President Obama Put it All on the Table

James Fallows wrote this about President Obama's speech yesterday.

I think the presentation as a whole — talking about law, balances of rights, the art of the possible, the long process of political change — will be one of the moments that is remembered and studied from Obama’s time in office.

What we saw in this speech was that - on an issue he obviously feels passionate about - the President put everything he has on the table. Let's take a closer look.

To begin, the President thanked Mark Barden (father of Daniel, who was killed at Sandy Hook) for the introduction. He included this:

I still remember the first time we met, the time we spent together, and the conversation we had about Daniel. And that changed me that day. And my hope, earnestly, has been that it would change the country.

He is referring to the quiet moments he spent with the families of the Newtown shooting. As Joshua Dubois wrote, President Obama has never spoken publicly about them. But obviously they had a profound impact.

The speech then goes through the lawyerly process of laying out the case for doing something about gun violence. I won't go through the entire argument. But there was a moment that stood out to me. It was when he talked about the bill on background checks that failed in the Senate after the Sandy Hook shooting.

Two United States Senators -– Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, and Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania, both gun owners, both strong defenders of our Second Amendment rights, both with “A” grades from the NRA –- that’s hard to get -- worked together in good faith, consulting with folks like our Vice President, who has been a champion on this for a long time, to write a common-sense compromise bill that would have required virtually everyone who buys a gun to get a background check. That was it. Pretty common-sense stuff. Ninety percent of Americans supported that idea. Ninety percent of Democrats in the Senate voted for that idea. But it failed because 90 percent of Republicans in the Senate voted against that idea.

There have been times that the President has been criticized by partisan Democrats for not being clear about which party is responsible for blocking legislation that is supported by a majority of the American people. This time he didn't hold back. He made it very clear who obstructed...Republicans.

After laying out the argument for action, President Obama described the executive actions he is taking. And then he got to the part of the speech that has received the most attention.

All of us should be able to work together to find a balance that declares the rest of our rights are also important -- Second Amendment rights are important, but there are other rights that we care about as well. And we have to be able to balance them. Because our right to worship freely and safely –- that right was denied to Christians in Charleston, South Carolina. And that was denied Jews in Kansas City. And that was denied Muslims in Chapel Hill, and Sikhs in Oak Creek. They had rights, too.

Our right to peaceful assembly -– that right was robbed from moviegoers in Aurora and Lafayette. Our unalienable right to life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness -– those rights were stripped from college students in Blacksburg and Santa Barbara, and from high schoolers at Columbine, and from first-graders in Newtown. First-graders. And from every family who never imagined that their loved one would be taken from our lives by a bullet from a gun.

Every time I think about those kids it gets me mad. And by the way, it happens on the streets of Chicago every day.

When the lawyerly arguments had all been made, the words came from the heart. And the tears the President shed let us all know that he not only gets angry when he thinks about those kids, his heart grieves.

President Obama ended his speech with a powerful story of inspiration.

Zaevion Dobson was a sophomore at Fulton High School in Knoxville, Tennessee. He played football; beloved by his classmates and his teachers. His own mayor called him one of their city’s success stories. The week before Christmas, he headed to a friend’s house to play video games. He wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. He hadn’t made a bad decision. He was exactly where any other kid would be. Your kid. My kids. And then gunmen started firing. And Zaevion -- who was in high school, hadn’t even gotten started in life -- dove on top of three girls to shield them from the bullets. And he was shot in the head. And the girls were spared. He gave his life to save theirs –- an act of heroism a lot bigger than anything we should ever expect from a 15-year-old. “Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

We are not asked to do what Zaevion Dobson did. We’re not asked to have shoulders that big; a heart that strong; reactions that quick. I’m not asking people to have that same level of courage, or sacrifice, or love. But if we love our kids and care about their prospects, and if we love this country and care about its future, then we can find the courage to vote. We can find the courage to get mobilized and organized. We can find the courage to cut through all the noise and do what a sensible country would do.

Washington pundits have often described President Obama as professorial. In this speech, he drew on that to make a strong argument. Republicans will do what they do - cut and paste his words to distort them rather than engage with what he actually said. But if anyone ever wants to understand the challenge we face when it comes to gun violence, it's all there.

But this speech was so much more than that. Because in addition, the President got to the heart of the matter and we all shared the grief and anger he expressed. Finally we were inspired by the courage and sacrifice of Zaevion Dobson.

So the President put everything he has on the table. That's why this speech will be remembered.

Disagreeing with Someone is Not the Same as Silencing Them

Tom Nichols is hardly the first one to blame the rise of Donald Trump on liberals. Blaming your failures on others seems to be a conservative fixation these days. But let's take a look at Nichols' argument that the rise of Trumpmania is based on the problem of "political correctness."

To understand Trump’s seemingly effortless seizure of the public spotlight, forget about programs, and instead zero in on the one complaint that seems to unite all of the disparate angry factions gravitating to him: political correctness. This, more than anything, is how the left created Trump.

What he and others want to claim is that by speaking up, liberals have attempted to silence the opposition.

When The New York Times tells the rubes that it’s time to hand in their guns, when The Washington Post suggests that Jesus is ashamed of them for not welcoming Syrian refugees the week after a terrorist attack, people react not because they love guns or hate Syrians, but because their natural urge to being told by coastal liberals that they’re awful people and that they should just obey and shut up is to issue a certain Anglo-Saxon verb and pronoun combination with all the vigor they can muster. And if they can’t say it themselves, they’ll find someone who will...

Let's leave aside the old canard about the "liberal media" as well as the lie that anyone is suggesting that it's time to hand in your guns. I have a question to ask: since when did conservatives "shut up" as a result of something printed in the New York Times or Washington Post that they didn't agree with? This whole argument about political correctness turns the concept of "free speech" on it's head. It basically comes down to this: Conservatives are allowed to exercise their right to free speech. But when liberals do so, it is an attempt to silence the opposition.

If conservatives disagree with something, instead of expressing that disagreement, they claim that political correctness is attempting to silence them. If they feel shamed by the argument, they have the option of examining the claim to see if it has any merit or presenting their case that the argument is wrong. For the life of me, I can't figure out what makes that so hard. That has been the nature of political debate since the dawn of democracies. Anyone who feels silenced by that process is choosing to be silenced. You don't get to turn all that around and blame it on the people you disagree with. Contrary to what some on the right believe, no one is going to come after you for speaking your mind and haul you off to a FEMA camp.

So where does this whole "silencing" meme come from? Is it because they are actually losing the argument rather than being silenced? I ask...you decide.

Regardless of the answers to those questions, it's time for all of these people who constantly complain about being silenced to put on their big boy pants, make their best arguments and quit playing the victim card of political correctness.

An Attempt to Maintain the Status Quo in the Middle East

There can be no doubt that the most important story unfolding right now is the increasing tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Here is a quick summary of the events so far:

1. On Saturday Saudi Arabia executed 47 prisoners, including Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr.

2. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called for divine revenge against Saudi Arabia and Iranian citizens attacked the Saudi embassy in Iran, setting it on fire with molotov cocktails.

3. Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic ties with Iran, expelling all of their diplomats from the country and canceling all air flights between the two countries.

4. Several countries with ties to Saudi Arabia (Bahrain, United Arab Emirates and Sudan) have followed suit, recalling diplomats from Iran.

This is an extremely complicated situation with roots in the domestic and foreign affairs of both countries. On the former, here is a quick look:

"There are domestic reasons for both of these countries right now to refuse to pull punches against each other," said Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group consulting firm.

Saudi Arabia, he said, is dealing with plummeting oil prices and an internal succession battle over who will next take the throne.

Iran, he said, needs a way to block reformists and Western advances in light of the recent nuclear deal. For both sides, he said, nationalist behavior can score points at home.

When it comes to the foreign affairs issues, it might be helpful to start by defining what we call "proxy wars."

A proxy war is a conflict between two nations where neither country directly engages the other. While this can encompass a breadth of armed confrontation, its core definition hinges on two separate powers utilizing external strife to somehow attack the interests or territorial holdings of the other. This frequently involves both countries fighting their opponent's allies, or assisting their allies in fighting their opponent.

In the Middle East, regardless of whether we are talking about the battles in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon or elsewhere, they can all be viewed not only as conflicts within the country, but as proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Outwardly, they are all part of the centuries-old battle between Sunni (Saudi Arabia) and Shia (Iran). But, as with most religious conflicts, it really come down to a battle for power and control.

Into that mix, President Obama has introduced a different vision. Here's how he described it to David Remnick a year ago:

Ultimately, he envisages a new geopolitical equilibrium, one less turbulent than the current landscape of civil war, terror, and sectarian battle. “It would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the region if Sunnis and Shias weren’t intent on killing each other,” he told me. “And although it would not solve the entire problem, if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion—not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon—you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran in which there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.

In other words, the President is attempting to introduce an alternative to the zero-sum game that has consumed these Middle East conflicts. Now that the Iranian nuclear deal has been reached, Marc Lynch describes how Saudi Arabia is reacting.

The Saudi escalation is above all driven by its fear of the potential success of the U.S. deal with Iran over its nuclear weapons program. Saudi Arabia views Iran’s reintegration into the international order and its evolving relationship with Washington as a profound threat to its own regional position...The sectarian escalation likely is meant to undermine America’s primary strategic objectives in the region such as the Iran deal and a negotiated end to the Syria war by inflaming tensions in ways that make diplomatic progress impossible.

Remember when President Obama suggested that the Republicans who opposed the Iranian nuclear deal had something in common with the hard-liners in Iran? He said that they were both interested in the "status quo." We can now officially add Saudi Arabia to the group that is doing everything it can to maintain the status quo of a Middle East engulfed in proxy wars.

Return of the Do-Nothing Republican Congress

Matt Yglesias has written an article that probably won't be embraced by the partisans on the far left or the far right. It's titled: 2015 Was the Year Congress Started Working Again. He begins by listing their accomplishments and adds some commentary.

Among some of the things Congress accomplished: The main federal statute governing K-12 education got an overhaul. So did the federal disability insurance system. A long-running dispute about federal highway funding got resolved, as did a long-running dispute about Medicare payments. Last but by no means least, December saw a whole bunch of tax changes featuring good news for low-wage workers and a broad set of business interests. Congress even passed a law to ban microbeads in bath products to help protect the nation's fisheries.

These aren't all good bills, and almost none of them are what anyone would consider a great bill, but in a way that's the point. Legislation passed in 2015 because congressional leaders went back to doing what congressional leaders are supposed to do in times of divided government: compromise to pass bills that don't thrill anyone but do make both sides happier than they would be in the absence of a bill.

We all know that people like Sen. Ted Cruz aren't happy about any of this. There are plenty of people on the left who aren't thrilled either. But as Yglesias points out - it is a clear improvement over the government-by-crisis dynamic we saw previously.

Unlike Yglesias though, I don't see the productivity resulting from the fact that President Obama is now a lame duck or that Congressional leaders don't have much of a stake in any of the Republican presidential contenders.

What those explanations miss is that in 2015, Republicans took control of both Houses of Congress. Simply obstructing Democrats was no longer a viable strategy. Initially they eschewed government-by-crisis in favor of passing bills that would force President Obama to use his veto pen. That strategy started to fall apart almost immediately when the lunatic caucus wanted to shut down the Department of Homeland Security over the President's immigration executive orders.

All of the compromises Yglesias listed happened when the Republican leadership abandoned the lunatic caucus and sought ways to work with the Democrats. And that, my friends, is precisely why John Boehner is no longer Speaker of the House. The lunatic caucus rebelled.

So what is the new Speaker to do? Here's what Siobhan Hughes reports:

House Speaker Paul Ryan starting this month will push to turn the chamber into a platform for ambitious Republican policy ideas, in a bid to help shape his unsettled party’s priorities and inject substance into a presidential race heavy on personality politics.

Right out of the gate for the new year comes this:

We owe it to the country to take our best shot at repealing #Obamacare while Pres. Obama is still in office. https://t.co/X6l59mv8vI

— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) January 1, 2016

It looks to me like Speaker Ryan is going to once again try to herd the cats of the lunatic caucus in an attempt to rack up symbolic votes that will be stopped by a presidential veto (if not in the Senate first). One has to wonder how that will fly with the angry/fearful right. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be stuck with a do-nothing Congress once again.

Republicans are Stuck in an Argument from the 1990's

Donald Trump likes to congratulate himself for sparking a discussion in the GOP primary about immigration. Of course, Republicans had taken up that challenge long before he got involved when they blocked any attempt to pass comprehensive immigration reform in the House. But what The Donald did with his "deport 'em all" approach to the 11 million undocumented workers in this country was to expose the way Republicans were trying to avoid that question and focus simply on "securing the border" with Mexico.

What's interesting about all of that is that the entire discussion was rooted in a problem that existed back in the 1990's rather than today. The latest report from the Pew Research Center on the topic demonstrates that.

More Mexican immigrants have returned to Mexico from the U.S. than have migrated here since the end of the Great Recession, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of newly available government data from both countries. The same data sources also show the overall flow of Mexican immigrants between the two countries is at its smallest since the 1990s, mostly due to a drop in the number of Mexican immigrants coming to the U.S.

In other words, net migration from the U.S. to Mexico is now below zero. From 1995 to 2000, that number was plus 2,270,000 and from 2009 to 2014 its was minus 140,000.

In naming the reasons for this dramatic change, Pew suggests that initially it was related to the Great Recession and the lack of available work in the U.S. There is also the fact that the United States has increased the number of people who are deported when they initially criss the border. But by far, this is what is having the biggest impact.

A majority of the 1 million who left the U.S. for Mexico between 2009 and 2014 left of their own accord, according to the Mexican government’s ENADID survey data. The Mexican survey also showed that six in ten (61%) return migrants - those who reported they had been living in the U.S. five years earlier but as of 2014 were back in Mexico - cited family reunification as the main reason for their return. By comparison, 14% of Mexico’s return migrants said the reason for their return was deportation from the U.S.

Many people also credit this change to the fact that Mexico is beginning to develop a more solid middle class.

Education. More sophisticated work. Higher pay. This is the development formula Mexico has been seeking for decades. But after the free-market wave of the 1990s failed to produce much more than low-skilled factory work, Mexico is finally attracting the higher-end industries that experts say could lead to lasting prosperity. Here, in a mostly poor state long known as one of the country’s main sources of illegal immigrants to the United States, a new Mexico has begun to emerge.

Another Pew Research report pointed to the reason that immigration to the United States has shifted away from Mexico and towards Central America.

As a whole, Latin America enjoyed solid economic growth in the first decade of this century, with a fall in poverty, a decrease in income inequality and a rise of its middle class. But in many respects, it was a tale of two Americas, with South America and Mexico seeing more of these gains than Central America and the Caribbean.

To the extent that we are willing to get beyond the fear-mongering about immigrants, this is the kind of information that demonstrates a rational approach to actually solving the problem. Newsflash: immigrants would prefer to stay in their home country when given the chance of security - both physically and economically. A sane approach would be mean engaging in the work to ensure that is a possibility.

First Principles

Sometimes it is helpful to take a step back from the particulars and take a look at the first principles that are animating a political conflict. With that in mind, I would propose that what is driving the current conservative movement is a world view that sees everything through the lens of what we've come to call a "zero-sum game."

Zero-sum is a situation in game theory in which one person’s gain is equivalent to another’s loss, so the net change in wealth or benefit is zero.

That sets up an "us vs them" battle where it is assumed that if they win, we lose. It's why Isaac Bailey correctly identified the problem (even as his proposed solution fell short).

…we are fast becoming a nation in which minorities make up a majority of the population. As a result, tens of millions of white Americans, accustomed for so long to having all the benefits of being the majority, are scared out of their minds—and it is this fear that Trump is exploiting so effectively.

These changing demographics are a real threat to any white person who assumes that everything is ultimately a zero-sum game. Because if "they" win, it is an automatic assumption that I lose. That was the basic premise of an important article by Adrien Schless-Meier months before Trumpmania emerged.

Take, for instance, the creeping anxiety among white folks in the U.S. about our impending “minority” status. The most recent projections from the Census Bureau name 2044 as the point when people of color will collectively outnumber white people in this country. This demographic reality has fostered a deep sense of paranoia about a pervasive existential threat, not just to white people but also to white institutions, values, and culture. White folks are, irrationally, afraid of being wiped out.

That is the kind of thinking that led Dylann Roof to say, "You're taking over our country," before he killed nine African Americans in Charleston. It is the same thing that drives people to think that granting citizenship to undocumented immigrants means that they will take away "our" jobs. On an international level, the zero-sum game means that if the United States isn't dominating other countries, we're losing. It's why Donald Trump says that American doesn't "win" anymore.

If the zero-sum game is an accurate way of viewing the world, the truth is that these folks have a point. If everything is about a battle of us vs them and "we" lose to the extent that "they" win, then fighting for dominance is the only game in town. The only difference between liberals and conservatives comes down to who is included in your "us" and who falls into your "them." That has often been how the battle is defined in politics.

But what if we go back to first principles and challenge the entire premise of the zero-sum game?
What if it is possible to actually construct win/win scenarios? Getting there is not difficult when it comes to the issue of immigration reform.

A new report, “Raising the Floor for American Workers: The Economic Benefits of Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” by Dr. Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, finds that comprehensive immigration reform that includes a legalization program for unauthorized immigrants and enables a future flow of legal workers would result in a large economic benefit—a cumulative $1.5 trillion in added U.S. gross domestic product over 10 years. In stark contrast, a deportation- only policy would result in a loss of $2.6 trillion in GDP over 10 years.

The reason that kind of analysis seems to go against "common sense" is that we are so used to seeing the world through the lens of a zero-sum game. That leads us to faulty conclusions in cases like this. In order to have an alternative, liberals need to develop some first principles for situations where the zero sum game doesn't apply.

In her book The Soul of Money, Lynne Twist suggests that the zero sum game is rooted in the concept of scarcity.

It is an unquestioned, sometimes even unspoken, defining condition of life. It is not even that we necessarily experience a lack of something, but that scarcity as a chronic sense of inadequacy about life becomes the very place from which we think and act and live in the world. It shapes our deepest sense of ourselves, and becomes the lens through which we experience life...

This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life, and it is deeply embedded in our relationship with money. In the mind-set of scarcity, our relationship with money is an expression of fear...

She suggests that an alternative is a sense of sufficiency.

Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don't mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn't two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn't a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn't an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, and a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.

The other first principle that challenges the zero sum game is something Martin Luther King articulated years ago...the "inescapable network of mutuality."

Taken together, the principles of sufficiency and mutuality take direct aim at the zero-sum game and are the necessary ingredients for liberals to combat the conservative movement's embrace of "us vs them" in a win/lose battle.

The Power and Limits of Symbolism

I remember back in 1984 when I first heard rumors that Walter Mondale was considering the possibility of nominating a woman as his Vice Presidential running mate, my reaction was pretty dismissive. I thought, "Pffttt...another woman in a supporting role, no big deal."

But then as I watched him actually announce that Geraldine Ferraro would be his running mate, I cried. The tears totally surprised me - I didn't see them coming. Their source was not my rational mind. Instead, they came from something very deep inside.

I saw the same kinds of tears on the faces of people at Grant Park in Chicago on the night Barack Obama was elected in 2008.

That is the power of symbolism. It touches the place that needs to hear, "You belong." Whoopi Goldberg captured that very well the next morning when she said, "I've always considered myself an American, but for the first time last night, I felt like I could finally put my bags down." We should never underestimate the power of "you belong" for people who have felt marginalized in our culture. It is not something that we articulate often on a rational basis, but it resides deep in our being.

On the other hand, there are limits to symbolism. There is a lot more that goes into making up our identity than the fact that we are a woman, or African American, or a member of another group that has been marginalized. We are complex human beings with a variety of thoughts and feelings when it comes to politics.

That is something that Republicans (and some Democrats) don't seem to understand about symbolism. It's why John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate and thought that is all he needed to do to reach out to women. And it is what some pundits and political strategists think will happen with candidates like Herman Cain and Ben Carson. In many ways that kind of thing only perpetuates the marginalization by assuming that we can be reduced to the fact that we have a uterus or a heavier dose of melanin.

Keep that in mind when you hear pundits assume that a presidential candidate like Marco Rubio will attract Latino and/or young voters. It is, first of all, insulting to many Hispanics to ignore the very real differences between Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Puerto Rican-Americans, etc. And, of course, it assumes a linkage between both cultures and complex human beings that is reduced to the fact that - for the most part - they share the same language.

I also know of no better way to insult young people than to suggest that the most important thing about them is their age. What most young people are telling us these days is that they are ready to move past the racism/sexism/homophobia that has divided us for so long and get busy tackling things that actually affect their future - like education and climate change. I think they're smart enough to chose a candidate who speaks to those issues and not get hung up on the year they were born.

So yes, there is power in symbolism. But to assume that marginalized voters can be reduced to one demographic factor is why the word "token" was introduced into discussions about diversity. It is demeaning to think that's all that matters.