Happy birthday, Abie baby,
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday, Abie baby,
Happy birthday to you!
-- "Abie Baby" from the musical "Hair"

Since it's the random Monday when we celebrate "Presidents' Day," and since it is the year of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, I'd like to take a moment to see whether any lessons can be learned from Lincoln in the Obama age. Lincoln and Obama seem linked together in our minds already (Obama encourages such, it must be noted), so I'd like to look back to Lincoln's First Inaugural Address and see what it has to say to us today.

Most, when quoting this speech, politely focus on the closing paragraph:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

It is an eloquent and poetic plea for stopping the Civil War before it began. It was, you might say, Lincoln's plea for bipartisanship. Lincoln was reaching across the aisle (which was growing into a chasm) and attempting to sit down and talk this thing out rather than go to war. He was a lawyer, so this was natural.

Continue Reading »

About a week ago, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs got off a good line about the progress of the stimulus package: "The sausage race is the beginning of the next inning. So just stay tuned." This was about halfway through the bill's legislative process. Not only did he declare an opening to Baseball Metaphor Season, he also rather ingeniously alluded to Otto von Bismarck's well-known warning that the public should not look too closely at how laws and sausages are made.

That was last week. This week, we are approaching the bottom of the ninth for the stimulus. The game's a foregone conclusion at this point, all the season ticket holders have left, and the beer's been cut off for anyone still in the stands.

OK, maybe it's too early for baseball metaphors. I mean, that was fun to write and all... but even I have no idea what it means.

Continue Reading »

Well, not really... but I couldn't resist the headline. As David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap so eloquently put it: "You know, several, you know, dozens of people spontaneously combust each year. It's just not really widely reported."

Because much like the fictional Spinal Tap's famed bad luck in drummers (all of whom have either disappeared or died in mysterious circumstances), President Obama now needs a new Secretary of Commerce.

Continue Reading »

Barack Obama is our first post-baby-boom president. He was supposed to usher in a new era, where we wouldn't have to fight the social battles of the 1960s all over again. Instead, we are now apparently going to fight the battles of the 1930s.

This isn't really Obama's fault, since he inherited Bush's Recession and the meltdown of America's financial system. Inevitably, references to the Great Depression were going to be made, no matter what he did. But astonishingly, the Republicans have chosen to try some revisionist history on the New Deal and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and have staked out their political position on the side of "the New Deal was a bad thing."

Amazing, but true. The Republicans, fresh off an electoral spanking in 2006 and 2008, seem to think that the road back to power is paved with F.D.R.-bashing. But while others have admirably deconstructed such "the New Deal didn't work" nonsense, I'd like to focus on attempting to teach the Republican Party that this might not be such a politically wise move to be making.

Continue Reading »

The Huffington Post is today reporting that Democratic Representative Bruce Braley will (later this week) be announcing the formation of the Populist Caucus in Congress. The group will initially have 21 members, all House Democrats. From the full article:

Braley said that the caucus will give voice to the populist anger created by the plummeting economy and opaque bank bailout.

"As someone who has been out holding town hall meetings and getting a faceful of that populist rage, I know that it is real, it is a force that needs to be dealt with, and it needs to be given a voice," said Braley.

Continue Reading »

While Barack Obama is making all the news headlines today for (finally!) doing some cheerleading for his recovery package (as it wends its way through Congress), I'd instead like to shine a light on something that appears to be getting lost in the media fray. Because, while it's admittedly more fun to cover politicians squabbling over stimulus details, we were just informed last week that the Treasury has apparently lost $78 billion of our tax dollars.

This is an outrage. To put this in perspective, this is more money than the annual budget for the Department of Transportation. It is more than we pay for the Department of Education. It is the size of the Departments of Justice, Energy, State, and the Interior -- combined. It is an amount bigger than the GDP of all but about 60 countries in the world. Even in Washington, this ain't pocket change, in other words. It's a lot of money. And it seems to have vanished.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you are not alone. This story broke briefly last week, and then was swallowed up in all the other political coverage. The story sank with barely a ripple in the media.

Continue Reading »

Truth be told, it's actually been kind of a "talking points week" for me this week. On Monday, I wrote about how the Democrats need to frame the stimulus debate better if they wanted to convince the public of the righteousness of their cause. Tuesday, I took a break to express my support for the idea of nominating Howard Dean as Health and Human Services Secretary, after Tom Daschle crashed and burned. Wednesday, though, I was back at it again advising Democrats to start demanding an up-or-down vote in the Senate, and yesterday I asked the eternal question: "Why must Democrats always act like such... well... Democrats?"

In other words, it's been a week of focusing on the stimulus package and how Democrats should be framing the issues. Now, President Obama seems to be finally hitting his stride on the issue, as he showed some genuine frustration yesterday. This is good, because he's going on prime time television Monday and he needs to be in peak form when he does.

But alongside the stimulus debate, there is another issue which needs addressing -- one which I have been avoiding talking about until now. I speak of executive compensation. The reason I have been avoiding it is that (1) the stimulus is a more pressing and immediate concern because it will be passed first, and (2) because every time I sit down to write about it I get so enraged I can barely type. So I've held off. Until now.

Continue Reading »

Why must Democrats always act like such... well... Democrats?

[Sigh.]

Half a century ago, Will Rogers (who famously "never met a man he didn't like") summed it up best: "I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat."

[Double-sigh.]

Maybe they all really believed their own press releases. Maybe they thought that Republicans truly were going to offer up flowers and rainbows and play nice. Maybe everyone was so new on the job that the backlash caught them unawares. Maybe they thought "we've got the votes, we don't need to sell it." Maybe they thought "it's so popular and so obviously necessary we don't need to sell it to the people." Maybe they just didn't think.

Granted, while slow off the mark, President Obama has finally realized he needs to explain his agenda to the American people in order to galvanize support for it. Starting this week, he has tried to go on the offense. Unfortunately, then this year's version of "nanny-gate" began, and Obama nominees began sheepishly admitting that they "inadvertently" didn't pay a bunch of taxes. Thanks, guys! That's just what we needed this week -- more ammo for Republicans and late-night comics.

Continue Reading »

Democrats are obviously having problems framing the issues in the ongoing debate about the stimulus package. The bill is now in the Senate, and Republicans are using the leverage of a filibuster (or, technically, a cloture vote) to tear the bill apart and rebuild it to their liking. So it's time to steal a page from their playbook: demand an "up or down" vote.

The thing about this phrase is that it sounds eminently fair to most Americans. The intricacies of the parliamentary procedures in the Senate aren't easy to understand, but the core (small "d") democratic principle of a vote in which the majority wins is. That's why Republicans used it so effectively over the past few years. Here are but a handful of examples:

Continue Reading »

Howard Dean is a man of many titles. You can call him Governor Dean, or Chairman Dean, or even ex-presidential candidate Dean. But the one title which qualifies him to be named as Secretary of Health and Human Services is Doctor Dean. Now that Tom Daschle has withdrawn from consideration (due to a few tax problems), Howard Dean should be first on the list of possible appointees.

This isn't my original idea, I should mention. Ryan J. Davis wrote about it yesterday in The Hill, and there is already a Facebook group in support of the idea.

Continue Reading »