Sunday, June 25, 2017

No Weekend Roundup

I'm going to suspend Weekend Roundup. Part of the reason is technical, which I may (or may not) explain in Music Week tomorrow. Suffice it to say that it's nearly impossible for me to search out the various links that the posts are based on. But also I find myself wanting to give in to depression, which has both personal and political dimensions. Maybe I'll write about the personal sometime -- I've been toying with a plan to write an autobiography, and it looms large there -- but my political despair got a huge boost on Tuesday when Georgia voters turned against Jon Ossoff in the GA-6 congressional election to replace Tom Price. At the time, I wrote the following in my notebook:

Democrat Jon Ossoff lost the GA-6 race (48.1% to 51.9%), possibly losing ground from his primary showing (where he got 48.12%). Both candidates spent a lot of money -- not sure much, but Ossoff spent $8 million in primary, and I've seen this described as the most expensive House election ever.

[Hillary] Clinton famously trailed Trump by only 2% in the district, so DNC thought they had a real chance with a Clinton-esque candidate. FiveThirtyEight, however, considers the district R+9.5, and Tom Price ran better than that in 2016. Given that district is upscale and suburban, it is credible that a pro-Sanders Democrats might not have done as well in this particular district, but pro-Sanders Democrats did much better than district expectations in recent contests in Kansas and Montana, with embarrassingly slim support from DNC/DCCC.

I also tweeted:

Ossoff loss tells me that Democrats failed to make case that it's not just Trump but all Republicans out to hurt the majority of Americans.

Also, a second tweet I thought then but only posted today:

It would be easier to resist Trump if Republicans are getting beat at the polls; otherwise all R's have to fear is their own right flank.

I'm not an ideological purist, so I'm not much bothered when a Democrat (or, more rarely, a Republican) tries to tailor his/her message to the prejudices of his/her district. Still, one worries that Democrats too readily give up not just principles but any sort of vision that life could be made better for their voters, and in doing that they lose credibility -- both that they know what to do and that they even care.

Still, one suspects that the problem with Ossoff's campaign wasn't that he tailored his message to voters so much as to the constituency he clearly cared most about: donors. He wound up raising and spending (and, given the results, wasting) some $26 million -- about 70 times as much money as James Thompson had to work with here in Kansas. Obviously, there are limits to what money can buy in an election, but there is also a lesson: when Democrats focus more on donors than on voters, they lose -- even if they're fabulously successful with donors (as Ossoff and Hillary Clinton undeniably were). And while their campaign compromises undermine voter trust, their de facto losses are destroying a second credibility front: the notion that those of us who lean further left have to support cowardly Democrats because they're the only ones who can win and protect us from the ever more vile Republicans.

Still, no matter how much those centrist, donor-supplicant Democrats demand allegiance from left-leaning voters, somehow they can't bring themselves to critique Republicans with even a tiny fraction of the vitriol Republicans heap on them. For example, Republicans have run attack ads in every House race trying to link the Democrat to Nancy Pelosi and her "radical agenda." I can't even imagine what they mean by that -- as far as I've been able to tell, she's an utterly conventional hack, her "leftist" more due to her representing San Francisco, a district which could certainly to better. But they've worked for years turning her into a bait word. So why don't Democrats turn the tables on Paul Ryan, who really does have an agenda? (By the way, I'd say that from a purely tactical view, Pelosi is done. Sure, they did the same thing to Tom Daschle and Harry Reid, but why not make them work a little?)

Or to pick another current example, Hillary Clinton tweeted: "If Republicans pass this bill, they're the death party." Why wasn't writing the bill reason enough for that tag? Does she still think that by leaving the door open enough Republicans will come to their senses to make a difference? Wasn't it true that thousands of people died needlessly in the years before they gained insurance through the ACA? Weren't the Republicans "the death party" when every single one (ok, except for the guy who won a freak election in New Orleans) voted against it? I do have quibbles about "death party" -- "pro-life" Republicans use that against Democrats who defend abortion rights, and both parties are tainted by their kneejerk support of war and arms sales.

I'm not advocating a coarsening of political discourse, but one needs to recognize that it's already happened, and that it's been remarkably successful for Republicans, getting many (if not most) Americans to turn their backs on everything that's worked to make this a decent country, as well as to ignore (or worsen) the many bad things we've done. I doubt there's a single solution to this, but Democrats need to develop some backbone, and start breaking through the shells that right-wing media have constructed to shelter the Republicans from the effects of their actions.

Somehow I didn't even notice the House election in South Carolina to fill Nick Mulvaney's seat. It was expectedly won by a Republican, but it turns out the race there was as close as in Georgia, with Democrat Archie Parnell losing 47.9-51.1%. In 2016, Trump won this district by 18.5%, and Mulvaney won by 20%. One might argue that the four House elections so far show the Democrats running better than in 2016, but it still hurts that all four elected Republicans. (Actually, the Democrats did win one: Jimmy Gomez in CA-34, but it was a solidly Democratic seat and the "top two" primary led to a runoff between two Democrats.)

Since Tuesday's election debacle, following several weeks of Russia nonsense (which despite the media obsession doesn't seem to bother voters much), political news took a remarkable turn toward reality with the publication of Mitch McConnell's health care bill. Crafted behind closed doors, given a new name (the "Better Care Reconciliation Act" to avoid the stink of the House AHCA bill -- although it shares an acronym with the "breast cancer gene"), with McConnell promising a vote before Congress goes into recess for July 4. The secrecy did manage to keep it out of the news, but now that we can see what's in it's still time to panic.

Some details vary, but the overall outline is the same as the House bill, which Trump initially applauded then admitted was "mean, mean, mean." It starts with a massive tax cut for the rich, which is balanced out by cutting subsidies and Medicaid, and it's stacked so that the tax breaks are retroactive while the service cuts are phased in over several years -- maybe you'll forget who caused them? While the CBO hasn't had time to score it yet, the advertised hope was that the number of people losing their insurance could be reduced from 23 to 20 million. Trump's campaign promises of cheaper policies, lower deductibles, and better coverage are still jokes.

Not surprisingly, the far right attacked the bill first, wanting to make it even meaner. I read one piece that said AFP (the Koch network campaign operation) was angling for two amendments: one is to free insurance companies from minimum coverage regulation -- the effect will be to let them sell fraudulent policies which don't cover many costs so will lead to many more bankruptcies; the other is for more "health savings accounts" -- a tax dodge only of interest to the rich. As you may recall, Ryan's House bill originally failed to get a majority, but while you heard some grumbling from "moderates" that the bill went too far, the winning margin actually came from the far right after Ryan agreed to make the bill more draconian. The Kochs are looking for the same dynamic in the Senate.

This should be a field day for the Democrats, but as Matthew Yglesias points out, The health bill might pass because Trump has launched the era of Nothing Matters politics. I've found two things especially disturbing in the last week: one is how shamelessly Republicans are lying about their bill; the other is how the media has been falling for the line that this bill is a test of whether Trump and the Republicans are able to deliver on their campaign promises. The obvious counter to the latter is that there are a lot of very dumb things Trump campaigned for that he cheerfully forgot once elected.

When I started this I didn't plan on writing this much, least of all about McConnell-Miscare, though I thought I might mention something about Russia -- not the hacking scandal (which regardless of how bad it was pales in comparison to what the Republicans have been doing in state legislatures to suppress votes) but about the dangerous games of chicken our respective air forces have been playing (for some on this, and more on health care, see Yglesias' The most important stories of the week, explained). I should also point you to Seymour M Hersh: Trump's Red Line, on Trump's escalation of the Syria War, which directly led to the later conflicts with Russia.

I have little doubt that had technology permitted I could have built a list of links to major Trump scandals and other misdemeanors this week, as I have every week since inauguration. If you need a reminder of the price Americans are paying for having hated Hillary Clinton and the Democrats so much that they figured they had nothing to lose by turning the federal government over to a bunch of con men and crooks, you're free to look at my posts (most of which portend the future more than they examine the past):

I don't know whether the Roundup will continue (although I'll probably file some links in the notebook for possible future reference). Feels like I'm shouting into the void. I often think back to an essay I read as a teenager, by R.D. Laing, called "The Obvious": his point was that everyone has their own idea of what's obvious, a condition which in no way undermines our conviction of its obviousness. My writing starts with a number of principles which I think I can justify but really just seem obvious to me. If you share them, you will like what I have to say, and if not, you won't. Clearly, a lot of people don't, and I have no idea how to get to them. And while I'm not necessarily writing for those who don't understand (or care), it's not very gratifying when they don't.

Ask a question, or send a comment.