Gov. Christie, still unpopular in his home state

By Richard K. Barry

Just because I like to point to anything that counts as bad news for that pompous bully governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, I note a recent Public Policy Polling survey on how Christie would fair against Obama head-to-head in the state. The results were 56 percent for the president, 39 percent for the pompous bully.

It is true that Obama won New Jersey by 15 points in 2008, and the state hasn't gone Republican since 1988, as Daily Kos points out, but isn't Christie supposed to be a cut above?

His current approval rating? 43 percent approve of the job he's doing and 53 disapprove, so maybe not.

I know that a lot of people think Christie could win the White House for the GOP if he would only run, but if the guy can't even come close to carrying his own state, that might be an overly optimistic assessment.

For the record, Obama beats all comers in "The Garden State" with the following breakdown: Romney (53-39); Bachmann (55-35); Pawlenty (54-32); Cain (55-29); and Palin (59-33).

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Space Camp and The Real Deal

     The Washington Post reports on the shifted mission of Huntsville's Space Camp in light of this week's last shuttle launch.

     Funny how all of the GOP presidential candidates agree that there should be no federal funding for human space flight, but the GOP generally is opposed to eliminating or cutting the tax breaks for the companies that build corporate jets.

     INNER Space GOOD! OUTER space BAD!

     And incument Democrat Barack Obama is being criticised by none other than Neil Armstrong (and two other moon mission commanders)---who barely ever says a word about anything---in a USA Today editorial. They say Obama is to blame for a NASA that is in disarray.

     The last shuttle mission launches on Friday morning.

     Live long and prosper.

     But keep your feet planted on Mother Earth.

Would someone please tell Chris Matthews what American exceptionalism means?

By Richard K. Barry

We hear a lot from the right about American exceptionalism, which they seem to think means that America is and Americans are simply better by virtue of identity. Failing to comprehend the genesis of the term they seem to understand it as a matter of common language as in, "Hey, America sure is exceptional."

I don't really care to get into a long treatise on why that is a facile understanding of the term. But in short, it's really an idea used by social and political philosophers to explain aspects of America's development as a nation that are different than, say, aspects of the development of European states. It doesn't mean better, it mean different.

Professor Louis Hartz, for example, emphasized the lack of a feudal tradition in America. He argued that this helped to explain the lack of significant left/socialist tendencies on the one hand and aristocratic tendencies on the other, which, it's been suggested, helps to explain the origins of a sort of centrist, liberal consensus in America.

Like I said, I'm not trying to get into it, only to say that it's a theory, or a set of theories, that explains difference. I'm not denying, however, that some writers have interpreted the term to suggest superiority, only that it would be giving too much credit to the current mis-users of "American exceptionalism" to believe that this is the origin of their interpretation.

The problem for me is when progressives start throwing the idea around. It's like they feel they have to do conservatives one better by agreeing that great things are only possible in the USA and other countries are second best by the simple fact of not being America.

You may have seen Chris Matthews on MSNBC doing a little segment about how Obama once commented that his story would not be possible in any other country and that America was exceptional in this way.

I can only say that for anyone who believes this, you really should get out more.

America has had more than its fair share of challenges as a leader in securing racial equality for its people and Obama's rise to the presidency should be seen as the extraordinary event we all know it to be, not an opportunity for blind self-congratulations. Obama was and is swimming against the current, not with it.

Anyway, if you haven't seen the clip to which I refer, here it is:

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)

Organizing to beat Republicans, one freshman at a time

By Richard K. Barry

One of my favourite political stories of the year thus far has been about the letter that House GOP freshmen sent to President Obama encouraging him to reject "playing politics with key issues facing the country." This was code language for asking that the President not draw attention to the fact that Paul Ryan's budget plan will destroy Medicare as we know it -- that he not "use it" against Republicans in a partisan way.

The fact is that House Republicans voted almost unanimously last month in favour of the Ryan budget that would reform entitlement programs, including creating a voucher program for Medicare recipients to buy private insurance. As we know, all hell broke loose from there. Public opinion polls are showing that most Americans are not impressed with this approach to the point that Democrats may steal a special election in New York's 26th Congressional District at the end of the month, an otherwise strong Republican seat, mostly on the strength of voter concerns about this proposed 'restructuring' of Medicare.

In other words, House GOP freshmen, many of whom owe their seats to wild misrepresentations of Obama's own health care plan, are begging the president not to make partisan hay out of the precise and undisputed meaning of this unpopular Republican plan.

Are they out of their fucking minds?

I must say that I was pleased to see that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been targeting Republican members of Congress, who are back in their home districts this week, on this very point.

According to The New York Times, the Committee:

has 20 Republican-held Congressional districts in its sights this week, hitting voters with automated phone calls denouncing the House Republican plan to revamp the nation's Medicare program and arming those who want with signs to protest at town hall meetings across the country. 

A web site sponsored by the campaign committee lists town hall meetings scheduled to be held by Republicans, mostly freshman, during the week. The group encourages voters to show up -- as many did during the Easter recess -- to protest or ask pointed questions of the members about their plan for Medicare, which would convert the program into one that subsidizes future retirees in private insurance plans.

This is in fact my favourite kind of politics -- organizing people to show up and ask questions of the other side in a good-faith exercise intended to elicit only the truth. If forcing new Republican members of Congress to speak the truth to their own constituents on their plans for Medicare reform is what this new class thinks of as "playing politics," I am at a loss for words.

Good on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. More of this please.

(By the way, the picture above is of newly-elected Republican Representative Nan Hayworth from NY-19, the district where I was born and raised. Democrat John Hall lost the seat to Hayworth in November. I'd like to get it back.)

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Let us again speak of the limits of civility in political discourse

By R.K. Barry

Yesterday Paul Krugman wrote about the hurt feelings the Republican leadership claimed upon listening to President Obama's speech on the economy last week. They seemed not to like, as Krugman points out, Obama's assertion that the Paul Ryan plan is cruel nonsense and should be exposed as such.

It was richly ironic to be reading about Republican hurt feelings on a day when right-wingers across the country were gathering to listen to the likes of Donald Trump, Michele Bachman and Sarah Palin, who have drawn serious attention to themselves by calling our president all manner of nasty names like "socialist, "the guy who wants to off grandma," and the "worst president ever," etc., etc.

In that context, having Republicans claim insult was a little odd.

Don't get me wrong. Civility has its place but not, perhaps, so much in the current context in which, as Krugman writes, "the two parties have both utterly different goals and utterly different views about how the world works."

Krugman continues:

It’s not nice to say this (but the truth is rarely nice): whatever they may say, Republicans are not concerned, above all, about the deficit. In fact, it’s not clear that they care about the deficit at all; they’re trying to use deficit concerns to push through their goal of dismantling the Great Society and if possible the New Deal; they have stated explicitly that they want to reduce taxes on high incomes to pre-New-Deal levels. And it’s an article of faith on their part that low taxes have magical effects on the economy.

Obama and Democrats generally tend to believe that major social programs are worth protecting, having extended them with health care reform. They tend to accept the fact, and the research to support it, that tax cuts for the wealthy are not the cure-all for what ails us.

So, the battle lines seem to be drawn. If civility means that we sit around politely chatting while Republicans tell lies about their true intentions, I want no part of it. While I hope we would all reject violence, I see no downside to taking to the streets to scream at the top of our lungs if necessary that we will not calmly debate the contours of a new economic regime that sees the rich get richer and the rest of us fight over the scraps.

Civility is all too often code language for passivity - and passivity always works in the interest of those who already have the power.

When it has been necessary to stand up for justice, fairness and equality, Americans have frequently found the strength to do so, whether for civil rights, women's right, gay rights or to oppose the war in Vietnam. In each instance, those who were being challenged could be heard bemoaning the lack of civility shown by protestors. You could always count on that.

The reshaping of our society proposed by Republican lawmakers and activists certainly requires the kind of push-back we saw in these earlier movements. If it doesn't happen in a way that is civil enough for them, I don't really care.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost)

The President's Speech

It would have been difficult, regardless of your politics, to hear President Obama's speech last night without being moved. Perhaps the most moving part came during his disclosure that Congresswoman Giffords had opened her eyes that afternoon....and his statement about the nine year old student council president who died:

I want to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. All of us -- we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations.

     Yet, I have to say I  found the frequent cheering somewhat odd. This wasn't a pep rally, or a political campaign event. It was, at least in part, a memorial for the six people who did not survive.



[UPDATE: Watch a CBS-News report on the "cheering" aspect of the event.]