Sometimes I wonder if I’ve just drunk too much of the Kool-Aid because I seem to always find myself agreeing with Barack Obama.  I’m not exactly a my team/your team kind of guy (I’m always the one that admits a bad call in my favor in sports, for example), so I don’t really think this is what’s happening.  I just think my political disposition is squarely in line with this President, which apparently is something of a rarity among Democrats lately.

When I checked in on the blogs late last night and saw the tax deal that was struck, I stuck out my lip, slowly nodded my head, and said, “Hmm.  Not bad.”  Which is not to say that I was necessarily excited about the deal, but it had a little more “sugar” in it than I had expected. 2% payroll tax cut?  Sounds good to me.  UI extension for 13 months?  Not bad.  Temp extension of Bush tax cuts for 2 more years?  Could be worse.

I think thats the key phrase.  It could be worse.  But could it be better?  The kids over at DailyKos would have you think so.

But what is this magical solution that our President has so stupidly failed to see?

Is it to have a staring contest with a emboldened political party that will clearly not back down, while raising taxes on lower to middle class families during a sluggish recovery that is still posting 9.8% unemployment?  Is that the solution America is craving?

Is it the likely death of unemployment insurance for people who are out of work through no fault of their own?

How about a guarantee of zero fiscal stimulus for 2011?  Is that the silver bullet to economic recovery?

Do people honestly believe that anyone will remember this in 2012?  Or that they’ll even blame Republicans for it?  That ship has sailed.  The only real chance of using this issue as an electoral bludgeon was before the midterms, not after, which I will remind everyone is exactly what Obama wanted to do, but the Democrats in Congress punted.

So now the tricks and gimmicks are over.  It comes down to what’s best for the economy today.  Middle class tax hikes, or temporary extension of tax cuts for the rich?  Extended unemployment benefits, or an expiration?  Fiscal stimulus, however modest, or pro-cyclical contraction?

I’ll take the deal.

I’ve been very critical of my friends over at DKos lately, and I can’t seem to stop.  I wandered over again today to see the reaction to health care reform passing the Senate, and the reaction was fairly positive.  There was a nice post by DemFromCT.

But then I looked further down and ran across this post quoting Drew Westen, who I am told “isn’t just any guy with a computer. He’s an expert on political communication, the guy who wrote The Political Brain, and as digby says, the “it boy” of the Democratic party.”  So obviously, he’s the bees knees, and we should all hail his opinion:

What’s costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting….

Consider the president’s leadership style, which has now become clear: deliver a moving speech, move on, and when push comes to shove, leave it to others to decide what to do if there’s a conflict, because if there’s a conflict, he doesn’t want to be anywhere near it. [...]

Leadership means heading into the eye of the storm and bringing the vessel of state home safely, not going as far inland as you can because it’s uncomfortable on the high seas. This president has a particular aversion to battling back gusting winds from his starboard side (the right, for the nautically challenged) and tends to give in to them. He just can’t tolerate conflict, and the result is that he refuses to lead….

The time for exhortation is over. FDR didn’t exhort robber barons to stem the redistribution of wealth from working Americans to the upper 1 percent, and neither did his fifth cousin Teddy. Both men told the most powerful men in the United States that they weren’t going to rip off the American people any more, and they backed up their words with actions. Teddy Roosevelt was clear that capital gains taxes should be high relative to income taxes because we should reward work, not “gambling in stocks.” This President just doesn’t have the stomach to make anyone do anything they don’t want to do (except women to have unwanted babies because they can’t afford an abortion or live in a red state and don’t have an employer who offers insurance), and his advisors are enabling his most troubling character flaw, his conflict-avoidance.

This is complete garbage.

May I remind Mr. Bad Ass Democrat Drew Westen that it was under Obama’s watch, his first year as President to boot, that comprehensive health care reform is about to be passed.  This is something that FDR and LBJ, heroes of progressive lore that they are, could not pass.

It was clear from the outset that the Senate never wanted to pass a bill, but we soldiered on.  Somehow Mr. Westin thinks that Barack Obama had nothing to do with it, which I find completely at odds with reality.

Furthermore, this is exactly the kind of attitude that frustrates me beyond belief from the netroots on this issue.  It’s this idea that if only Barack Obama got into a staring contest (or perhaps an arm wrestling match) with Joe Lieberman, then the public option would have passed.

Ridiculous.

With a health care reform bill poised to pass, I thought I would mosy on over to DKos to see what the climate was like.  And that’s when I came across this:

People are so quick to rush to embrace a bill that’s not set in stone, which has been consistently eroded over the past year, at an exponentially accelerated pace, with each major concessions not just making the bill worse, but emboldening critics to make further demands. As crappy as the bill is now, it’s inevitably getting worse, and then, it’ll get even worse after that.And every time progressives shrug their shoulders and say, “all right, we’ll take whatever we can get”, you empower those critics. Rather than draw a line in the sand and bolster the efforts of true reformists, you are leaving them high and dry. And the weaker progressives get, the more Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman and Blanche Lincoln and the rest of that bunch can do to make this not just a bad bill politically, but a bad bill policy wise. [...]

We’re at the point, I think, where you strip this thing of anything remotely controversial and pass whatever is left — maybe tougher rules against rescissions, some regulatory reform, etc. But as far as substantive reform, we live in a legislative world were a majority can’t accomplish shit because idiotic rules prevent government from governing. And we can’t resort to reconciliation because we live in a world in which procedural tactics that were okay for Republicans, are somehow off limits for Democrats.

Nate Silver has a very well detailed take down of this kind of attitude, which I basically agree with unconditionally.

The bottom line is that the bill currently under consideration in the Senate (with the Executive Amendments and Nelson’s support) is still a good bill.  Is it a great bill?  No.  Is it my favorite bill?  No.  Would I like to see a robust public option?  Yes.  Am I pissed off that procedural rules give the keys to the palace over to the likes of Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson?  Absolutely.  But the take-away is that this bill is significantly better than the status quo.

To sit in your corner and stamp your feet because the bad men threw your bill in the dirt is beyond childish.  This bill will improve the lives of millions of Americans.  Ron Wyden’s bill will not.  The House bill will not.  Why?  Because they won’t pass the Senate.  Period.  Not even with reconciliation.

It’s time to grow up and pass a bill.

That’s all I am going to say. Worth a read. Definitely worth a read.

NicholasC from Daily Kos on:

Obama to GOP: “Grab a Mop.” This is political gold (and we need to use it)

Kos is absolutely full of shit here.

I’ve been severely disappointed with the coverage of this bailout package on DKos lately.  They’ve been so focused on the poltics of this whole bailout package that they can’t even see the forest from the trees.  They just can’t seem to bring themselves to support this thing because it was proposed by Bush’s Treasury Secretary.  Now I’ll admit that this gave me pause, also, but at some point you have to realize that at the end of the day, you have to be able to set aside the fact that you don’t trust the Administration, and realize that we have to do something.  But the thing is, they won’t even accept that there’s a crisis, or at the very least, they are just pissed that no one’s told them anything.  Here’s kos:

See, this is my biggest pet peeve about this entire fiasco. There has been zero effort to educate the American people about why the situation is so urgent. There have been a lot of proclamations that the situation is urgent, but still no explanation.

I asked both Reid’s office and Pelosi’s office about releasing Paulson’s presentation to the leadership to the American people, so we can all see what supposedly has them all so spooked that we have to mortgage the next several generations of Americans. Reid’s office was non-committal (i.e. “I hear you”, but no movement toward full transparency), and Pelosi’s office blew me off.

Maybe Frank or Dodd can clue us in? I mean, we know they think it’s the end of the fucking world, but this isn’t Iraq, there’s no pretensions of “secret intelligence” and “protecting sources” to hide behind. If they want the peoples’ representatives to sign off, then don’t treat us like damn toddlers too delicate to see the facts.

Because from where I’m sitting, it looks just like the Iraq War bullshit, and we all know how those dire “facts” ended up turning out. Either offer full transparency, or stop whining about people skeptical about this solution to the crisis.

Yeah.  This looked exactly like the Iraq War debate, until the Democrats started driving this.  Now, all of a sudden, the netroots is distrusting its darling Chris Dodd?  I mean, wtf?  Am I suppose to sit over here and get pissed off because I haven’t seen Paulson’s presentation (which probably shows a lot of info about banks’ balance sheets that would most likely send the Dow in a freefall if it were released), even though people I trust (i.e. Dodd) are spearheading this effort.  I mean it’s not like were about to pass the Bush Admin’s joke of a bill in it’s 3-page entirety.  Democrats wrote this bill.  The Bush Admin caved to us.  We got oversight.  We got executive pay restrictions.  And now kos has the temerity to go to public opinion polls to show that we’re on the wrong side of this?

Yet every challenger across the nation, Democratic and Republican, is running against this thing to public cheers. The tone deafness on this is shocking.

House Republicans, of course, have their own take on what happened. They blame Frank and Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, for trying to force through an agreement lacking bipartisan backing once they knew McCain had suspended his presidential campaign in order to return to Washington. Republicans said it was a blatant attempt by Democrats to deny McCain – and House Republicans – a role in the discussions.

When did McCain suspend his campaign? And if Republicans were smart, they would embrace this, rather than try to argue that it was actually the Democrats who were stymying this bill. They’re acting as if people will give political props to whichever party makes this boondoggle happen. It’s like bizarro world over there.

Goes to show that political tone deafness is currently a bipartisan affair inside the Beltway.

Tone deaf?  Where the hell are the grown-ups at DKos?  Listen, I’ve spent hours reading about this crisis, and I’m still not in a position to form a credible opinion on what should be done.  So to expect the American people to even begin to understand what this bailout package is supposed to do, is just ludicrous.  All they see is the headline “Congress bails out Wall Street”  which to them means that Congress is just helping out rich people who made ridiculous risks.  But damn it, if Ben Bernanke, Depression scholar, says we need a big bailout package, then I’d probably give it some thought.  If Henry Paulson, a well-respected finance expert who’s been inside the investment banking world, says we need it, then I’ll give it more thought.  If Sen. Chris Dodd, a netroots-beloved, clear-thinking Chairman of the Senate Banking Comittee, wrote the bill, then I’M FUCKING ON BOARD, to hell with the ridiculous populist posturing.  All the grown-ups are on board with this package.  The only people that aren’t are the House Republicans and John McCain.  Yet kos somehow finds himself on the same side as all the kids in the room.  And why?  Partisan blather.

Grow up.