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ViewPoints Steamboat Today • Thursday, September 10, 2009
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Less Spocky, more Rocky Maureen Dowd
THE NEW YORK TIMES
As soon as I started covering Barack Obama, I knew he was going to be trouble. Not Global Trouble, like W. and Dick Cheney. Or Hanky-Panky Trouble, like Bill Clinton and John Edwards. Or Tedious Trouble, like John Kerry and Michael Dukakis. He was going to be the kind of guy who whipped you up and then, when you were all excited, left Dowd you flat, and then, when you were deflated and exasperated and time was running out, ensorcelled you again with some sparkly fairy dust. It’s an irritating pattern. Not as puerile as Bill Clinton’s pattern of wasting time and plunging into personal chaos, or as horrifying as Dick Cheney’s routine of
bullying and cutting paper dolls out of the Constitution. After keeping his great powers of persuasion and elucidation under wraps all summer, the president at long last comes forward to explain his health care plan to an utterly confused and increasingly skeptical and wary public. He should have done this speech back in June and conjured up a better glossary. You can’t combat a scintillating term like “death panels” with a somnambulant one like “public option.” President Obama is so wrapped up in his desire to be a different, more conciliatory, beer-summit kind of leader, he ignores some verities. Sometimes, when you’ve got the mojo, you have to keep your foot on your opponent’s neck. When you’re trying to get a Sisyphean agenda passed, it’s good if people in the way — including rebellious elements in your own party — fear you. Civil discourse is fine, but when the
other side is fighting dirty, you should get angry. Don’t let the bully kick sand in your face. The White House should have impaled death panel malarkey as soon as it came up. By the time the president got feisty in a speech on Monday, the inmates had taken over cable TV, much like the spooky spirits swarming up over Bald Mountain in “Fantasia.” Even Steve Hildebrand, the strategist who helped shape Obama’s historic win in the Iowa caucuses, complains that his former hero “needs to be more bold in his leadership.” Disenchanted at Obama’s disengaged approach on health care and gay rights, Hildebrand told Politico’s Ben Smith that he was “losing patience.” It was one thing for Obama to delegate freely when he was on the Harvard Law Review, but it’s madness to go play golf and delegate freely to Congress, letting Nancy Pelosi make your case. After See Dowd, page 9
Our 1-party democracy Thomas Friedman THE NEW YORK TIMES
Watching the health care and climate/ energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it also can have Friedman great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries,
MALLARD FILLMORE
nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down. Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats really are playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Barack Obama to fail. Such a waste. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions. Look at the climate/energy bill that came out of the House. Its sponsors had to work twice as hard to produce this
breakthrough cap-and-trade legislation. Why? Because with basically no GOP representatives willing to vote for any price on carbon that would stimulate investments in clean energy and energy efficiency, the sponsors had to rely entirely on Democrats — and that meant paying off coal-state and agriculture Democrats with pork. Thank goodness, it still is a bill worth passing. But it could have been much better — and can be in the Senate. Just give me eight to 10 Republicans ready to impose some price on carbon, and they can be leveraged against Democrats who want to water down the bill. The only way for us to match them is by legislating a rising carbon price along with efficiency and renewable standards that will stimulate massive private investment in clean-tech. Hard to do with a one-party democracy. The same is true with health care. “The See Friedman, page 9 Bruce Tinsley
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