Emotional Truth

Thers: Veal Pen

As Jane says, if the Obama administration, and "liberal institutions," want lousy liberal base turnout in 2010, they're sure doing everything they possibly can to get lousy liberal base turnout in 2010.

Democrats were elected to fight for the kind of healthcare enjoyed by the rest of the developed world, to stop climate change disaster, to make sure the fools and greedheads who wrecked the economy don't get to do so again, and to end stupid wars. Oh, and to punch back at wingnuts.

Fight for these things: win. Don't: FAIL.

And there you go.

Daily Dish: Tactics Vs. Strategy

In his column this week, Andrew remains confident that Obama will get healthcare reform done:

Obama has a solid majority and can achieve all this with Democratic votes alone. So why is he in such trouble? Partly it is that this kind of reform rightly stirs scepticism, and Obama has allowed a hapless and divided Congress to take the lead, muddying the message. Partly it is that the hard right is becoming more and more extreme and its fears have eclipsed the hopes of Obama’s supporters. But the most critical part, in my view, is the public understanding that after two massive bank bailouts and a vast stimulus package, with two still-intractable wars, the US cannot afford even the modest 10-year trilliondollar package Obama is proposing. And Obama’s inability to cut spending while the economy is so fragile means he is constrained from offering fiscal reassurance.

So, tactically, Obama is on the defensive. Strategically? Again, he is stronger than he now appears. When the health insurance bill is passed and elderly Americans are not rounded up into concentration camps and granny isn’t subjected to euthanasia, and when many uninsured people gain a peace of mind they have never felt before, and people become able to change job without fearing loss of insurance, the Republican scare tactics may come to seem absurd.

DougJ: Disaster

This sounds terrible:

After months of frustrating deliberations, and a threat from the White House that President Obama would write his own legislation, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has finally circulated a draft of a health care bill—one that contains neither a co-op plan nor a public option.

The committee was expected to propose creating a system of privately run, regional, health care co-operatives in lieu of a public option, but Baucus has eschewed even that compromise. According to the New York Times, Baucus’ plan is calculated to win the support of Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME). But Snowe supports a public option affixed to a so-called “trigger mechanism,” raising questions about why this plan doesn’t at least propose something along those lines.

JMM sums up:

But I do wonder whether, if the details are not thought through carefully, you might not end up with a system less effective at driving down costs than driving down the number of Democrats serving in Congress.

This is the first time during this whole process I’ve been scared. For the past few months, I’ve believed that Democrats would create a decent (if not spectacular) bill that would make it easier for Americans to get health insurance and possibly do something about controlling costs, and that the bill would prove to be a major political success in the medium and long terms.

Now, I’m not so sure.

I think this really matters. Obama may lose in this even if he wins . . .
digby: Emotional Truth

This week-end a former Obama campaign volunteer wrote a wonderful post about her growing disillusionment, that you should read in its entirety. Here's an excerpt:

One of the great joys for me in working on the Obama campaign was being involved with people who understood this concept [of emotional truth] very, very well. Although I had no part in the messaging of the campaign myself, I watched with great appreciation how the campaign tapped into the emotions of it's volunteers. They took a demoralized activist base beaten down by 8 years of quasi-fascist rule and lifted us up with three simple words and one simple concept - "Respect, empower, and include" and "CHANGE."

Day after day, they used these concepts, ritualized them, repeated them, made them into a mantra. They created the emotional truth around which the campaign drew it's power.

To this day I still tear up when I remember how, at the end of Camp Obama, our facilitator told everyone in the room to close their eyes and envision Obama and his family on January 20 - to envision Michelle and her girls as they stood to watch their father take the oath of office. And I can tell you, when I was there on the Mall and watched it happen for real, it was all I could do not to break down.

But whatever alchemy created this understanding during the campaign has all but vanished in the last few months. I know so many OFA staff and volunteers who do everything they can to keep this spirit alive, but it's not really coming from Obama anymore. The arguments for health care, even the pledges OFA asks constituents to sign - contain not one whiff of emotional truth. Even the health care horror stories collected by OFA have been stripped of their emotion, filed away to be trotted out in mild DNC ads or handed over to congressional members. These stories need to be used, repeated, and ritualized for the entire country - they need to become our nation's emotional truth.

That is not happening. Instead the administration is pushing policy arguments, lists of ideas, pieces of paper. And they shrivel and die next to Sarah Palin's Baby Trig and the reptile fear of people clinging desperately to whatever they have left after a brutal recession.

So here we are. What now?

I confess that I never felt that connection, but I readily admit that I'm probably not the audience for which these emotional appeals are intended. (I'm dead inside.) But the fact that these emotional appeals were powerful is absolutely true. I know many people who were profoundly affected by them and who felt connected to politics in a way they had never felt before because of it. I think it's bordering on indecent to kick these people in the teeth in order to appease a bunch of establishment scolds who require Democrats to "stare down their own party" in order to be acceptable leaders of Real America. (Meanwhile we have Republicans performing various metaphorical sex acts on the likes of Beck and Limbaugh on a daily basis and nobody says a word.)

She asks, what now? Well, here's one thing people can do including this person. From the PCCC:

If Obama doesn't stand firm on the public option, millions of people will lose hope.

So today, we're launching a petition to President Obama signed by those who volunteered, staffed, voted for, or donated to Obama's campaign in 2008, asking him to please stand firm on the public option.

If that's you, can you sign this petition today? Click here.

Then, please think hard about others you know who worked for change last year -- and forward them this email.

The petition says: "We worked so hard for real change. President Obama, please demand a strong public health insurance option in your speech to Congress. Letting the insurance companies win would not be change we can believe in."

We'll make sure the White House gets our message. In addition to delivering the signatures and personal notes from the petition page, we're planning an ad featuring the voices of those who sign.

Obama's speech "is still being debated in the West Wing." * That means there's still time -- we have one week to persuade Obama to do the right thing.

Can you sign this petition to President Obama today? Click here.

Then, please forward this to others. Again, we have until Wednesday, September 9. Thanks for being a bold progressive.

They are fundraising for an ad as well:

The group has also set up an ActBlue page showing the amount donated so far, and what more money could do: "$20,000 can make a splash in a DC publication, $40,000 could buy cable news in DC, $100,000 could buy a New York Times ad."

Founder Adam Green wrote in a blog post on The Huffington Post:

We'll make sure the White House gets our message. In addition to delivering the signatures and personal notes from the petition page, we're planning an ad featuring the voices of those who sign.

Obama's speech "is still being debated in the West Wing," reports Politico. That means there's still time -- we have one week to persuade Obama to do the right thing.

Maybe the White House isn't interested in a little emotional truth from their own supporters, but they should be.

Think Progress: Tom Coburn Loses ‘Tenther’ Debate With Town Hall Attendee

In a town hall forum conducted late last month in Bentonville, AR, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) admitted that health care rationing occurs in the United States.
In a YouTube clip that is being celebrated by conservative bloggers, Coburn engages in a debate with a woman who supports a single-payer system.

Coburn argued that instituting a single-payer system would result in “rationing.” The town hall attendee astutely noted, “I feel like health care is rationed now.” Coburn responded, “Well, not near the extent it is in the countries that have single-payer.” In fact, countries with single-payer systems — like Australia and Canada — enjoy higher life-expectancy, lower infant mortality, and better cost efficiency.

Coburn quickly pivoted to a “tenther” argument, asking the woman: “Where do you find the authority in the U.S. Constitution for the federal government” to run a single-payer health care system? The crowd exploded with applause. Undeterred, the woman town hall participant quickly stumped Coburn:

TOWN HALL PARTICIPANT: Let me ask you a question about the Constitution. I’m not an expert on the Constitution, but we already have Social Security, we already have Medicare –

COBURN: And both of them are bankrupt. So you want to create another bankrupt program?

TOWN HALL PARTICIPANT: You know, we have to take care of people. [Crowd yells "no!"]

Coburn never responded to the woman’s constitutional argument. Watch it:

The town hall attendee who challenged Coburn was exactly right. Under the Oklahoma senator’s understanding of the Constitution, Medicare and Social Security would cease to exist. As Ian Millhiser writes, “[T]here is something fundamentally authoritarian about the tenther constitution. Social Security, Medicare, and health-care reform are all wildly popular, yet the tenther constitution would shackle our democracy and forbid Congress from enacting the same policies that the American people elected them to advance.”

When you've lost CW mavens like Brokaw and Friedman . . .
C&L: Meet The Press: Reaction of Obama's school speech by Republicans is "the Stupid"

By John Amato Sunday Sep 06, 2009 2:00pm

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David Gregory paints this phony outrage as a firestorm, but Friedman has to correct him. Even Tom Brokaw was stunned at the ignorance and stupidity of the right wingers going ballistic over President Obama's speech to our school kids.

Meet the Press:

MR. GREGORY: We brought it up with David Axelrod. Well, this has created such a firestorm. Here's the New Canaan Public Schools, writing a parent letter, and in it they say this. "In developing their plans our principals have considered issues such as developmental appropriateness, curricular relevance, the time at which the speech is being broadcast and the importance of teachers assuming responsibility for the selection of instructional materials. In elementary schools the administration and faculty will view the speech, download it and after discussing it, make decisions regarding how it might be used in the future--including deciding its appropriateness for various grade levels. Parents will be notified, if and when, the decision to show the speech is made." Tom Brokaw, talk about tortured language. What's going on here?

MR. FRIEDMAN: Signs of the apocalypse. I mean, really.

MR. BROKAW: It's stunning to me. I come from a time and a place in America where it would be thrilling to have a president of the United States address your school about the importance of studying and staying in school. And this president, whatever else you think about his political philosophy, is a symbol of working hard, coming from difficult circumstances and getting to where he is in part because of education. I think it's so ripe for satire, it's unbelievable. The superintendent of the Gettysburg Public School System said today that they have devised a plan for students to be shielded from a President Abraham Lincoln who will be coming to make an address. Look, that is the most tortured thing I can possibly imagine, what we just read there. It sounds like East Germany trying to form some restrictions on people leaving the eastern sector to go into the western sector. I think it's perfectly appropriate for parents to say, "I don't want my child to hear that. I would rather keep them out or put them in a different school that day." But this is completely out of control, in my judgment. And it's not--it's not partisan. I mean, if--when I was a student or when my children were in school...

MR. GREGORY: Right.

MR. BROKAW: ...if it had been Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or George Bush, the idea of hearing a president of the United States saying we should study hard and that's how we advance and we all need to get in on, on this, I think is an appropriate message.

MR. GREGORY: Mayor Giuliani, you ran for president and one of the things that I've noticed in my experience covering a Republican president,George W. Bush, is the lack of respect for the institution of the presidency. Whether it's people saying during Bush's time, "Hey, he's not my president." Well, no, yes, he is. Does that trouble you?

MR. GIULIANI: Yes, it does, and Tom is right. But the difference is we looked at President Eisenhower or President Reagan, even up to about that point, even President Bush 41 differently. There's a lack of respect for the president, there's a lack of respect for politicians. And David Axelrod said, "Well, this isn't politics." Everything the president does nowadays is politics, for better or worse. And I think that's what you're seeing. You're seeing people distrust the president's motives or the administration's motives. It's not just about the speech, it's about the lesson plan. I think it's unfortunate and I think, you know, what's the--it almost seems a shame to say what's the harm in a president speaking to a group of children.

FMR. REP. FORD: I wish when I was in fourth...

MR. GIULIANI: I think, I think the president should be given the opportunity to do it.

MR. FRIEDMAN: But David, you know, you said, it's a firestorm. And we live in the age of firestorms. You know, today, or this week, it's the president speaking in school. What it needs is for people to stand up and say that's flat out stupid, OK? That's flat out stupid what you're talking about. The president of the United States, addressing schoolchildren in this country to study hard, work hard because that's the way you advance in today's global economy. And instead of that, we kind of dance around it, you know. It's flat out stupid.

Wow, Friedman said something I can get behind here. "Signs of the apocalypse." That's how their reaction is to everything done by the president. Why didn't Gregory call it stupid too? Rudy couldn't even defend their actions. That's saying a lot when the only thing he can come up with is that it's all politics now. How does that make it OK? When will the media start acting like the f*&king media? They can't even do it for something as absurd as this.

Think Progress: Only 51 percent of Kentucky residents believe Obama was born in U.S.

A new Research 2000 poll released by Daily Kos shows that only a slight majority — 51 percent — of Kentuckians believe President Obama was born in this country. Twenty percent said they think he was born elsewhere, and 29 percent said they weren’t sure. “While 94 percent of black respondents said they think Obama was born in the United States, only 45 percent of white respondents were certain that he was born here.” The Lexington Herald-Reader reports, “Investigations by numerous media outlets, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact service of the St. Petersburg Times, have determined that Obama was born in Hawaii.”

Benen: IT'S A MEANINGLESS WORD, ANYWAY...

The right-wing drive to target the Obama administration's use of "czars" seems to be catching on among Republican lawmakers. On Fox News yesterday, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said the president's use of czars is "an affront to the Constitution."

I did some research last night, trying to find examples of Lamar Alexander criticizing the Bush administration's use of czars. After all, Bush/Cheney not only kept some of the czars left over from the Clinton and the H.W. Bush administrations, but also oversaw the creation of a "food safety czar," a "cybersecurity czar," a "regulatory czar," an "AIDS czar," a "manufacturing czar," an "intelligence czar," a "bird-flu czar," and a "Katrina czar." If Alexander is concerned about this "proliferation" of czars, surely he raised some concerns during the previous administration.

Except he didn't. As far as I can tell, Alexander never said a word. Apparently, Republican czars are fine; Democratic czars are un-American. Just because. Good to know.

I think I have a solution to this meaningless dust-up: stop using the word "czar." It's a meaningless word, anyway. It's not as if there's a single person in the executive branch with the word "czar" in their formal title -- it's just a colloquial political euphemism.

Take this report from last night, for example, and notice the "c" word isn't in it.

President Obama has named Ron Bloom as the administration's senior counselor for manufacturing policy, the White House said Sunday night. The announcement came ahead of Mr. Obama's planned remarks at the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s annual Labor Day picnic in Cincinnati.

Since February, Mr. Bloom has been a senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. He sits on the president's automotive industry task force. The White House said Mr. Bloom would continue that position and would expand his role to coordinate the administration's manufacturing policy with the Commerce, Treasury, Energy and Labor departments.

The White House said Mr. Bloom would work with the National Economic Council to help lead policy development and strategic planning for "the president's agenda to revitalize the manufacturing sector."

Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? The president wants a special focus on the U.S. manufacturing sector, so he'll have a senior advisor who'll help oversee the White House manufacturing policy.

So, is Bloom the new "manufacturing czar" (a position created by George W. Bush)? Only if we choose to use the phrase. The alternative is to say that Ron Bloom will be advising the president on manufacturing policy. The "c" word has been deemed scary, but the job description is innocuous.

This has broad applicability. The president has a "Guantanamo closure czar"? No, he has a guy at the Pentagon whose focus is on closing the detention facility there. There's nothing "czarist" about it. The president has a "Mideast peace czar"? No, he has a guy whose job it is to focus on negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. The president has a "Great Lakes czar"? No, he has a guy heading up the administration's efforts to improve water quality in the Great Lakes.

None of these jobs are controversial. It only becomes "an affront to the Constitution" when it's made to sound unnecessarily nefarious.

C&L: Glenn Beck's long history of extremist rhetoric: When will he finally face the music?

By David Neiwert Monday Sep 07, 2009 8:00am

Probably the most ironic -- no, make that flat-out bizarre -- aspect of Glenn Beck's ultimately successful campaign to force out Van Jones is that it was predicated on Jones' supposed indulgence in extremist rhetoric ideas.

This isn't just a matter of the pot calling the kettle black. It's more like the black hole calling the sunspot dark.

Glenn Beck's history of indulging in extremism -- not just turning a blind eye to its presence, but promoting it outright to an audience of millions -- is so deep and wide that whatever indiscretions Jones might be guilty of fade into total insignificance.

Of course, we're all familiar with the remarks that lie at so much of the root of this matter: Beck's outrageous claims that President Obama is a "racist" who has a "deep-seated hatred of white people", which prompted a largely succesful campaign by Color of Change to encourage advertisers to pull their support for Beck's Fox News program. But that, frankly, is barely scratching the surface.

Keith Olbermann has put out a plea for information about Beck's own background in outrageous remarks. Of course, all he probably needs to do is go through the C&L archives on Beck for everything he needs.

Still, what Olbermann -- and everyone else wondering how to fight back from this latest round of right-wing viciousness -- should focus on is the inordinate number of times that Beck has simply promoted extremist ideas and memes straight out of the most fringe elements of the American far right.

It goes back several years. Beck, in fact, openly promoted the John Birch Society and its "New World Order" conspiracy theories frequently when he was still at CNN Headline News. As I observed at the time:

Beck is busy building a narrative that not only opens the Pandora's Box of mass public consumption of far-right conspiracism, it also portrays the most hateful and paranoid and poisonous bloc of American politics as credible and normative.

Since joining Fox in January of this year, however, the tendency has not only intensified, it's simply gone off the rails.

Most notably, Beck has actively promoted ideas, theories, and concepts taken directly from the far-right "Patriot"/militia movement, many of which in turn derive from the ugliest sector of the right, white supremacy:

-- He "war-gamed" out an apocalytpic American future in which society has completely crumbled, leaving behind a "Road Warrior" society in which militias remained the only defenders of the remnants of white society.

-- He told his audience for several weeks running that he "could not disprove" the existence of concentration camps run by FEMA in which conservatives were to be rounded up. After a few weeks of this, he finally ran a segment that in fact did debunk these claims, explaining that in reality all of the supposed "evidence" for these camps was the product of a long-running hoax that began in the 1990s with the "Patriot"/militia movement. (He then later claimed that he had done nothing to promote these theories.)

-- He ran several segments, including one on his radio show, in which he promoted the concept of the secession of Texas from the Union. A little later, he tried to pretend he didn't agree with the concept while in fact giving a secessionist the opportunity to promote his plans to Beck's audience.

-- He regularly promoted "one world government" paranoia. This included a supposed plot to put us all on a global currency controlled by the New World Order.

-- He tried to argue that the chief cause of the sour economy was the United States' reliance on a central banking system.

-- He hosted an entire hourlong segment devoted to promoting militia-derived constitutional theories about state sovereignty.

-- He expressed his admiration for Nazi admirer and renowned anti-Semite Henry Ford.

-- He warned his audience about Obama's supposed secret plot to grab our guns.

-- He also speculated that it is actually liberal "political correctness" that inspires right-wingers to go on murderous killing rampages.

-- Later, when a Beck fan named Richard Poplawski shot three Pittsburgh police officers because he believed the cops were going to take his guns away on behalf of President Obama -- and a number of other acts of right-wing violence occurred that were similarly inspired by Beck's kookery -- Beck attacked C&L and other blogs for having the audacity to point out the connection.

-- Then, after building up his audience's paranoia, anger, and fearfulness, he pleaded with them not to indulge in acts of violence.

Of course, this is only a sampling of the ugly lunacy that has permeated Beck's Fox program since just this January. Some of the more notable other instances including some really classic examples of right-wing projection, not to mention complete incoherency:

-- He accused Al Gore of creating a new "Hitler youth" by promoting environmental awareness among young people.

-- Even before the election, he declared that Barack Obama was a Marxist. Then, after the election, he began calling Obama a communist and socialist. A few weeks later, he changed course and decided that Obama was actually leading us down the path to fascism.

-- He also called for kicking California out of the Union.

It's not as though any of this could have been a surprise to the Fox executives who hired him. Before he ever joined Fox, these tendencies were self-evident. There was the time, for instance, when he asked newly elected Rep. Keith Ellison, a Muslim, the following:

"[W]hat I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies'."

He also proposed that we simply dispose of our terrorism detainees at Guantanamo by shooting them in the head.

He's also made clear that he's a compulsive liar and self-serving jerk by disingenously pretending that he hasn't said things that he has in fact said. For instance, he tearily praised a 9/11 widow who died this year, but back in 2005, he had said this:

Beck: You know, it took me about a year to start hating the 9/11 victims' families. It took me about a year. Um, and I had such compassion for them and I really, you know, I wanted to help them, and I was behind -- let's give them money, let's get them started, and all of this stuff. And I really didn't -- all the 3,000 victims' families, I don't hate all of them, I hate about, probably about ten of them. But when I see 9/11 victim family, you know, on television, or whatever, I'm just like, 'Oh, shut up.' I'm so sick of them. Because they're always complaining. And we did our best for them. And again, it's only about ten.

As we say, this really is only a portion of the ceaseless deluge of insanity flooding out from Beck's show. The attacks on Van Jones, of course, were of a piece with this (along with his attacks on ACORN).

But you know what is strangest of all about this? People in the media -- not just at Fox, but throughout the rest of the cable-news business -- have considered this not just acceptable business as usual, but have stood back in admiration at the high ratings Beck has garnered as a result.

There's something profoundly wrong with that kind of tolerance. And it is long past time that it ended.