Tag: politics

My Political Insight: Why Are the GOP Candidates So Weak?

~ Clarissa ~ 7 Comments

Even in Iowa, of all places, where the Republican candidates have had a very strong campaigning presence recently, they are all trailing President Obama in approval ratings. Mind you, Obama’s ratings are quite low. The problem for the Republicans is that theirs are even lower:

Iowa: President Obama vs. Republicans

Obama 49%, Mitt Romney 39% (+10%)
Obama 51%, Rick Perry 38% (+13%)
Obama 51%, Michele Bachmann 34% (+17%)
Obama 51%, Herman Cain 33% (+18%)
Obama 54%, Sarah Palin 33% (+21%)

As I said before, Obama is set to win the upcoming elections. He isn’t going to win because citizens love him and approve of the job he’s been doing. To the contrary, the disappointment with his actions has been growing among his base, while the anti-Obama propaganda has been virulent and unflagging among his detractors. The reason why he will win is that the GOP hasn’t been able to come up with a viable candidate.

Now, my question is: why hasn’t it?

Does the party really have only this bunch of freaks and unelectables to offer? Or is the answer that it isn’t interested in winning at this time?

Today’s balance of power is pretty much a win-win for the GOP. A Republican Congress that frustrates the Democratic President’s every move. The President who is seen as impotent by his own base and is blamed for the tanking economy by everybody. Isn’t this the perfect opportunity to tell the Americans, “Oh, you wanted change and progress? Now you can have your Socialist President and see how much you like it.”

A Republican President coming to power in 2012 would mean that the GOP would have to do something to repair the economy. Isn’t it easier to just sit back and allow the second Democratic presidency in a row to fail day after day at getting the country out of the recession? Is there a better way of discrediting the progressive agenda for a long time to come?

My Political Prognosis: Let’s Watch Texas’ Economy

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

If there is a single Republican candidate right now who could challenge President Obama during the 2012 elections, it is, of course, Rick Perry. There is no other even remotely viable candidate that the GOP has managed to scare up at this point. Perry is a Governor of a big state, which means that he can start playing the “Obama is inexperienced” card all over again (mind my words, he is absolutely going to do that, as strange as it may sound to Liberal ears.)

Of course, Romney also has been a Governor of an important state. However, that state is Massachusetts, which colors Romney as somewhat of a Liberal by association. Most importantly, the guy is a Mormon, which makes him unelectable as President of the US. He is trailing Perry in the polls by 13 points right now, which is not surprising.

As for people who, for some inexplicable reason, thought Bachmann stood a chance, I hope they understand now how silly that was. She is completely crazy and a woman. A man who is totally bonkers has some marginal chance of getting the nomination and maybe even winning if his family is rich and powerful enough (wink, wink). A woman, though? Not a chance.

Which is why the following prognosis becomes crucially important:

Some signs point to Texas under-performing the national economy in coming months. The federal stimulus that Perry derides (after accepting $17.1 billion in aid) is ending, and Texas has imposed steep budget cuts that could depress its economy short term.

If Perry manages to convince the country that his state’s 8,4% unemployment is somehow indicative of a thriving economy (which is the message he’s working very hard to bring out right now), he might have a shot at the presidency. If, however, the economy of Texas suffers a blow, he’s done for in these elections, and Obama will have a clear road to the presidency.

All of this is, of course, contingent on nothing major happening in this country in terms of either a terrorist attack or another bout of the recession. Either of these could revive the Republican hopes of retaking the Oval Office in 2012.

Looking for Rick Perry’s Sex Partners

~ Clarissa ~ 36 Comments

I’m not a huge fan of Rick Perry’s, to put it very mildly, but I think this kind of ad is absolutely disgusting:

I found the ad here. Apparently it has been paid for by Robert Morrow, a supporter of Ron Paul from Texas. Can people get any lower than this?

Why Didn’t We Do This? On Iceland

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

Via Mike’s blog, I discovered this fascinating article about Iceland.

I’m sure everybody remembers how at the beginning of the current economic crisis Iceland was on the news a lot. This was a country that had participated most actively in the financial bubble and now crashed a lot harder and a lot faster than many other countries. At that time, the crisis that now is experienced by Greece, Spain and Italy was still a thing of the future. Iceland was the first small country (please correct me if I’m wrong here) to be hit hard by the crisis. It was also the first one to come out winning.

Iceland hasn’t appeared on the news for a while, so I’m sure many of my readers will be surprised to learn (just as I was) that this is how the country decided to deal with the crisis:

The belief that citizens had to pay for the mistakes of a financial monopoly, that an entire nation must be taxed to pay off private debts was shattered, transforming the relationship between citizens and their political institutions and eventually driving Iceland’s leaders to the side of their constituents. The Head of State, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, refused to ratify the law that would have made Iceland’s citizens responsible for its bankers’ debts, and accepted calls for a referendum.

While here in the US we keep agreeing to endless cuts to education, healthcare, science, research, social programs, etc. in order to repay the debt caused, to a great degree, by bailing out billionaires, people of Iceland decided to jail the crooks instead of rewarding them:

In the March 2010 referendum, 93% voted against repayment of the debt.  The IMF immediately froze its loan.  But the revolution (though not televised in the United States), would not be intimidated. With the support of a furious citizenry, the government launched civil and penal investigations into those responsible for the financial crisis.  Interpol put out an international arrest warrant for the ex-president of Kaupthing, Sigurdur Einarsson, as the other bankers implicated in the crash fled the country.

Moreover – and this really sounds like science fiction – the people of Iceland are now writing a new constitution. Mind you, not the politicians are writing it. The people are:

To write the new constitution, the people of Iceland elected twenty-five citizens from among 522 adults not belonging to any political party but recommended by at least thirty citizens. This document was not the work of a handful of politicians, but was written on the internet. The constituent’s meetings are streamed on-line, and citizens can send their comments and suggestions, witnessing the document as it takes shape. The constitution that eventually emerges from this participatory democratic process will be submitted to parliament for approval after the next elections.

I don’t think the US needs a new constitution. However, it would be nice to have a system where, instead of watching corrupt politicians of both parties fight their useless battles in Congress, citizens could have more of a say in what’s going on.

For now, it seems like there are two countries that have been able to weather the global crisis pretty well: Iceland and Canada. (I’ve just come back from Canada and, believe me, they are doing extremely well compared to how things are going in the US, let alone in Western Europe). If anybody knows of any other countries that are dealing with the crisis in inventive and productive ways, please let me know in the comments.

Because no matter what your political persuasion is, I think that you have to agree that whatever we are doing in the US is not working.

Would You Have Handled It That Much Better?

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

I kind of don’t like it how people are falling all over themselves in criticizing Obama for the way he handled the whole debt ceiling debacle. He compromised too much, people say.

And what alternative did he have, exactly? No, seriously, if you are disappointed with Obama’s actions during the crisis, what would you have done in his place?

I Wonder If Chomsky. . .

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

. . . has been following the recent events in the US Congress and whether he still feels that the Tea Partiers can be recruited for massive support of progressive causes (the video has been removed by YouTube, but it’s clear from the comments what it was about.) A year ago, I said the following:

There is this huge delusion on the Left that there is a way of connecting with some of these people [Tea Partiers] and getting them on our side. Now Chomsky is participating in that delusion as well. But I don’t think that strategy will work. It never has before.

Everybody was trying to persuade me that Tea Partiers are the movement of the disadvantaged and the unemployed who have a huge potential of coming to support a Liberal agenda.

Today, the representatives elected by those same Tea Partiers have destroyed what this country still had left of its welfare system.

Now, was I right or was I completely right?

To Be Continued. . .

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

So it seems like the debt ceiling will be raised. Not to worry, though, there are several more rounds of this drama awaiting us:

  • We get not one, but two more debt ceiling votes in the immediate future, like Republicans wanted.
  • The McConnell notion of a future debt vote in which the president can get a small partial raising of the debt limit if he agrees it’s all on his own head, upon which Congress gets to have a meaningless “no” vote to wash its hands of it.
  • But that’s not good enough, so we also include the formation of Super Congress! It’s a Republican-desired committee tasked with making up to $1.5 trillion in budget cuts, so that Congress doesn’t have to do the dirty work itself. Then Congress gets to vote on whether to adopt those cuts…
  • … and we get the Republican demand of a “trigger,” because if those committee-proposed cuts get voted down by Congress, presuming the committee can even produce recommendations in the first place (the last one couldn’t), we get cuts anyway, in the form of mandatory across-the-board cuts of as much as $1.5 trillion.
  • As the GOP insisted, there are no new revenues. No tax increases.

If the Democrats were going to roll over and play dead anyways, then what was the point of the whole drama, I wonder?

I’m getting a sinking feeling we are never going to get out of this whole mess.

And Sometimes It’s Just a Cigar

~ Clarissa ~ 35 Comments

Somebody I know has been recommending Juan Cole to me forever. So I finally found time to check him out. And this is the first article of his I stumbled upon:

I take it the American news cycle is dominated by the artificial debate over raising the debt limit. It is a silly season story. The budget was being balanced by Clinton in the late 1990s, and the Republicans were the ones who created long-term structural deficits by slashing taxes on the wealthiest Americans (even Bush argued with Cheney over the second cut), by an unfunded prescription drug give-away to get votes from the medicare crowd, and by two unfunded wars, one of them illegal in international law.

The reason that the Republicans deliberately destroyed the balanced budget and created unprecedented government debt was precisely in hopes that at some point they could use the debt as an excuse to destroy social security, medicare, and myriads of educational and health programs. They represent rich people, and the rich don’t want to be having to bear their fair share of the national burden. What better way to get out of having to pay those pesky taxes than making sure the government doesn’t do anything for anyone but the rich.

So everything unfolding in Washington was planned out in a room in 2001, and is going according to plan.

I like a good conspiracy person as much as the next person, but this one is just too outlandish. A group of people huddled in a room ten years ago and planning everything that would happen ten years from then would make for a bad Hollywood movie. Reality, however, is always a bit more nuanced, complex, and unpredictable.

Also, I don’t think that demonizing the Republicans in this way is useful to the Liberal cause. If they are capable of such brilliant, out-of-this world planning and strategizing, then we really might want these resourceful and organized people leading the country. Of course, the question arises as to why such ultra-intelligent folks allowed themselves to lose the White House in 2008. Maybe that was part of their hidden agenda whose consequences will become evident ten or a hundred years from now.

The reason why the Republicans are anti-tax is much simpler, in my opinion. The voters who handed them the congress last November are anti-tax, so the Republicans are simply following through on that popular sentiment. In my Spanish class that I was teaching right around the time of the 2010 elections, we arrived at the chapter in our textbook that introduced the vocabulary related to politics. I always ask my students to begin approaching the new vocabulary by creating sentences with the new words. From these sentences, I discovered that my students in the American Midwest overwhelmingly believe that taxes are the government’s way of ripping off hard-working folks to feed a huge bureaucracy.

One might not like this fact but the truth is that there are very very many people in this country who are anti-tax and anti-government spending. A huge number of citizens is driven by the hope of becoming extremely rich and buying their own yacht. Whether they will succeed or not, having that possibility is crucial to them. They are more prepared to identify with a millionaire on a personal jet than they are with an unemployed steel worker. Even though their personal circumstances place them much closer to the steel worker, their sympathies still lie with the more positive example of the millionaire. Psychologically, this makes a lot of sense.

I’m sure most of my readers are well-aware of all this. As in immigrant, however, I felt puzzled by this phenomenon for a long time. Only after living in the Midwest and talking to people of all ages and professions did I begin to understand why these hard-working folks seem to vote consistently against their own economic interests. The thing is, they don’t. They are neither stupid nor deluded. They simply vote for the interests of their future selves, the ones who will have managed to make it big eventually.

Weiner Lied!

~ Clarissa ~ 11 Comments

Are this journalist and I surrounded by the same Americans?

The public outrage has stemmed in my opinion not from Weiner’s tweets, but his deception. Rep. Weiner lied to reporters, instructed others to lie and went so far as to invent a completely fallacious story that his Blackberry and Twitter account were hacked.

Seriously? This whole brouhaha came about just because Weiner lied about who sent his tweets? That’s truly an egregious lie. In a country that is passionately dedicated to hold its politicians to a high standard of truthfulness, it is no doubt that Weiner has been punished. Look what we did to the guy who told us that whopper about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was the same guy, if you remember, who said,

By far the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum.

And his campaign promised that,

Governor Bush’s income tax cuts will benefit all Americans, but they are especially focused on low and moderate income families.

When it turned out that, in reality, the top 20% of earners received 69% of Bush’s tax cuts, we surely held him accountable for lying about something this important.

For those with a short-term memory loss of Orwellian nature, I want to offer a little reminder of how the entire presidential campaign of 2004was conducted by the progressives under the slogan “Bush Lied!” Remember the bumper stickers, the articles, the websites? If you do, then you’ve got to remember that the voters did not care. In 2000, it was very difficult for Bush to hustle up a win. In 2004 – after the lies – he won fair and square.

So one politician lies and says,

We found the weapons of mass destruction.

And another politician lies about sending naked pictures of himself. The latter is forced to resign, while the former is elected to a second term as president. And there are still people who think that it’s the deception that the voters care about? For the information about what really bugs the voters, please see my preceding post.

P.S. For those who want to start the debate along the lines of “Bush didn’t lie, he was just misinformed”, this argument is as convincing as the argument that Weiner had no idea how Twitter worked, so technically he didn’t lie. Before such arguments are made on my blog, familiarize yourselves with the issue. For example, here and here.