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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Death of the Moderates

December 16, 2010•

Extreme Problems Require Extreme Solutions

Given his druthers, Obama will pursue the most left-leaning course that he can get away with.” So says Jennifer Rubin, a right-wing pundit at the neoconservative-leaning Washington Post. “Obama,” Rubin claims, “would have marched through his entire liberal agenda—if he had the votes.”

This, of course, assumes that Obama ever had a liberal agenda. There’s not much evidence of that. Moreover, Obama did have the votes in Congress to get almost everything that he wanted. But he chose not to even try.

It is also not true. He did have the votes. In recent years, for example, minority Republicans in the Senate have threatened filibusters on most major Democratic initiatives. When they have 60 or more votes, Democrats file a cloture motion to stop filibusters before they start. In practice, Democrats say—and the media has been repeating their meme—that it now takes 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate.

It isn’t true. Not now. Not ever.

What Dems fail to understand is that they are depriving themselves of a big political opportunity by embracing automated parliamentary procedure. If Republicans want to filibuster, let them drag out their District of Columbia white pages and start reading on C-Span. Footage of GOP senators stonewalling popular legislation—extensions of unemployment benefits, eliminating tax breaks for individuals who earn more than $1 million a year, or healthcare benefits for 9/11 first responders—would make for awesome attack ads in 2012.

When the Bush Administration enjoyed a razor-thin 50-vote majority in the Senate, it only needed a simple majority in order to pass major bills. Even though they should have, Democrats didn’t filibuster. Democrats lack nerve. And voters hate them for it.

There’s another factor at work: self-delusion. Much liberal disappointment with Obama stems from the fact that, on several issues, he is doing exactly what he said he was going to do during the campaign. He told us that we were going to go deeper in Afghanistan. Liberals simply chose to pretend that he was lying. It’s not Obama’s fault if people are in denial. At the same time, Obama failed to realize that the world had changed dramatically between September and November of 2008.

During the summer of the 2008 campaign, there was a plausible argument to be made that the American people were fundamentally moderate. But after the economic meltdown of September 2008, a crisis of capitalism and consumer confidence that continues today with no end in sight, the electorate moved decidedly to the left. Six months into Obama’s term, most Americans told pollsters they preferred socialism to capitalism. In early 2010 one in five Republicans said they have a positive view of socialism.

Meanwhile, the right became more radical too. This is what happens during a crisis when the “mainstream” system is unresponsive. Moderation? There are no more moderates.

As we have seen time and time again in American history, compromises usually mean no solution at all. From the status of Missouri as a slave state to last week’s tax deal between Democrats and Republicans, compromise usually means kicking the can down the road for another generation of people and politicians to contend with.

Yet the myth persists: moderation equals common sense. I don’t know about my fellow lefties, but I find more common ground with Tea Party types who are angry as hell and don’t want to take it anymore than I do with squishy soft liberals who think everything is fine as long as Barack Obama gets reelected in 2012.

Nothing is fine. The unemployment rate is over 9.8 percent officially and about 20 percent unofficially. Yet neither party has lifted a finger to even talk about proposing a jobs program. Tax cuts? Unemployed people don’t pay taxes. Depression-level joblessness is fiscal poison. If we don’t create tens of millions of new jobs soon, social and political unrest will increase dramatically.

Chris Hedges recently put out a book titled “The Death of the Liberal Class.” A better title might have been “The Death of Moderation.” No one better embodied the American brand of political moderation than traditional liberals. They supported income redistribution, but only through a slightly progressive income tax: not enough to make a difference, but plenty to make right-wingers spitting mad. They consistently voted for huge defense budgets and war after war, yet were successfully framed as wimps by Republicans whose rhetoric matched their similar bellicosity.

The smug and the complacent love moderation precisely because it can’t change the status quo.

Look at ObamaCare: that’s what happens when you compromise. The insurance companies get to soak even more Americans than usual—and charge those of us who are already in the system more. Like many other issues, the “extremes” work better than the centrist, “common sense” solution. If I can’t have full-fledged socialized medicine, give me free markets.

Moderates know their time has past. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently brought 1,000 people together to create a militant moderate organization called No Labels. Like Jon Stewart’s Million Moderate March, No Labels is meant “not to create a new party, but to forge a third way within the existing parties, one that permits debate on issues in an atmosphere of civility and mutual respect,” say organizers.

Sweet.

Because, you know, you should always be civil and respectful to people who think torture and concentration camps are A-OK.

For those who despair of the rise of political extremism, I ask: From multi-trillion dollar deficits to endless war to mass die-offs of species and climate change, are the problems America face so trivial that they can be resolved with more half-assed compromises?

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

Presidential Entropy

September 20, 2008•

Ted Rall

Just wait…a few years from now, we’ll look back at George W. Bush and wonder why we were so hard on him.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: So Much for Democracy

October 8, 1996•

Ted Rall

Is a Clinton Victory Worth the Cost?

My involvement with the Democratic Party started at age 9, when my mom took me along to pass out McGovern-Shriver leaflets door-to-door in our solidly Republican neighborhood. “The Democrats,” my mother explained, “are the party of the people. Republicans only care about rich big-shots.” Nothing I have seen since 1972 has contradicted the latter part of that summary of our two-party system. Watching my mom’s enthusiasm while she tried to reason with our neighbors and dialed number after number in the dingy campaign headquarters in downtown Dayton convinced me that there really was a chance of ousting President Nixon—a man, who all attempts at historical revisionism notwithstanding, was the devil. My fourth-grade class held a mock election that fall. There were 32 little Nixonites to my one Democratic vote.

I quickly learned that, in America, Democrats usually lose, even when they win. Jimmy Carter squeaked by Ford in 1976—an astonishing fact when you consider the unelected incumbent’s corrupt pardon deal and idiotic demeanor—and never enjoyed a mandate to act like a real Democrat. The great Reagan defense build-up actually began in 1978 under Carter, along with draft registration and the U.S. refusal to attend the 1980 Olympics because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I was convinced that Carter lost in 1980 because these compromises had lost him his party’s liberal base, but I still worked for Mondale and Dukakis as they continued to pursue watered-down liberalism, organizing college students and dodging New York cops while wheat-pasting posters in the subways.

The capitalism run-amok excesses of the Reagan and Bush years made it easier to be a Democrat again—by the time 1992 rolled around, there was nothing more important to the country’s political and financial health than getting George Herbert Hoover Walker Bush out of the White House. The day after the election, a reporter called me to ask my reaction. “I feel like an evil cloud has lifted from the country,” I told him as I scribbled file labels at one of my three jobs. “Americans have rejected the idea that caring about other people is a sign of weakness.” I really did feel that way.

Which brings me to November 5th, when I will not be voting for Bill Clinton.

I am personally better off than I was four years ago, but the country has continued to go to hell. The reasons are simple. Given the first chance in a century to get national health protection passed, he blew it by proposing an outlandish scheme designed to protect insurance-company profits. Then he signed NAFTA and GATT, treasonous free trade deals that sell out American workers for the benefit of his corporate pals’ bottom lines. Even Reagan and Bush never pushed hard on NAFTA. To be sure, he did the right thing by sending troops to Bosnia, but he waited so long that the people they were sent to protect were all dead by the time they got there.

Clinton’s 1995 copresidency with Newt Gingrich was an embarrassment, but the last straw was his cynical election-year betrayal of the poor by eliminating welfare without creating the jobs to replace it.

My friends argue that a vote for Ralph Nader or Ross Perot—or for that matter, opting to stay home and watch TV—is a vote for Bob Dole. In a rigid two-party system, they’re right, but so what? Even if there were a chance that Dole could be elected, he and Clinton are both essentially the same: Both are pro-business, pro-choice and deficit-obsessed. A Dole Administration might cost the nation a few progressive appellate judges, but on the issues that really matter, most Americans wouldn’t notice much difference.

Furthermore, casting a protest vote, or not voting at all, is an effective means of telling the mainstream parties that you’re not interested in what they’re offering. While low voter turnout allows “winners” to claim mandates at press conferences, they know that the truth is that their message isn’t selling. While it may mean supporting a “spoiler” in the short term, it can force the big parties to reevaluate their directions.

This year, voting for Clinton potentially tells him that you agree with everything he’s done so far when you’re actually voting for the anti-Dole. If you support NAFTA and guaranteed unemployment and making children homeless, fine. But our republic wasn’t intended to have voters support the lesser of two evils—or likely winners simply because they’re likely to win. If you substantially disagree with Clintonism, you have a moral obligation as a citizen to vote for someone else. If no other candidate else appeals to you, your duty is to stay home.

Some people may question how I could abandon the Democrats after all this time. But I never left the party—it left me.

(Ted Rall, a syndicated cartoonist and freelance writer based in New York City, was a 1996 Pulitzer Prize finalist.)

SYNDICATED COLUMN: ‘Civil’ Democrats Defend Kemp, Dole on Morals

September 3, 1996•

Ted Rall

‘NEW YORK, August 32—In an active demonstration of his convention speech call for a new era of “civility,” yesterday President Bill Clinton (D-AK) took the unusual step of coming to the defense of his Republican opponents on moral issues.

“I have come under fire over so-called moral issues myself,” said Clinton, who survived the Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones scandals and now leads the polls by twenty points. “This isn’t about partisan politics—I know how painful it is to have one’s private life overshadow one’s accomplishments in the public arena.”

Clinton then turned his conciliatory remarks to vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp, who has been dogged by rumors that he attended a gay orgy in California ever since columnist Drew Pearson wrote about the incident in 1967. The episode became public when then-Governor Ronald Reagan fired a staffer who also attended the orgy in a remote cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains. It has come up several times during this year’s campaign.

“The Democratic Party has always supported homosexual rights,” Clinton said in a hastily-called news conference held in front of the Anvil, a gay bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. “Is it so wrong to love another man? There is absolutely nothing wrong or immoral about a buff 32-year-old quarterback rolling around with a bunch of sweaty nude men in the middle of nowhere. It took great courage for the Republican Party to nominate the nation’s first openly, or closeted, as the case may be, gay, or bisexual, or whatever, vice-presidential candidate.”

“There will be those bigots who would otherwise have supported our opponents on the Dole-Kemp ticket this November but plan to vote Democratic instead because Jack Kemp chose to experiment with his sexuality three decades ago,” Clinton continued as a hand-picked crowd of transvestites and male prostitutes cheered. “Well, hear this—the Clinton-Gore ticket doesn’t want your vote! Just because Al and I have always limited ourselves to straight sex doesn’t mean that we don’t support Jack Kemp’s right to

rub his firm, tight, rippling biceps against the twitching thighs, supple buttocks and welcoming arms of a dozen men greased down with massage oil!”

Clinton also reaffirmed his party’s support of gay marriage.

“In fact,” the president concluded, “Jack Kemp and Bob Dole have every right to come out of the closet. If elected, I think they ought to divorce their wives and live together as man and wife—which would demonstrate that the Republicans are serious about deficit reduction by eliminating the expense of maintaining a separate residence for the vice president.”

Jack Kemp could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, while campaigning in front of the Grassy Knoll Bar & Grill in Dallas, Vice President Al Gore (R-TN) told an enthusiastic lunch-hour crowd of born-again Christians that it was time to “reach out” to Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich and other well-known Republicans who have gotten divorced.

“Ronald Reagan, a great president, divorced Jane Wyman before most people were even born. Newt Gingrich knew that marrying his high school math teacher would help him get the SATs he’d need to get into a good college, but when it came time to enter public life, that wife was no longer appropriate,” Gore said, his facial expressions alternating masterfully between sympathy and understanding. “So he divorced her in that hospital bed—but if he hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t be who he is today. Similarly, you won’t find any mention of Bob Dole’s first wife in his autobiography. Dumping the mother of his only child wasn’t an easy decision, but it gave him the opportunity to marry a woman who would one day run the Department of Transportation!”

A well-dressed heckler screamed out: “What about Bill and Hill?”

“No!” Gore responded directly to the man. “It’s wrong to compare marriages along party lines. No one knows why Republicans get divorced while Democrats stay married, but we are all Americans. We are inclusive and we are tolerant and we are nice, and that means accepting lifestyles that we ourselves may not necessarily agree with. We’re bigger than a few sundry ‘til death do us parts.”

A Dole spokesman replied: “It’s about time the Democrats started talking about family values.”

(Ted Rall, a syndicated editorial cartoonist and freelance writer living in New York City, is the author of The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done! (NBM Publishing, 1996), a graphic novel depicting the true confessions of Americans’ worst crimes.)