Lance Mannion

The Myth of the Reagan Democrats

I wonder whose idea it was for Mitt Romney to hand Bill Clinton all that great material for a stump speech.

You may have heard that Mitt attacked Barack Obama the other day for not being a good Bill Clinton-esque New Democrat. It’s easy to imagine the Big Dawg having a lot of fun with a speech that begins with his thanking Governor Romney for the kind words but reminding him and the audience that Republicans didn’t have such nice things to say about him and his policies at the time.  From there he can ease into a compare and contrast between the good that good Democrats like himself and Barack Obama have done and are trying to do and the messes Republicans like Mitt Romney have made and are promising to make again.

But Romney’s campaign strategy seems to include saying anything and everything, even if he contradicts himself two or three times in a sentence, in the cynical certainty that the rubes hear only what they want to hear anyway.  And make no mistake.  Romney thinks he’s talking only to rubes.

But NPR Frank James apparently thinks Romney was talking to Independents in a canny play for their votes as he moves more towards the center as the general election approaches and he puts the primaries behind him.

It is an article of faith among the Washington Press Corps that Mitt Romney is really a moderate, even a closet liberal, and that as soon as he’s President he will start driving the Republican Religious Right crazy by reverting to his true Massachusetts-based self.

The assumption is that he’s lying to the rubes now.

But there’s no reason not to think he was lying to the rubes then.

People talk about his stated support for gay rights back when he was running for the Senate against Ted Kennedy.

They forget that while he was governor he worked towards getting marriage equality banned.

My feeling is that he’s lying now, he was lying then, he’ll lie in the future, because none of it matters to him.  All that matters is that he gets to be President.

Another assumption is that President Mitt will have an easier time keeping the conservative members of his party in Congress in line than President Obama has had keeping the conservative Democrats in line.

Eric Cantor would drink his milk shake every day.  Every. Damn. Day.

But James also thinks that, while Mitt was risking riling up Right Wingers with his praise of Clinton, there’s another big question.  How will a different demographic react?  Sure, Michigan went for Clinton in 1992 and 1996, but:

Michigan is also the land of the Reagan Democrats, conservative, blue-collar voters, many of whom now identify as the independents both parties hotly compete for.

Ok.  Let’s review.

In 2008, Michigan, the land of the Reagan Democrats, went for…Barack Obama.

In 2004, Michigan went for…John Kerry.

In 2000, Michigan went for…Al Gore.

And, of course, it went for Bill Clinton in 1996 and 1992.

The last time Michigan, land of the Reagan Democrats, went for a Republican was 1988, twenty-four years ago.

Twenty-four years is one year shy of a generation.

It’s one year short of a quarter century!

But here’s the thing.  The Reagan Democrats?  They were mostly Nixon Democrats and George Wallace Democrats to begin with.  They’d made their switch in 1972 and even 1968, forty and forty-four years ago.

Forty-four is six years shy of half a century.

Those “Reagan” Democrats? Or Reagan “Democrats”?

They’re mostly long gone from Michigan and from this planet.

Of those who didn’t leave the state by dying, many moved out in the 1980s to chase after jobs that had been shipped south.  It was under Reagan that auto plants began shutting down and with them much of what was left of Detroit and places like Flint.

For a lot of people, including many of those Reagan Democrats, when you said the name Reagan, know what they heard?

Toyota.

The Washington Press Corps is dominated by men in their forties and early fifties who came of age during the dawn of Morning in America and they were either traumatized or seduced by it and can’t get over it.

The reason it’s always bad news for Democrats in their minds is that back then it mostly was.

And to them, all Democrats are versions of Jimmy Carter or Michael Dukakis.  All Republicans are avatars of Ronald Reagan.

The ones who aren’t living in the 1980s are stuck in the early years of Bill Clinton’s presidency when for the Press Corps it was all-Whitewater all the time.

But the Reagan Democrats?  They’ve moved on.

Paul Ryan’s hammock

Anytime Paul Ryan talks about student loans, he should be asked how he paid for college.

Talking treason with Mitt Romney

To anyone upset by this: Do you think Mitt was actually listening to her?  After all, it was just a voter talking.

Paul Ryan discovers that the Catholic Church is all about storing up treasures on earth

Dear Congressman Paul Ryan,

Fellow Catholic here  I saw online that you think your budget is consistent with the Church’s teachings on issues of social justice.  Interesting.  I must have missed class the day the nuns taught us to shaft the poor, leave old people to suffer without necessary medicines and surgeries, tell parents they can’t take their kids to the doctor or buy them a hot lunch at school or send them to college, so that the already very rich can store up more treasures on earth.

I do remember Jesus saying something about selling everything to follow him to the rich young man who asked what he must do to be saved.  But maybe I got that mixed up.

Or maybe, knowing the value the Church places on good works and charity, you designed your budget to encourage both by giving people nothing to rely on in times of trouble except the charity of their neighbors?  Is that it?

Or maybe you got mixed up and confused Ayn Rand, the prophetess of your true religion, Selfishness, with St Francis of Assisi and Atlas Shrugged with the Sermon on the Mount.

Oh well. I’m sure the bishops will correct you if you’re wrong.

Yours in Christ,

Lance Mannion

PS.  Sister Mary Jacinta did teach us how to do basic math. We weren’t allowed to balance equations by declaring “Here magic happens.”  What did they teach at your school?
________________________

Because he just won’t go away, this from a year ago today:  Ayn Rand and the God-less Republican budget.

A few less than enthusiastic words in praise of Newt

Newt’s barely an after-thought now and if he doesn’t bother to officially withdraw from the race he’ll only be sparing himself the indignity of having his concession universally ignored.  Reporters and editors across the land will say, “Oh, that’s right, Gingrich was in it for a while there, wasn’t he?”  and shrug and look around for an intern to cover his speech.  He might as well ride it out, visiting zoos and posing for photos as if he was his own cardboard cutout, until the convention in Tampa and then show up demanding the podium in prime time for one last “It’s all about me” barnburner.

At which request Romney’s people will look at each other and say, “Oh, that’s right, Newt was running against us for a while there, wasn’t he?” and shrug and look around for an intern to tell him they’ll try to fit him in early in the afternoon on the second day.

But as loathsome a specimen as he is, I don’t take any real satisfaction in his resounding defeat.  First of all, I never expected him to win (It was always going to be Mitt.)  but I also never thought that he expected he was going to win or that he cared if he didn’t.  I’ve always thought he was running for the same reason he does anything, he saw an opportunity to hog cameras and make a lot of money while not doing any honest work to earn it.

Newt’s a con artist but he’s not on his way to jail.  He’s not about to be tarred and feathered or ridden out of town on a rail.  All that’s happening is he’s had to stand and watch while the suckers he intended to fleece chase after the other guys’ wagons, clamoring to buy their snake oil.  Now he has to think up a new scam.

I expect he’ll come up with one.

Another reason I can’t gloat is that he hasn’t been defeated by the forces of good.  It isn’t the case that karma caught up with him either.  He was smothered under the avalanche of Mitt Romney’s money.  But even if he could have dug himself out from under that mountain of cash, he was not going to be able to pull off what Santorum was able to pull off until Mitt’s money snowed Rick under too.  Newt’s ability to reach the Right Wing reactionary base was limited by his inability to appeal to one of their most important values, hypocrisy.

Newt was too appalling for them to pretend that there’s anything more to their politics than resentment and hate.  He’s such a creep that they couldn’t use him to wrap up their resentments and hatreds in religiosity. 

Newt failed because he couldn’t afford to be as nasty as Mitt and he didn’t have enough cover in his biography to be as sanctimonious as Rick.  He lost because he wasn’t the worst of the three.

Not that he didn’t try.

But there’s one more reason I can’t take any satisfaction in his losing.  It’s a defeat for what’s left of the democratic spirit in the Republican Party.

I’ve said before that a part of me was rooting for Santorum against Romney because Santorum was running a democratic campaign---small d democratic---and that’s still true and that part of me is disappointed that now Rick’s on his way out, leaving the road clear for Mitt to continue buying his way to the nomination and he hopes, with the spare change he has left over, the White House.  But Rick himself isn’t much of a democrat.  He’s a patriarchal theocrat and a Santorum presidency would be all about putting the sinners in their place.

But Newt is still enough of an old-fashioned Southern populist to believe that the purpose of government is to make life better for the people (excepting, of course, those the majority has chosen to exclude from the sharing of liberty’s blessings just because) and the wealth of the nation is meant to be spread around, after politicians like him take their cut and the people who’ve bought them take theirs, of course.

I’m not saying that a Gingrich Presidency would be a liberal dream come true.  But under President Newt the country might have been run along the lines of a corrupt town or graft-ridden city where after the payoffs some things get done. Schools get built, people get hired (relatives, at any rate, but it’s amazing how big families can be when there are paychecks to be handed out), roads get paved and plowed.

Newt got into politics to make money but I believe he took it for granted that the way a politician makes money is by doing things for voters and then skimming as the money required to do those things changes hands.

And there’s this.

Newt is the only one of the three who thinks that there’s more to life.

Mitt believes life is about making money.  Rick believes it’s about making babies and then making it safe for them to grow up to make more babies.

Newt likes money, obviously, but he also likes sex (I know, I don’t like to think about how he likes it either.), he likes food, he likes traveling.  He likes people.  I honestly believe he does.  He likes to be with them.  He likes to talk.  He might be picking their pockets with one hand while he slaps them on the back with the other but there’s nothing personal in that. 

He likes ideas.  He doesn’t have many and the few he does have are crackpot.  So maybe it’s better to say he likes the idea of having ideas.

He’s a fake intellectual, a bad writer and a worse historian, but the reason he pretends to be an intellectual and a writer and an historian is that he admires intellectuals, writers, and historians. 

He likes science and technology.  He likes to see things get built. Those moon colonies?  They were his grandiose way of proposing a reinvigorated and expanded space program.  That means government jobs, government-funded research, government-sponsored science.  I really think Newt was looking forward to seeing those moon colonies built.  I think he would like to visit one and I don’t think that makes him crazy.  No crazier than me, at any rate.

None of this makes Newt a good person or even close to one.  All his likes and pleasures and enjoyments are corrupted by his need for self-aggrandizement and his scheming to make money off them.  The point is that it’s only because of him that those things---those spiritual and material goods---are part of the Republican vision.

He’s not the best spokesman but these days he’s the only Republican spokesman for a richer, fuller, happier life.

When it came down to just Mitt and Rick it was all about money and religion.

Now it’s only about money.

Mitt unzipped

If you want to know the “real” Mitt Romney listen to him talk about Thomas Edison.  Mitt really thinks of what he did at Bain Capital as an achievement equivalent to what Thomas Edison achieved in founding General Electric.

He equates scavenging with creating.  As plenty of others have noted, he’s like a vulture who thinks he’s an eagle or a jackal who sees no difference between himself and a lion.

Edison is apparently one of his heroes.  But it’s Edison the businessman not Edison the inventor he reveres.

That’s not quite right.  It’s Edison the accumulator of wealth he reveres.  He doesn’t see the inventor at work.  He doesn’t see the businessman at work.  He doesn’t see how the inventor and the businessman were inseparable.  He just sees the money raining down.

And that’s what he sees as the purpose of government and the goal of public life, to keep the money raining down on today’s Edisons.

Except that as far as he’s concerned today’s Edisons are today’s Mitt Romneys.

They don’t invent.

They don’t build businesses based on providing goods and services.

They just rake in the dough any way they can get away with.

Photo via the Boston Globe.

The Luck of the Romneys

The news that Mitt Romney’s California vacation palace will have elevators for the family cars probably won’t affect his already low approval ratings.  About as many people who aren’t ever going to like the guy already don’t like the guy.  It’s just more confirmation of what everybody already knows.

Mitt Romney isn’t just rich.  He’s really rich.

His problem has never been, despite what he thinks, that people envy him for his dough.  People don’t care he’s rich.  They just don’t like his attitude.  Being rich has made him arrogant and heartless and left him clueless.  The question is not his money but what he thinks about people who don’t have money and what the government should do to help people who don’t have money?

His answers are Not much and Nothing.  Or next to nothing.

So this exchange with Jay Leno last night should be more damaging than the news his cars don’t have to take the stairs to get to their second floor garage suites.  But, you know what?  I don’t think it will be.

On the face of it, here’s Romney showing his arrogance, his heartlessness, and his cluelessness all at once.  But…he’s using the familiar and reassuring language of SUCCESS!

You can argue he’s saying that poor people without health insurance are shit out of luck if they get sick.  But what a lot of Americans are going to hear is him congratulating them on how smart they are.

We are the luckiest people on the face of the planet, but on the whole Americans don’t like to think of themselves as lucky, mainly, I think, because we don’t want to think there might come a day when our luck runs out.

Mitt is especially galling on the subject because as much as he likes to invoke his father’s memory he is in total denial about what it means to have been born George Romney’s son.  He didn’t just come into the world having money stuffed into the pockets of his rompers.  He inherited connections, insider knowledge, and a whole lot of good will as well.  Money opens doors but what blows them off their hinges is knowing which doors need to be opened and who’s in the office on the other side.  He was lucky as lucky can be, yet he seems to think he was a born a poor orphan and worked his way up out of a slum.

Now of course rich conservatives hate to admit they’ve been lucky.  That would imply they didn’t earn and possibly didn’t deserve all their money, and if they didn’t earn it or deserve it, it’s harder for them to make the case that they should get to keep all of it.

But it’s not just the rich.

We all would like to think that we’ve earned and deserved all our good fortune by working hard, being responsible, being prudent, and by being smart.  Many of us are able to convince ourselves that it’s so.  Luck, we’ll boast, had nothing to do with it.

And there are plenty of us who believe something more was involved.

Divine favor.

From this arises the temptation to think that those who haven’t been lucky have been undeserving.  God didn’t favor them because they didn’t earn his favor.  They didn’t work hard.  They weren’t responsible or prudent.  They weren’t smart.

You can watch Mitt talk to Jay and hear him being arrogant, heartless, and clueless.  But what a lot of people are going to hear is him praising them for not making the mistakes the uninsured made and for playing the game right.  For being smart enough to be lucky.

Hat tip to Greg Sargent. Photo courtesy NBC.

Updated for the yuks:  Mitt tells a funny. The Lighter Side of Destroying Jobs.

Also, Mr Pierce thinks Mitt did himself no good on Leno.

That embarrassing scene with Leno last night, wherein Romney essentially threw people with pre-existing heart conditions onto an ice flow and waved bye-bye from the shore, coupled with the apparently immortal image of Romney as an Etch-A-Sketch candidate, has reinforced the widely held notion that, not only is Romney an unprincipled opportunist, but also that he does indeed believe that there are only two kinds of people in the world — himself, and The Help.

Shafting the poor is central to Paul Ryan’s religion

It’s been lost in the shuffle, which is news in itself considering how excited the National Press Corps was about Paul Ryan and his budget last year, but our once upon a time most “courageous” politician, lauded and feted, his praises sung to the skies for starting a “serious” conversation about that horror of horrors, the DEFICIT!!!, presented a new budget this week.

The news was greeted with a collective yawn from pundits and journalists who last time out were predicting Ryan’s immediate apotheosis as the Republican Savior who’d take back the White House for its rightful GOP owners and make Barack Obama the Carteresque one-termer he deserved to be.

Within the ranks of the shrinking We’re Not As Crazy As Those Guys Wing of the GOP, Ryan’s budget was greeted with a collective thump of heads banging on desks.

Several things have gone wrong for the zombie-eyed granny-starver (Thanks again for that one, Mr Pierce) since he released his previous budget.

One is that the economy has been improving so the DEFICIT!!! isn’t quite so scary these days.  It’s become the deficit and seems manageable and that’s just what the President has been doing, managing it.  Granny-starving isn’t as imperative as it once was.  Another thing that’s happened is that austerity, that is granny-starving of the degree required for Ryan’s budget to “balance,” is failing miserably in Europe.  What do you know?  Keynes might have been right.

But more devastating to the Cult of Ryan was that even while the Insiders were still fawning over him, voters recognized Ryan’s budget for what it was, a plan for ruthless granny-starving…and gramps-starving, and grandkids starving…and a “mercy killing” of Medicare in the cause of shoveling more money to the already filthy rich.  It turned out that a way to sink a Republican in a Republican district was to tie Ryan’s budget to her ankle.  Back home in Wisconsin, Ryan himself suddenly felt a whole lot less secure in his previously safe seat.

And in the year since, Republicans in general have grown less and less popular.  Their candidates for President and the Tea Party crazies in the House have disgraced the Party, mainly by demonstrating how mean-spirited and bloody-minded the GOP has been for a long while now.

Ryan and his budget are integral to that meanness.

I said there was a cult of Paul Ryan among some Washington insiders.  Ryan is a devotee of the Cult of Ayn Rand.  He worships at the altar of her ego.  Selfishness is the cardinal virtue of his religion.  Charity is that religion’s deadliest sin.  Traditionally, conservatives have argued that social welfare programs are wrong-headed because they encourage what they’re meant to help solve.  They make the poor dependent on the labor and hard-earned wealth of others.  In other words, the poor become like parasites.  But to a Randian the poor and everybody who isn’t a Colossus of Wealth are parasites. Leeches and fleas.  Bloodsuckers.  Or in another word, thieves.  And thieves must be put down and punished. 

The question at the center of Atlas Shrugged, “Who is John Galt?” is a mask for the central tenet of Rand and Ryan’s cathechism, “Whoever isn’t John Galt is worthless scum!”

In a deft and detailed analysis of Ryan’s budget showing how intensive the granny-starving will have to be in order for Ryan’s budget to “balance,” Ezra Klein inexplicably suggests that granny-starving isn’t something Ryan really wants to do, he’s just forced into it by certain political and economic necessities created by the Republicans’ insistence on even greater tax cuts for the rich and their refusal to consider doing anything with the money allotted for Defense except increasing it.

Kevin Drum has replied with essentially a “Oh come off it, Ezra!”:

Ryan's budget didn't spring forth immaculately from the forehead of Zeus. It's pretty much the same as his 2011 budget. Which in turn is pretty much the same as his 2010 budget. Which in turn is just a nicely formatted version of everything he's been saying for the past decade.

I'm so tired of Paul Ryan I could scream. Every year we get a slightly different version of the same old thing, and every year we have to waste entire man-years of analysis in order to make the same exact points about it. And the biggest point is that his budget would force enormous, swinging cuts in virtually every domestic program, especially those for the poor. If this bothers Ryan, he's had plenty of time to revise his budget roadmap to address it.

But he hasn't. He knows perfectly well that his budget concentrates its cuts on the poorest Americans. It's been pointed out hundreds of times, after all. If he found that troublesome he'd change it. Since he hasn't, the only reasonable conclusion is that this is exactly what he intends.

I suspect Ezra just likes thinking the best of people.  But there isn’t a whole lot of good to think about Ryan.  As Kevin says, if shafting the poor, and the middle class while he’s at it, bothered him, it’d show in his revisions.  But he keeps coming back with the same shaftings.  The only thing that changes is the numbers he uses to show how much money can be saved by shafting people.  It doesn’t matter if he likes doing it or doesn’t like it.  He believes it’s the righteous thing to do.  In his religion, shafting the poor is a commandment.

But there’s one more thing.

I’ve been putting “balance” inside quotation marks because Ryan’s budgets don’t balance.  The numbers don’t add up.  The only way he’s been able to claim any one of his budgets is “balanced” is by building economic miracles into it.  At some point, if you read closely, you will find a line that says, “Here magic happens.”

Of course Ryan doesn’t want to admit he’s relying on magic.  He has himself convinced it’s simply a matter of tweaking the numbers.  He’s like a basement inventor who’s convinced he’ll have invented cold fusion if only he can make the equations work.  It doesn’t occur to him that it’s not the design, it’s the designer.

In the year since Ryan was hailed for his courage and his seriousness, a lot of people who joined in the hailing have begun to realize what should have been obvious from the get-go.

Paul Ryan just isn’t that bright.

______________________

A good chunk of this post is adapted from my Twitter feed from a couple days ago, and I’m pretty proud of myself---I got to this before Paul Krugman did.  But then he’s a lot busier than I am.  Also more succinct:

Overall, the response seems muted, maybe out of embarrassment. But leaving aside the predictable right-wing cheerleaders, it looks as if the emperor’s nakedness is now common knowledge.

Updated Sunday morning with only mild astonishment:

Maybe I was too hopeful in thinking the “serious” people in Washington were figuring Ryan out.  James Stewart has an op-ed in the New York Times in which, as James Kwak says, falls “into the trap of believing that Paul Ryan is something other than a charlatan and a political hack.”

Ryan makes no secret of what he’s up to, except when he’s directly in front of cameras and what he says might get back to the voters back home.  But he’s stated it flat out in other places and it’s right there in his budget.  I don’t know why they have such a hard time believing Ryan is the Randian he says he is and wants to do what he says he wants to do.

via Brad DeLong.

A democratic case for Rick Santorum

Small d democratic.

Santorum is the worst of the Not-Romneys or, rather, he’s the least excusable.

Not that there’s much excuse for the others.

But Bachmann is sincerely deranged.  Perry is dumb.  Cain was clueless about anything that didn’t have to do with making and selling pizza which is to say about everything necessary to being President of the United States.  And Newt…

Well, Newt is damn near impossible to excuse.  But he’s an opportunistic grifter and doesn’t make a move that won’t make him a buck or put him in a position to cash in some other way and he’s so obvious about it that there’s something almost honest about him.  Plus, he’s the only one who believes that a democratic government can do the country some good and would, as President---Stop laughing---actually work to bring that good about.  It wouldn’t add up to a lot of good and he’d do great harm along the way, but those moon colonies---I said, Stop laughing---could only come about through a reinvigorated space program and that’s what he was actually promising.

But Santorum isn’t crazy---Stop it.  He’s not dumb---Stop.  I didn’t say he’s a genius.  He’s not clueless about either politics or economics, just wrong or lying.  He is corrupt, although not as openly or unrestrainedly as Newt so he’s better able to pretend to be an honest man and get away with it.  When lazy political journalists reflexively describe him as a “devout Catholic,” among a dozen alarm bells this ought to ring for their editors and producers one should cause them to ask, Where in the catechism does it teach that a good Catholic scams the government and fleeces taxpayers?  It doesn’t seem to happen and so Santorum effectively passes himself off as an uncorrupted and incorruptible man of conscience, right with his God.

All this makes him more despicable than the others and more dangerous.

Like them, he appeals to the worst in people, encouraging voters to fear their fellow Americans as enemies.

Like them, he talks a populist game but his economic policies benefit the rich at the expense of the middle and working class and the poor.

Like them, he believes the United States is and ought to be a theocracy, although unlike the rest of them, except for maybe Bachmann---Who knows what goes on inside her head?---he is the only one who seems to understand what that would mean and the only one who would actually be happy living there.

In Santorum’s ideal America it’s always Sunday morning and an entire nation of identical sexless sweater-vest wearing dads shepherding their perpetually pregnant wives and litters of impossibly well-behaved home-schooled children into their SUVs is making its collective way to church where the priest or preacher will tell the faithful that everybody but them is going to hell.

But also unlike the other clowns, and because he’s not crazy, dumb, clueless, or just saying things because he’s on the make, he has a much clearer notion of what he would do to establish the theocracy and defeat all the enemies within.

Which is to say he knows better than the others what he wants and who he is.

He hates black people.  He hates and fears gays.  He fears and resents women.  Everything he believes, including his version Catholicism, is warped and poisoned by anger, paranoia, hysteria---general, religious, and sexual---and an inexplicable sense of personal aggrievement.  He is an avowed enemy of joy.  He believes that we are all put by God into our proper places in life and we shouldn’t go against His will by trying to lift ourselves out of those proper places.  He tells his working class audiences that if elected their lots will improve but he means that it will happen relatively by his returning those Others to their proper subservient, ignorable if not invisible places much lower down the totem poll.

I can’t explain his antipathy to aspiring to a college education except that he sees it as a way for people to climb out of their proper place and get above those who know where they belong and are content to stay put.

You’re catching on to the fact that I don’t like the guy, right?

And yet I’m sorry he didn’t carry Ohio last night and I’m rooting for him to keep going and to win the primaries coming up in Kansas, Alabama, and Mississippi, and the Missouri caucus.

But I’m not rooting for him for all the expected partisan reasons.

Of course if the Republicans nominate him it will be a disaster for them up and down the ticket in November.  But that’s not going to happen so I don’t bother to even fantasize about it.  Mitt Romney is racking up the wins and picking up delegates at a rate that will secure him the nomination.  New York and Pennsylvania are coming up in April.  California’s primary is the first week of June.  It’ll be fun while it lasts, though.  Santorum is forcing Romney to spend money and expend energy and while Mitt can probably afford the dough, he doesn’t have that drive.  He tires out and it shows when he does.  He gets irritable, testy, distracted, and listless.  And in having to run to the right he frightens moderates and independents who believe him and disgusts those who know he’s faking it.  The longer Santorum keeps at him, the worse for Mitt and the better for the President and the Democrats.

But there’s a part of me that’s rooting for Santorum because, over on that side, he is the democratic candidate.

Small d democratic, again.

Mitt Romney is the candidate of money and privilege and he stands for nothing except money and privilege. In himself and as a symbol.

Having repudiated even the little he achieved as governor of Massachusetts, he is running on nothing except the boast that he’s rich.  “Vote for me. I made a pile of dough. That’s reason enough.”  Really.  Has there ever been a Presidential candidate who has run on merely the fact of himself?  Boil it all down, throw out the lies and empty promises to the Right, and what’s he offering the country?  The gift of himself.  All the good he’s going to do is put himself in charge and that should be enough for us.

That’s him personally.  As a symbol he stands for nothing but the idea that the rich sons of privilege are born to rule.

His campaign is all show, a performance for television.  All his campaign stops are photo ops.  Voters are props.  We got a big laugh out of his delivering his big speech to an empty stadium but he could have filled those seats if he’d wanted to, if he’d thought it was important, if talking to actual voters mattered.

Mitt hasn’t much talent for mixing with regular folk.  Everybody’s noticed and remarked upon that.  What I haven’t seen discussed is that he’s apparently made no effort to learn and improve.  The man’s been running for President for over ten years---Governor of Massachusetts was just the first step---and he still can’t talk to a voter without coming across as a robot or an oaf or as what he is, a condescending aristo who can’t believe the help has dared to talk back.  It’s not that he can’t do it, it’s that he doesn’t seem to think he should have to.  It’s enough that he deigns to play along with the charade to the degree he does.

But Santorum is out there in his sweater vest, reaching out eagerly to shake hands and asking for votes.  Asking is the only way he has to get them.  He doesn’t have the money to buy them.  So he goes everywhere, sees everyone, and he asks them, with a good answer for when someone asks back, “Why should I give you my vote?”

“Because I won’t just take it and run away it.  I want to use it to get things done, and those things are things I believe you and I want done and things you and I know need to be done.  I’m with you.  I’m for you.  I am you.”

Mitt says, “Vote for me because I know what’s best.”

Rick says, “Vote for me because we know what’s best for us.”

This is the way a democratic election is supposed to work.  And it almost has worked.  It might very well have worked if the other clowns had gotten out of the way sooner.  It would stand a better chance of working still if Newt would shut up and go away.  And it would be wonderful if it did work, if the people defeated the money and the privilege.

Now, of course, this is purely an abstract feeling on my part.  I’m sure I’d feel differently if there was a real chance Santorum could be nominated.   Santorum is the democratic candidate because he is a representative candidate but I don’t want to live in a country run by and run for the people he represents.  Everybody should have a say in how the country is governed but I don’t want the final say given to an angry and resentful minority who fear and loathe the rest of us.

So, here’s the other reason I’m rooting for Rick to keep going.

The longer he’s out there, the more attention he receives, the more attention he receives, the more attention he brings to the people he represents, and the more attention they get the harder it is for the Press to ignore who and what they are and keep on pretending they are jess folks, the real regular Americans.

This campaign has exposed Mitt Romney’s weaknesses, but it’s also exposed the true nature of the Republican base.

The Right Wing Evangelicals Rick Santorum wants to represent have been working to use democratic means to bring about anti-democratic ends.  They need to be seen as the danger they are and Rick Santorum is doing a fine job helping with that.

It’s good for the Democrats that the Right is showing itself up for what it is.  But it’s good for democracy too.

Small d.

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Will Bunch: The Rick Santorum that America doesn’t know.

Charles Pierce: Me-Me-Me: The Tale of Romney in Massachusetts.

Jonathan Chait: Mitt: Pay for Your Own Damn College!

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The awful continuing relevance of Sarah Palin

Ed Harris as John McCain and Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin in HBO’s Game Change, which premieres March 10.

Over at ThinkProgress, Alsyssa Rosenberg is speculating about why HBO’s adaptation of Game Change, John Heilmann and Mark Halperin’s book about the 2008 Presidential campaign, focuses on John McCain and Sarah Palin, a story she says:

…that’s both been done to death and is essentially irrelevant: Palin is a PR phenomenon and McCain will never be president. They’ve both returned from whence they came.

Meanwhile:

By contrast, the story of how President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarded each other in the buildup to and during the 2008 campaign, and how they came to be partners rather than enemies, is both directly relevant to ongoing events and a much richer story than that of John McCain’s taking a flyer on his VP selection.

Rosenberg thinks it might have been due to how hard it would have been to cast a compelling and convincing Barack Obama.  Could be.  Although, off hand, I think if they’d asked Denzel he’d have been glad to give it a shot.

My guess why Palin and McCain rather than Clinton and Obama?  Ratings.  Soap opera outdraws a civics lesson.

Also, Julianne Moore in a short skirt and boots vs Meredith Baxter in a pants suit.

Let’s leave aside the fact that by the time Sarah Palin prompted her first, “Sarah Who?” Hillary had been long out of the picture.  It would have been hard to do the whole book and it makes sense that the producers would have chosen to focus on the most crucial part of the election campaign---the election.

As a pure story, what went on in the McCain campaign is just far more dramatic and filmable.

It’s stunning on the face of it that Palin could have been placed that close to becoming President.  (Which, by the way, wasn’t really that close.  McCain picked her because he was desperate and he was desperate because he knew he was going to lose.)  It’s horrifying to realize just how unsuited she was for any public office, never mind the highest in the land.

But here’s the thing.  Last year, when the project was greenlighted, Sarah Palin wasn’t irrelevant.  Far from it.  There was still the real possibility that she would not only run for the Republican nomination but win it. Game Change could have been airing at about the time Palin was wrapping up the nomination.  All those supposed Not-Romneys who have come and gone, were really We Want Sarahs.  The Radical Right is deciding the nomination and she is still their darling or she would be if she hadn’t jilted them.  It’s astounding how quickly she made herself irrelevant to this election season.

And that fall from grace is part of a fascinating story.

It’s a story that might be better told in a novel, and it’s too bad Sinclair Lewis isn’t around to write it.

But here’s the other thing.  Sarah Palin will never be President, now.  But she is still relevant and will be relevant for a while longer (a short while, I hope), not in herself, but because of what she represents.

Liberals and the very few sane conservatives who are left can’t believe anyone could think Sarah Palin was fit to be President.  But no one was going to vote for her to be President.  They were going to vote for her to be their hero-queen.

She was their anger embodied.  Their bitterness, their hatreds, their resentments revenged.  She was to be their righteous rage let loose upon all those Others who made them feel afraid, insecure, cast aside, and irrelevant. 

They weren’t going to vote for her to govern the country.  They were going to vote for her to get even on their behalf.

They being mostly middle-aged white men and youngish white men feeling themselves slipping into premature obsolescence and impotence.

And they haven’t gone away.

And they’re not going to go away, not before November at any rate.  They’re in the process of deciding the Republican nomination and with it the Presidential election---even if Romney runs off Santorum, they’ve so crippled Mittens by making him pander to them, at the cost of his losing the independents and even more women, that they’ve effectively ensured the re-election of the Other they most fear, loathe, and despise.  But that’s the only good news.  They are still going to decide the make-up of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and a whole bunch of state houses and the insanity is going to continue and get worse wherever they win.

Sarah Palin is terribly, terrifyingly relevant to their story.

______________________

To tell the truth, I don’t think I’d be interested in a TV movie about the Clinton and Obama campaigns. Two hours of scenes of Barack Obama strategizing with David Axelrod and David Plouffe alternating with scenes of Hillary Clinton strategizing with Mark Penn?  No, thanks.  I’m just relieved there isn’t one about John Edwards’.

As far as casting goes, I don’t know who’d have made as good an Obama as Moore is said to be a Palin and Harris a McCain.  But I get a real kick out of the fact that they cast Austin Pendleton as Joe Lieberman.

__________________

Morning update: Robert Reich doesn’t mention Palin in this post, As Santorum and Romney Battle for the Looney Right, the Rest of Us Should Not Gloat, but he’s making a similar point.  Palin herself may not be relevant to this election, but what she stands for most definitely is and that’s scary. (via Brad DeLong.)

The Donald contextualizes the Mitten

Last week Mitt Romney took some flak for saying, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”  He’s still taking it.

Good.

But I don’t think that was the only dumb thing he said last week.

“I’m so honored and pleased to have his endorsement…”

Actually, I can understand why the Mitten didn’t reject the Donald’s endorsement.  That would have taken courage.  But why did he appear with him?  What good did he think it would do him to have Donald Trump’s picture following him into November?

Doesn’t he already have the rich asshole vote locked up?

Mitt’s miffed because he thinks people are taking his remark about the very poor “out of context.”

Ok.  Here’s what he said, in “context.”

I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor — we have a safety net there.  If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich — they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.

Ok, Mitt.  In that context it’s still a dumb thing to say.  If you’re very poor you’re not fine.  You’re poor.  Very poor. That means no money.  No money for food. No money for medicine.  No money for rent.  If you’re very poor the safety net, if you’re lucky and it catches you, keeps you from starving and freezing to death out of doors.  At best the net saves you from becoming worse than not fine.  Mitt seems to think if it catches you you bounce up like a circus performer and land right back on that middle class tightrope you were walking.

Mitt wants us to look at the whole of what he said.  Fine.

But as Paul Krugman points out, the whole of what he said is a lie.  The safety does need to be repaired and Mitt has no intention of fixing it.  Just the opposite.  His proposed economic plan pretty much slices it to ribbons.

Also, while we’re at it.  Mitt went on to say that he’s not concerned about the very rich either, because “they’re doing just fine.”  But, again as Krugman points out, that’s a lie too, because if Mitt thinks the very rich are doing fine and are not worth his concern, why is he promising to shower them with money if he gets to the White House?

Mitt forgets---or he hopes we’ll forget---that everything candidates say on the stump is part of the larger context of their campaign.  Everything they say is by extension and implication and design a reiteration of everything else they’ve said, proposed, and promised.  

The larger context for Mitt is this:  He’s running for the Republican nomination for President.  Republicans don’t like the safety net.  They don’t think it’s a net.  They think it’s a king-sized, top of the line Sealy Posturepedic mattress with linen sheets and piled high with down comforters in a if not four-star hotel then a very nice Best Western with complimentary breakfasts and if you let the poor climb into it and settle under the covers they will never want to climb out.

There are no Eisenhowers left in the GOP. No Rockefellers. No Fiorello LaGuardias.  No Everett Dirksens. No Howard Bakers. No George Romneys.

It’s getting to the point that there’s no place for any Ronald Reagans.

Once upon a time Republicans believed it was their job to look out for business interests while taking care of the whole country.

These days they believe that advancing corporate interests is taking care of the whole country or the whole of it that matters.

Once upon a time there were Republicans who stood up for Civil Rights.

These days Republicans on all fronts are working furiously to take away rights, from gays, from women, from black and brown-skinned Americans.  The Republican base seethes with anger and hatred directed towards anyone who is not by their narrow definition US.  They have made it plain that they think of millions and millions of their fellow Americans as THEM, as the enemy.

And Mitt wants their votes.  And he has shown over and over and over that he will do or say anything to get them.

He demagogues every chance he gets.  He lies and then he lies again and when he feels that wasn’t enough he tells an even bigger lie.  He has repudiated everything he ever stood for before he started running for President in 2008.  He has repudiated everything productive he did as governor of Massachusetts.  It’s gotten to the point where he’s practically written those four years out of his resume.  His main qualification for President, as he wants us to see it, is that he started a business that made him a pile of money.

“Vote for me cuz I’m a really rapacious rich guy with no conscience!”

And he’s done all this---debased himself, dishonored his father’s memory, insulted the intelligence of the majority of the electorate that is not made up of Right Wing yahoos and corporate greedheads and their flunkeys---to serve one single, low purpose.  To get himself elected President.

That’s it.  That’s all he stands for.  Money and self-aggrandizement.  That is the context of what he said.

And in that context, chumming up with Donald Trump makes all the sense in the world.

Photo by Monica Almeida, courtesy of the New York Times.

Mitt’s Office

I used to think Justin Long was the perfect choice to play Gilligan if they ever get around to making a movie version of Gilligan’s Island.  But now I think he’s found the part he was really born to play:

Not as inspired as Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin, but still on the money.  On the money?  Get it?  Mitt Romney?  Really rich guy?  On the money?  Oh, never mind.

By MoveOn.org. Via Greg Mitchell.

The last of the fighting Dems

In the nearly ten years since we moved here, I’ve always been proud of our Congressman, Maurice Hinchey.  I call him the Last Fighting Democrat.  He isn’t.  Not the last. But…He’s a Democrat. He fights. Back in what you’d think the Republicans would call their glory days but which, judging by how eager they are to have them forgotten they seem to be as ashamed of as they should be, that is, back when they controlled both houses of Congress and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove were the President everybody called George W. Bush, Mo seemed to be one of the few on our side of the aisle who wasn’t so cowed and demoralized he couldn’t get up out of his seat to stand up and fight back.  He’s not perfect but he’s been good, very good not just for Democrats but for his district.  And now he’s retiring.  He’s been at this a long time.  It’s far from a surrender.  He’d keep going if he could but he’s got something other than Republicans to fight.  He’s sick, he’s fighting cancer. But he’s emphatic.  That fight’s not why he’s leaving Congress.

Reporter for our still-vital local paper knocked on his door the other day to ask him about this and other things:

Reluctant at first to break the embargo on official comment his office had just issued, but gracious in the face of a request, Hinchey invited the visitor inside.

There, he spoke about the job he'll be leaving at the end of his term and his feelings about that decision.

Was the voice a bit softer than in his glory days on the stump? Yes. Was he more contained? Yes. Had the visitor ever seen him sit so still, or even sit at all if there was a hand to pump, a back to slap, a camera to be grinned into? No.

The lion was at rest in his den, his battles well behind him.

Was it safe to say that he was retiring for health reasons, after enduring surgery for colon cancer?

"No."

"No?"

"I'm leaving after 20 years. It's time."

You can read all of Jeremiah Horrigan’s story, Retiring Hinchey proud of legacy, at the Times Herald-Record. (Registration not required, but recommended.)

The photo above was taken by me in May 2009 at the dedication of our new bike trail which Hinchey helped get funded.  He worked with the Republican supervisor of our town and the Republican mayor of the next village over. There are still Republicans who like to build things.

SOPA

This blog will not be going dark today to protest SOPA.  LanceMannion.com is not anyehere near up there with Wikipedia.   Congressmen and Senators do not read my blog.  They read letters.  I wrote mine.

They also answer phone calls.

Romney and Jobs

The next time Mitt Romney blithers about how all the criticism of his time as a vulture capitalist is motivated by envy of his wealth, will someone please ask him why so many of the people who “envy” him idolize Steve Jobs?

Huntsman

Jon Hutsman is the Republican Paul Tsongas of 2012.  The Political Press loves him, voters think he’s a bit of a nerd.

When it comes to economic policy, Huntsman is every bit as Republican, which means every bit as heartless and cruel and itching to punish the middle and working class and the poor for the greed of the plutocrats, as the man Charles Pierce calls the “zombie-eyed granny starver,” Paul Ryan.

On the whole, however, Huntsman is---was---the most intelligent, capable, accomplished, and sensible of the lot of them.  But the fact that he thought someone like him---reasonable, willing to put country ahead of ideology and partisan grudges, unwilling to hide his intellectual gifts, unwilling to pretend we live in some other, romanticized to the point of delusion century previous to the 21st, not motivated by hatred or fear himself and incapable of playing to the hatreds and fears of others, and, never mind Mormon, not a bible-thumping, Right Wing Christian would-be theocrat---stood a chance of winning the Republican nomination shows that he simply is not smart enough about the politics of the moment to be President.

In his own way, he is as dumb as the rest of them.

Mitt in context

Looking forward to reading a lot of earnest well-meaning commentary about how when Mitt said he likes to fire people he didn't mean it.

Ha.

Hard to feel a guy like Mitt is suffering a great unfairness here, considering he’s gotten to the point where he can’t go five minutes without telling an outrageous lie and he’s proud of an ad that takes something Barack Obama said about John McCain wildly out of context to use against him.

Still he didn’t mean to say he likes to fire people, generally, just people who offer a service he’s decided he doesn’t want anymore, specifically health insurance.

Of course what he actually meant shows him to be clueless about how health insurance works/doesn't work for most Americans.

Most of us can’t “fire” our health insurance company, whether we’d like doing it or not, because…

A.) Many of us don’t have an insurance company to fire.

B.)  Many of us who do can’t afford to hire a better one.

C.) Most of us who do are locked into the insurance we have because it’s picked for us by the company we work for, which isn’t much interested in whether we’re happy with it or not only in whether or not it’s costing them more money than they think we’re worth to insure.

The only people who can just up and fire their insurance company are rich people.

So if Mitt wants his words placed in that context, which is “Gee, isn’t it great to be a self-satisfied rich asshole like me,” fine.

But the fact is he DOES like to fire people. He apparently enjoyed his time at Bain and thinks he did the world good there.

The most authentically conservative thing about Mitt is his belief that most people are expendable in the cause of making rich people richer.

In that cause, firing people gives him the same satisfaction as a car owner gets replacing old spark plugs.

Or a real estate developer tearing down a neighborhood to put up a high-end shopping mall.

To a predator like Mitt people are either tools, resources, or costs to be used, exploited, or reduced.

Firing people is how it's done. So, yes, Mitt likes to fire people.

So unless you're going to explain how he's callous and out of touch on health insurance and he made millions of bucks firing people for fun and profit, please…

Spare us the concern trolling about context.

Adapted from my Twitter feed. Thanks to Brad DeLong for the link to Aaron Carroll’s post.

The Essential Rick Santorum

For Ralph H. and Wev McEwan.

“When I’m President, everyone in the United States will be required to live their lives exactly as my wife and I have led ours or as we would have if it had not been inconvenient for us to do so or if I could have made as much money from it as I made by being a hypocritical scam artist.  Plus, Iran fries.”

The Essential Ron Paul

“As long as I get mine, the rest of the world can go hang.”

My liberal conscience is clear, thank you, Glenn, thank you, Andrew

Recently, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald have each made the case that the reason Ron Paul sends liberals into conniptions is that he presents us with a serious challenge to our conscience.

I don’t know where Sullivan and Greenwald get off thinking they get to tell us what we think and how we ought to think, since neither one is a liberal.  Sullivan thinks he’s a conservative, Greenwald is under the impression he’s a liberal and more liberal than thou at that, but both really belong to different wings of the same party of self-righteous self-regard. Actually, Sullivan is more of a liberal than he knows, just a liberal who can’t get over a schoolboy crush on Margaret Thatcher.  Greenwald doesn’t have a political philosophy these days so much as a religion.  At any rate, both think they know what should be bothering my conscience with regard to Ron Paul.

Guys, my conscience is fine.  In fact, my conscience would have an easier time of it if I voted for Newt Gingrich than for Ron Paul.  At least Gingrich understands that it is part of the job of government to make life better for people.  It’s just low down on his list of things he believes government should do, below making Newt Gingrich rich and paying off the people who helped Newt Gingrich get rich, which itself is below the first job of making Newt rich.  But even though I don’t want a lot of the kind of “help” a Newt-run government would offer, he still appears to believe that we’re all in this together, even if some of us are meant to get more out of it than others.  Paul believes that the very idea that we’re all in this together is an evil.  That we all owe something more than facile moral support to each other is what Ron Paul exists to deny.

Remember, Paul wants to get rid of FEMA for reasons that pretty much add up to his thinking that people in Galveston, Texas in 1900 were better off drowning and dying under the collapsing roofs of their blown down houses than they would have been having to suffer the tyranny of a government that would have provided them with a hurricane warning system, an evacuation plan, and money to rebuild.  He’d rather see the contemporary city of Galveston wiped out by another hurricane than pay the taxes to support a government that would help save it because that government, besides taking his money, would have the power to make him treat black people at his medical practice and let them move into his neighborhood.

Ron Paul believes we’re each in this for ourself.

Greenwald and Sullivan argue that Paul forces us to choose between our supposed principles.  But he doesn’t since he stands firmly against our first principle, the one from which all our other principles arise, which is that we are all in this together and the reason we have a government is to help us help each other make things better.

Of course, there’s a How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? aspect to this argument.  Ron Paul is not going to win the Republican nomination.  He’s not going to be President.  I don’t know what a third-party run would do, except not put him in the White House.  If it had any effect at all on the outcome of the election that effect would be either negative or negligible.  Either he would help elect President Romney, something this liberal does not want, in which case what Paul forces me to choose is which of two ways I could vote to bring about what I would regard as a bad day for liberalism.  Or he helps Obama get re-elected, which I believe would happen anyway without Paul on the ballot, the outcome I want and which I can better help bring about by voting for Obama directly.

So, no, Andrew, no, Glenn, Paul doesn’t force me to examine my conscience any more than any other intellectual gameplaying does.  It might be illuminating and even useful in the An examined life is the only life worth living department, but it’s not going to keep me up nights any more than knowing that if I could go back in time to prevent the birth of Bud Selig I would do it.

But, what the heck, let’s play the game for a bit.

Ron Paul doesn’t present me with a choice because he doesn’t offer the choice.

Presidential candidates don’t run on platforms that are like Chinese menus.  You don’t get to pick one issue from column A and one from column B.  You take a candidate for all in all.  And all in all Ron Paul’s brand of libertarianism---Liberty for me but not for thee if thou are somebody who in taking advantage of your liberty would get in the way of me doing whatever the hell I want---is or ought to be repulsive all in all to every good liberal, no matter that a few of the things he would like to see happen are also on a liberal wish list.

But then there’s this.  Once elected, Presidents don’t get to be their own all in all.  They only get to do what Congress lets them do.  And no Congress, Democratic or Republican, is going to let President Paul rein in the National Security State or dismantle the military-industrial complex.  It’s not likely that even a generally liberal Congress would let him end the war (on some people who use) drugs and even if it was so inclined he’d still need the cooperation of fifty state legislatures.  BUT…it’s easy to imagine what a Right Wing Congress, like the half of one we have now and which we’d be likely to get in full if liberals abandoned the Democrats to vote for Ron Paul (or not vote at all) would let President Paul do.

No good liberals should have any trouble from their consciences in rejecting the idea of a Ron Paul presidency out of hand.  It’s a very simple proposition.

Under President Paul, one way or another, Galveston drowns.

__________________

Kevin Drum says Paul is pretty much the dictionary definition of crank.

Over at Cogitamus, Sir Charles does a thorough job of explaining why Paul’s views, the seemingly acceptable and the utterly awful, are all of a piece and how Paul’s “liberatarianism” is viciously anti-liberal.

(And a thank you to nancy for the shout out.)

Ron Paul on War

Ron Paul is not anti-war.  He is anti-being required to care about anybody outside of his immediate circle of acquaintance and affection.  He’s an extreme isolationist whose isolationism is of a piece with the rest of his libertarianism.  He’s not pro-peace.  He’s pro being left alone to ignore the tribulations and suffering of others.  He wasn’t against the war in Iraq on any other principle than Fuck the Iraqis, who are they to me?

Plus, you know, wars cost money and that money comes from taxes and Paul is against paying taxes for anything he doesn’t immediately benefit from and that includes poor children’s medical bills as well as bombs, and fuck poor kids, who are they to me?

Never mind the newsletters

Never mind the newsletters, Ron Paul isn’t a racist.

He just thinks that the right of white people to bar black people from their businesses trumps the right of black people to be treated as full citizens and fellow human beings.

Mitt in the gutter

George Packer is really talking to his colleagues in the political press here:

It would be a mistake, though, to believe that, long after Iowa, once the horse race is over, and if he’s elected, Romney could suddenly flip a switch, clear the air of the toxicity left behind by the Republican field, and return to being a cautious centrist whose most reassuring quality is his lack of principles. His party wouldn’t let him; and, after all, how a candidate runs shapes how a President governs. In politics, once a sellout, always a sellout; once a thug, always a thug.

Read the whole post, Un-American Activities, at the New Yorker.

Iowa does not matter

The fears of the quotable Edroso are well-founded. Of course what Roy fears is the loss of entertainment value when the other clowns are driven from the field:

When the dust settles I'm afraid it'll be Romney with a briefcase and a fountain pen, trying gosh-darned hard to get America to switch insurance companies.

The art of negotiation

The Republican Position: We should get everything we want exactly as we want it or else we’ll shut down the government and blow up the economy.

The President’s Position:  We should be grateful for any little thing we can get out of this.

The Obamabot Postition: Whatever the President managed to get out of this is another sign he’s the greatest President since FDR.

The EmoProg Position: We should get everything we want exactly as we want it or else we should let the Republicans shut down the government and blow up the economy, whichever, we get to feel morally superior either way.