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How time flies. This column marks its second anniversary today, by the calendar if not the Volume number. For the second straight year, we only produced 47 columns, but by the calendar we've gone two full years and a few odd days. Actually, now that I think of it, more than just a few odd days. Ahem.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
This is due to the fact that political discussions in America are fast becoming solely theological in nature. Allow me to explain this concept. Each side has their beliefs. Each has their tenets which they fervently defend. Much of this is done on faith. And, when your entire world view is radically different than the person you're arguing with, there is very little chance of either agreement or mind-changing. It's like the Jews and the Muslims arguing not over where the boundaries of Israel and Palestine are, but over whether Moses or the Prophet were right. In other words, it is like just about every disagreement over religion you can think of -- from all of history. If my core beliefs do not agree in a factual way with your core beliefs, then we can discuss things up to a point, but once we both hit that point then we just stop listening to each other, and begin talking past each other instead. Or, even worse, shouting at each other.
President Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress on healthcare reform needed to be a game-changer of a speech. That, it seemed was just about the only thing everyone could agree upon before the speech. Everyone -- even conservatives -- were saying Obama had to either take control of the process or watch it slip away from him. Of course, after the speech, we'll all go right back to disagreeing with each other about whether (or how much) the game was changed, and whether the changes are good things or bad. Such is the nature of politics.
President Barack Obama will address Congress and the nation this Wednesday night on the subject of healthcare reform. What he'll say is anyone's guess, at this point. Which (by the way) is exactly the problem he's trying to fix. Nobody's really sure what Obama will fight for, and what he will toss overboard in the name of political expediency. Even staunch Obama supporters would be hard-pressed to say, right now, what Obama will say in his speech this Wednesday. But whatever he says, one fact remains crystal-clear: Obama has got to be specific in his speech, or else the healthcare reform effort may collapse of its own weight soon after. And by being specific, Obama's got to start taking some things off the table. If Obama attempts more lofty (but detail-free) rhetoric, and does not (his other favorite metaphor for this situation) "draw bright lines in the sand," then he is going to disappoint a lot of people who voted for him because they thought he would be a good leader.
Perhaps President Obama thought his address to the nation's schoolchildren would generate a similar touching moment with parents across the country. But instead, it has become yet another target for his political opponents (as if they didn't already have enough fronts in this battle). Sadly, the event has become mired in manufactured controversy from the right, with typical sky-is-falling rhetoric about how the evil, evil man who occupies the Oval Office is going to brainwash all of our children into being either: (a) Marxists, (b) Socialists, (c) Obamamaniacs, or (d) all of the above. No matter that presidents have been doing this sort of heartwarming photo-oppery since the time of Kennedy (do some pushups, children!), and that Saint Ronald of Reagan actually used such an address to children to hawk his tax cuts. No, none of this matters, because... well, to tell you the truth, it's hard to figure what some of these people are thinking.
So, with the standard disclaimer aside, we can delve in to Obama's poll numbers for August. The news for Obama fans continues to be bad, unfortunately. There may be a faint glimmer of a spark of hope in the numbers -- but that's about all I can promise here, sorry about that. Obama's approval numbers continued their downward trend this month, and his disapproval numbers also increased. We'll go into these numbers in detail, up front.
So here is where we find ourselves -- in a recent CBS poll, two-thirds of the respondents said the current ideas proposed for healthcare were confusing. This is why Obama wanted just two bills to have emerged from Congress at this point -- to lessen this confusion. But this is also largely due to the Democrats utter lack of being to explain themselves coherently, it should also be pointed out.
Some of the Wall Street firms who got so-called "bailouts" from the taxpayers are making money again. But this is not a scandal, it's good news. Because the United States Treasury is raking in some of these profits, as a result of the money invested earlier under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (or "TARP"). This should not come as a stunning surprise, but it indeed may to some people -- because of the massive failure to politically frame the issue correctly when the money was originally invested. This failure, it should be noted, is shared by both the Bush and Obama administrations.
Republicans, masters of chutzpah that they are, have launched a pre-emptive strike against "politicizing" Senator Edward Kennedy's funeral with unseemly Democratic ideals. This should be so ridiculous as to endanger Americans' health from side-splitting laughter, but (Democrats being Democrats) it might just work.