The age of radical intolerance; the firing of David Frum

Of all the articles I read about the health care bill, the best came from David Frum, not a liberal but a conservative who was a speechwriter for Bush. The article so persuasively scolds the Republicans and documents what they did wrong that it's worth copying it out in its entirety (italics mine).

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:

(1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.

(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.

So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Follow David Frum on Twitter: @davidfrum

Due to the high volume of traffic this piece is receiving, comments have been suspended. We will restore comments once traffic returns to normal levels.

Note the last statement.

Yesterday, David Frum was fired from the American Enterprise Institute where he worked for writing this article.

There is no better instance than this of the intolerance, bigotry and utter inability to compromise that have become the defining features of the Republican party. As CNN analyst Jeff Toobin put it, "one of the biggest changes in the politics of this country in the last thirty years has been the disappearance of the moderate Republican".

Even if they had any good points against the Democrats and the health care bill (and it would not have been difficult for them to keep pressing the economic shortcomings) those points have been completely drowned out by the vile playground behavior displayed by Republican activists over the last year, some of which was actively supported by the Reps and most of which was tacitly endorsed through silence. As Frum noted on CNN, there were actually some real chances for the Republicans to adopt a reasoned approach with which they could have gotten in some concessions into the bill. But as it turned out, they were only interested in fear-mongering, hate speech, doomsday predictions and pessimism; the "party of no" indeed. All they have done is to oppose, threaten and warn about dire consequences without providing constructive and balanced criticism aimed at compromise. In the process they have threatened their own existence; as many conservatives themselves have noted, support for the Republicans is going to be severely crippled once the "death panels" and the government takeover fail to materialize.

With such behavior, the Democrats did not have a single obligation to compromise. In fact they must have been smiling in glee all the time; the Republicans with their vile behavior gave them the perfect excuse not to negotiate, and they were handed a conscience-free health care bill by their opponents on a golden plate. One only wishes Obama had done this earlier.

We can only believe, and indeed hope, that this trend will continue in the absence of evidence that the Reps have any intention at all of being more civilized.

Middle Ages March

As far as possible I try to avoid writing about the teaching of evolution and opposition to climate change in this country because of their overly politicized nature, but this piece in the NYT is one that no one can wisely ignore. It details a growing movement to conflate rejection of evolution with rejection of climate change that many people, and sadly especially conservatives, are spearheading. States are trying to introduce bills encouraging the teaching of “all sides” of scientific issues. Conservative politicians are advocating for students to know “all the facts”. But nobody is fooled by these thinly veiled promotions of ignorance...


...Read the rest of this post on the Desipundit blog

TAPPING THE PHONE LINES: NON NSA STYLE

As part of the election, I did something which I had not really planned for; I made 30 phone calls to voters on behalf of Barack Obama's campaign. I did this pretty much on impulse and in spite of not being a US citizen. But I also think that there was a genuine reason behind it. Perhaps that reason points to how important we felt this election was not just for the country but for the world. It indicates how much each of us were fed up with bullying, cronyism and irrationality, and how all of us wanted a breath of fresh rationality, honesty and compassion in the national and international dialogues of our times. Perhaps it especially demonstrated how those of us who have come to these shores with a certain image of the US in our mind wanted to resurrect that image after we were sorely disappointed with how badly that image was tarnished.

I started with registering on barackobama.com and noting my address. After that it was really simple. They gave me a list of tasks I could do, such as driving people who cannot drive to the polls. Since it was a little late for that, I thought I would do the next thing on the list which was really easy: call people. Call them to make sure they have voted. If they have, ask them if they considered supporting Obama. If they have not, ask them when they plan to vote. And ask them if they will strongly consider supporting Obama. If nobody is home, leave a message with the above questions and comments. If the phone number is not working, note this fact on the website. That was really it.

I had an interesting experience overall. Most of the times I either talked to people who have already voted, or left a message. In some cases I left a message with another member of the household. As I made one call after another, I understood the value of doing this. I realise that sometimes when people are sitting on the fence, a simple phone call from a campaign (and a lack of one from the other) can possibly change their minds. I guess that's what all the talk about grassroots efforts is about.

My last phone call was the most interesting of all, when I had to accomplish the difficult task of convincing someone to vote for Obama. I reached a 88 year old voter in Ohio. This man had lived through the Depression and the War. He probably was fed up with both political parties. Before I could say anything, he asked me to recite the first 7 words in the Declaration of Independence. I was completely caught unawares and hesitatingly began with the words "We the people" before quickly embarrassing myself and realizing that that was the Constitution. I had another chance to salvage my dignity, but then I realized that the most famous words of the Declaration, the whole part about all men being created equal which I did know, could not possibly be the beginning. Nevertheless I mumbled those words and got another reprimand from him. Finally he decided to give this anonymous Obama supporter (with an accent!) a last chance and asked me who wrote it. I said Jefferson and thereby barely managed to save the last shreds of my dignity. But then it got interesting. Somewhat bitterly, he asked me why he should support Obama if I did not know the Declaration. To which I falteringly answered that while I profusely apologized for my ignorance, I did know what the document stands for and I thought that its implications and ideals were more important than its exact wording. That seemed to satisfy him. I breathed a sigh of relief and wiped my brow before thanking him and hanging up, although it turned out at the end that he had already voted "at high noon" and this was probably a "test". Later I asked many of my American friends the same question, and all of them except one or two ended up citing the same lines from the Declaration or Constitution as I did. I guess they are as ignorant about Obama and what he stands for as I am!

So I had an interesting experience. But I also realized the power of grassroots efforts and the medium of the Internet. If I could so easily place 30 phone calls and out of those 30 voters if I could convince even 2 to vote, imagine what it would be for hundreds of thousands of such people around the country to constantly make phone calls days on end and talk to voters.

It may sound strange and perhaps even unpatriotic that I who have never voted in India am now contributing to a drive to garner votes in a country where I am not a citizen. In fact not voting in India when I had one chance to do it is something that I count as a failure in my life and, although I had my reasons, I feel ashamed of not doing it. In my flimsy defense, I was blissfully uninterested in politics when I was in India. This was mainly because I was too cynical about it and also because I was too interested in science and music to find time for it. My protests against politics had a ring of truth to them; what's the point of voting if all of these people are going to mess up the country anyway? But it was later that I realized that even if my disillusionment with the national political scene made sense, by not voting I was not exercising the most crucial right I have in my country, and ironically by not doing this I was not helping to improve the same situation that I had been deploring for so long. More importantly, even if none of them were good, someone has got to be better than the previous one. He doesn't need to be a paragon, he simply needs to be better than the previous one and that should be reason enough to vote for him or her.

I resent the fact that I did not vote or do such simple volunteering in India. If I am back in India at some point and can do it, I surely will. But in spite of being an outsider, I am glad I did this here on Tuesday. Perhaps it was the scientist in me that encouraged me to do this for a man who respects scientific inquiry more than many of his predecessors. It was my shout out not just to Obama but more importantly to rationality, a virtue without national boundaries.

THE END OF OUTRAGE

A few weeks ago when a friend told me about Thomas Frank coming over to give a talk at the local library, I enthusiastically agreed. Frank was going to speak about his new book "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule". Frank is something of a funny man and as I sat in the first row I laughed. But as he recounted how conservatives have torn apart the moral fabric of this country and belied their own creed, I felt a genuine sense of outrage welling up inside me, as it had done so countless times before and as it would inside any reasonable person.

Then a week after that, I saw that Steven Wax, author of "Kafka Comes to America" was going to give a talk at the same library. Again I went. Again, outrage welling up in the front row. Suddenly I realized that I had felt this outrage so many times that I was becoming masochistic and getting addicted to it.

And that was the reason why I wasted so much time on politics. Over the last two years or so I have seriously spent much more time on politics than I should. I used to find myself unable to resist with pointed sarcasm and and an outrage overflow when the talk around me turned to politics. How could these people possibly be like this? I could not stop expressing outrage over these questions. I realized that that was why I sometimes watched Bill O'Reilly for "entertainment". The sense of outrage had so enveloped me over the last two years or so that I had started genuinely liking it. Sometimes outrage would knock me out in a speechless stupor and yet when I woke up I would want more of it. It's like that weird and sweet pain you feel when you bang your knee against a wall. You know that it's genuinely hurting and yet you don't want it to go away.

That's what the Republicans did to me as they did to many others. They got all those who care in this country and in the world addicted to outrage, the genuine kind and not the Sean Hannity kind. They got us wasting time and diverting ourselves from more important things so that we could repeatedly feel that outrage and relish it. I hated myself for spending so much time on politics and yet I loved it.

And that's why I want tomorrow to get over as soon as possible. I think I and millions of people everywhere have had enough of outrage. That's one of the reasons why I am going to savor Obama's win. Because I can finally start resisting the urge to keep on spending time on politics because I keep on getting outraged. And as I have said before, if McCain wins, then that would work for me too and I won't talk about politics anymore. Because then the outrage would reach such a fever pitch that my brain will finally not be able to handle it and abandon it.

In any case, it would be at least temporarily the end of outrage. Hopefully this blog could see much less politics then. This election is being hailed as historic by the country. While it indeed is, it shouldn't have been. Why does a country which considered itself the foremost promoter of freedom and equality for two hundred years have to wait until 2008 to elect a black man as president? By electing Barack Obama this country will finally secure the place in history which it has touted all along. So now all I pray for dearly is for John McCain to win Arizona.

JUST LIKE US

I personally feel that the scariest thing about the upcoming election is that the people want to vote for someone "just like them". In spite of the fact that this is a path straight to disaster, as should have been obvious from the 2004 election. It's really hard to see why people don't understand the simple fact that the President of the United States should understand their problems but he or she simply cannot be just like them; he or she has got to be smarter, more capable and tougher. Otherwise why would that person be fit to hold the highest office in the land? Isn't the difference between understanding the problems of the common man and being a common man yourself clear? Apparently not to the people of this great land.

What gets my goat even more is that in speaking thus, people also allude to Lyndon Johnson, Truman, JKF and FDR who were apparently "just like them". This is just ganz falsch. FDR and LBJ may have understood the problems of the common man but they were far from being like the common man. Both FDR and JFK were born in privilege and lived as elites, a fact seldom remembered. LBJ and Truman might have been the closest to the common man, but LBJ was a man who was one of the toughest and most savvy politicians of the century; one just has to read Master of the Senate to understand what kind of a political heavyweight he was. Truman may have been underappreciated before he became President, but again, David McCullough's magisterial biography clearly denotes the immense capability and potential he had already demonstrated. LBJ, Truman, JFK and FDR; they were far from being "common men". Or let's just say they were common men of uncommon ability.

Previously Americans seem to have appreciated such leaders, exceptional men who were more than fit to lead. Now though, they want common men of common or even subcommon ability to rule over them. This is one of the most fatalistic and downward-looking streaks in the current American voter. They demonstrated this streak in 2004 when they elected Bush because they thought he would be fantastic as a beer-drinking partner. Now they are demonstrating it again by embracing Sarah Palin as someone who espouses "small town values"; this is a woman they hadn't even heard about a month ago, and who is almost completely clueless about the past 8-year history of her country. She doesn't have any idea what the Bush Doctrine is, and she is sending her son to Iraq because she still seems to think it's Saddam who attacked her country on 9/11. One would be extremely hard-pressed to find a Vice Presidential contestant who was this frighteningly ignorant in such a crucial time; her selection seems to almost border on the surreal at times.

But in an ominous development, Thomas Friedman accurately notes that since Americans vote with their gut feelings they are actually warming up to Palin. On the other hand, Friedman notes that Obama who had that gut connection with especially young Americans a couple of months ago, no longer seems to radiate that tough and highly inspired attitude that rouses the irrational among us. I tend to agree. In fact in some of his recent interviews Obama frighteningly has a demeanor similar to John Kerry's; congenial and forthcoming, yet not connecting to voters' deeper centres.

And William Kristol of the NYT comparing Palin to Truman and LBJ simply indicates that the delusion is complete. The future of this country really seems to be in jeopardy, not because of its politicians but because of its people. Democracy never had a more glamorous display of its inherent problems.