87% disapprove

In the wake of the debt-ceiling debate, 82 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job—the highest ever, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. I'd like to hear what the other 18% think.

We got a deal

I am not a fan of declarations of things will never be the same, or of the current penchant to include the words Here's how in any pronouncements, but perhaps this article does have quite valid points. In the aftermath of the deal worked out between te Three Stooges (namely, Obama, Democrats and Republicans), all talking heads are in a rush to provide instant, profound analysis.

My judgment is that all the Three Stooges look worse now than before the most recent crisis: Obama looks indecisive, seems to have no spine, to not understand how to use power, to be reluctant to twists arms (let alone kick a little ass), and to have no guiding principle other than reelection; the Democrats seem timid, weak, ignored by a president of their own party, and unable to fight the opposition effectively; and the Republicans look to be hostages of their right wing.

Nonetheless, perhaps the Republicans came out looking the best of the three. Speaker Boehner resisted the Tea Party dictates in the end, and he got his party to vote for the legislation.

Debt-ceiling increases are now tied to deficit reduction. With President Obama's signature, every future president until America's debt monster is tamed must come to Congress on bended knee and plead for the privilege of avoiding default.

Obama looked weak an dineffective, and was unable to impose his will. Then again, he does seem to believe he should be imposing his will. Score one for a weak president.

Bipartisan entitlement protection lives on. No one has the nerve to cut spending in any meaningful way. For all the GOP fervor to rein in government spending, the agreement defers all decisions about entitlement spending to a so-called super committee with an internal architecture almost built for stalemate. The legislationcreated a committee to com eup with cuts. Last year's Deficit Reduction Commission, already all but fiorgotten, is an indicator of how this new committee will fare: badly.


Congress's back-loading of spending cuts lives on. A Democratic president and a tea party-inspired Republican Party will mutually agree to cut domestic discretionary spending (defined by budget authority) by $10 billion compared with 2011 budget totals. That's out of projected domestic discretionary spending of just more than $2 trillion for fiscal 2012 and 2013. Crumbs.Half of one percentage point.

Speaker John Boehner wobbled but didn't fall. Does that make him a force to be reckoned with? Well, he still has the Sperakership. And he did get the votes.

Standoff, or stalemate?

President Obama will not promise that Social Security checks will go out on August 3 unless a deficit-reduction deal is struck. "I cannot guarantee that those checks go out … There may simply not be enough money in the coffers to do it,” he told Scott Pelley of CBS News on Tuesday. “This is not just a matter of Social Security checks,” he explained. "These are veterans’ checks, these are folks on disability and their checks. There are about 70 million checks that go out.” Meanwhile, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said that he does not think a significant reduction deal can be reached as long as Obama is in power. He said, “After years of discussions and months of negotiations, I have little question that as long as this president is in the Oval Office, a real solution is probably unattainable.”

The president probably has the upper hand in this matter, but both sides smell pretty bad.

Anonymous Democrats money

Why not? Republicans exploit it. The(ir) Supreme Court allowed it. Use it.


At the heart of the effort, introduced Friday morning, are two groups: Priorities USA Action, which will engage directly in electioneering backed by donors who will have to be identified but can give unlimited amounts, and Priorities USA, which will advertise about related campaign issues using money from undisclosed sources. The effort is modeled on the one Republicans started last year — with help from the Republican strategist Karl Rove — that attacked Democrats with a barrage of advertisements, mailings and phone calls. It was widely credited with helping the party to take control of the House and diminish the Democrats’ edge in the Senate last fall. One of those groups, Crossroads GPS, was set up under a section of the tax code that allowed its donors to remain anonymous, leading Mr. Obama to refer to such groups collectively as “a threat to democracy” for the way they had shielded corporate interests from view as they sought to sway elections.

Democrats can not be afraid or reluctant to hit back. Allowing the Republicans to play hardball and not doing the same is stupid.

Schizoid policies

Massachusetts House Seeks to Limit Collective Bargaining - who'd expect that, in the liberal bastion?
The bill, passed late Tuesday night in advance of planned labor protests, would let local officials unilaterally set health insurance co-payments and deductibles for their employees after a monthlong discussion period with unions. Leaders of the House said it would save cities and towns $100 million in the budget year that starts in July. While Republican-controlled legislatures in Wisconsin and Ohio this year have weakened the ability of public-sector unions to bargain collectively, and Republicans in other states have pushed for a variety of curbs on unions, Massachusetts is the first state where a Democratic-led chamber has voted to limit bargaining rights. 

In Florida, G.O.P. Help for Unions - in Florida? Republicans? Unions representing teachers, firefighters, the police and other public employees say they have persuaded nearly half of the Senate’s Republicans to oppose the bill by reminding them that in Florida, far more than in most states, organized labor has supported Republicans. Still; who wouldn't assume it'd be the opposite?

GOP faces voter ire

In central Florida, a Congressional town meeting erupted into near chaos on Tuesday as attendees accused a Republican lawmaker of trying to dismantle Medicare while providing tax cuts to corporations and affluent Americans. At roughly the same time in Wisconsin, Representative Paul D. Ryan, the architect of the Republican budget proposal, faced a packed town meeting, occasional boos and a skeptical audience as he tried to lay out his party’s rationale for overhauling the health insurance program for retirees. After 10 days of trying to sell constituents on their plan to overhaul Medicare, House Republicans in multiple districts appear to be increasingly on the defensive, facing worried and angry questions from voters and a barrage of new attacks from Democrats and their allies. The proposed new approach to Medicare — a centerpiece of a budget that Republican leaders have hailed as a courageous effort to address the nation’s long-term fiscal problems — has been a constant topic at town-hall-style sessions and other public gatherings during a two-week Congressional recess that provided the first chance for lawmakers to gauge reaction to the plan.

Predictable, and welcome, results.

Democrats pessimistic about avoiding shutdown

Let the Republicans force a shutdown. If they haven't read the history of what their party did, and suffered for doing, 17 years ago, go ahead, shut 'er down.


“Right now, they look a bit dismal,” Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said when asked about the prospects of keeping the government running beyond the April 8 deadline. Across Capitol Hill, expectations grew Tuesday that — given the procedural and political obstacles ahead — the parties will fail to reach an agreement, which would prompt a massive government disruption in just a matter of days. And while both sides are already engaged in a sort of blame game in advance of a potential shutdown, they are also bracing for the political blowback.

Who, besides the right wing zealots, are gonna like this?

Tables are turned

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, faced harsh questions Wednesday about the central bank’s efforts to stimulate the economy, in his first hearing before the new Republican majority in the House.

Bashing the Fed has become de rigueur for right wingers.

Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee, defended Mr. Bernanke and the Fed.

And, in a turnabout, Democrats are now the Fed's defenders.

Hawaii’s Governor Takes On ‘Birthers’

Gov. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, who befriended President Obama’s parents when they were university students here, has been in office for less than three weeks. But he is so incensed over “birthers” — the conspiracy theorists who assert that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya and was thus not eligible to become president — that he is seeking ways to change state policy to allow him to release additional proof that the president was born in Honolulu in 1961. “It’s an insult to his mother and to his father, and I knew his mother and father; they were my friends, and I have an emotional interest in that,” Governor Abercrombie said in a telephone interview late Thursday. “It’s an emotional insult. It is disrespectful to the president; it is disrespectful to the office.” The governor, a Democrat and former congressman, said he has initiated conversations with the state’s attorney general and the chief of its Health Department about how he can release more explicit documentation of Mr. Obama’s birth on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital. He said he has done so of his own accord, without consulting the White House, which declined to comment.

Dr. No's Yes roils GOP

Looks funky with that beard.s the Senator from Oklahoma going counter-culture?

Kamikaze Capitalism: GOP out to destroy

I am not sure, at all, who this person is, but he has a column today in Marketwatch.com with this title.


Yes, Sen. McConnell, the drama’s unfolding, powered by your vow that the GOP’s “No. 1 priority” is destroying the Obama presidency. Not creating jobs … not economic recovery … not even national security.

Where will we be in twelve months? Eighteen?

Get it? America’s losing. And we better reinvent our Kamikaze Capitalism soon. Because the New Beijing Capitalism is winning the 21st century economic race, and we’re helping them beat us.

It doesn't take much imagination or perspicacity to see that the "Western" capitalist model is damaged. The right wing's response is to prescribe more of the same failed policies, to denigrate their opponents as unAmerican, America-haters or socialists, and promise bright days ahead for those that believe.

Friedman’s Disaster Capitalism peaked under Bush, adding trillions of new debt to pay for two costly wars, huge tax cuts and an increasingly privatized government. Today even Reagan’s Budget Director David Stockman warns “his GOP has destroyed the American economy.” Yet, even as GOP bullies keep adding insult to injury telling the world that their No. 1 goal is destroying Obama’s presidency, the gutless Dems continue talking compromise, failing by refusing to stand on principle and fight dirty on GOP turf, using their weapons against them, in a ruthless political war.

President Obama will have to make a choice in about four months, and no matter how many times he calls for bipartisanship, it will be a choice between caving in to the Republicans, or fighting them head-on.

Boehner’s Army

John Heilemann, who co-wrote Game change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the race of a lifetime with Mark Halperin, a book that created quite a stir earlier this year, writes a political column for New York magazine. This one is subtitled The Republican revolutionaries have problems with authority—and that may provide Obama an opening.

John Boehner: “We must remember, it’s the president who sets the agenda for our government,” he said. And though two days later he suggested that Barack Obama was in “denial” about the meaning of the midterms, Boehner offered that he and Obama “get along well,” that maybe they could hold a Merlot Meeting (rather than a Slurpee Summit). “I don’t want gridlock,” he insisted. “I don’t want squabbling.” Mitch McConnell would never go that far, for fear that his pants would catch on fire.


But McConnell's stated primary goal is to make sure Obama is a one-term president.

That 1994 is much on the minds of Boehner and McConnell comes as no surprise—since for any politically sentient being, the analogy is inescapable. Most often, of course, the parallels are drawn to illustrate the challenge that Obama faces: Can he pull a Bill Clinton, tacking back to the center, triangulating his way to reelection? Yet as the two maximum Republicans are evidently aware, the historical antecedent raises an equally urgent question for the GOP: Can Boehner and McConnell avoid the sort of grievous errors that their forebears made, which opened the door to Clinton’s revival—and yet might do the same for Obama?

It's a big question. After his election, Team Obama seemed poised not quite invincible as much as on a winning streak, yet even with legislative accomplishments, it mired down in the politics of an angry opposition and a lost spin war. Now the President seems to be floundering, to be back on his heels. It remains to be seen how things will play out.

Comparatively speaking, Boehner and McConnell are peas in the proverbial pod. Both are Establishmentarians to their core, who see politics and their role in promoting Republicanism in similar terms.  They are not firebrands or visionaries, but they are bone-deep partisans. For the past two years, they have demonstrated enormous discipline and skill in working side by side in the exercise of obstructionism. And for the next two, they will both be afflicted with the same headache: managing the tensions not between their caucuses but within them, as each is simultaneously energized and roiled by the infusion of a new crop of members more populist and hard-line than the guys who ostensibly command them.

Both have to appear to be mindful of the tea party rhetoric, Boehner more so.

It’s this cadre to which Boehner was catering last week when he stated flatly that “we are going to repeal Obamacare”—an obvious impossibility given the remaining, if reduced, Democratic majority in the upper chamber and the president’s veto pen. This kind of talk will only get Boehner so far with the tea-partyers, however. His allegiance to their cause will be tested early, thanks to Michele Bachmann, who announced that she intends to seek a post in her party’s leadership: that of GOP-conference chair. Leadership fights are never pretty, but this one may be especially charged, as the hot-eyed lady from Minnesota (and Tea Party Caucus founder) campaigns among her colleagues on the grounds that the new majority needs a genuine “constitutional conservative” in its top ranks—an argument containing the implicit suggestion that Boehner does not qualify as one.

There are few developments that would please me more than to see Bachmann get a leadership position in the Republican caucus. That wingnut would alienate more moderates than just about anyone else, whilst simultaneously throwing red meat to her extreme constituency.

the pressure on McConnell from his party’s anti-Establishment flank may in some ways be greater than that on Boehner—because of the presence of Jim DeMint. More than anyone, the junior senator from South Carolina is the animating spirit of the tea party. Having broken with long-standing tradition and encouraged primary challenges this year to sitting members of his own party, he has already made clear that he has no intention of backing away from his crusade for ideological purity.

How luck y can the Democrats get? Enforced ideological purity in the Republican party gives the President a chasm wide enough to drive the proverbial truck through the middle. Especially if the left insists on its own ideological purity.

In the likely event that a stalemate arises between the White House and Republicans over the budget, many tea-partyers are already champing at the bit for a government shutdown; but Boehner and McConnell, recalling how well that worked out for Gingrich and Dole, will be loath to let it happen.

Intra-party bickering; too bad we won't get to see it play out in all its gory glory.

In all of this, Obama will find opportunities to exploit. If he and his team handle it adroitly, they stand a chance of forcing the Republican leaders into a series of devil’s choices between, on the one hand, making compromises that exacerbate intra-party tensions and, on the other, satisfying the appetites of the ascendant wing of the GOP by coming across as ideological extremists to the vast American middle. The degree of adroitness required will be enormous, to be sure. Unlike Clinton, Obama will not be blessed with a foe as prone to massive overreach—and to indiscipline, messianism, and just plain silliness—as Gingrich was in 1995. The president will need to be clever, flexible, patient, and tough in roughly equal measure.

O, but he well might: the teabags will push the extreme, and will not be silent if denied. Can't wait to see the first firebrand speech Rand Paul makes.

House Democrats spar - Blue Dog won’t back down

Top House Democrats said late Friday night that they had settled on an arrangement that avoided a divisive fight for the No. 2 position in the party when it reverts to the minority in January. In a statement, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would nominate Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina to be the No. 3 Democrat when the party holds an internal party election on Wednesday.

But what did Limbaugh say? Rush: Clyburn could be 'driving Miss Nancy' Idiot.

After a junior year in which he almost won the Heisman Trophy, Heath Shuler was picked in the first round of the 1994 National Football League draft by the Washington Redskins. In less than two seasons — and after a few too many interceptions — he was replaced as the team’s starting quarterback. ESPN described him as one of the all-time draft busts. He might be expected to play down such a distinction. But Mr. Shuler, 38, who just won a third term as the congressman representing North Carolina’s 11th District, has turned it into metaphor. “It’s no different than me as a quarterback,” he said in an interview here on Thursday. “I didn’t play very good. So what they’d do? They benched me.”

And eventually released him. I agree with his assessment, and would vote that way, for new leadership.

The Democrats’ achievements in the last Congress, Mr. Shuler said, are unpopular with the public because the party’s leadership has been too reflexively partisan. He says a more moderate approach is needed.

True enough, as far as it goes, but, why is it that when the right is overly partisan few people characterize it so and call for a "more moderate approach"?

Debatable point

Pelosi: 'We Didn’t Lose Because of Me'  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she has the “overwhelming support” of fellow Democrats in her bid to become minority leader in the next Congress, and says she’s not to blame for the Democrats’ mid-term debacle. She might be technically correct, but when a team loses badly the manager gets fired. She should step aside.

Dealing with the deficit

Paul Krugman is not impressed with the Commission, in the least.

Count me among those who always believed that President Obama made a big mistake when he created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — a supposedly bipartisan panel charged with coming up with solutions to the nation’s long-run fiscal problems. It seemed obvious, as soon as the commission’s membership was announced, that “bipartisanship” would mean what it so often does in Washington: a compromise between the center-right and the hard-right.

And:


It’s no mystery what has happened on the deficit commission: as so often happens in modern Washington, a process meant to deal with real problems has been hijacked on behalf of an ideological agenda. Under the guise of facing our fiscal problems, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson are trying to smuggle in the same old, same old — tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net.

Gerald Seib, of the Wall Street Journal (wherein he qualifies as a moderate), called it differently: Deficit-Cutting Chairmen Call Washington's Bluff.

Matt Miller, who writes a column for the Washington Post (I have an email subscription to his column; I think I first read him on the Daily Beast), opines on the Simpson-Bowles Commission, also. Miller fancies himself "a Radical Centrist." I suppose he does not want to be tarred as a Liberal. Or call himself a Progressive.

21 versus 22. As I wrote in The Post a few months ago, the Bowles/Simpson plan to hold spending to 21 percent of GDP as the boomers age is a dangerous fantasy. All you need to know is that Ronald Reagan ran government at 22 percent of GDP when 76 million baby boomers weren't retiring. Today we're on the verge of doubling the number of folks on Social Security and Medicare. The Bowles/Simpson size of government goal is a fantasy -- it will not happen. Unfortunately, this wrongheaded goal undermines much of what they propose, since it's the organizing feature of their proposal.

2037. The co-chairs don't balance the budget until 2037! The outer limits of the ambition of a commission set up to get our fiscal house in order is thus a 27-year plan to balance the budget? Oy. The most you can say is that it's faster than the plan offered by that other falsely-hailed fiscal conservative, Paul Ryan, whose "Roadmap" wouldn't balance the budget until the 2050s!

He also criticizes them on health care, social security and gas taxes.

Divided We Fail

Paul Krugman never minces words, and today's column is no exception to his rule.

Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect?

Very, he opines. And he clears the historical record: the era of partial cooperation in the 1990s came only after Republicans had tried all-out confrontation, actually shutting down the federal government in an effort to force President Bill Clinton to give in to their demands for big cuts in Medicare.

People forget that, and Republicans do nothing to remind them. They harp on big government and cutting taxes, but never explain just how they plan to do so. Mitch McConnell did say that “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

But what does that mean? If they have power, they can't keep blaming the Democrats and just saying no. They will be part of government and won't be able to just blame government for everything. Will that make them responsible and coöperative?


should any Republicans in Congress find themselves considering the possibility of acting in a statesmanlike, bipartisan manner, they’ll surely reconsider after looking over their shoulder at the Tea Party-types, who will jump on them if they show any signs of being reasonable. The role of the Tea Party is one reason smart observers expect another government shutdown, probably as early as next spring.

President Obama and his team will have to get real, get ready, and get tough. Because if the Republicans get power and get their way we’ll get the worst of both worlds: They’ll refuse to do anything to boost the economy now, claiming to be worried about the deficit, while simultaneously increasing long-run deficits with irresponsible tax cuts — cuts they have already announced won’t have to be offset with spending cuts. So if the elections go as expected next week, here’s my advice: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Something to look forward to?

Who knows better?

Lawmakers from both parties, including the top two House Republicans, are pressing in a vote Thursday to add $485 million to the defense budget for a fighter-jet engine that the Pentagon says it doesn't want. The White House and Defense Secretary Robert Gates say the backup engine for the next-generation Joint Strike Fighter is a waste of money that will deplete funds for military priorities.

Provincial concerns cloaked in national defense rhetoric show that "It's another classic example of politics being local," said Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who opposes the engine spending. Mr. Flake said supporting the spending undermines Republicans' description of themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility. "If we can't rein in this type of spending now, how are we going to do it later?" Mr. Flake asked.

Ain't.

It's not about health care

An interesting opinion piece in the Times written by Frank Rich. An unapologetic liberal, he runs down the litany of the current imbroglio: health care reform legislation has been passed, and the right wing is apoplectic. Hell no is John Boehner's rallying cry to the few that listen to him; Don’t Get Demoralized! Get Organized! Take Back the 20! is Sarah Palin's motto on her Facebook page, which includes gun cross-hairs in Congressional districts she and her ilk want to target in November (target an apt verb in her case).

As tired as I am of all this bickering, posturing and rhetoric, Rich hits the nail on the head: If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

That is spot-on: blacks, gays, liberals, all those that can be tarred by labels that include un-American, those are the targets for this nativist, reactionary anger. They have appropritated the monicker of Tea Party, as if their actions equate with what happened in Boston Harbor in December 1773. They are trying to make their actions equal to those of the rebellious colonists who fought the yoke of royal oppression, of taxation without representation.

They hold uyp Ronald Reagan as their hero: alleging he cut taxes, alleging he cut the size of government, both untrue allegations, they forget he ignored, and broke, the law and traded with the Iranian clerical government, so to provide illicit arms to the contra rebels in Central America.

March 28, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The Rage Is Not About Health Care
By FRANK RICH

THERE were times when last Sunday’s great G.O.P. health care implosion threatened to bring the thrill back to reality television. On ABC’s “This Week,” a frothing and filibustering Karl Rove all but lost it in a debate with the Obama strategist David Plouffe. A few hours later, the perennially copper-faced Republican leader John Boehner revved up his “Hell no, you can’t!” incantation in the House chamber — instant fodder for a new viral video remixing his rap with will.i.am’s “Yes, we can!” classic from the campaign. Boehner, having previously likened the health care bill to Armageddon, was now so apoplectic you had to wonder if he had just discovered one of its more obscure revenue-generating provisions, a tax on indoor tanning salons.

But the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. And as the week dragged on, and reports of death threats and vandalism stretched from Arizona to Kansas to upstate New York, the F.B.I. and the local police had to get into the act to protect members of Congress and their families.

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.

No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big deal, all right, so much so it doesn’t need Joe Biden’s adjective to hype it. But the bill does not erect a huge New Deal-Great Society-style government program. In lieu of a public option, it delivers 32 million newly insured Americans to private insurers. As no less a conservative authority than The Wall Street Journal editorial page observed last week, the bill’s prototype is the health care legislation Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts. It contains what used to be considered Republican ideas.

Yet it’s this bill that inspired G.O.P. congressmen on the House floor to egg on disruptive protesters even as they were being evicted from the gallery by the Capitol Police last Sunday. It’s this bill that prompted a congressman to shout “baby killer” at Bart Stupak, a staunch anti-abortion Democrat. It’s this bill that drove a demonstrator to spit on Emanuel Cleaver, a black representative from Missouri. And it’s this “middle-of-the-road” bill, as Obama accurately calls it, that has incited an unglued firestorm of homicidal rhetoric, from “Kill the bill!” to Sarah Palin’s cry for her followers to “reload.” At least four of the House members hit with death threats or vandalism are among the 20 political targets Palin marks with rifle crosshairs on a map on her Facebook page.

When Social Security was passed by Congress in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, there was indeed heated opposition. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post, Alf Landon built his catastrophic 1936 presidential campaign on a call for repealing Social Security. (Democrats can only pray that the G.O.P. will “go for it” again in 2010, as Obama goaded them on Thursday, and keep demanding repeal of a bill that by September will shower benefits on the elderly and children alike.) When L.B.J. scored his Medicare coup, there were the inevitable cries of “socialism” along with ultimately empty rumblings of a boycott from the American Medical Association.

But there was nothing like this. To find a prototype for the overheated reaction to the health care bill, you have to look a year before Medicare, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both laws passed by similar majorities in Congress; the Civil Rights Act received even more votes in the Senate (73) than Medicare (70). But it was only the civil rights bill that made some Americans run off the rails. That’s because it was the one that signaled an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.

The apocalyptic predictions then, like those about health care now, were all framed in constitutional pieties, of course. Barry Goldwater, running for president in ’64, drew on the counsel of two young legal allies, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, to characterize the bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation” of states’ rights that “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” Richard Russell, the segregationist Democratic senator from Georgia, said the bill “would destroy the free enterprise system.” David Lawrence, a widely syndicated conservative columnist, bemoaned the establishment of “a federal dictatorship.” Meanwhile, three civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

That a tsunami of anger is gathering today is illogical, given that what the right calls “Obamacare” is less provocative than either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Medicare, an epic entitlement that actually did precipitate a government takeover of a sizable chunk of American health care. But the explanation is plain: the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964.

In fact, the current surge of anger — and the accompanying rise in right-wing extremism — predates the entire health care debate. The first signs were the shrieks of “traitor” and “off with his head” at Palin rallies as Obama’s election became more likely in October 2008. Those passions have spiraled ever since — from Gov. Rick Perry’s kowtowing to secessionists at a Tea Party rally in Texas to the gratuitous brandishing of assault weapons at Obama health care rallies last summer to “You lie!” piercing the president’s address to Congress last fall like an ominous shot.

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

If Congressional Republicans want to maintain a politburo-like homogeneity in opposition to the Democrats, that’s their right. If they want to replay the petulant Gingrich government shutdown of 1995 by boycotting hearings and, as John McCain has vowed, refusing to cooperate on any legislation, that’s their right too (and a political gift to the Democrats). But they can’t emulate the 1995 G.O.P. by remaining silent as mass hysteria, some of it encompassing armed militias, runs amok in their own precincts. We know the end of that story. And they can’t pretend that we’re talking about “isolated incidents” or a “fringe” utterly divorced from the G.O.P. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 74 percent of Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, while only 16 percent are aligned with Democrats.

After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, some responsible leaders in both parties spoke out to try to put a lid on the resistance and violence. The arch-segregationist Russell of Georgia, concerned about what might happen in his own backyard, declared flatly that the law is “now on the books.” Yet no Republican or conservative leader of stature has taken on Palin, Perry, Boehner or any of the others who have been stoking these fires for a good 17 months now. Last week McCain even endorsed Palin’s “reload” rhetoric.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

•

Fear Strikes Out

The day before Sunday’s health care vote, President Obama gave an unscripted talk to House Democrats. Near the end, he spoke about why his party should pass reform: “Every once in a while a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country, where you have a chance to make good on those promises that you made ... And this is the time to make true on that promise. We are not bound to win, but we are bound to be true. We are not bound to succeed, but we are bound to let whatever light we have shine.”

And on the other side, here’s what Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House — a man celebrated by many in his party as an intellectual leader — had to say: If Democrats pass health reform, “They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” by passing civil rights legislation.

The correction below states that the Newt meant Great Society programs. What were those programs? Medicare? What would he have done?

I’d argue that Mr. Gingrich is wrong about that: proposals to guarantee health insurance are often controversial before they go into effect — Ronald Reagan famously argued that Medicare would mean the end of American freedom — but always popular once enacted.

Not the only time Reagan was wrong.

But that’s not the point I want to make today. Instead, I want you to consider the contrast: on one side, the closing argument was an appeal to our better angels, urging politicians to do what is right, even if it hurts their careers; on the other side, callous cynicism. Think about what it means to condemn health reform by comparing it to the Civil Rights Act. Who in modern America would say that L.B.J. did the wrong thing by pushing for racial equality? (Actually, we know who: the people at the Tea Party protest who hurled racial epithets at Democratic members of Congress on the eve of the vote.) And that cynicism has been the hallmark of the whole campaign against reform.

Cloaked in opposition to Big Government. Their hero Reagan spoke the same crap, yet presided over a great expansion of the federal government.

Yes, a few conservative policy intellectuals, after making a show of thinking hard about the issues, claimed to be disturbed by reform’s fiscal implications (but were strangely unmoved by the clean bill of fiscal health from the Congressional Budget Office) or to want stronger action on costs (even though this reform does more to tackle health care costs than any previous legislation). For the most part, however, opponents of reform didn’t even pretend to engage with the reality either of the existing health care system or of the moderate, centrist plan — very close in outline to the reform Mitt Romney introduced in Massachusetts — that Democrats were proposing. Instead, the emotional core of opposition to reform was blatant fear-mongering, unconstrained either by the facts or by any sense of decency.

It wasn’t just the death panel smear. It was racial hate-mongering, like a piece in Investor’s Business Daily declaring that health reform is “affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color.” It was wild claims about abortion funding. It was the insistence that there is something tyrannical about giving young working Americans the assurance that health care will be available when they need it, an assurance that older Americans have enjoyed ever since Lyndon Johnson — whom Mr. Gingrich considers a failed president — pushed Medicare through over the howls of conservatives.

And let’s be clear: the campaign of fear hasn’t been carried out by a radical fringe, unconnected to the Republican establishment. On the contrary, that establishment has been involved and approving all the way. Politicians like Sarah Palin — who was, let us remember, the G.O.P.’s vice-presidential candidate — eagerly spread the death panel lie, and supposedly reasonable, moderate politicians like Senator Chuck Grassley refused to say that it was untrue. On the eve of the big vote, Republican members of Congress warned that “freedom dies a little bit today” and accused Democrats of “totalitarian tactics,” which I believe means the process known as “voting.”

Without question, the campaign of fear was effective: health reform went from being highly popular to wide disapproval, although the numbers have been improving lately. But the question was, would it actually be enough to block reform? And the answer is no. The Democrats have done it. The House has passed the Senate version of health reform, and an improved version will be achieved through reconciliation.

This is, of course, a political victory for President Obama, and a triumph for Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker. But it is also a victory for America’s soul. In the end, a vicious, unprincipled fear offensive failed to block reform. This time, fear struck out.


Editors' Note: March 23, 2010
The Paul Krugman column on Monday, about the health care bill, quoted Newt Gingrich as saying that “Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” by passing civil rights legislation. The quotation originally appeared in The Washington Post, which reported after the column went to press that Mr. Gingrich said it referred to Johnson’s Great Society policies, not to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
March 22, 2010-Op-Ed Columnist
Fear Strikes Out-By PAUL KRUGMAN

Country First?

In her column, Maureen Dowd features the Democrats as giddy over their ability to actually get something done, to pass legislation.

The Democrats held hands, held their breath and jumped over the cliff — not that it was a radical bill. And, mirabile dictu, nothing awful happened. The markets went up. The polls went up. Their confidence went up.

And the Republicans? John McCain threatened Democrats, telling an Arizona radio affiliate that “there will be no cooperation for the rest of the year” from Republicans. So much for “Country First.” (He’s so clueless that he came on the Senate floor and said, “Let’s stop this legislation, and let’s start from the beginning.”)

For the rest of the year? There has been no cooperation for the past year. In part, that is a result of the extreme right eing of the Republican party becoming dominant. Litmus tests, purity tests are the norm, and one of the primary enforcers has been Rush Limbaugh. His reaction to the passage of the House bill?

they won yesterday. They won because they held congress and the presidency and therein lies the lesson. We need to defeat these bastards. We need to wipe them out. We need to chase them out of town. [...] “They must my friends, be hounded out of office. Every single Democrat who voted for this needs to know, safe district or not, they are going to be exposed and hassled and chased from office. We now have leftist radicals in charge of your healthcare decisions rather than doctors”