Welcome to the club, Charles!

I've always thought that when I grow up, I want to be a writer like Charles Pierce. No one - but NO ONE - does a take-down better than he does. Todays match-up has him taking Dana Milbank to the matt. But Dana is just one in a long line of folks who are getting their bubbles burst for ridiculous notions about presidential leadership. When Pierce suggests that we're about to read a quote from "Maureen Dowd's Ye Old Shoppe of Daddy Issues," you know its best to just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Here's where Pierce gets to the point:

The country doesn't want a conversation on race, especially one led by the blah president whose simple legitimacy has been under assault since the moment his hand came off the Bible. The country doesn't want a conversation on race unless it is sure from the outset that white people will "win" it. The idea that the president could jump-start this conversation, let alone "give voice" to black people's complaints about (largely) white policemen who are killing them, and not be greeted with the shitstorm sharknado of all time, is so fantastical that it makes me wonder whether I even read Milbank correctly...We're not having a serious conversation about race because, as a nation, we're a bunch of chickenshits who aren't interested in being citizens ourselves, let alone extending that title to people whom we consider less than we are.

Pierce is one writer who never leaves you wondering exactly where he stands. That is a thing of beauty when he speaks the truth so clearly. Put it right alongside AG Holder's bold statement about America being a "nation of cowards" and you get the message.

Pierce's last line is a lead-in to an awareness he has recently had about President Obama's leadership style.

It didn't become clear to me until I heard the president accept his nomination for the second time. He referred to "the hard and necessary work of self-government." Put simply, in so many areas, the president is putting the responsibility of governing -- of Leadership (!)tm -- on us, which is where it should be. We shouldn't need a president to start a conversation on race. We should start it ourselves, in thousands of town halls and church basements and radio talk-shows. But, as a self-governing democracy, we are too cowardly to do it honestly, because it rubs up against the comfortable myth of American exceptionalism. We should make him do things, not the other way around. That's been the fundamental challenge of him from the outset. He's left the hard and necessary work of self-government to a country that simply is no longer up to the job.

Of course, I have been talking about the President's commitment to citizenship and partnership for a long time now...just not with the umph Pierce brings to the table. So...welcome to the club, Charles!!!

Crafting the narrative that explains Cantor's defeat

Eric Cantor's primary defeat is one of those things that fascinates me about politics. As I mentioned yesterday, pundits are not only tripping over themselves to understand why it happened, but also to predict what it means for the future. In order to do so, they have to examine the motivations for human social behavior - and I suppose it shouldn't surprise us that an awful lot of them are really bad at that.

It strikes me that what happened is that a narrative everyone had settled on to understand social behavior (how Republican primary voters would behave in the midterms) got broken by Cantor's loss.  And now everyone is scrambling to be the one who tells us what the new narrative will be. We need a narrative to understand what's happening - that's why storytelling is so important. The trouble is, these things take time to develop and understand...and we're impatient.

In the meantime, we have folks telling us that it was all about immigration reform, or that it portends the rise of populism in our politics. The one thing I can guarantee you is that anyone who says they know the one and only reason for Cantor's defeat right now is likely wrong. These things are always more complicated than that.

Eventually a new narrative will develop. But it won't be a reflection of the actual reality of what happened. It will be shaped by what people chose to believe about what happened and how that influences their behavior in the future. History never has a beginning and ending, its a continual process of events, the stories we tell ourselves about those events, and how those stories affect our interactions in the future.

One part of the story I think is important to recognize, but hasn't gotten much attention, is what David Jarman wrote about the reasons for Cantor's defeat. He's smart to listen to the analysis of Erick Erickson - someone who has played a key role in the tea party insurgency. Here's the money quote from Erickson:

Cantor and his staff both lost the trust of conservatives and constituents. They broke promises, made bad deals, and left many feeling very, very betrayed. Much of it was because of Cantor’s hubris and the arrogance of his top staffers. He could not be touched and he could not be defeated. He knew it and they knew it. He kept his attention off his district, constituents, and conservatives while he and his staff plotted to get the Speaker's chair.

And here's Jarman's insightful conclusion:

"Hubris" may be the key word here. The climb through the ranks through treachery and intimidation, and then the sudden realization when you're at the top that you've burned through all your allies, is almost allegorical. It's a pattern we've seen many times before, whether it's from the Greek playwrights or Shakespeare, or in the collapse of some of history's nastiest regimes: When the leader who appeared to rule effortlessly suddenly falls with a lot of knives in his back, few people are saddened, while many people are surprised at just how thin and flimsy his support actually was, and how he was just staying in power propped up by a combination of fear and entropy.

Beyond hubris, what Jarman is describing is someone who went all-in with the power of dominance.

That is the achilles heel of Republicans - because its their go-to mode on a style of leadership. Its also why President Obama's call to remind us of the responsibilities of citizenship (ie, the power of partnership that is the very basis of democracy) is the critical message for today.

Desperado

If I had to pick one song that is my number one favorite of all time, it would probably be this one:


The whole thing is packed with wisdom, but think about this line for a moment.

Freedom, oh freedom, well that's just some people talking. Your prison is walking through this world all alone.

I initially fell in love with this song when I had come to care very deeply for a young woman I was working with in a group home who was experiencing all the pain and hunger that come with being a desperado. She, like many other teenagers, clouded her pain in a desperate cry for freedom.

But I think we can broaden the application of this song and think about it as a lament for much of our political discourse these days. We're constantly subjected to cries from the libertarians and conservatives about "FREEDOM." I don't necessarily have a problem with that. But as an emphasis that excludes our need (as human beings) for each other, it is just another prison of its own kind.

This is a theme to which President Obama constantly returns.

We, the people — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.

As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us, together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government.

Whatever name we chose to give it: citizenship, empathy, ubuntu,  e pluribus unum, expanded moral conscious - I believe that this is the defining issue of our time. The cultural march towards individualistic independence that was once a healthy development is beginning to show its limits. Its time to climb down from our fences and open the gate.

And so I say to America: You better let somebody love you, before its too late.

Private charity is no substitute for the commonweal

For decades Republicans have tried to claim that - in their attempts to eliminate the government's social safety net - they are not heartless. They simply suggest that private philanthropy should do the job. Today Michael Hiltzik does a pretty good job of explaining why that won't work. He provides two reasons.

To begin with, charitable organizations typically fall prey to the same economic pressures as the rest of society. "Giving falls when it's needed the most," observes Christopher Wimer, an expert on poverty and the social safety net at Columbia University.

In economic terminology, charitable giving is pro-cyclical, not counter-cyclical, unlike programs such as unemployment insurance and food stamps, which expand to meet rising needs...

Another issue is that philanthropic giving is not synonymous — at all — with helping the needy. Quite the contrary. As charitable giving is structured in the United States today, it too often plays out not as the rich helping out the poor, but as the rich increasing the gap between themselves and the poor...

A 2007 study by Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy found that only 30% of individual giving in the benchmark year of 2005 was aimed at the needs of the poor — including contributions for basic needs, donations to healthcare institutions, for scholarships and allocations from religious groups.

Anyone who had any association with a nonprofit during the 2008/09 Great Recession is very well aware of Hiltzik's first point. As the need for assistance grew, charitable giving plummeted and nonprofit services either scaled back or shut down.

His second point is also critically important. We often hear about how generous people are in the U.S. What we don't hear is a breakdown of where that money goes. The vast majority goes to churches (Hiltzik points out that 3/4 of that goes to "congregational operations") and schools (mostly alma maters). But it gets even worse. As federal, local and state funding is reduced - schools, firefighters and police are setting up their own nonprofits to raise private funding. While those efforts might be noble, unless the pie being divvied up grows, the competition for charitable dollars intensifies.

One point Hiltzik didn't make that should be included is that there simply aren't enough charitable dollars to cover the need. For example, according to Charity Navigator, private donations totaled a little over $300 billion in 2012. Sounds like a lot of money, right? But lets compare that to what the government currently spends on a pretty weak safety net:

Social Security: $773 billion
Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP: $732 billion
Other safety net programs: $411 billion

That pretty much covers the financial side of things. But what about the moral case? Let's take a look at how Dinesh D'Souza makes that argument. (Yeah, I know you don't want to listen to him. But I suspect that most conservatives think he makes the best case out there - so its worth deconstructing.)



D'Souza uses an interesting analogy in which he compares government programs (in this case, Obamacare) to the President holding a gun to our heads. Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that most people using Obamacare will pay for their own health care and think about his argument more generally. What he's saying is that this is a fitting analogy for programs initiated via our democratic republic. Our founding fathers should be turning over in their graves at this bastardization of government "of, by and for the people." But its a pretty typical Republican argument. Remember Ronald Reagan: "Government isn't the solution...its the problem?" IOW, government is "them" not "us."

I have a completely different view of the role of our government - the one outlined by President Obama last year at the Democratic National Convention.

We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk- takers, the entrepreneurs who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system, the greatest engine of growth and prosperity that the world's ever known.

But we also believe in something called citizenship — citizenship, a word at the very heart of our founding, a word at the very essence of our democracy, the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations... 

We, the people — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.

As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us, together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That's what we believe.

That belief in self-government says to me that when something is not working in our society, we are obligated to come together as citizens to develop solutions. Government is where we work towards the commonweal: the welfare of the public.

Citizenship

I wouldn't say its a pretty word. But it was a profound one for President Obama to embrace last night.

We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk- takers, the entrepreneurs who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system, the greatest engine of growth and prosperity that the world's ever known.

But we also believe in something called citizenship — citizenship, a word at the very heart of our founding, a word at the very essence of our democracy, the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations.

Before I get into the depth of how President Obama used that concept I want to say that from what I've read and seen so far, Melissa Harris-Perry was the only one to recognize why the use of that word would be especially important for this President. Last night in commenting on the speech at MSNBC she pointed out that what he was saying is that citizenship is about something more than birth certificates. KA-BOOM! Shoot and score.

And if it means something more than birth certificates, it also has a special meaning to the millions of young DREAMers in our country who might have been watching last night. It means that citizenship is about something more than where you were born.

So what does it mean?

We, the people — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.

As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us, together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That's what we believe.

Those who have listened to what President Obama has said over the years will recognize this theme. For a long time now his speeches almost always include an embrace not only of our individual responsibility but our collective responsibility to one another.

His emphasis on this idea of citizenship last night though went to a different level than it has before. As he talked about in the first part of his speech, this election is about a choice between two sets of values. At the very heart of that choice - beyond all the different policies - is this idea of whether or not we as Americans will maintain a commitment to "what can be done by us, together..."

That kind of talk is a direct hit to the theme of the Republican convention which was to suggest that success is only about what we do for ourselves on our own. Everyone - even Mitt Romney - knows that's a lie.

And so regardless of what particular policies we want to talk about, nothing gets solved until we get this one right. President Obama told us what happens if we abdicate our sense of collective responsibility by not engaging in "the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government."

If you turn away now — if you turn away now, if you buy into the cynicism that the change we fought for isn't possible, well, change will not happen. If you give up on the idea that your voice can make a difference, then other voices will fill the void, the lobbyists and special interests, the people with the $10 million checks who are trying to buy this election and those who are trying to make it harder for you to vote, Washington politicians who want to decide who you can marry or control health care choices that women should be making for themselves. Only you can make sure that doesn't happen. Only you have the power to move us forward.

What is stunning to me is that this is a President who is actually trying to take himself out of the spotlight. He wasn't attempting to wow us with all the things he will do for us in a second term. Perhaps that's why some pundits are suggesting that his speech last night wasn't the kind of soaring rhetoric they expected.

He knows that if we're going to get there, it isn't going to be about one or two terms for President Barack Obama...

And while I'm proud of what we've achieved together, I'm far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, "I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go."

 ... Its going to be because we figure out the long game of what citizenship and self government are all about.

America, I never said this journey would be easy, and I won't promise that now. Yes, our path is harder, but it leads to a better place. Yes, our road is longer, but we travel it together.

We don't turn back. We leave no one behind. We pull each other up. We draw strength from our victories. And we learn from our mistakes. But we keep our eyes fixed on that distant horizon knowing that providence is with us and that we are surely blessed to be citizens of the greatest nation on earth.

In other words, he's beginning the process of passing the torch to us.