible that the case will wind up in the Supreme Court and that we will lose. On our side: Ginsburg, Breyer, hopefully Sotomayor, and hopefully whoever replaces Stevens after he likely retires this summer. On the other side: Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito. In the middle: Anthony Kennedy, who wrote Romer and Lawrence and therefore would seem to be on our side, but you never know, especially since it would be a really big deal for the Court to overturn the laws of 39 states. Some say that if we lose, it will set gay rights back for years. On the other hand, what do we really have to lose? And if not now, when? Roberts, Alito and Thomas are all young, and Scalia could be on the Court for another 10-15 years. The makeup of the Court isn’t going to change in our favor anytime soon.

More importantly, this case is a great teaching moment. From the list of witnesses that Ted Olson and David Boies have put together, it looks like the case will touch on everything from marriage to discrimination to child-rearing to children’s education to so-called “conversion therapy.” Despite the ballot initiatives and the state legislatures that keep going against us, the more we discuss marriage equality, the more the public gets on our side.

On the other hand, if the Supreme Court rules in our favor, it could give fuel to the movement to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment. But you know what? I can’t see 67 U.S. senators voting to enshrine discrimination in the Constitution. And I’m tired of worrying about what our opponents are going to do if we fight for our rights. We’ve been timid for too long. What happens, happens.

Interestingly, there’s another federal marriage equality case going on right now, Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, which seeks not to overturn state laws against marriage equality but rather to overturn part of the Defense of Marriage Act. Gill seeks to force the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages that were validly performed in a state that recognizes them. Normally, if, say, Massachusetts allows a marriage to take place, the federal government doesn’t second-guess Massachusetts and refuse to recognize that marriage. Why should it be any different in the case of same-sex couples? This is what the Gill plaintiffs argue, and in a sense it’s a more palatable case, because it seeks not to overturn state laws but rather to strengthen them. It’s not clear which case will get to the Supreme Court first, Gill or Perry.

In the meantime — still waiting for Obama to stop discharging U.S. soldiers for being gay, and for Congress to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Damn, I’m tired of waiting.