The Dish

Facial hair has become extremely popular among African-Americans in Philadelphia. This video explains why:

Phillybeard.com presents: The Sunni Beard from Chikodi Chima on Vimeo.

Rod Liddle revisits the bizarre but instructive case of Iris Robinson, a virulently homophobic Christianist who once believed that homosexuality was worse than child abuse  … and is now in psychiatric care.

I can't believe I haven't figured this out yet. The closeness of the race in Massachusetts is not just a function of the dreadful Martha Coakley and right-wing hostility to health insurance reform. It's also about the Kennedys.

This Senate seat was held warm for Ted decades ago, when he was parachuted in and stayed there for ever. Part of the revolt is based on the fact that Coakley seems to be the ultimate Kennedy clan crony, and was also plopped in by a tiny number of primary voters, and seems to imbue the arrogance of the Democratic party elite. Most voters know that she could lord it over them for decades. But they'll almost certainly be rid of Brown in a few years.

Brown has also played class politics more effectively. Obama's swoop in to save Coakley also makes him look like an upper-class elitist rather than a mobilizer for change for the poor. The optics, as they say, are awful.

So you have resistance to machine politics in a seat controlled by elites for ever; you have an atmosphere of unrest and discontent after two years of recession; you have the Republican base whipped up into an FNC-induced frenzy against the end of America as they know it; and you have the Herald readers sick to death of Kennedy power. For good measure, you have the ugly spectacle of closed door final meetings in Washington over health reform.

I don't see how even Obama can turn back this perfect storm.

Channel Firing

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No;
It’s gunnery practise out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

“And all nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

“That this is not the judgement-hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they’d have to scour
Hell’s floor for so much threatening. . . .

“Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).”

So down we lay again. “I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,”
Said one, ‘than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!”

And many a skeleton shook his head.
“Instead of preaching forty year,”
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
“I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

– Thomas Hardy, 1914. Cliff Notes here.

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My own take on this potential disaster for the Democrats is best represented by my response to an Obama supporter who is intending to vote for Brown. Vote for him in 2012. Hold your nose and vote for Coakley on Tuesday. The message is already clear to Obama about the need to pivot quickly to debt and spending (something his record already proves he can do). But losing health insurance reform now, and crippling the Obama presidency as the far right wants, would be to throw away the last chance for a decade of any meaningful change.

If you voted for Obama in 2008, don’t abandon him now.

The exchange, from earlier today, is here.

A year ago this week, in even colder temperatures than recently, a young, charismatic, black president-elect gazed across the Mall in Washington DC and gave an Inaugural address that some felt was anti-climactic. It feels like an age ago, and so I went back to see what my first impression was:

“From the moment he gave his election night victory speech, Obama has been signaling great caution in the face of immense challenges. The tone is humble… He is not a messiah and does not act or speak like one. He’s a traditionalist in many ways.”

A year on, that seems like a good call to me. Those on the left who foolishly saw him as a revolutionary are in a major sulk right now. Those on the right who still see him as a leftist ideologue keep railing against the reality in front of their eyes – as if contemplating a small-c conservative black Democratic president is too much for their brains to grasp. To those who hadn’t observed or read or listened closely enough to Obama, the first year therefore remains a baffling record. But to my mind, it is almost exactly what I expected and yet much more than I could have hoped for.

Obama is a liberal pragmatist in politics and a traditional conservative in his understanding of the presidency. Once you grasp this, his first year makes much more sense.

He has marshalled conservative constitutional norms – against the radical claims of Bush and Cheney with respect to the presidency – in defense of a liberal restoration of the importance of government. This has made for a frustrating year for those who want instant results – because he has often deferred to Congress; or those who want short-term tactical political coups – because he prefers strategy to tactics. But for anyone taking the long view, it is hard to see where Obama has really gone wrong.

What mistakes has he made?

His inheritance is one even Republicans concede was the worst since Reagan’s: a global economy spiraling into a possible Second Great Depression; a deficit exploding just as long-term debt was poised to enter the red zone; failing banks; an imploding car industry; two flailing wars; a deeply polarized country; a mortgage crisis; a collapse in America’s moral standing after the Cheney torture regime; 30 million Americans with no health insurance; crumbling domestic infrastructure; and eight wasted years in the fight to mitigate climate change.

So where did he go wrong? Was the stimulus too big or too small? In retrospect, it looks like a pretty good balance in putting a bottom under the economy without adding too much debt. Was the bank rescue insufficient, as many liberals at the time argued? Nope. If you judge by results, Obama got it right: no nationalization and targeted bailout money led to a stunning turn-around in which many of the major recipients of aid were able to pay it back within a year. Last week, Obama announced a big new tax on the banks to get back the rest and is preparing a major new bill for financial re-regulation. In other words, he didn’t succumb to leftist populsim or right-wing ideology. He neither attacked the banks nor let them off the hook. And it worked. The global economy has since stabilized – something that was by no means inevitable.

Did Obama make a mistake by sticking with his campaign pledge to reform and expand health insurance in such a perilous economic time? My view is: no. He crafted a compromise bill that would provide insurance to 30 million people, reduce the deficit, and bring the drug and insurance companies along. Such a result enraged the left, and sent the right into a tizzy of fury – but it will endure as the biggest social reform since Lyndon Johnson if it survives the Massachusetts special election. Did he err by allowing the Congress to take the lead? Well: the Clintons tried dictating to Congress and look how that turned out. No president has succeeded in this area before, in good times and bad. Obama got his reform in a year of economic crisis. The further you remove yourself from this, the more impressive the achievement is.

His first Supreme Court nominee? Sonia Sotomayor was a smooth, shrewd choice, rewarding Hispanics (who support health reform by massive margins, by the way), and elevating a competent, moderate liberal. His war management? Again, you see the caution of the first Bush, led by Clinton and Gates at State and Defense. Obama kept the second Bush’s timetable for Iraq withdrawal, dispatched three Somali pirates, intensified the drone attacks on al Qaeda, saw a huge drop in al Qaeda’s popularity in the Muslim world, a huge rise in pro-American sentiment around the world, and recrafted an Afghanistan strategy that won both Democratic support and the enthusiasm of General Stanley McChrystal. I retain severe doubts about the future in both Iraq and Afghanistan and suspect both efforts to create stable states there are doomed. But I have learned to reserve judgment in the fog of war and neither of Obama’s big decisions here seemed obviously misjudged. They seemed like the least worst option on the table.

More broadly, his quiet demotion of inflammatory rhetoric in the war on Jihadist terrorism in favor of talking softly and taking one Qaeda leader out at a time strikes me as a shrewder way to win this war than Bush’s grandstanding. On Iran, he helped the Green Movement immensely by removing the “Great Satan” card from the Khamenei junta’s weakening hand. If he can target sanctions precisely at the Revolutionary Guard, he could help some more. But his breakthrough was in understanding – as any conservative should – that this is the Iranians’ revolution, not America’s. And the job of the West is to get out of the way.

His only obvious failure has been Israel. He misjudged the intransigence of Netanyahu and the power of his support on Capitol Hill. But he will keep persisting in trying to rescue the Jewish state from the perils of its own hubris and paranoia.

And on the social issues, he has stepped right back to help unwind polarization, and allow society to evolve and federalism to work. By merely refusing to use federal agents to police states where medical marijuana has been legalized, he has all but ended cannabis prohibition in large swathes of the country without lifting a finger. Although his term saw marriage equality lose in Maine, it also saw gay marriage rights come to the US capital, Washington DC, and the debate shift so much that we are now watching a Reaganite conservative, Ted Olson, argue that the California initiative that denied marriage to gays violated the equal protection clause of the federal constitution.

He has also failed to end the cultural and partisan polarization in America. But he has not empowered it. The energy for this polarization has come from the hard left (which is angry at him) and the hard right, which, to a great extent, has gone completely bonkers in the wake of their defeat in 2008. This rabid conservatism – one that seeks more tax cuts as debt spirals, that thinks Gitmo is an asset in the war on terror, that wants no extension of health insurance, no bailouts, no stimulus – may well ride some populist anger to short term success at the ballot box (watch Massachusetts’ by-election next Tuesday). But under Obama, the Republicans have become whiter, more extreme, more religious, and synonymous in the public mind with polarizing fugures like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn beck. This may be a good ratings strategy for a cable  network like Fox News, but it’s a highly risky one for a party attempting to win back the center.

And Obama himself? Suffice it to say that his first year revealed something we already knew. He is a very cool customer, a very shrewd strategist, and has also managed to marshall the stagecraft and elegance to inhabit the role of the presidency with more ease and grace than anyone since Reagan. Two years ago, a black president was unimaginable. Now it seems like background noise. Like all of Obama’s revolutions, this was a quiet one. But in the eye of history, my guess is it will be seen as game-changing – for America and the world.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

Mark Halperin puts it this way:

The country took a risk on Barack Obama, he was untested.  And if you look at what Hillary Clinton and John McCain both said about him, they said, "He's just words.  He doesn't know how to run the government." I think, ironically, it's just the opposite.  He's done, I think, an extraordinary job running the government, as John said, under difficult

circumstances.

He managed the economic crisis and kept the world from going into a depression.  He staffed the government with very quality, quality people.  He showed he could be commander-in-chief and manage these two difficult wars.  What I think, ironically, the problem has been is he's not inspired the country to feel a sense of optimism and renewal and to be unified in a bipartisan way.  Those are the things I think people thought he would excel at.  Those are, I think, are the problems.  He's making progress in governance, not necessarily in that bully pulpit leadership.

The nihilist right can smell blood. And they will try to interpret this special election as a repudiation of everything Americans voted for in 2008. They may well succeed, as the Rovian gambit seems to be working again. It barely registers that health insurance reform was in Obama's platform, debated ad nauseam in the campaign, a clear distinction from McCain's refusal to take the uninsured as a legitimate issue. There are of course legitimate reasons to oppose the bill – but the GOP have no alternative plans to rein in healthcare costs, no alternative plans to insure more people, and no alternative plans to restrain spending in general. To vote GOP to restrain spending is like voting for Biden because you love the sound of silence.

In fact, here is one of conservatism's leading lights making one criticism of the healthcare bill.

In Jeff Jacoby's view, one problem with the bill is that it would

slash Medicare by half a trillion dollars.

Yep: Republicans in defense of Medicare with no cuts! If you want no attempt to rein in Medicare's costs, vote Brown. If you want no entitlement reform, vote Brown. If you want to postpone health inusrance reform for another decade, vote Brown. If you want a restoration of torture, vote Brown. If you want more debt, by slashing more taxes and reducing no spending, vote Brown.

Maybe it will make some people feel better. But this is politics as populist, nihilist emotion. Which is what this country voted against over a year ago.

A reader writes:

It is truly frustrating to read some of the emails regarding the Coakley/Brown race.  I had to control my anger as I read the one entitled "Two Scenarios."  For so many professional and amateur commentators, politics is about gaming out scenarios, but for ordinary citizens, it is about real lives. 

For the past few months, I have listened to some progressive radio talkers and callers tear apart Obama – some even calling for revolution (whatever that is) – because he is not liberal enough for them.  In particular, some of these people cite the lack of a public option as a reason to chuck HCR altogether and start again at some amorphous point in time.  To them, I say stop pretending to help because you are actually hurting people.  To the GOP, I would say nothing because they do not listen and do not care.  

Through no fault of her own, she was struck by this disease, and until there is a cure, she must have lifelong, life-sustaining medical care which costs thousands of dollars.  In fact, we are less than a year into it and have spent thousands of dollars already.  What so many of the talking heads seem to forget is that all of us are one diagnosis away from a total seismic shift in every aspect of our lives.  For my family, our lives will never be the same. 

I care for my daughter around the clock, and while it is an easier disease than some others to manage, it is exhausting and worrisome.  The very least we deserve – my child deserves – is to know that she cannot be denied the coverage that she needs to live.  In fact, I bet just about everyone of every political stripe would agree with that concept.  Yet, in this paralytic political system we have devolved into, no one has addressed the issue.  If it is not addressed now, then it simply will go on for another fifty years when another politician with either guts or naivete dares to touch it. 

I am sick of tea baggers.  I am sick of those liberals that have made the perfect the enemy of the good.  I am sick of people who want to send a message to Washington.  If you have a loved one who can benefit from healthcare reform, then stop the politics and support this President's call for reform.