A Better Politics

After President Obama's speech ended last night, I spent a few minutes listening to TV pundits react. The basic line was: "The President talked about a better politics. But he didn't offer any conciliation to Republican ideas."

I had to turn the TV off after just a couple of minutes because I was so frustrated that none of them seemed to even remotely grasp what the President said. The assumption was that the only way to achieve a better politics was for him to agree with Republicans.

Here's some of what the President actually said:

So the question for those of us here tonight is how we, all of us, can better reflect America’s hopes...

Imagine if we broke out of these tired old patterns. Imagine if we did something different. Understand, a better politics isn’t one where Democrats abandon their agenda or Republicans simply embrace mine. A better politics is one where we appeal to each other’s basic decency instead of our basest fears. A better politics is one where we debate without demonizing each other; where we talk issues and values, and principles and facts, rather than “gotcha” moments, or trivial gaffes, or fake controversies that have nothing to do with people’s daily lives...

If we’re going to have arguments, let’s have arguments, but let’s make them debates worthy of this body and worthy of this country.

Too many pundits (and Americans in general) assume there are only two options: agree or demonize your opponent. That's the kind of politics we've been living with for far too long. It's what President Obama calls our "empathy deficit." He is saying that we can disagree strongly with each other AND still address the heart of the matter.

I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny...

So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scapegoating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others - all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face - war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.

This is truly President Obama's unique contribution to our politics today. Unless/until we can begin to grasp what he's saying...the poison will continue to infect our system.

Back to Why He Ran

The White House referred to last night's State of the Union speech as "Turning the Page." And no, I didn't know that was going to happen when I posted this yesterday morning. But even as I wrote that, I didn't realize the import of that title. Here's how President Obama described it in the introduction to his remarks.

Tonight, after a breakthrough year for America, our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999. Our unemployment rate is now lower than it was before the financial crisis. More of our kids are graduating than ever before. More of our people are insured than ever before. And we are as free from the grip of foreign oil as we’ve been in almost 30 years.

Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in Afghanistan is over. Six years ago, nearly 180,000 American troops served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, fewer than 15,000 remain. And we salute the courage and sacrifice of every man and woman in this 9/11 Generation who has served to keep us safe. We are humbled and grateful for your service.

America, for all that we have endured; for all the grit and hard work required to come back; for all the tasks that lie ahead, know this: The shadow of crisis has passed, and the State of the Union is strong.

But it wasn't until he got to the end of the speech that I realized why the President has a spring in his step lately and more determination that ever to push his own agenda. No, its not simply because he doesn't have to face another election. And no, its not simply because he wants to set the agenda for the 2016 election. And no, its not because he's finally learned how to be combative with Republicans.

Listening to the President last night I got more of a sense of how burdened he's been by the near-collapse of our economy and the seemingly endless wars in which we were engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. For almost six years he has had to focus almost exclusively on fixing the messes he was handed by previous administrations. As he has said a lot lately, 2014 was finally a "break-through year" on all those fronts. And now he is free to get back to the issues that motivated him to run in the first place.

I can hear it now: "But, but, but...income inequality!!!!" My response would be to say that addressing that issue is EXACTLY why Barack Obama ran for president. It's not a new challenge that exists because of the Great Recession. It has been building for the last 30-40 years (or more). President Obama's assessment of our situation is that the fundamentals of our economy are now strong enough that we can begin to tackle the structural issues that create inequality.

It was when President Obama recalled his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention that I recognized the transformation that has happened in him over the last few months. He's finally able to let go of an incredibly difficult crisis that was not of his making and get on with the work he felt passionate enough about that he was able to take on the risk of running for president against all odds...and won...twice :-)

He's only got two years left to go. But I predict that over that time we'll see the president Barack Obama dreamed of being. So hang on for a VERY interesting fourth quarter!

The Hallmark of an Effective Leader

Ever since Michael Grunwald ignored all the wailing on both the left and right about the American Recovery Act, I've been a big fan of his. And before I get to his more recent contribution, let me take a detour to point out that six years ago today, we celebrated President Obama's first inauguration. Twenty-eight days later (on February 17, 2009), he signed the ARA. Think about that for a moment...28 days to pass and sign the biggest stimulus package in this country's history!

Anyway, back to Grunwald. Just yesterday I was reflecting on how our media fueled the fear and hysteria about Ebola last fall, but has done almost nothing to tell us why there has been such success in containing an epidemic. And then along comes Grunwald to remedy that. He did it by interviewing Ron Klain - the man President Obama appointed to be the "Ebola Czar."

If you remember what happened at the time, a lot of people critiqued and/or laughed at this appointment because Klain was not a medical expert. Here's what he had to say about that:

I think people maybe had a misperception of what was needed. We had great medical advisers; the president was getting great advice from Dr. Fauci, from Dr. Frieden, who runs the CDC, from a panoply of other medical experts. I think the White House was looking for someone to come in and do the very unglamorous, bureaucratic coordination it takes to produce a response of this size. I think folks here knew I had done that with the Recovery Act and saw this as a very similar kind of project. It was taking a 14-or-15-agency response, a lot of great people, and making it all work together, figuring out where the seams were, figuring out what policy decisions needed to get made...

The medical science of what it takes to treat and stop the Ebola epidemic really isn’t that complicated. You just have to figure out who has the disease, isolate them from other people and get them some pretty basic treatments.

We needed some policy work on domestic response, how to figure out which hospitals to get ready to deal with this, how to put the right procedures in place to screen people who come in to the country and identify them in case one of them got sick and get them to the right place. The other thing we’ve had to do is make sure the science was informing our policy decision and not letting misperceptions or anxiety shape the policy decisions. But the science was clear.

One of the hallmarks of an effective leader is the ability to accurately diagnose a problem and bring in the people who have the skills to solve it. That's exactly what President Obama did in appointing Klain. The fact that almost no one is talking about Ebola these days speaks volumes about the outcome.

State of the Union: Turning the Page

As we prepare for tonight's State of the Union speech, we already know most of the ideas/proposals President Obama will talk about. And so much of the pundit chatter has moved away from what he will say to why he will say it. This is always a fascinating inquiry to watch. That's because a lot of the responses tell us more about the pundit than they do about the President.

The conventional wisdom accepted by almost everyone is that what Obama will propose tonight is a break from what he's done in the past. The centerpiece for that assumption is that he will talk about an increase in taxes on the wealthy in order to pay for programs that assist the poor and middle class.

But is this really something new for President Obama? Let me give you three examples of where he's done it before:

1. Obamacare takes revenue mostly from the wealthy to pay for assistance for the poor and middle class - in other words, it is redistributive.
2. The reason Republicans walked away from a Grand Bargain with President Obama is that he insisted on additional federal revenue (mostly from ending tax loopholes for corporations and the wealthy) in order to agree to their spending cuts.
3. In the so-called "fiscal cliff" deal of 2012, President Obama insisted on continuing the Bush tax cuts for the middle class and elimination of them for the wealthy.

So what the President will propose tonight aligns very well with his approach in the past.

For those who buy into the conventional wisdom however, their rationales for why are fascinating. The Republican response is - of course - predictable.

Republicans cast Mr. Obama’s slow-motion rollout of his State of the Union agenda in recent weeks as the desperate flailing of a lame-duck president who has not come to grips with the electorate’s decision in November or the fact that the opposition now controls the Senate as well as the House. In defying reality, they said, he simply wants to return to the tax-and-spending ways of the past.

“I see this as the president returning to the theme of class warfare,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois. “It may have been effective in 2012, but I don’t find it to be effective anymore. I think, frankly, he’s out of ideas if he is unwilling to work with Republicans, and I think he is unwilling to work with Republicans.”

But when it comes to the President's overall response to the 2014 midterms, I find myself in the odd position of agreeing with conservative pundit Byron York.

"The reason he is being aggressive is that he knows he can generate a response," says a well-connected Republican strategist. "When he does an executive order, what he is trying to do is generate a response so that the entire conversation is about what he did — so that he has defined the agenda."

Likewise, when Obama, facing a newly-empowered conservative Congress, uses his State of the Union speech to propose a tax plan the liberal columnist E.J. Dionne calls "genuinely redistributive," he is trying to dictate the terms of the debate with a powerful adversary. Of course Obama knows his plan is anathema to Republicans, but if they debate the president on his terms, he makes progress.

On the other side of the political spectrum, progressives are announcing for the 157th time (just kidding, I made that number up - but it has happened a lot in the last 6 years) that President Obama has FINALLY come to his senses. Tim Mak captures that one with a quote from David Greenberg.

And in previous State of the Union addresses, argued Greenberg, President Obama has laid out points of potential compromise — only to find the negotiating window shifting to the right when Republicans made stronger demands.

“Obama has made the mistake a lot over his initial years by opening with a compromise bid, and Republicans would counter with their maximum bid,” he said. “Obama may have finally figured out that it's better to open with your maximum bid.”

Spare me...please!

Here is how Jared Bernstein sees it:

For years, he [Obama] had to worry about getting growth back in place following the Great Recession, and getting major legislation—health reform, Dodd-Frank—through Congress. Those measures are in place and must be defended. The recovery, while not complete, is solidly underway.

But the inequalities of wealth, income, and even opportunity are as embedded as ever in our economy, and the goal now must be not merely to sustain the growth we have, but to craft the policy agenda that will give the middle class, and the aspiring middle class, the chance to claim their fair share of that growth.

Bingo gringo!!! Because that's exactly what the man himself said. Remember what he told Steve Inskeep a few weeks ago?

...I have spent six years now in this office. We have dealt with the worst economic and financial crisis since the Great Depression. We have dealt with international turmoil that we haven't seen in a lot of years.

And I said at the beginning of this year that 2014 would be a breakthrough year, and it was a bumpy path.

But at the end of 2014, I could look back and say we are as well-positioned today as we have been in quite some time economically, that American leadership is more needed around the world than ever before — and that is liberating in the sense that a lot of the work that we've done is now beginning to bear fruit. And it gives me an opportunity then to start focusing on some of the other hard challenges that I didn't always have the time or the capacity to get to earlier in my presidency...

But what is true is that I'm in a position now where, with the economy relatively strong, with us having lowered the deficit, with us having strong growth and job growth, for the first time us starting to see wages ticking up, with inflation low, with energy production high — now I have the ability to focus on some long-term projects, including making sure that everybody is benefiting from this growth and not just some.

And here's how he said it in his video discussion about the upcoming SOTU speech:

Over the last six years, we have been weighed down by the legacy of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And because of the incredible grit and resilience of the American people, America is now in a position to really turn the page. Now that we have fought our way through the crisis, how do we make sure that everybody in this country, how do we make sure that they’re sharing in this growing economy? How do we make sure that they have the tools to succeed?

Wanna Blow Your Mind?

From NASA:

That is a portion of our neighbor galaxy Andromeda.

It is over 2 million light years away.

In just this portion of Andromeda, there are 100 million stars.

The universe contains over 100 billion galaxies like Andromeda.

The image above can't really do this justice because it was assembled into a mosaic image using 7,398 exposures taken over 411 individual pointings. It's a mammoth 1.5 billion pixel image (69, 536 x 22, 230) and requires about 4.3 GB disk space.

Trying to grasp all of that brings on the definition of "awe."

Lessons From the Media Coverage of Ebola

The fact that the outbreak of Ebola in Liberia is fading is the best news I've heard so far today. With fewer people suffering and dying, I'd suggest that this might be a good time for some reflection. This situation provides us with a pretty clear-eyed take on how our media fails so often precisely because a disease outbreak doesn't come with a ready-made villain.

Our reflection could start by noticing the different level of coverage about the problem being solved than there was while it was escalating. Even the article I linked to above says very little about what worked and is more focused on how the US-built treatment centers were too little too late.

But even worse than that, we all remember how in the month of October last year the media talked about almost nothing but the Ebola outbreak and ISIS. And that coverage only added fuel to the fire.

A new poll last week revealed disturbing trends about the increasingly dire media coverage of the Ebola story in the United States. Measuring the rising anxiety among news consumers, a Rutgers-Eagleton poll of New Jersey residents found that 69 percent are at least somewhat concerned about the deadly disease spreading in the U.S.

The truly strange finding was that people who said they were following the story most closely were the ones with the most inaccurate information about Ebola. The more information they consumed about the dangerous disease, the less they knew about it. How is that even possible?

Poll director David Redlawsk cast an eye of blame on the news media. "The tone of the coverage seems to be increasing fear while not improving understanding," Redlawsk told a reporter. "You just have to turn on the TV to see the hysteria of the "talking heads" media. It's really wall to wall. The crawls at the bottom of the screen are really about fear. And in all the fear and all the talking, there's not a lot of information."

All that fear immediately subsided the moment the media quit reporting on the story. And there has been almost no coverage of how our public health system worked to stop the spread of Ebola in this country.

In the end, what we got was about a month and a half of panic-enducing hysteria and then nothing. Please let me know if you've seen anyone in the media apologize for that miserable failure.

But it's not just Ebola. Micah Zenko suggest that this is how the media covers all foreign affairs.

Although a dwindling number of Americans truly care about what happens elsewhere in the world, those who still do might believe, as former government officials have described it, that "the world is aflame," "there are fires burning everywhere," "many places around the world that we have interests … are perilous," "the trend towards a more chaotic world is not going to change anytime soon," or "to put it mildly, the world is a mess."...

The extent to which these terrifying and uncontested characterizations reflect "fact" is increasingly irrelevant. Once it emerges as conventional wisdom among government officials and foreign-policy commentators, given the political utility in using such language, such dire warnings become accepted as "truth." The relatively sudden development of this normative hyperbolism should be concerning for anyone still interested in U.S. foreign policy and world affairs, more generally.

In discussing how good news is never reported, Zenko said this - which really nailed what we so often see happening in media stories.

Rare positive foreign-policy news stories are usually centered upon relatable experiences of one individual trying to do good amid the surrounding mayhem. These are human interest stories, such as the Christian woman and Muslim woman who come together for religious services under the same roof in Iraq in the midst of ISIS atrocities. Or the professor at an Israeli fashion university who carries on with a scheduled runway show because she feels that the students’ work deserves to be seen despite the ongoing conflict. This reinforces an unspoken narrative that the world is a fiery, chaotic mess and that only a few saintly individuals are capable of good — but never governments, organizations, or popular movements.

All of what Zenko said could be applied to domestic media coverage as well - including the bit about those human interest stories.

The result - of course - is cynicism... a persistent belief that the world is in chaos and the United States is on the wrong track.

But rather than get cynical about the cynicism, we can do as Al Giordano suggested (feel free to substitute "poutrage" with poutrage/panic):

I do believe fervently in constructing a counter-culture of noncooperation with the daily poutrage cycle, and so whatever the next big outrage that comes to surprise us today or tomorrow brings, the first task is to step back, examine what is driving this particular poutrage convention, and not say anything unless and until one has something real to add to it. That's how all truly meaningful change ever began: a few people stepping back from what everybody else was saying and thinking while they were driven by the dominant media of their eras, refusing to get swept up in it because there was something more worthwhile, outside of those limitations prescribed from above, yet to do...

"If We Do It All Together, We'll Be Okay"

On this day every year I get overwhelmed with all the articles written about Martin Luther King. He was a great - and very complex - man who is worthy of our attention.

But to keep myself grounded, this article written by HamdenRice is something I always go back to. I hope he won't mind if I quote it at length. I'm thinking I'll make this an annual tradition.

At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn't that he "marched" or gave a great speech.

My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south."

Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don't know what my father was talking about.

But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.

He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.

I'm guessing that most of you, especially those having come fresh from seeing The Help, may not understand what this was all about. But living in the south (and in parts of the midwest and in many ghettos of the north) was living under terrorism.

It wasn't that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn't sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.

You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement used to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth's.

It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.

This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people...

The question is, how did Dr. King do this—and of course, he didn't do it alone...

So what did they do?

They told us: Whatever you are most afraid of doing vis-a-vis white people, go do it. Go ahead down to city hall and try to register to vote, even if they say no, even if they take your name down.

Go ahead sit at that lunch counter. Sue the local school board. All things that most black people would have said back then, without exaggeration, were stark raving insane and would get you killed.

If we do it all together, we'll be okay.

They made black people experience the worst of the worst, collectively, that white people could dish out, and discover that it wasn't that bad. They taught black people how to take a beating—from the southern cops, from police dogs, from fire department hoses. They actually coached young people how to crouch, cover their heads with their arms and take the beating. They taught people how to go to jail, which terrified most decent people.

And you know what? The worst of the worst, wasn't that bad.

Once people had been beaten, had dogs sicced on them, had fire hoses sprayed on them, and been thrown in jail, you know what happened?

These magnificent young black people began singing freedom songs in jail.

That, my friends, is what ended the terrorism of the south.