Wednesday, January 20, 2010
The Second Coming - thoughts on the Republican resurgence
A year ago we were in Washington for the inauguration honeymoon. The atmosphere was of harmony and hope. Now we have a voter rebellion taking from the Democrats the seat that Ted Kennedy held . Massachusetts - which Obama captured by 26 % a year ago! Stung by a guy who posed nude in Cosmo, who has a pickup truck, and thinks waterboarding is OK. The knots in my stomach are tight. Torn between blaming the voters, the candidate, and the President for not knowing how to be a populist in a populist moment.
Barack Obama is a conciliator. That has been clear from the first. The hope was that his thoughtfulness could transform the atmosphere. Even I joined that hope - though I expected he would be subject to the same kind of vicious attacks as Bill and Hillary suffered. And they came.
Obama’s instinct to compromise has hobbled him. He wanted to be practical - so he didn’t ask for too much. But anything was too much for a Republican Party that reminds me of Yeats. The center cannot hold, the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats
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What rough beast indeed.
ReplyDeleteYou correctly point out that Obama's strength as a conciliator is a weakness in dealing with the irrational right. But there are a couple of larger issues that have structured Obama's present difficulties. The first is the relative success of the economic recovery program in avoiding an utter catastrophe. It has made the bailout of the banks appear to be a pure and simple handout. Failure to link the restructuring cash with incentives and curbs on executive compensation were a disaster. A second is that health reform offers very little benefit for the middle class. Sure it does for folks with serious medical conditions who cannot find employer-based insurance, but those folks are a minority. With the elderly population taken care of, the average middle class wage earner does not have to worry about how screwed up the insurance market is; he gets insurance through their employer and may gripe about the cost but has coverage. The uninsured are a minority and a good percentage of them are young folks who choose not to buy coverage since they feel (perhaps incorrectly and certainly selfishly) that they don't need it. Something this big cannot be reformed unless there's something concrete in it for the broad middle. In short, the system is screwed up but not screwed up enough to overcome the considerable interests favoring the status quo. Of course, Obama was not helped by the decision of the Mass. Democrats to nominate a limp dish cloth of a candidate either.
Nickname unavailable - Re: " the average middle class wage earner does not have to worry about how screwed up the insurance market is; he gets insurance through their employer and may gripe about the cost but has coverage. "
ReplyDeleteSurely you remember all the stories of the insured who have been forced into bankruptcy or spent every penny they had and still owe money and have to fight with their insurance companies to cover expenses. In Santa Barbara the only hospital chain available (they bought or sank all the hospitals here) does not contract with one of the major providers -Blue Cross! On average they charge three times what Blue Cross allows. So much for the benefits of insurance.
The insured middle class needs to realize that "there but for the grace of God go I." It only takes one major diagnosis to wreak personal and financial havoc.