Nate Silver is apparently on vacation in Tokyo. I love how he describes the city:
Tokyo is a bit intimidating so far — roughly speaking, it’s as expansive as Los Angeles but as dense as New York; it doesn’t quite feel foreign in the way a European city might to an American, but instead, almost like some sort of parallel universe.
That description is dead-on to me.
You could see Obama furiously spinning the tax cut deal in his press conference yesterday: it’s a necessary compromise! This country is built on compromise!
I’m getting tired of Obama always telling us he deserves points for compromise, as if compromise were the only option. Of course compromise is the only option if you never fight for anything in the first place. It’s one thing to compromise after you’ve been negotiating with someone for a long time; it’s another thing to signal before you even begin negotiating that you’re willing to compromise with an opposition who is not willing to do the same.
What did the country get out of this? What did Republicans give up? The Republicans gave in on unemployment benefits, which they would eventually have conceded anyway. It was just a bargaining position. They know how to negotiate; the Obama White House does not.
I am so tired of this.
Obama thinks he’s such a masterful leader. But he’s not. True leaders think creatively. They look at the chessboard and say, how can I rearrange all these pieces to achieve my goals? If they don’t like the chessboard, they create a new one. They make up new rules and get other people to agree to them. Obama should be on prime-time TV every night, telling the American people why the Republicans are wrong and he is right. The Republicans want to block unemployment benefits? Fine — Obama should go on TV and say, Look at what the Republicans are doing, and all because they refuse to make rich people pay the same tax rates they paid during the Clinton era. They claim they’re concerned about the deficit and yet they have no way to pay the $900 billion cost of these continued tax cuts.
Obama doesn’t do any of that. He’s completely passive. He never even tries to fight. Over and over again, the Democrats let Republicans frame the debate, even on issues where the Democrats have the more popular position. And over and over again, the White House negotiates against itself.
This White House is pathologically afraid of political combat. It’s so afraid of poisoning the political well, when actually, nobody cares about the damn political well. People don’t care about political discourse; they just want results. You can turn off the TV or close the newspaper, but you can’t turn off your economic situation.
Obama just cares about things that most people don’t really care about. He needs to come back down here to Earth where the rest of us are.
Yesterday we had our annual family Hanukkah party. This used to be a tradition when I was growing up: the families of my paternal grandmother and her two sisters would get together on Saturday or Sunday evening during Hanukkah at someone’s house or apartment (we were spread from northern New Jersey to the Bronx and Queens, so the location was different ever year) and have latkes and other food, and all us kids — the second cousins — would get presents. By the end of evening, piles of wrapping paper would be everywhere.
The tradition was dormant for many years until being revived last year, but Matt and I couldn’t go last year because we had a chorus concert. Fortunately we were able to go this year, and although there weren’t as many people due to deaths and distance and conflicting commitments, it was still a wonderful time.
The best part of it was that I got to see my 95-year-old great aunt, my grandmother’s sister, who I hadn’t seen since my grandmother’s funeral four years ago. I consider my great aunt to be my last link to my grandma. (The third sister passed away many years ago.) At 95 she’s still sharp as a tack, with a droll sense of humor; although she uses a walker, she can walk a little bit without it. She lives in an assisted living community in Queens; someone comes in a couple of times a day to look after her, but other than that she can manage on her own. God bless her. I cherish her deeply.
I learned a couple of things about my relatives yesterday. One, my dad’s cousin (my great aunt’s son) went to junior high school with Lee Harvey Oswald. Two, my great aunt knew Ethel Rosenberg. I had no idea.
I was also reminded that most of my relatives of my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generation were Bundists, which means they were basically socialists and/or communists. This was pretty typical of New York City Ashkenazi Jews in the 1920s and 1930s who emigrated from Russia and Eastern Europe. They all read the Forverts or the Freiheit. Of course, the Cold War came along and made these beliefs dangerous, so they had to tame it down and dropped out of politically questionable organizations. But I think it’s great. I love my radical commie ancestors.