Man with a plan?

I remember reading an interview with Kevin Smith back in 1997 in which the trench-coat-wearing writer/director/Miramax poster boy admitted that his third film, Chasing Amy, which was getting a lot of positive critical attention at the time, was actually intended to be his second. Figuring there was bound to be backlash against him after the enormous success of his first, no-budget feature, Clerks, Smith decided that, rather than let a film he felt was actually worth something get unfairly torn apart by jealousy and bad press, better to send out a sacrificial lamb to take the hit – in this case, a movie he didn’t care too much about and that no one would ever mistake for a good film that had gotten a bad rap.

And hence Mallrats.

Well, with apologies to anyone who takes politics and high-minded social criticism seriously, I have come to the conclusion that President Obama is taking a similar tack with the public health care option.

I figure it this way: Obama had to know when he got elected that whatever goodwill he enjoyed during his first few months in office would eventually dry up. He and his advisors were sharp enough to realize that his high early poll numbers were soft and that, in our overheated political climate, eventually the Republican Party would figure out a way to go on the attack and knock him back down to Earth.

They also knew that the relative ease Obama had experienced in passing the financial bail-out bill in February was a honeymoon victory resulting from those high poll numbers and a desperate economic environment in which any strong action would be looked on positively by an American public driven to disbelief by Bush’s detachment.

They also knew that when it came time for the president to call his second big play, the Republicans would waiting in the tall grass for him.

So rather than put health care reform on the table straight and risk getting into an ugly dog-fight over issues he thought were vital (like lower premiums and guaranteed coverage), Obama put the public option out into the world as a sacrifice, a big piece of Democratic red-meat, with a slight tang of socialism, that he knew would drive the Right crazy and give them something to focus their vitriol on.

Then, just when things seemed to be getting irretrievably dark (like, say, early September, after a full month of town hall nonsense), Obama put the word out that he was willing to reach across the aisle. By doing this, he suddenly appeared munificent and bi-partisan in an environment of extreme ideological toxicity, willing to do whatever it took to get a bill passed. Now any Republicans who continued screaming and shouting about the danger the president’s health care plan posed to America’s social fabric would come off looking petty: They would be representatives of the “party of no,” disagreeing just to be disagreeable in a time when insurance premiums kept rising, more and more Americans were losing their coverage, and the economy was sinking deeper into the tank.

My friend Eliot Tretter, doctor of geography and apparent closet boxing fan, calls this approach the “rope-a-dope”: Obama lays back during the summer and lets the Right Wing have their effigy-burning, name-calling, Hitler-referencing fun, and then, just when it looks like the Democrats are getting their heads handed to them, he swoops in with a compromise only a mindless ideologue could truly hate. Suddenly health-care reform looks alive again, naysaying Republicans no longer look like the principled opposition party but a bunch of intransigent cranks, and the president comes off looking like a bipartisan rationalist.

So now what? Now that you’ve given a couple of speeches and gone on all the Sunday news programs and Late Night With David Letterman and told the American people what your plan is really all about?

Now you have to get some version of health care reform passed (not a perfect bill, of course, but one that speaks to the issues you find most pressing), finding common ground among Democrats both left and centrist while leaving Republicans out in the wilderness, now both blindly contrarian and powerless.

Then you sit back and let people get used to the good that can come from government involvement in the health care industry – the reduced premiums, the fixed prices, the guaranteed coverage. Never underestimate the American public’s capacity to change its ideological tune when it experiences firsthand the benefits of a policy they were once skeptical of.

Remember, when social security was being debated in the 1930s, opponents swore up and down that anyone supporting it was a socialist. Same with Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. And now look: Social Security has become the great untouchable in American politics (just ask George Bush and the Republicans about the virtues of privatization); meanwhile Medicare – that shining example of government-run “socialized” medicine – is so sacred that even right-wing town hall crazies carry signs demanding the government stay out of it (and without a hint of irony, too).

(Medicaid, of course, is slightly less sacred to Americans because it benefits only the poor, and if there’s one thing the Right is good at, it’s screaming about the need for a national Christian morality while totally missing the point of Christianity.)

If this all happens, then you’ve built up enough political capital and public goodwill that maybe the voters will trust you and your party enough to keep you in power come 2010 and 2012, whether because of the good you did or the nothing the other side did. And then – after you’ve been re-elected and after you’ve established yourself and after the American people have grown accustomed to the idea of government involvement in health care and seen what it can do for them – then you spring the public option on them. Because by that point you will have softened them up to the idea. It’s a perfect demonstration of the old adage that politics is the art of the possible, achieved in increments.

If this is all true, if Obama really is “rope-a-doping,” and if he manages to pull it off, then he very well may be a political genius, a thinking-man’s leader so patient he’s willing to bide his time (through one of the darker, more intellectually demeaning months in American history, no less) and suffer all kinds of indignities in order to get what he feels is best for the country. But if it’s not true, then Obama is stuck in neutral, a man both without a cause and without a plan. A moral and political lightweight.

And if that’s the case, then Eliot Tretter Ph.D. and I are the only political geniuses around. Us and the Republicans. And God help this country if that proves to be true.

Setting for a national crisis

As you read this, there is a writer somewhere in America deleting an essay about how best to improve our education system while maintaining federal solvency; a journalist has tucked an editorial that solves the problem of Palestinian sovereignity into a desk drawer; and yet another collection of rhyming couplets about genocide in Darfur, the consequences of global warming, and the dangers of adjustable rate mortgages goes unread, exposing more innocent people around the world to violence, privation, and long, confusing telephone conversations with bank representatives.

I know this to be true because that writer is me, that desk drawer is mine, and I rhymed those couplets myself.

Count me as one more victim of America’s health care crisis.

We’ve all heard the horror stories from the front lines of our national insurance debate: citizens who woke up one morning to find their premiums had been raised during the night, patients who learned that their coverage had been terminated because of a disease some insurance company decided was too costly to fight, good Americans who discovered that no insurance company would cover them because of a pre-existing condition, family members struggling to pay rising stacks of medical bills.

But there is a group of Americans whose stories have gone untold, whose struggles we never hear about. They are the silent victims of the health care crisis. I’m talking about writers. And now is the time to speak up for them.

Since that first crazy old lady stood up in that town hall meeting in early August to declare that President Obama wasn’t a real American, writers like me have had to spend all our time writing about health care, shelving other, equally important pieces in the name of satisfying the editorial desires of an uncharacteristically focused American public. We’ve written stories about White House political tactics, right-wing demagogues and their followers, the weak knees of the Democratic party, the strong knees of the Republican party, the conservative approach to civil disobedience, and on and on and on. Process stories, political stories, personal stories, op-eds, satires, single-panel cartoons: You name it; we’ve written it. When we wanted to write about gay marriage, we were told to write about health care. When we wanted to examine inconsistencies in the president’s position on enhanced interrogation techniques, we were told to write about health care. Every idea we’ve had over the last two months has been swallowed whole.

Writers are the unseen, unheard victims of the American health care disaster. True, we might not have cancer or AIDS or even diabetes, we may not be bankrupt or homeless, but we do know what it’s like to sit at a computer for hours at a time trying to come up with new ways of making fun of people who believe death panels really exist. And it’s starting to take a toll. Every day, reports come in of yet another political writer somewhere who is seriously considering giving up journalism altogether and going back to school. Is that really what this country needs right now? More graduate students?

Of course not.

Please help us: Call your congressman or senator today and tell them you want health care reform passed so that our journalists can get back to writing about congressional sex scandals and you can get back to reading about the season finale of True Blood.

Your writers will thank you for it.

The nation's capital in simpler times

You know something is upside-down in the world when conservatives are marching on Washington.

I mean, say what you will about the birthers, the nativists, the death panelers, the 9-12ers, and the John Birch Tea-Party guys; conservatives are not by nature a marching people – the cardiovascular side of their civil disobedience generally involves rising from seats at town hall meetings and shouting – so to see them gathered on the Mall in D.C. this past weekend like a bunch of liberals at an anti-IMF rally was to witness evidence of a world gone completely loopy.

What was really fascinating about Saturday’s Freedom Works Glenn Beck Never Forget 9-12 March on Washington for Continued Prosperity was the variety of beliefs being touted. I thought message discipline was supposed to be the hallmark of the conservative movement: You could hate the Right’s message but you had to respect the lock-step way in which they delivered it. The Left, on the other hand, was always the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, a rag-tag band of wildly varied interests barely living together under the big tent of the Democratic Party and incapable of staying focused.

And never was this ad hoc approach to ideology more on display than when the Left would gather for a protest (or try to pass health care reform). If you got a bunch of liberals together at a rally protesting the war in Iraq, for example, you were guaranteed to see signs attacking the World Bank, racism, genocide in Darfur, “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Dick Cheney, globalization, Starbuck’s, censorship, deforestation, God, country, honor, truth, babies, pudding, you name it.

That’s just the way the liberals do things, as if promoting a political ideology were like improvising a stew: throw everything into the pot and stir until boiling.

But not conservatives. They get their talking points memos in the mail, memorize them, and repeat them word for word to anyone who will listen, like good soldiers – “We don’t want the smoking gun to turn out to be a mushroom cloud,” “We will fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here,” “Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder and Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad …” Which may be spooky (and odd for a political ideology that advertises itself as the defender of the individual), but it makes for smart politics.

And yet on Saturday conservatives were incapable of sustaining anything even resembling a coherent message. They held up signs protesting excessive spending, taxes, government take-over of health care, death panels, “shadow governments,” the death of liberty, the rise of fascism, the rise of communism, the unholy marriage of fascism and communism, Barack Obama as illegitimate foreign-born usurper, Barack Obama as race-warrior, Barack Obama as Nazi-Marxist-Czarist-communist killer of grandmothers, the government trying to pry their guns from their still-alive still-warm hands (which wasn’t the agreement), and Nancy Pelosi.

And tune in tomorrow for another protest protesting the media’s misreporting of the size of Saturday’s protest.

I suppose this is what happens to people when they start to feel the ground shift beneath their feet and realize that the tide of history has turned against them. They throw blame around willy-nilly, playing catch-as-catch-can with the facts in a mad attempt to bring some sense back to their world. What else can you do when the world is refusing to stay the way you want it to other than raise your voice and throw a fit, like a kid who just found out his parents are getting divorced and he’s going to have to go to a different school?

At this point the fears of white conservative America go beyond losing elections.  They’re losing the country, losing the culture, losing the future, losing the past. Losing everything, slowly but inevitably, like the air going out of a tire. No wonder they’re so cranky.

Hence the shots of Barack Obama dressed like Hitler and the wild claims about eugenics plans, the belief in a national civilian defense corps, government internment camps, and swine flu quarantine conspiracies. Hence Glenn Beck’s proclaiming (and his acolyte’s believing) that Obama hates the white race and white culture (whatever that might be: John Cougar Mellencamp, maybe? Lemonade? Go-karts?) and that he’s using health care reform as a means to exact reparations for slavery. Hence the trumped-up charges of racism and “hot-headedness” leveled at Sonia Sotamayor and the claims that Nancy Pelosi’s health care plan will provide insurance for illegal aliens. Hence the ranting and raving about the death of American values and the dissolution of the American family that will result from the legalization of gay marriage. Hence the irritation-turned-to-ideological-frenzy that comes from having to listen to your telephone banking options read to you in Spanish.

Hence the entire three-ring circus that is American democracy in 2009.

All of which would be fascinating to watch if it weren’t so unnerving. I don’t know about you but angry white folks with a stung sense of pride, a growing sense of irrelevance, an out-sized reverence for an over-romanticized past, a paranoid fear of the future, a firm mistrust of the “other,” a dodgy understanding of history, and guns worry me. Then again, maybe I’m the one being paranoid. They are patriots after all, right? Simple folk doing what they feel needs to be done to save America and preserve its traditions. Better that, I suppose, than the alternative: to sit idly by while blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, secularists, Darwinists, foreigners, socialists, and social deviants steal the country we love so very very very much and turn it into Germany 1933 or Russia 1917 or Cuba 1959 or some previously unimagined hybrid of all three.

Surely that’s not what the Founders had in mind, right?

Gov. Mark Sanford is in love.

That’s the only conclusion I’ve come to after watching and rewatching the press conference he gave this past Wednesday upon returning from his mystery tour of Argentina:

Pundits can argue all they want about the political implications of yet another 2012 Republican presidential hopeful crumbling under the weight of expectation (see Bobby Jindal, John Ensign, Newt Gingrich, etc.). Religious leaders can pontificate about the sanctity of marriage, the need for forgiveness, and the importance of sending our prayers to Sanford’s wife and four sons. And prigs disguised as newspaper columnists can scream and shout about yet another politician who is guilty less of committing adultery than of divulging “too much information,” as if our tender eyes can’t possibly bear the sight of lightly erotic e-mails.

But those seem to me tiny issues when compared to the reality that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is in love – really in love – and that, in a remarkable public act of contrition/admission/confusion/desperation, he declared as much, for all the world to see.

Wednesday’s press conference wasn’t your typical post-affair mea culpa designed to save some horny politician’s career. Instead it was a cri de coeur from a man who had just made the decision to deny love for the sake of duty and tell the world about it, a man set loose from his moorings, rambling incoherently, reaching for words that weren’t there, crying out for, if not help, then at least a little empathy.

Of course, he’s not getting any. This is America, after all, land of sanctimony. Instead he’s receiving scorn and skepticism and moral condemnation – always, always moral condemnation.

And, to be perfectly honest, on most occasions I would be right up there with the rest of the vultures, heaping scorn. I would be luxuriating in the sight of a hypocritical, self-important, sanctimonious windbag getting his comeuppance for all those times he tried to crush other men of weakness from atop his own personal Mount Sinai (see Sanford’s role in the Clinton impeachment nonsense). But, I just can’t summon any ill will toward Sanford today. I hate everything he stands for, disagree with everything he fights for, and loathe those pompous claims about being a “man of faith,” made while he was secretly slobbering all over the seventh commandment in Buenos Aires. But I just can’t seem to make myself indignant. And the reason is simple: How can you attack a guy who just publicly sacrificed love in the name of honor or duty or family or religion or confusion over all of the above? That seems to me the very definition of kicking a man when he’s down.

Check out the video tape. This is a Southern Republican governor admitting to the whole world that he had spent the last five days crying in Argentina. That admission alone is political suicide: Americans can tolerate their politicians showing emotion but not on foreign soil.

No, I can’t feel hate. All I can manage is fascination. And pity. A whole lot of pity. And a little bit of awe at what we’ve just witnessed.

Indeed, Wednesday’s press conference was a remarkable piece of political theater because it wasn’t theatrical at all; it was just an unscripted display of human desperation. Sanford wasn’t there to renounce and deny his mistress; he was there to proclaim his love, in all its jumbled, self-destructive, incoherent beauty. It wasn’t just guilt that drove him to that microphone, but a need for human compassion and understanding, a desperate cry for help from a man who has convinced himself, though years of religious indoctrination, that love – even true love – outside the bounds of wedlock is a sin. This past Wednesday, we got to watch a man’s religious convictions crash headlong into his human desires on national TV.

Listen to Sanford at the 14:17 mark, when he says, “She lives thousands of miles away.” Listen to the crack in his voice. Listen to him mitigating his speech with ungainly phrases like “zones of protectiveness.” If that sounds to you like a man cynically manipulating his way back into the public’s good graces after cynically manipulating a woman into bed simply for the sake of getting himself off, then you’re more jaded than I am.

I watch that footage, I listen to Sanford calling his mistress a “dear, dear friend” and talk about their “remarkable friendship” that “sparked into something more than that,” and what I hear is a man thinking to himself, “All I want to do is leave this press conference, resign the governorship, jump on a plane, and get back into the loving arms of my girl.” Like Mark Antony, he’d be willing to sacrifice the whole world for this woman … if he could only find the guts to do it.

Problem is, Sanford doesn’t appear to have any guts, and it looks like he’s going to sacrifice the whole world and sacrifice the love he was sacrificing that world for and, as a consequence, lose both and get neither. What kind of thinking is that, Governor? You’ve come this far; you might as well go all the way. True, you mistreated your wife and deceived your kids and maybe even broke your oath to the people of South Carolina, but turning back now out of some deluded sense of religious obligation means you did all that sinning for nothing. It’s a rare thing to find true love in this world. Are you really going to throw it away out of guilt?

Remember, Guv, God spits out the lukewarm.

Pray for Gov. Sanford, religious pundits tell us. But he doesn’t need our prayers. On the contrary, we should all be so lucky as to find true love in South America. And despite my cynicism and my political prejudices, the simple fact is, my heart’s with the guy. Because anyone who’s ever been in love knows it makes you do crazy, self-destructive, embarrassing things.

And that press conference was so crazy, so self-destructive, so embarrassing, it could only have been orchestrated by a man in love.

The Republican Party Casts Out the Infidels, Goes the Way of All Flesh

The last few months have been a bit of a catastrophe for the Republican Party. From the defection of Arlen Specter to the ideological battles between popular moderate Colin Powell and Prince of Darkness Dick Cheney to the firing of small-time party officials who dared to question the words of Rush Limbaugh, the Party has managed to shrink its tent down to the size of the Confederacy (minus Virginia and North Carolina and Florida) and a few Plains States, give or take. Of greatest concern isn’t why Specter left, or who’s speaking for the party, or even how these events just might give Democrats the elusive filibuster-proof majority that will finally allow them to push through all their favorite Marxist,  Stalinist, and Maoist pet projects. The real issue for Republicans is the fact that they have successfully purged from their party almost everyone with even a hint of moderate feeling in them. Cut Maine out of the Union and the Republican Party might as well  be the political wing of the 700 Club.

The most amazing thing is that conservative Republicans appear to be happy about the situation. From RNC Chairman Michael Steele to Senate leader Mitch McConnell, from Jim DeMint to Newt Gingrich, from Sean Hannity to Rush Limbaugh, conservatives are celebrating the expulsion of the infidels from their holy army, as if purity and not political viability were the name of the Washington power game. Recent events go beyond the triumph of conservatives over moderates. They even go beyond the triumph of righteousness over compromise. What is really frightening for moderate Republicans worried about their party becoming an irrelevant fringe group is that the events of the past few months signify the triumph of orthodoxy over political competence, a doomed approach to democracy if ever there was one. Just ask Barry Goldwater.

Tossing the notion of a broad-based coalition out the window, the Republicans have staked everything on ideological fundamentalism, choosing to view political pragmatism and wide appeal as heterodoxy and sins worthy of banishment, even going so far as to promote the insane belief that it’s more important to win a primary election than it is to win the office. Former moderate Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee, who underwent a serious primary challenge from the conservative zealots in the Club for Growth back in 2006 (just as Specter would have in 2010), mourns this approach as “the celebration of ideological purity at the cost of winning elections.” Carrying on that tradition, Limbaugh celebrated Specter’s defection by pleading with the senator to take John McCain with him. And then there’s Republican strategist and Fox News contributor Andrea Tantaros, who was able to put an optimistic spin on Specter’s leaving the same way she rationalized the switching of some 200,000 registered Republicans to the Democratic party during last year’s presidential primary: by claiming that “the pool has been skimmed of its lukewarm constituency.” Translation: We may never win a national election again, but let no one ever question our purity.

If the whole tone of this discussion is starting to sound a little religious, it’s because the Republican Party’s current struggles begin and end with religion. Particularly Christianity. And even more particularly, Evangelical Christianity. The Christianity of Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed. The Christianity of the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family. The Christianity that got George W. Bush elected twice. With the rise of Obama, the loss of Specter, the defiance of the centrists, and the decline of the Republican Party to a regional regime serving cranky creationist white men who feel besieged by a rising tide of Other-ness (including, but not limited to, brown-ness, gay-ness, and science-ness), the chickens born out of the conservatives’ 20-year love affair with the Christian Right have finally come home to roost.

These days the Republican Party is almost exclusively the stomping ground of religious ideologues and moral arbiters. Gone is the necessary backroom dealing and clever compromising of politics, the oil that greases the wheels of the republic; gone is the strategic big-tent pragmatism of the Reagan years, replaced by the un-nuanced sermonizing, unquestioning devotion, and self-assured moral purity of a religious sect. For more than 10 years, the Republican Party has been led by men who either sprang from the Christian Right or were swept into power by them, so it makes sense that their approach to politics would take on a tone of zealotry. Take that, subtlety! Move over, compromise! We’ve got God on our side, and God does not make deals!

No wonder the Republican Party is so ill-equipped to deal with changing demographics, shifting landscapes, internal defections, and evolving voter priorities: Religious fanatics don’t tolerate changes, shifts, or defections, much less evolution. It’s a political philosophy that seeks for unambiguous fundamentalism in a world of messy reality. And what could be more Christian than looking for meaning and order in the meaningless and the chaotic?

Let’s take that notion a step further. Republicans have argued that a Jim Toomey loss in Pennsylvania in November 2010 would be better for the Party than a Specter win, for the reason that they will have proven the strength of their convictions and inspired fellow conservatives to double their efforts for the cause. But a Toomey loss wouldn’t be merely better; it would be glorious – an act of ritual sacrifice performed in the name of righteousness and the realization of God’s will.

In Christian theology, the ultimate loss is also the ultimate gain. Jesus was willing to sacrifice himself, to lose everything, in order to save the world. As such, Christianity is a religion predicated entirely on the idea of the triumphant defeat. Martyrdom, sacrifice, liturgical devotion in the face of secular temptation: These are the tropes of the Christian faith. So it makes perfect sense for a political party that’s been devoted to the tenets of that faith to see virtue and redemption – even godliness – in defeat, so long as that defeat comes at the hand of infidels and is suffered in the name of ideological purity.

Republicans are now facing a perfect storm of political irrelevance, a confluence of two inevitable and destructive outgrowths of their generation-long courtship of Christian fundamentalists. Not only have they grown political unsavvy as a result of all that ideological complacency – dooming themselves to appeal to an ever-shrinking constituency – they’ve also driven away the very constituency they grew so unsavvy courting. After years of disappointment in the party and their theologically imperfect approach to legislating, Christian conservatives have grown impatient with even the minor compromises Republicans have had to make in order to stay politically relevant, and, as a consequence, they’re starting to flee politics in droves. According to a recent article in The Washington Post by Kathleen Parker, there’s a war brewing among Christian conservatives, with the old-school, politically motivated wing of the movement, exemplified by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, losing ground to a new generation that views the impiety and shaky morality of the political world as the devil’s playground. As a result, more and more Christians are leaving the Beltway and retreating to the home, the church, the family, and the soul – where unspoiled idealism actually stands a fighting chance.

Once Christian conservatives realized they were only choosing a slightly lesser evil by siding with the Republican Party, while getting almost nothing in return – once they figured out that George Bush wasn’t going to make abortion illegal; once it dawned on them that Congress wasn’t going to push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage; once they saw that opposition to federally funded stem-cell research was a millstone around their party’s neck; once they realized that they were being taken for granted by a cynical political force looking to gain an advantage in the electoral math – they were bound to pack up their things and leave Washington. Because unlike gun-rights advocates or environmental lobbyists, evangelical Christians don’t need the political realm to do their work; they can afford to be idealistic. If that group of Republicans couldn’t get the job done, they’re starting to realize, then no one in Washington ever will. So it’s farewell Babylon, and back to Jerusalem we go. Back to our homes and our churches and our shelters, to do whatever quiet work pleases Jesus best.

So where does this leave Republicans, that once-proud coalition now teetering on the edge of political irrelevance? With a party that’s not pure enough for the religious constituents that make up its base yet too pure for the rough-and-tumble, philosophically malleable, morally questionable world of politics.

Caught, it seems, between the sacred and the profane.