After a lovely bowl of mini ziti a-la marinara and diced tomatoes I thoroughly annoyed my wife by dutifully watching the President’s State of the Union address, and the following Republican responses. So, since I invested all that time in front of the television, I will spend another block of time trying to make sense of it all.
I have never, truly enjoyed one of these things. I find them all inherently dishonest in a certain respect. American is always a great nation, we’re all working hard but need to work harder to get better, and the State of the Union is always strong, with room for improvement. There seems to be a little too much self-congratulation and not enough frank honesty about where we are and what we need to do. But, they are what they are, and once you accept that there is always going to be more cheer-leading than substance you can set that critique aside and examine the overall vision laid out by the speaker.
Overall I thought it was a good speech. The President clearly and concisely laid out his vision for the country during the upcoming election cycle. He advocated an emphasis on education, energy and infrastructure, with a pledge to tackle the tough issues of trimming popular government programs, reducing regulations and reforming the tax code. He spoke of reforms to create a leaner, more responsible government, a government worthy of being trusted to efficiently execute the responsibilities it is charged with. And, of course, made mention of significant administration achievements like trade agreements and nuclear arms reductions. He did not spend much time discussing the past, choosing instead to look ahead to the challenges of the near future, promising renewed educational competitiveness and 80% renewable energy reliance by 2035. But he also did something I haven’t heard a national Democratic political figure do in as long as I can remember. He noted, albeit subtly, that those low-skilled, good-paying industrial manufacturing jobs that have been lost over the past 30 years, are simply never coming back - despite the perpetual lamentations of many liberals and Democratic politicians to the contrary. We are no longer going to pay ten human beings to do the work of one robot, and the sooner we can put that notion behind us and focus on other ways to create jobs, the better off we’ll be.
I would have preferred a little more emphasis on debt reduction than the President provided. I know clean energy is one of his core values, but I think he might have been better served - both practically and politically - by reducing his focus on that and spending more time on deficits and spending. During the current political cycle, comprehensive energy reform is an impossible goal to accomplish. But some mix of tax reform and deficit reduction is certainly achievable. I don’t subscribe to the paranoia that this country is one sub-prime loan away from a collapse of Grecian or Irish proportions. Rhetoric of that sort is disingenuous and irresponsible, and does nothing but obstruct serious debate. There are myriad reasons why America is in vastly superior financial shape than most of its global competitors, all of which we have previously and will continue to explore in upcoming weeks. But persistently high debt to GDP ratios will cause trouble for the country down the road, and therefore must be deal with seriously before they become impossible to control without catastrophic consequences. Late last year the President’s Fiscal Commission released the findings of its year-long study into ways to bring the structural budget deficit under control. Their recommendations included reducing military and Medicare/Medicaid budgets significantly (around 20%) over the next ten years, raising the retirement age to 67, means-testing Social Security, eliminating federal subsidies of all types, allowing the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 to expire and reducing the marginal tax rates while broadening the tax base by eliminating tax deductions across the board. I think many of those were solid suggestions, provided to President Obama under the cover of a bi-partisan commission, and he would have done well to embrace as many of those recommendations as possible. Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan would not have been able to deliver such an eloquent reasonable-sounding argument for thrifty, limited government if the President had stolen his thunder beforehand.
Speaking of Paul Ryan, he certainly did himself and his party a favor by not Jindal-ing or Bachman-ing the official Republican response. By constraining his remarks to a single topic, speaking to the audience like we are adults and avoiding trivial things like “volcano monitoring,” Ryan easily came off as at least the second-most reasonable guy in the room. Agree with him or not, Ryan does have extensive and fairly serious ideas for decreasing the size and cost of government. However, he has, to this point, been able to get a grand total of zero of his Republican colleagues to sign on to any of them. They all seem far more interested in promoting a useless repeal of a needed reform to an industry they have never been interested in reforming until now and drafting legislation in opposition to abortion and marriage equality. So, while the President has a difficult task in regaining the trust of the Independent voters who elected him, Ryan’s task of marshaling Republican support for difficult, meaningful fiscal reform may be almost as difficult.
I’m not even going to dignify Michelle Bachman’s attempt at a Ross Perot / Glen Beck imitation with a response.
Last Thursday the New York Times published a poll in which respondents answered questions on how they would prefer to cut the deficit. Poll results were broken down into four categories; All, Republicans, Independents and Democrats. For almost every single question the deviation of Republicans and Democrats from the overall (“All” category) was the same, while the responses for Independents much more closely reflected the general response. On this issue - perhaps more than any other, the President needs to understand his audience. From now until November of 2012, the block of voters that matters most to him are the Independents. According to the latest Gallup survey, 28% of voters identify themselves as Republican, 28% as Democrat and 42% as Independent. Those 42% of Independent voters are the ones President Obama needs to reach in order to continue on to a second term. An examination of these poll results could help give him insight into how far Independents are willing to go on deficit reduction, and how they would prefer to see it accomplished. Some of the results might surprise him.
Two weekends ago, Jared Loughner strolled into a Tucson, Arizona Safeway, interrupted a town hall-style meeting being held there by U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and opened fire. By the time he ran out of bullets and was tackled by onlookers as he attempted to reload, he had injured 13 people and killed six, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl. Representative Giffords was shot through the head and remains in serious condition at an Arizona hospital.
In the aftermath of the shooting, everyone immediately and continually speculated on the motives of the shooter. Was he crazy? Was he a terrorist? Was he influenced by the overheated political rhetoric so frustratingly common in our day to day discourse? We still don’t know. Due to some YouTube postings and comments from former professors and classmates, most seem to have settled on the as yet unfounded conclusion that Loughner is mentally ill. I’m not sure why this is the case. He has no history of mental illness and has not been recently diagnosed as such. Strange internet postings and outbursts in class might make you weird, but they don’t necessarily qualify you as mentally ill.
Most of those not buying the mental illness angle, engaged in sometimes heated debate regarding the degree of responsibility the purveyors of poisonous political rhetoric should feel for Loughner's actions. Predictably, the political entertainers claimed their venom was merely entertainment, and they could not and should not be blamed for the actions of a crazy man, then accused their accusers of all the same things their accusers were accusing them of. Some even attempted a little revisionist history, claiming rifle scope targets placed over certain congressional districts on web pages during the mid-term election campaign were actually “surveyor’s sights”, having nothing to do with targeting certain members for defeat. All in an attempt to make the point that violent speech and imagery has absolutely no negative impact on society at large. I guess advertisers have been wasting their billions each year trying to influence the public with words and pictures. I wonder if any of them limit their kids’ access to rap music, Dead Space and R-rated movies?
I am also always fascinated by the inevitable gun control discussion that always follows incidents like this. Somebody always says that if there were tougher laws controlling access to firearms, the shooter would not have been able to purchase the legal gun and extended magazine he used in the shooting. That person is countered by someone who claims that if only citizens of insert-state-here were allowed to carry concealed weapons these incidents would never happen. Someone else brings up the fact that in countries like England, Japan and Canada were access to handguns is severely restricted, far fewer gun-related deaths take place than here in the United States. Which then causes another person to note that in countries were handguns are prolific and in some cases required to be carried, like Israel, gun-related crime and fatalities are also substantially less common than they are here. Things continue ad-infinitum in such a manner and nothing is ever resolved. I don’t know which argument is correct, and frankly I don’t care. I have never understood the intrinsically American fascination /fetish for shooting and killing things and I suspect I never will. But in this case, the facts are as follows. When it comes to firearms, Arizona is literally the wild wild West. You can own pretty much whatever you want, however many you want, and take them with you where ever you want to. If you don’t have a leg holster, shoulder holster, gun rack for the Suburban and one for the dog, you aren’t living up to your obligations as an Arizonan. Representative Giffords owned and was licensed to carry a Glock semi-automatic pistol on her person. I would have a difficult time believing that there aren’t more guns residing in Arizona than there are people. Yet, on the day of the shooting, after firing 33 uncontested rounds into a crowd of people, Jared Loughner was subdued while he tried to reload his weapon by first two, then four bystanders, with the help of a folding chair and some blind luck. Not by gun-wielding citizen sheriffs. If this incident could take place in the state with perhaps the least restrictive gun laws in the country, how could restricting access to firearms have possibly made this situation any worse?
Finally, due to an odd confluence of circumstances, next month’s Super Bowl between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers will likely be the first in history played without cheerleaders on either sideline. How can this be, you ask? How can a championship game, played at the home of the world famous Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders not feature any cheerleaders? It seems the Packers and Steelers are two of only six NFL teams (the Browns, Bears, Giants and Lions being the others) that do not have cheerleading squads. I guess it makes sense. Not much point to cheering snow pants and triple-layered down jackets now is there.
