Why Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts was lost--and who lost it

All,

It's a much deeper fundamental crisis in the national Democratic Party than has been properly acknowledged--as well as Obama's clearly inept administration-- that's really responsible for the horrendous loss of Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat than anything that Martha Coakley, the DP candidate in Massachusetts, individually failed to do. The senatorial election in Massachusetts in the final analysis had very little to do with Coakley, even though she obviously didn't run a very good campaign. But the simple truth of the matter is that she didn't lose because of that. She lost because a very significant number of white independent voters were sending a loud ugly message to Congress (i.e. the Democratic majority in both houses) and specifically to President Obama that they categorically oppose his reform agenda in healthcare and beyond and they also have no confidence in the weak half-assed and frankly "running scared" positions that Obama has taken on the banks, Wall Street, major corporations, and national unemployment. People are very frustrated, angry and fedup--on both the right AND the left! While it's true that much if not most of the anger on the right is fueled by racism, some of it is also an ideological rejection of Obama's general political and economic agenda and the disturbing sense that many people (not just rightwingers!) feel--and I think justifiably--that both Obama and the Democratic Party generally have failed to seriously address their very real needs and problems in the national economy. Many people on the Left--including myself--also feel that over the past 5-6 months the president and the Senate especially (where Democrats outnumber Republicans 60-40) have fundamentally failed to provide genuine progressive leadership and clarity on healthcare reform, unemployment, financial regulation, and many other pressing domestic policy issues. In addition Obama's absurd decision to send 30,000 more troops to the endless destructive quagmire that is Afghanistan in the midst of this major economic crisis in the U.S. was not only wrong but politically foolish and economically wasteful.

In the end Coakley couldn't do anything about any of that. As it was she still lost by only 120,000 votes out of nearly 3 million votes that were cast. That tells me that not only was there a much smaller democratic voter turnout in this election--in a state where registered Democratic voters outnumber Republicans 5 to 1!-- but that clearly a small but pivotal number of independent and Republican voters in the white suburbs (by far Coakley's weakest demographic in this election--she won a sizeable majority in every major urbanized district within the state) decided that this senatorial election was to be a public referendum on President Obama's agenda and the flailing and clueless Democratic Party majority in the House and Senate. Under these circumstances Coakley--or any other DP candidate in this election except Ted Kennedy himsef-- didn't have a chance in hell of winning this election.

What we all had better remember in the larger context is that President Obama received only 43% of the white vote in the national presidential election in 2008. McCain received 55% of the white vote. This means of course that if the national election for President had been left up to white voters only Obama would have lost the election in a LANDSLIDE to McCain. It is this stark political reality that is taking Obama down now on the right and among independents because the truth is that nearly 60% of white voters have ALWAYS rejected Obama anyway-- and still do. This means of course that without the 81% of the black, Latino, and Asian American voters who voted for Obama HE WOULDN'T BE PRESIDENT TODAY. Black folks cast an incredible 95% of their total votes for Barack (or 15.5 million votes) and Latinos cast 67% of their votes for him which added up to another 16 million votes. Without those 30 million votes we wouldn't even be having this discussion about Obama now because he would have already lost bigtime.

So I say all that to remind us that the reasons for Obama's severe difficulties now can't possibly be attributed only to Martha Coakley. The problem has always been much bigger than that for both Obama and the Democratic Party. Which is all the more reason why the way they've been spending their --and our--political capital is both strategically and tactically suspect at best because they keep trying to foolishly accomodate the Republican party through emptyheaded and self destructive "compromises" that the nihilistic Republicans and the right generally have absolutely NO INTENTION WHATSOEVER of making with them. This is the major reason why Scott Brown--who is to the right of Atilla the Hun AND Sarah Palin-- is the new Senator from Massachusetts. It's basic political ineptitude on the part of the President and the DP and no amount of lofty or apologetic rhetoric can possibly cover up that fundamental fact in this situation. If the President doesn't fight back--and I mean HARD--from this point forward he and the DP will be BURNT TOAST by the midterm elections of November 2010. Because if the Republicans take back Congress Obama won't be able to pass one piece of significant legislation for the remainder of his entire first term! It'll be much worse than the debacle of 1994 when Newt Gingrich, Jesse Helms, Trent Lott, Phil Gramm, Richard Armey and all the other super rightwing white supremacist demagogues in the Republican Party took over the House & Senate and effectively crippled the agenda of not only the last two years of Bill Clinton's already heavily compromised first term but also completely paralyzed his scandal ridden second term as well (even the Lewinsky sex scandal was ultimately merely a footnote in that poisonous context).

Kofi

President Obama Must Fight For Real Change or Surrender to His Enemies--He Can't Do Both!

http://www.truthout.org/will-obama-fight-health-care-reform56322?print

All,

Real questions demand real answers. Are you listening Barack?...

Kofi


Eugene Robinson | Will Obama Fight for Health Care Reform?
Sunday 24 January 2010
by Eugene Robinson
Op-Ed
Washington Post

Washington - If President Obama has decided to give up on health care reform, he should just come out and say so. Then we could all get on with our lives -- those of us with health insurance, that is. But I don't see how his talk about some sort of slimmed-down package, reduced to its "core elements," could possibly inspire Democrats in Congress to do anything but run for the hills.

Republican Scott Brown's victory Tuesday in Massachusetts, grabbing the Senate seat that was held for decades by the late Ted Kennedy, left Democrats rattled. Actually, frantic would be a better word. Thus far, Obama has said nothing that would help calm the waters -- or help the party get out of what now can officially be called the Health Care Mess. If anything, Obama is making it messier.

In an interview Wednesday with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Obama said this about health care: "I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on." He said that we have to keep insurance companies from "taking advantage of people," that we have to contain costs, and that we have to give small businesses help to provide health insurance to their employees.

That's all well and good. But there is already a measure on the table that would do these things -- the bill passed on Christmas Eve by the Senate. Now that the Democrats no longer have a filibuster-proof majority, it is all but inconceivable that the Senate could produce a new bill with all those elements. And it's not possible to do health care reform a la carte.

One thing that "people agree on" is prohibiting the insurance companies from denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions. But doing that in isolation would cause insurance premiums to skyrocket. To make it work, you need a mandate that forces everyone -- including millions of young, healthy people -- to buy insurance, thus effectively subsidizing the older, sicker people whom the insurance companies would be forced to cover. But if you make low-income and moderate-income people buy health insurance, you have to give them financial assistance because otherwise they can't afford it.

Later in the interview, Obama acknowledged this chain of "interconnected" imperatives that any workable health reform package would have to accommodate. And why shouldn't the House just pass the Senate bill?

"I think it is very important for the House to make its determinations," Obama said. "I think, right now, they're feeling obviously unsettled and there were a bunch of provisions in the Senate bill that they didn't like, and so I can't force them to do that."

Would a full-court press by the president have been able to cajole or coerce the House into passing a reform bill that many in the Democratic caucus consider insufficiently progressive? It looks as if we'll never know. On Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi flatly declared that for now, at least, she cannot find the 218 votes needed to pass the Senate bill.

"I'm not going to get into the legislative strategy," Obama said in the ABC interview. That has been the White House approach all along, and it managed to bring meaningful health care reform legislation closer to final passage than ever before. But close doesn't count: Reform didn't make it across the finish line.

Yet.

Pay no attention to the Cheshire Cat claims by Republicans that they'd love to cooperate on a bipartisan reform bill. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has already ruled out modifying the current bill, insisting that the Senate has to start the process from scratch. There remains another way, and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., mentioned it Thursday: Pass a reasonable reform package using the parliamentary tactic known as budget reconciliation, which would require only a simple majority of 51 to get through the Senate rather than a supermajority of 60.

The problem with budget reconciliation is that it would require considerable intestinal fortitude on the part of nervous Democratic senators following the Massachusetts result, even though it left them with an 18-vote majority. I don't know if that courage can be summoned. I'm certain that it won't be if the message from President Obama is: "Whatever."

The president can surrender and blame Republicans for killing health care reform yet again, or he can fight tooth and nail on behalf of the 46 million Americans who remain uninsured. But he has to do one or the other. He can't do both.


Eugene Robinson's e-mail address is
eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.
(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group

French Newspapers Weigh in on American Politics and the Challenges facing President Obama

http://www.truthout.org/time-a-change56284

All,

Meanwhile France--via Le Monde and Libération--weighs in on the current state of American politics and President Obama...

Kofi


Time for a Change?
Wednesday 20 January 2010
by: Le Monde
Le Monde | Editorial

Barack Obama was preparing to celebrate the first anniversary of his presidency with relative confidence and the feeling of a job fulfilled. Specifically, he was counting on getting the definitive Senate vote on the emblematic reform of the health care system in very short order, which was the great political battle of his first year in the White House.

Consequently, the victory the Republican candidate has just scored in the Massachusetts Senatorial by-election is a stinging affront for the American president. The symbol is, indeed, cruel: the Democrats have lost one of their fiefdoms and the seat occupied for 47 years by Ted Kennedy, who, right up until his death, was one of health care system reform's warmest supporters.

Also See: Fabrice Rousselot | Some Time

As for the political consequences, they are various. First, this defeat makes the president lose the qualified majority his party just barely enjoyed in the Senate. His task will be that much more arduous in consequence. In the immediate future, the very fate of health care reform becomes quite uncertain. Secondly, this failure testifies to the swing in American public opinion. In November 2008, Americans' anger against the disastrous conclusion to George W. Bush's term contributed in large degree to Barack Obama's election.

Today, that anger has turned against Obama: although the signs of economic recovery dispel the specter of a "Great Depression," unemployment remains above 10 percent, which is exceptional in the United States; as for the tsunami of public debt, it places the country in a relationship of dependency with its foreign creditors, notably the Chinese. Finally, by transforming the Massachusetts election into an anti-Obama referendum, Republicans have demonstrated the effectiveness of the incessant and violent campaign they have waged against him since summer 2009. Ten months from the midterm elections, it's a very bad omen for Barack Obama.

It's his credibility - undermined - and his ability to act - impeded - that he must now restore. From now until the State of the Union address, he has a week to decide: must he put the brake on, even renounce, his reforms? Must he in his turn surf the populist wave, as he has recently attempted, at the risk of destroying the credo of national unity on which he built his victory? How to escape the "Clinton syndrome:" failure of health care reform in 1993, then a great electoral failure in 1994? The American president will have to respond on January 27.

Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher.

Le Monde, founded in 1944 by Hubert Beuve-Méry, is generally considered the French "newspaper of record."

===========

Some Time
Fabrice Rousselot, Libération
Wednesday 20 January 2010

What can he do, really? Right when it's time to blow out the first year candle, the "Yes, we can"-president is not necessarily enjoying the anniversary he had hoped for. If one is to believe his detractors, once ensconced in the Oval Office, the brilliant campaign orator has not measured up to his promises. In the United States, the ultra-conservatives are back on their feet, invigorated by quasi-racist arguments and partisan political hysteria. Yet, in twelve months, Barack Obama has established himself as an historic president. He is the architect of a health care reform that America did not even dare to outline just a few years ago. Also, without forcing it, he has changed the image the world held of a premier global power damaged by eight years of unbridled and unilateral Bushism. Obama's America has returned to the concert of nations as a partner open to dialogue and directed towards the future. Of course, not everything is settled, far from it. But who could really believe that within a few months Obama was going to work miracles on Afghanistan, Iraq, the crisis or the environment?

At the White House, he proceeds by the method that has been his signature for three decades, that of the Chicago community organizer and Illinois legislator, who navigates by negotiation and research to arrive at a solution. The rupture does not have the facile sparkle of Sarkozyism, but will be measured over time. Nobel Peace laureate in wartime, Obama was the first to emphasize that he did not deserve the reward and that it would be necessary to judge him by his actions. Let's give him a little more time.

Translation: Truthout French Language Editor Leslie Thatcher.

Founded under the aegis of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1973, Libération was once the newspaper of the far left in France, but has moved to the center since changes in ownership and management during 2005-2006. Principal shareholder Édouard de Rothschild owns a substantial minority position in the paper.

We Must All Take Responsibility for the Necessity of Social Change

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/opinion/18krugman.html?em=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1263898911-j2wnlEEmQJKS30Ug5zdQrw

All,

As usual Krugman is right on target in his prescient analysis of the Obama administration's current tragic miscalculation of its own actual political strengths and weaknesses and what clearly should have been done with and about them both since the President took office a year ago. Unfortunately for us as citizens we, as well as the dominant majority but clearly waffling Democratic Party-- both in Congress and the White House--are instead saddled with the dire results and consequences of overly compromising on fundamental principles and refusing to decisively stand up to and properly FIGHT AND DEFEAT our common enemies--the brazenly rightwing Republican Party, their many fiercely loyal ideological supporters, and their deliriously reactionary public media representatives (e.g. Palin, Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, FOX News et al).

However these current political, ideological, and ethical failures--whatever we may think or feel about them generally-- simply cannot and should not be attributed to President Obama and the Democratic Party alone. That would be an infantile, inadequate, and ultimately self defeating abdication of our own collective social and personal responsibility for what is happening in this society. Thus It would not only be intellectually and politically dishonest to assert that Obama, his administration, and the government generally are exclusively responsible but it would obscure our own hopelessly passive and/or actively cynical complicity as activists and citizens who have also failed to make the large scale social demands for real progressive reform and long range political, economic, and cultural change in the country as a whole that this historical moment demands. That massive ongoing effort/commitment would of course require an organized mobilization and education of ourselves and many others on a highly coordinated national level that would and should encompass far more than just an abstract, isolated and self serving critique of the President's performance. Without a well organized, united, and highly networked radical social movement that would truly challenge the dominant corporate class and effectively demand fundamental changes of the present political and economic reality-- no matter what the President does or doesn't do on his own or in his response to such a movement--we will all continue to be subject to the whims, shortcomings, fears, irresponsibility, and opportunism of the Democratic Party and its deeply flawed and heavily compromised leadership...

Kofi




January 18, 2010

OP-ED COLUMNIST

What Didn’t Happen
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times

Lately many people have been second-guessing the Obama administration’s political strategy. The conventional wisdom seems to be that President Obama tried to do too much — in particular, that he should have put health care on one side and focused on the economy.

I disagree. The Obama administration’s troubles are the result not of excessive ambition, but of policy and political misjudgments. The stimulus was too small; policy toward the banks wasn’t tough enough; and Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations.

About the stimulus: it has surely helped. Without it, unemployment would be much higher than it is. But the administration’s program clearly wasn’t big enough to produce job gains in 2009.

Why was the stimulus underpowered? A number of economists (myself included) called for a stimulus substantially bigger than the one the administration ended up proposing. According to The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, however, in December 2008 Mr. Obama’s top economic and political advisers concluded that a bigger stimulus was neither economically necessary nor politically feasible.

Their political judgment may or may not have been correct; their economic judgment obviously wasn’t. Whatever led to this misjudgment, however, it wasn’t failure to focus on the issue: in late 2008 and early 2009 the Obama team was focused on little else. The administration wasn’t distracted; it was just wrong.

The same can be said about policy toward the banks. Some economists defend the administration’s decision not to take a harder line on banks, arguing that the banks are earning their way back to financial health. But the light-touch approach to the financial industry further entrenched the power of the very institutions that caused the crisis, even as it failed to revive lending: bailed-out banks have been reducing, not increasing, their loan balances. And it has had disastrous political consequences: the administration has placed itself on the wrong side of popular rage over bailouts and bonuses.

Finally, about that narrative: It’s instructive to compare Mr. Obama’s rhetorical stance on the economy with that of Ronald Reagan. It’s often forgotten now, but unemployment actually soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Reagan, however, had a ready answer for critics: everything going wrong was the result of the failed policies of the past. In effect, Reagan spent his first few years in office continuing to run against Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Obama could have done the same — with, I’d argue, considerably more justice. He could have pointed out, repeatedly, that the continuing troubles of America’s economy are the result of a financial crisis that developed under the Bush administration, and was at least in part the result of the Bush administration’s refusal to regulate the banks.

But he didn’t. Maybe he still dreams of bridging the partisan divide; maybe he fears the ire of pundits who consider blaming your predecessor for current problems uncouth — if you’re a Democrat. (It’s O.K. if you’re a Republican.) Whatever the reason, Mr. Obama has allowed the public to forget, with remarkable speed, that the economy’s troubles didn’t start on his watch.

So where do complaints of an excessively broad agenda fit into all this? Could the administration have made a midcourse correction on economic policy if it hadn’t been fighting battles on health care? Probably not. One key argument of those pushing for a bigger stimulus plan was that there would be no second chance: if unemployment remained high, they warned, people would conclude that stimulus doesn’t work rather than that we needed a bigger dose. And so it has proved.

It’s important to remember, also, how important health care reform is to the Democratic base. Some activists have been left disillusioned by the compromises made to get legislation through the Senate — but they would have been even more disillusioned if Democrats had simply punted on the issue.

And politics should be about more than winning elections. Even if health care reform loses Democrats’ votes (which is questionable), it’s the right thing to do.

So what comes next?

At this point Mr. Obama probably can’t do much about job creation. He can, however, push hard on financial reform, and seek to put himself back on the right side of public anger by portraying Republicans as the enemies of reform — which they are.

And meanwhile, Democrats have to do whatever it takes to enact a health care bill. Passing such a bill won’t be their political salvation — but not passing a bill would surely be their political doom.


Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Democratic Party Fails to win Massachusetts Senate Seat

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/us/politics/20election.html?th&emc=th

All,

The incredible political ineptitude, hubris, and smug cluelessness of the Democratic Party and the Obama administration that led to the inexcusable victory of a previously unknown far rightwing Republican in the "liberal" state of Massachusetts--a state that Obama won by a whopping 26 percentage points in the national presidential race of 2008--is nothing short of a major setback for the president's entire reform agenda--especially national healthcare legislation. How the DP and the President could have blown so many genuine opportunities to seriously challenge and change the general direction of the society and political economy over the past year is just astonishing and their inexplicable loss of the venerated seat of the late iconic liberal Senator Edward 'Teddy' Kennedy--who held the seat for 47 years!--is yet another glaring example of what happens when progressives, the Democratic party, and President Obama, don't properly stand up and actually fight for political and economic change, instad of constantly giving away our collective political capital in the delusional name of "bipartisanship' and mindless compromises with the right...Without ideological integrity and a genuine commitment to organized political activism on a mass scale we can't possibly defeat those truly heinous forces in this society who are absolutely determined to have corporate class domination, racism, sexism, militarism, and homophobia continue to rule us and ultimately destroy any semblance of a truly humane social community, democratic political economy, and progressive civic culture in this country...

Kofi


G.O.P. Senate Victory Stuns Democrats
By MICHAEL COOPER
January 19, 2010
New York Times


BOSTON — Scott Brown, a little-known Republican state senator, rode an old pickup truck and a growing sense of unease among independent voters to an extraordinary upset Tuesday night when he was elected to fill the Senate seat that was long held by Edward M. Kennedy in the overwhelmingly Democratic state of Massachusetts.

By a decisive margin, Mr. Brown defeated Martha Coakley, the state’s attorney general, who had been considered a prohibitive favorite to win just over a month ago after she easily won the Democratic primary.

With all precincts counted, Mr. Brown had 52 percent of the vote to Ms. Coakley’s 47 percent.

“Tonight the independent voice of Massachusetts has spoken,” Mr. Brown told his cheering supporters in a victory speech, standing in front of a backdrop that said “The People’s Seat.”

The election left Democrats in Congress scrambling to salvage a bill overhauling the nation’s health care system, which the late Mr. Kennedy had called “the cause of my life.” Mr. Brown has vowed to oppose the bill, and once he takes office the Democrats will no longer control the 60 votes in the Senate needed to overcome filibusters.

There were immediate signs that the bill had become imperiled. House members indicated they would not quickly pass the bill the Senate approved last month.

And after the results were announced, one centrist Democratic senator, Jim Webb of Virginia, called on Senate leaders to suspend any votes on the Democrats’ health care legislation until Mr. Brown is sworn into office. The election, he said, was a referendum on both health care and the integrity of the government process.

Beyond the bill, the election of a man supported by the Tea Party movement also represented an unexpected reproach by many voters to President Obama after his first year in office, and struck fear into the hearts of Democratic lawmakers, who are already worried about their prospects in the midterm elections later this year.

Mr. Brown was able to appeal to independents who were anxious about the economy and concerned about the direction taken by Democrats, now that they control both Beacon Hill and Washington. He rallied his supporters when he said, at the last debate, that he was not running for Mr. Kennedy’s seat but for “the people’s seat.”

That seat, held for nearly half a century by Mr. Kennedy, the liberal lion of the Senate, will now be held for the next two years by a Republican who has said he supports waterboarding as an interrogation technique for terrorism suspects, opposes a federal cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions and opposes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants unless they leave the country. It was a sharp swing of the pendulum, but even Democratic voters said they wanted the Obama administration to change direction.

“I’m hoping that it gives a message to the country,” said Marlene Connolly, 73, of North Andover, a lifelong Democrat who said she cast her first vote for a Republican on Tuesday. “I think if Massachusetts puts Brown in, it’s a message of ‘that’s enough.’ Let’s stop the giveaways and let’s get jobs going.”

Mr. Brown ran strongest in the suburbs of Boston, where the independent voters who make up a majority in Massachusetts turned out in large numbers. Ms. Coakley did best in urban areas, winning overwhelmingly in Boston and running ahead in Springfield, Worcester, Fall River and New Bedford, but her margins were not large enough to carry her to victory.

In a concession speech before cheering supporters, Ms. Coakley acknowledged that voters were angry and said she had hoped to deal with the concerns.

“Our mission continues, and our work goes on,” she said, echoing well-known remarks by Mr. Kennedy. “I am heartbroken at the result, as I know you are, and I know we will get up together tomorrow and continue this fight, even with this result tonight.”

The crowd at Mr. Brown’s victory rally, upset by reports that Democrats might try to vote on the health care bill before he takes office, chanted, “Seat him now!” Mr. Brown, for his part, noted that the interim senator holding the seat had finished his work, and that he was ready to go to Washington “without delay.” And he effusively praised Mr. Kennedy as a big-hearted, tireless worker, and said that he hoped to prove a worthy successor to him.

Ms. Coakley’s defeat, in a state that Mr. Obama won in 2008 with 62 percent of the vote, led to a round of finger-pointing among Democrats. Some criticized her tendency for gaffes — in a radio interview she offended Red Sox fans when she incorrectly suggested that Curt Schilling, a beloved former Red Sox pitcher, was a Yankee fan — while others criticized a lackluster, low-key campaign.

Mr. Brown presented himself as a Massachusetts Everyman, featuring the pickup truck he drives around the state in his speeches and one of his television commercials, calling in to talk radio shows and campaigning with popular local sports figures.

The implications of the election drew nationwide attention, and millions of dollars of outside spending, to the race. It transformed what many had expected to be a sleepy, low-turnout special election on a snowy day in January into a high-profile contest that appeared to draw more voters than expected to the polls. There were reports of traffic jams outside suburban polling stations, while other polling stations had to call for extra ballots.

The late surge by Mr. Brown appeared to catch Democrats by surprise, causing them to scramble in the last week and a half of the campaign and hastily schedule an appearance by Mr. Obama with Ms. Coakley on Sunday afternoon.

“Understand what’s at stake here, Massachusetts,” Mr. Obama said in his speech that day, repeatedly invoking Mr. Kennedy’s legacy. “It’s whether we’re going forwards or backwards.” He all but pleaded with voters to support Ms. Coakley, to preserve his agenda.

As voters went to the polls, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, made it clear that the president was “not pleased” with the situation Ms. Coakley found herself in. “He was both surprised and frustrated,” Mr. Gibbs said.

Although the race has riveted the nation largely because it was seen as contributing to the success or defeat of the health care bill, the potency of the issue for voters here was difficult to gauge. That is because Massachusetts already has near-universal health coverage, thanks to a law passed when Mitt Romney, a Republican, was governor.

Thus Massachusetts is one of the few states where the benefits promised by the national bill were expected to have little effect on how many of its residents got coverage, making it an unlikely place for a referendum on the health care bill.

On Capitol Hill, the fate of the health care legislation was highly uncertain as Democratic leaders quickly gathered to plot strategy in the wake of the Republican victory.

Sentiment about how to proceed was mixed, with several lawmakers saying the House would not accept the Senate-passed plan. Top officials had said that approach was the party’s best alternative, and many members said they still believed it was crucial that Democrats pass a plan.

“It is important for us to pass legislation,” said Representative Baron P. Hill, a conservative Democrat from Indiana.

Reporting was contributed by Katie Zezima, Danielle Ossher and Bret Silverberg in Massachusetts, and Carl Hulse and David M. Herszenhorn in Washington.

New Book Examines Contradictions and Warring Mythologies of 'American History' and its Narrative Conceits

All,

Renowned Detroit poet, playwright, and cultural critic Bill Harris has written a dynamic new book that through a creative synthesis of various literary and musical forms and structures (rooted in the folk and narrative traditions of the quintessential U.S. aesthetic expressions Jazz and Blues), confronts and critically examines the complex dimensions and nuances of the confluences and often warring conceptions of myth and history governing our dubious, conflicted, and authentic notions of 'truth and reality'. These conflicts and challenges take place in a country conceived in and largely controlled by the stark and heinous historical legacies of slavery, genocide, racial, class, and gender oppression and exploitation, imperial hubris, and an equally pathological desire to ignore, dismiss, or avoid the profound and painful implications and consequences of this extremely vexed and destructive history/mythology. This bizarre tradition of course continues its fervent and self immolating direction today as we all well know--or at least those of us in the contentious 'American vein' who still wish to recognize these truths, take social and spiritual responsibility for their existence and critically act upon what they represent and reveal to us...

Kofi

Excerpt from Birth of a Notion; Or, The Half Ain’t Never Been Told: A Narrative Account with entertaining Passages of the State of Minstrelsy & of America & the True Relation Thereof (From the Ha Ha Dark Side)

by Bill Harris

Wayne State University Press 2010

1847

Close up: Frederick Douglass (1818?-

1895) Orator. Abolitionist,

former slave sits for his portrait.

The photographer, under the velvet drape,

hides from the inverted eyes, agate-hard &

looking through the boxes’ lens, seeing,

through the shutter & plate, down the bellows & through him & the hand

writing on the wall, & beyond. He does not implore the negro to smile.

Hand trembling, releases the shutter. Snap. Douglass holds, does not blink.

Bushfire mane. Plow rutted brow. Broad nostril’d.

Lips a thin gash through his beard.

Montage: British friends purchase his freedom.

Founds the abolitionist paper The North Star.

North Star. Celestial point for northward navigation.

End jewel in Little Dipper "handle";

in ancient times Ursa Minor was the Dragon's wing.

Fly away! Fly away! Follow the North Star, Fly away!

The North Star. "Right is of no Sex — Truth is of no Color —

God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren,"

is its motto.

Douglass exits the Orpheum having seen his

first minstrel show. The laughter a wasp in his ear.

He holds the programme rolled like a switch.

Strides rapidly toward the Assembly Hall.

A passerby speaks. He does not hear them but he nods.

We see him now in slow motion. Like he is wading,

knee deep against the current, eyes keen, fixed.

THIS EVENING

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Lecture to commence at ½ past 7

The North Star is a stick. A big stick assault

on slavery’s aspects & forms. Swagger stick.

Carrot & stick of promised recompense & threat.

A goad, prod & pike to hasten the day

of universal emancipation for the 3 million still in slavery.

A jackstraw, a wand.

Each edition, column & line is a crabstick,

linstock, a staff promoting the moral &

intellectual improvement of (faceless) colored people.

It is a bail, a baton, a single stick. A switch.

Raising welts on Jim Crow’s buttocks.

Leaning forward, arms straight as rails; fingers talons

on the oak podium, he reads them, sitting stern, earnest,

clinch mouthed, foreheads rucked like washboards. Solemn as stele.

Trying to summon up a song, gurgle & hock it up

like phlegm, a spirit-song—of the harmony of their labor—

so he can spit it out at them—a jigging song—

a song of gladness in the task—of the depth of the evil

& foolishness flaming all around them—

with a high stepping melody for strides with a kick

at the end of each one—for crossing all lines & boundaries.

His fist about to clinch, rise, elbow bent, to beat,

like a drumstick against the Meeting Hall air,

thick as cotton lint,

2, 3, 4!

Douglass, essayist, autobiographer, is proof

coloreds ought have more than aught voice in their emancipation.

He, future counselor to Lincoln, & ambassador to Haiti,

in a last minute change announces minstrelsy as his topic.

He brands it an entertainment which holds “up to ridicule

an already too much oppressed people . . .” Its perpetrators

he nails as, “filthy scum,” who pretend their foolish representations

“are the characteristics of the whole people.”

Psalms 92:3-7 his text, its cadence is its context.

Not for their lack of loving kindness,

but their failure of acknowledgement or penance

he hews into them like a chorus of whet-edged axes into punk wood.

The collection plates brimmed to overflowing.

Bill Harris is a playwright, poet, and professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. His numerous New York productions include Stories About the Old Days, starring S. Epatha Merkerson and Denzel Washington; and Robert Johnson: Trick the Devil, with Guy Davis. His books of poems include Yardbird Suite: Side One, a bio poem of jazz musician Charlie Parker (Michigan State University Press), and The Ringmaster's Array (Past Tents Press). There are two novels in progress.



Birth of a Notion; Or, The Half Ain't Never Been Told
A Narrative Account with Entertaining Passages of the State of Minstrelsy & of America & the True Relation Thereof
(From the Ha Ha Dark Side)
By Bill Harris

Available May 2010
Size: 5.5 x 8.5, Pages: 228, Illustrations: 45
Subjects: Fiction and Poetry
Series: Made in Michigan Writers Series
Paper - 9780814334089
Price: $18.95t


DESCRIPTION AUTHOR(S)

In Birth of a Notion, poet and playwright Bill Harris confronts contemporary stereotypes and prejudices by looking back to their roots in early American history. In a hybrid work of prose and poetry that takes its cues from nineteenth-century minstrelsy, Harris speaks back to preconceived notions about “blackness” through many different characters and voices. His narrative is at turns sarcastic, serious, wry, and lyrical, as he investigates the source of pervasive racist images and their incorporation into American culture.

Harris takes readers on a tour of nineteenth-century American history, from the 1830s and the rise of the abolitionist movement, to Reconstruction and the Industrial Revolution in the 1860s, and to the beginning of the twentieth century. He considers cultural productions that gave rise to America’s idea of the “new Negro,” including the development of minstrelsy as popular entertainment, the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the museum curios of P. T. Barnum, and the exhibitions of “exotic” people at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Along the way, Harris interjects a range of symbols, word-play, and famous personalities into his narrative, referring to everyone from Karl Marx, Uncle Sam, Charles Dickens, Buffalo Bill, and Walt Whitman. He ends with the development of jazz and the blues as cultural products that would become important vehicles for self-representation in the new century.

Harris’s fast-paced narrative interspersed with graphic elements shows the importance of point-of-view in creating history, which always contains some elements of fiction as a result. Anyone interested in poetry, American history, and African American studies will appreciate Birth of a Notion.

Published by Wayne State University Press

The False Dichotomy Between "Idealism" and "Pragmatism" in Present Critiques of President Obama's Performance

http://dissentingjustice.blogspot.com/2009/12/criticizing-president-obama-is.html

All,

Many of the ongoing political and ideological debates over the direction of domestic and foreign policy in the Obama administration are distorted by a curious tendency to act as though any genuine and substantive criticism of the president and his administration from the left is somehow being "disloyal" to the president's assumed agenda. The following article by Darren Hutchinson, a law professor at American University, Washington College of Law, goes a long way toward refuting this canard by properly focusing on the shibboleth that to criticize Obama is to engage in the notion that to do so is to be a mere idealist as opposed to a hard-headed and more efficient pragmatist. We see widespread evidence of this false dichotomy in many critical debates about the president and his administration's policies -- so much so in fact that genuine political and ideological criticism of the inadequacies, weaknesses, or shortcomings of his current agenda are seriously obscured by the dubious assumptions governing how many view Obama's actual stances on various issues. What Hutchinson provides us with is thankfully a wider and deeper appreciation of both the necessity for mature political criticism and a real social engagement of active citizens who wish not only to impact the direction of the country but who will not be deterred by the personal desires and priorities of Obama's presidency. What we must all remember as we continue to make this critical engagement with the government is that what's most important is creating a space for real political, economic, and social change that is not subservient ultimately to any single politician's careerist ambitions -- including those of President Obama.

Kofi

Professor Darren Hutchinson

Criticizing President Obama Is Pragmatic

President Obama's defenders in media often describe him as a "pragmatist." Although these journalists usually do not define the term, it seems that they wish to imply that Obama can set aside his ideological commitments in order to deliver concrete results to his constituents. By contrast, many commentators portray Obama's progressive critics as people who place ideology above tangible results and who refuse to compromise and accept the incremental advancement of their overall political agenda.

Mainstream media outlets barely do a decent job reporting the news. Their attempt at political science is absolutely atrocious.

The Assumption That Obama Is a Progressive

When commentators describe Obama as a pragmatist, they assume that he is a progressive who compromises to achieve practical benefits. It is unclear, however, that Obama is actually a progressive.

Although Obama became the darling of the political Left during the Democratic primaries, he never really embraced policies that were more progressive than other mainstream Democratic presidential contenders. Nevertheless, the Left was so desperate to replace President Bush and to avoid the "triangulation" of the Clinton era that it easily accepted Obama's progressive narrative. Obama also benefited from an adoring media, which failed to raise tough questions about his progressive credentials and which often rushed to denounce his critics.

After he secured the Democratic nomination, President Obama started moving more overtly to the center. Many progressives accepted this "transformation" as a necessary element of a national political campaign. But long before he won the election or even the Democratic nomination, progressives had enough reasons to question Obama's liberal credentials. Obama, for example, criticized a Supreme Court ruling that reaffirmed prior caselaw forbidding the death penalty in rape cases. He also praised a conservative Court ruling that found an individual right to bear arms and which invalidated a Washington, DC gun law. Obama also voted to renew the Patriot Act and, betraying a campaign promise, to extend immunity to telecoms that conducted unlawful surveillance on behalf of the Bush Administration. Citing his own religious views, Obama stated that he did not agree with same-sex marriage. And while the antiwar Left certainly preferred Obama to Hillary Clinton, Obama, like Clinton, said that he viewed the war in Afghanistan as a "just" war.

Although journalists often portray Obama as a pragmatic progressive who can prioritize concrete outcomes over his own ideological commitments, another narrative is also highly plausible. Obama is a political centrist who is in fact pursuing his own ideological commitments -- even if this means discarding the interests of liberals who were instrumental to his political success. This narrative, however, does not sound nearly as laudatory and self-sacrificing as the pragmatism rhetoric. It is, however, a perfectly logical take on Obama's political orientation.

Even if Obama is a progressive, he could compromise his ideological values in order to maximize his opportunity for reelection. If this is the reason for Obama's "pragmatism," then it is unclear that voters -- and certainly liberal voters -- should laud his careful effort to tread the center and to compromise with conservatives.

The Assumption That Obama's Progressive Critics Are Not Pragmatic

Commentators who laud Obama as a pragmatist almost uniformly condemn his progressive critics as ideological and impractical. Unlike Obama, who is a good, pragmatic progressive, liberals who criticize the President are politically inflexible ideologues whose rigidity, if widely followed, would preclude the implementation of helpful policies.

This juxtaposition of Obama (good, pragmatic) and his progressive critics (impractical, ideologues) has occurred most recently in debates surrounding healthcare reform. After the White House instructed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to delete the public plan and Medicare buy-in from the healthcare bill, liberals criticized Obama for betraying his campaign promises and for watering-down the measure. The White House responded by calling Obama's liberal critics "irrational" and "insane." Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic argued that they are privileged white college graduates who need not worry about the practical implications of their positions. These arguments are deeply flawed.

Brownstein's racial analysis is simply another bizarre manifestation of the notion that criticizing Obama -- even from a progressive perspective -- inevitably comes from a racial place. This argument is old, tired, and should be retired.

With respect to the point about pragmatism, depending upon the goals of progressives, criticizing Obama could operate as a highly pragmatic political tactic. President Obama has several items on his agenda -- including reelection. These goals, however, might cause him to act in a way that is inconsistent with progressive political agendas. Progressives can only influence Obama and other elected Democrats if they express their discontent. If they can also reveal that Obama is betraying his liberal base, then they can possibly make him more vulnerable from a political perspective. In order to cure or avoid this vulnerability, Obama may have to act in a way that addresses the concerns of progressives. If progressives never complain or engage in advocacy or mobilization, then politicians will have very few incentives to address their concerns.

By criticizing Obama, progressives are modeling the behavior of social movement participants as diverse as the abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights advocates, feminists, and proponents of GLBT rights. Progressive movements have never achieved their goals by peacefully acquiescing to the will of politicians. While successful progressive movements have undoubtedly made and accepted compromises, they have also condemned politicians -- even sympathetic politicians -- when doing so was appropriate. The election of Obama does not provide a reasonable basis for abandoning this tried and tested historical approach to social change.


Professor Darren Hutchinson teaches Constitutional Law, Critical Race Theory, Law and Social Change, and Equal Protection Theory at the American University, Washington College of Law. Professor Hutchinson received a B.A., cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Professor Hutchinson has written extensively on issues related to the intersection of antidiscrimination law, social movements, and identity theory. His articles have appeared in several journals including the Cornell Law Review, Washington University Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Illinois Law Review, Michigan Journal of Race and Law, and the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. Professor Hutchinson also authors Dissenting Justice -- a blog related to law and politics. Professor Hutchinson has participated in workshops and conferences at many universities, including Yale, Stanford, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell, and Georgetown. Before joining the American University faculty, Professor Hutchinson was an Associate Professor at Southern Methodist University School of Law.



http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/opinion/05herbert.html?em

All,

Once again Bob Herbert hones in on the real issues and problems facing American society today and what needs to be done about them. An excellent, insightful, and very accurate article...

Kofi


OP-ED COLUMNIST

An Uneasy Feeling

By BOB HERBERT
New York Times
January 4, 2010

I’m starting the new year with the sinking feeling that important opportunities are slipping from the nation’s grasp. Our collective consciousness tends to obsess indiscriminately over one or two issues — the would-be bomber on the flight into Detroit, the Tiger Woods saga — while enormous problems that should be engaged get short shrift.
















Bob Herbert

Staggering numbers of Americans are still unemployed and nearly a quarter of all homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Forget the false hope of modestly improving monthly job numbers. The real story right now is the entrenched suffering (with no end in sight) that has been inflicted on scores of millions of working Americans by the Great Recession and the misguided economic policies that preceded it.

As The Washington Post reported over the weekend, the entire past decade “was the worst for the U.S. economy in modern times.” There was no net job creation — none — between December 1999 and now. None!

The Post article read like a lament, a longing for the U.S. as we’d once known it: “No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent.”

Middle-class families in 2008 actually earned less, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999. The data for 2009 are not yet in, but you can just imagine what happened to those families in that nightmarish downturn. Small children over the holidays were asking Santa Claus to bring mommy or daddy a job.

One in eight Americans, and one in four children, are on food stamps. Some six million Americans, according to an article in The Times on Sunday, have said that food stamps were their only income.

This is a society in deep, deep trouble and the fixes currently in the works are in no way adequate to the enormous challenges we’re facing. For example, an end to the mantra of monthly job losses would undoubtedly be welcomed. But even if the economy manages to create a few hundred thousand new jobs a month, it would do little to haul us from the unemployment pit dug for us by the Great Recession. We need to create more than 10 million new jobs just to get us back to where we were when the recession began in December 2007.

What’s needed are big new innovative efforts to fashion an economy that creates jobs for all who want and need to work. Just getting us back in fits and starts over the next few years to where we were when the recession began should not be acceptable to anyone. We should be moving now to invest aggressively in a new, greener economy, leading the world in the development of alternative fuels, advanced transportation networks and the effort to restrain the poisoning of the planet. We should be developing an industrial policy that emphasizes the need for America to regain its manufacturing mojo, as tough as that might seem, and we need to rebuild our infrastructure.

We’re not smart as a nation. We don’t learn from the past, and we don’t plan for the future. We’ve spent a year turning ourselves inside out with arguments of every sort over health care reform only to come up with a bloated, Rube Goldberg legislative mess that protects the insurance and drug industries and does not rein in runaway health care costs.

The politicians will be back soon, trust me, screaming about the need to rein in health costs.

We keep talking about how essential it is to radically improve public education while, at the same time, we’re closing libraries and firing teachers by the tens of thousands for economic reasons.

The fault lies everywhere. The president, the Congress, the news media and the public are all to blame. Shared sacrifice is not part of anyone’s program. Politicians can’t seem to tell the difference between wasteful spending and investments in a more sustainable future. Any talk of raising taxes is considered blasphemous, but there is a constant din of empty yapping about controlling budget deficits.

Oh, yes, and we’re fighting two wars.

If America can’t change, then the current state of decline is bound to continue. You can’t have a healthy economy with so many millions of people out of work, and there is no plan now that would result in the creation of millions of new jobs any time soon.

Voters were primed at the beginning of the Obama administration for fundamental changes that would have altered the trajectory of American life for the better. Politicians of all stripes, many of them catering to the nation’s moneyed interests, fouled that up to a fare-thee-well.

Now we’re escalating in Afghanistan, falling back into panic mode over an attempted act of terror and squandering a golden opportunity to build a better society.