Thursday, September 30, 2004
D-Day
The first presidential debate is today--a day we eagerly envisioned during the high Deaniac days of last fall, but it’s not going to be what we hoped for, mostly because our guy is on a book tour selling his memoir instead of standing on the stage in Florida. (The debate is at the University of Miami, which has reportedly been locked down since the candidates arrived yesterday. If so, it’s the first time the campus has been truly safe from the various felons on the football team.) There’s lots of handicapping available on the Internet this morning, and most of it will be more intelligent than my own, but the view from here is that the debate is Kerry’s to lose. Nobody expects anything from Bush but squinty blinking and the same platitudes he’s been mouthing for years. But Kerry’s carefully nuanced position on Iraq, in contrast to Bush’s straightforward “central front in the war on terror”--which is utterly stupid and wrong, but easy to grasp conceptually--is going to be trouble, just as I predicted months ago. Nevertheless, we hope for the best. We hope that debate moderator Jim Lehrer won’t help Bush out when he gets in trouble (which I seem to remember him doing against Gore four years ago), and we hope that Kerry will get enough licks in to make a difference in the race.
We all want Kerry to win, of course. But just in the last 24 hours we’ve seen a breathtaking rush of reasons why the reelection of Bush would open a Baskin-Robbins of disaster. Ashcroft’s declaration that the Justice Department will fight a New York court ruling that the Patriot Act is unconstitutional is one. "We believe the act to be completely consistent with the Constitution," he said. (Blogger sighs heavily, beats head against desk.) The act hasn’t caught one damn terrorist, it’s done profound damage to the Constitution and made suspects of us all, and yet like much else we’ve seen from the House of Bush, we must not tamper with it because that would let the terrorists win, and in fact what we need are greater police powers to keep Insensate Evil at bay. The House of Representatives’ passage of a bill erasing all gun-control laws in the District of Columbia is another. Think about the logic of that--DC has one of the highest murder rates in the country, and the Repugs think the solution is more guns. (The Senate won’t take up the bill, so it’s unlikely to become law, but that wasn’t the point of the vote yesterday. The point was to put pressure on rural Democrats to take a high-profile gun control vote a month before the election.)
And there’s more. Stories have been surfacing in the last few days about some of what Bush is planning for a second term. There’s reportedly a great deal of bustle around the Pentagon lately regarding invasion plans for Syria (although as we used to say on the playground, “You and what army?”). And during a campaign appearance the other day, Bush raised the idea of the flat tax.
Remember the flat tax? This was Steve Forbes’ pet idea during his two runs for president. It’s often pushed as a great act of simplification--wouldn’t it be nice not to have to do all that paperwork, yes it would, just send in a postcard with your check and go back to your shopping and TV. But as former Clinton economic advisor Laura Tyson told Air America Radio yesterday, the flat tax, when it was first devised, was created precisely to protect the wealthy. So yeah, it will cut down on paperwork, but it will also continue to shift more of the tax burden away from the richest Americans and onto working people. So far, the wealthiest Americans--the top one percent—have gotten as much tax relief as the next 80 percent of Americans combined, and under a second Bush term, there’s more on the way.
If Americans had any sort of class consciousness, Bush and his economic advisors would have been swinging from lampposts years ago. But they aren’t because we don’t--mostly because we cling to the belief that someday, we’re going to be rich, too. And for a lot of Americans, that’s proven to be true, sort of. We forget that there are a lot of people walking around who are the first members of their families to attend college--and they’re not as old as you think. Lots of people have jumped class barriers--hell, even me. Going backward to time immemorial, I come from a long line of farmers--and it’s a fairly big leap from being a rough-skinned son of toil to a fully citified writer blogging on a laptop. Nevertheless, while the opportunities this country provides us are certainly admirable, we’ve got to understand what they truly represent. What most of us are doing is ascending to higher rungs of the middle class, and we’re not going to make the top one percent unless we win the lottery. And that means most of us are going to bear the burdens the top one percent will escape thanks to Bush. As long as we confuse our own economic successes with the successes of the American upper crust, we’ll be tempted to vote in ways directly opposite our most basic economic interests.
If there’s good news--good being a relative term--in any of this economic nonsense, it’s Stein’s Law, first formulated by Nixon economic advisor Herb Stein: “Things that can’t go on forever don’t.” Thus the radical, irresponsible economic policies of Bush and the Repugs are going to come to grief eventually, and someday, we’ll look back and wonder how we could have been so damn stupid not to see how ridiculous they were. Trouble is, it will probably take a depression that makes the 1930s look like the 1990s to sufficiently clear our heads.
Yah, You Betcha: I am in Plymouth, Minnesota, this morning--a prosperous suburb southwest of Minneapolis. This town appears to have named some of its major streets after famous battles, such as Dunkirk and Vicksburg. (And since Dunkirk was a famous defeat, I suppose that means it’s possible that one day our children or grandchildren might live on Fallujah Lane or Najaf Boulevard.) On the way here, you go past the headquarters of some of America’s most famous corporations, like 3M in Maplewood and General Mills in Minneapolis, which sits at the corner of General Mills Boulevard and Betty Crocker Drive. And once you hit the suburbs, it’s strip malls as far as the eye can see, and expensive houses sitting like beached battleships in bare fields.
I seem to be seeing more yard signs and bumper stickers for Bush than for Kerry, which is typical of prosperous suburbs. Minnesota has traditionally been strongly Democratic--up here, the Democratic Party is known as the DFL, for Democratic-Farmer-Labor. It's gone Democrat for president every year since 1976, and it was the home state of the late senator Paul Wellstone. But it also elected Republican Norm Coleman to the Senate in 2002, days after the unfortunate death of Wellstone, and its current governor, Tim Pawlenty, is a Republican. And of course, voters here elected Jesse Ventura governor in 1998, and it’s a critical battleground for president this year.
The first presidential debate is today--a day we eagerly envisioned during the high Deaniac days of last fall, but it’s not going to be what we hoped for, mostly because our guy is on a book tour selling his memoir instead of standing on the stage in Florida. (The debate is at the University of Miami, which has reportedly been locked down since the candidates arrived yesterday. If so, it’s the first time the campus has been truly safe from the various felons on the football team.) There’s lots of handicapping available on the Internet this morning, and most of it will be more intelligent than my own, but the view from here is that the debate is Kerry’s to lose. Nobody expects anything from Bush but squinty blinking and the same platitudes he’s been mouthing for years. But Kerry’s carefully nuanced position on Iraq, in contrast to Bush’s straightforward “central front in the war on terror”--which is utterly stupid and wrong, but easy to grasp conceptually--is going to be trouble, just as I predicted months ago. Nevertheless, we hope for the best. We hope that debate moderator Jim Lehrer won’t help Bush out when he gets in trouble (which I seem to remember him doing against Gore four years ago), and we hope that Kerry will get enough licks in to make a difference in the race.
We all want Kerry to win, of course. But just in the last 24 hours we’ve seen a breathtaking rush of reasons why the reelection of Bush would open a Baskin-Robbins of disaster. Ashcroft’s declaration that the Justice Department will fight a New York court ruling that the Patriot Act is unconstitutional is one. "We believe the act to be completely consistent with the Constitution," he said. (Blogger sighs heavily, beats head against desk.) The act hasn’t caught one damn terrorist, it’s done profound damage to the Constitution and made suspects of us all, and yet like much else we’ve seen from the House of Bush, we must not tamper with it because that would let the terrorists win, and in fact what we need are greater police powers to keep Insensate Evil at bay. The House of Representatives’ passage of a bill erasing all gun-control laws in the District of Columbia is another. Think about the logic of that--DC has one of the highest murder rates in the country, and the Repugs think the solution is more guns. (The Senate won’t take up the bill, so it’s unlikely to become law, but that wasn’t the point of the vote yesterday. The point was to put pressure on rural Democrats to take a high-profile gun control vote a month before the election.)
And there’s more. Stories have been surfacing in the last few days about some of what Bush is planning for a second term. There’s reportedly a great deal of bustle around the Pentagon lately regarding invasion plans for Syria (although as we used to say on the playground, “You and what army?”). And during a campaign appearance the other day, Bush raised the idea of the flat tax.
Remember the flat tax? This was Steve Forbes’ pet idea during his two runs for president. It’s often pushed as a great act of simplification--wouldn’t it be nice not to have to do all that paperwork, yes it would, just send in a postcard with your check and go back to your shopping and TV. But as former Clinton economic advisor Laura Tyson told Air America Radio yesterday, the flat tax, when it was first devised, was created precisely to protect the wealthy. So yeah, it will cut down on paperwork, but it will also continue to shift more of the tax burden away from the richest Americans and onto working people. So far, the wealthiest Americans--the top one percent—have gotten as much tax relief as the next 80 percent of Americans combined, and under a second Bush term, there’s more on the way.
If Americans had any sort of class consciousness, Bush and his economic advisors would have been swinging from lampposts years ago. But they aren’t because we don’t--mostly because we cling to the belief that someday, we’re going to be rich, too. And for a lot of Americans, that’s proven to be true, sort of. We forget that there are a lot of people walking around who are the first members of their families to attend college--and they’re not as old as you think. Lots of people have jumped class barriers--hell, even me. Going backward to time immemorial, I come from a long line of farmers--and it’s a fairly big leap from being a rough-skinned son of toil to a fully citified writer blogging on a laptop. Nevertheless, while the opportunities this country provides us are certainly admirable, we’ve got to understand what they truly represent. What most of us are doing is ascending to higher rungs of the middle class, and we’re not going to make the top one percent unless we win the lottery. And that means most of us are going to bear the burdens the top one percent will escape thanks to Bush. As long as we confuse our own economic successes with the successes of the American upper crust, we’ll be tempted to vote in ways directly opposite our most basic economic interests.
If there’s good news--good being a relative term--in any of this economic nonsense, it’s Stein’s Law, first formulated by Nixon economic advisor Herb Stein: “Things that can’t go on forever don’t.” Thus the radical, irresponsible economic policies of Bush and the Repugs are going to come to grief eventually, and someday, we’ll look back and wonder how we could have been so damn stupid not to see how ridiculous they were. Trouble is, it will probably take a depression that makes the 1930s look like the 1990s to sufficiently clear our heads.
Yah, You Betcha: I am in Plymouth, Minnesota, this morning--a prosperous suburb southwest of Minneapolis. This town appears to have named some of its major streets after famous battles, such as Dunkirk and Vicksburg. (And since Dunkirk was a famous defeat, I suppose that means it’s possible that one day our children or grandchildren might live on Fallujah Lane or Najaf Boulevard.) On the way here, you go past the headquarters of some of America’s most famous corporations, like 3M in Maplewood and General Mills in Minneapolis, which sits at the corner of General Mills Boulevard and Betty Crocker Drive. And once you hit the suburbs, it’s strip malls as far as the eye can see, and expensive houses sitting like beached battleships in bare fields.
I seem to be seeing more yard signs and bumper stickers for Bush than for Kerry, which is typical of prosperous suburbs. Minnesota has traditionally been strongly Democratic--up here, the Democratic Party is known as the DFL, for Democratic-Farmer-Labor. It's gone Democrat for president every year since 1976, and it was the home state of the late senator Paul Wellstone. But it also elected Republican Norm Coleman to the Senate in 2002, days after the unfortunate death of Wellstone, and its current governor, Tim Pawlenty, is a Republican. And of course, voters here elected Jesse Ventura governor in 1998, and it’s a critical battleground for president this year.
