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To Democrats Abroad
29 August 2010
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON
To Democrats Abroad
29 August 2010
Tom Fina
Executive Director Emeritus
Unless there is a sharp turn-around, the November elections will be decided not by Democrats, Republicans or Independents but by Irrationals.
Voters are swept up in a rolling wave of dissatisfaction - part justified and part aroused by false perceptions both vigorously trumpeted by Republicans and others on the right who aim to roll back the reforms pushed through by Obama and his Democratic majority. The right is joined in its dissatisfaction with the Obama Administration by the left which says that Obama has not been bold enough.
The combination of an angry right and an angry left threatens the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress and the public policy changes on which Obama campaigned and for which he was elected.
Voters are justified in their frustration by the painfully slow economic recovery with its attendant unemployment and home foreclosures. Every poll shows that economic well-being is the prime voter concern. Yet, many who are angry at unemployment are also opposed to the pump priming necessary to make up for lost consumer demand . They are spooked by rightist screams conjuring up the deficit bogeyman . Only the irrational would vote for Republicans who fought against stimulus spending and unemployment insurance!
The sense that the United States is helpless was further inflated by the endless BP oil eruption with hourly cries of anguish and anger from those who were losing their livelihood and the political leaders competing to blame Obama and Washington bureaucrats for not doing more. If BP and Washington were responsible for causing the disaster, Obama was again to blame for ordering a moratorium in deep sea drilling to avoid another disaster!
But, voters are also justified in their frustration about the continued casualties and bleak outlook in Afghanistan, the perception that despite the billions of dollars given the Government of Pakistan to fight the Taliban, it is protecting it. Nor, is there any confidence in the Afghan Government which is failing its own people as well as the United States and other countries that are fighting the Taliban. And, while Obama has removed combat troops from Iraq ahead of schedule, the prolonged failure of the Iraqi parties to form a functioning government adds to public despair that we have just been spinning our wheels.
The focus on Muslims, as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere who are killing Americans and who perpetrated the attacks on 9/11, has become an easily exploited political weapon to use against Obama.
The claim that Obama is a Muslim and not born in the United States is perhaps the most insidious attack on him and his policies. If the most startling poll news in July was the drop in the President's approval ratings to 40%, its equal was the August 19 Pew poll about his religion.
Even in October 2008, only 51% said he was a Christian and 12% said he was a Muslim. By this August, only 34% said he was a Christian and 18% claimed that he was Muslim. Taken by political classification, 34% of Republicans and 30% of those who disapprove of his policies said he was a Muslim.
But that lie is also believed by many Democrats: in March 2009 more than half of Democrats said he was a Christian (55%). By this August, only 46% said so!
This deception is largely fueled by the Republican and Tea Party right. Rush Limbaugh on Fox News refers to the President as "imam Obama". The Rev Frank Graham claims that Obama was "born a Muslim because religious seed passed on from his father." Fox commentator Glen Back claims Obama is a racist who hates whites.
Nothing has so served their campaign as the exploitation of the plans to build an Islamic cultural center in Manhattan two blocks from ground zero. The plan was reported in the NYT on December 2 last year. No one paid any attention. Until the Murdoch media machine exploded the issue in May of this year. Three months later opposition to building the center has become an anti-Muslim rallying cry from sea to shining sea. It morphs the imaginary mosque into the imaginary imam Barak Obama. This hysteria mirrors the Red Scare of the 1920's and the McCarthy witch-hunt for Communists in the 1950's. It is hard to imagine a greater propaganda gift to our Muslim terrorist enemies and a nastier blow to our efforts to win public support in Afghanistan and Pakistan than this anti-Muslim uproar. It may win Republican votes in November but at a terrible price for the nation.
These real and imaginary issues over-shadow the historic achievements of the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congressional majority in the face of absolute Republican obstructionism. The front page achievements like healthcare and Wall Street reform, averting a national depression, saving the auto industry and beginning a revolution in public education are only part of the changes that are of direct benefit to the public. Often the stories are buried on the inside pages of even the great press. But there is a continuing stream of beneficial actions: expanded regulation of tobacco, of food safety, of credit card abuses, quick approval of a new contraceptive, prohibition of home mortgage abuses, enforcement of voter registration at welfare and food stamp offices, cracking down on failure to pay overtime to health care employees, expansion of Federal stem cell funding, facilitating discriminatory pay recovery (Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act), increasing auto gas mileage requirements, tightening industrial pollution standards, expanding broadband service to rural areas, funding high speed passenger rail services, starting to end "Don't ask, don't tell", ending use of torture, negotiating a new START treaty with Russia, extending unemployment insurance payments, reversing Reagan/Bush bans on funding overseas family planning, reforming Pentagon contracting practices, beginning to cut Pentagon budget and jobs - and more.
Despite late polling showing that 49% of likely voters both disapprove of the President and favor the Republican candidate in a generic ballot, the outcome in November is far from certain.
Republicans have serious internal problems. In seven state primaries the anti-Republican establishment candidate has won. The national and local Republican organizations opposed these right wing candidates because they are too extreme. Their selection improves Democratic chances. And, just how the Tea Party, Palin and Glen Beck's call for a right wing "religious rebirth", (as he claims to be the real heir to the Martin Luther King civil rights movement), will play out, remains to be seen. So does the very vocal Republican hostility to Hispanic immigrants and to Muslims. Will these right wing irrationalists deliver winning votes to Republican candidates or will they scare the bejesus out of moderate Republicans, Independents and diffident Democrats to defeat them?
In the long run these Republican positions in total opposition to the Obama Administration and in support of right wing racial and religious intolerance will be costly. But, the November Congressional elections are short run and Republican leaders, like Faust, are willing to sell their souls for the short run.
Obama will make his second Oval Office address on August 31. It could be a pivotal statement about both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and about his economic policy. Both issues cry for bold leadership that could influence the November outcome.
Overseas absentee voters, who are less given to irrationality, could tip the balance in many close races if they will register and vote as massively as they did in 2008.
Thomas W. Fina
Executive Director Emeritus
Democrats Abroad
Comments: demsabrd@gmail.com
19 June 2009
To Democrats Abroad
19 June2009
Tom Fina
Executive Director Emeritus
If you are one of the readers of the Letter from Washington who has had difficulty communicating with your elected representatives in Washington, I suggest this procedure.
1. Go to WWW.Congress.org
2. On the top line enter the postal code (zip code) where you are registered as an absentee voter and click on "GO".
3. The next screen will list all of your elected representatives. Click on the name of the person with whom you wish to communicate.
4. Click on "Contact" on the next screen. This will provide the mailing address, the fax and telephone number. It will also allow you to post your message on the member's web page.
5. The most effective way to communicate is to telephone to the Washington office. Ask to speak with the staff member who is following the issue you are calling about. Tell that person that you are a voter in the member's district. Say what you would like the member to be told by the staff. Be polite.
6. Next best is fax. Include the same information about your voting residence and your recommendation to the member.
7. Next best is e-mail through the member's web page. Again, be sure to enter the postal code where you are registered to vote.
8. Least satisfactory is postal mail because of the elaborate and slow screening of all letter mail since the anthrax attacks on Congress several years ago.
Let me know if you have problems at demsabrd@... .
Thomas W. Fina
Executive Director Emeritus
Democrats Abroad
17 June 2009
To Democrats Abroad
17 June 2009
Tom Fina
Executive Director Emeritus
Obama has more balls in the air than the jugglers at the Cirque dâ€TMHiver. As they flash by, here are some you may have recognized: economic stimulus and job recovery, reviving the banking system, reforming financial regulation, coping with foreclosures, getting Chrysler and GM out of the ditch, guessing what is happening in North Korea, pushing Benjamin Netanyahu to negotiate seriously, getting our prisoners out of Guantanamo, calibrating his reaction to the Iran election, satisfying disappointed gays and lesbians, getting a new justice to the Supreme Court confirmed - oh, and taking his wife to the theater in New York and his family on a hurried tour de Paris.
And, that omits the hot debate in Congress about his core campaign aims: transformational legislation now coming to a boil.
By his 150th day in office, Obama emerges as the most impressive ring master since FDR whose legislative and executive activism has no match since the New Deal. His skillful, informed, thought-through and pragmatic approach is giving as much attention to foreign as to domestic issues. And, so far, he has not dropped a ball. But, his opponents hope to knock him off balance with a major defeat on health care.
As the July 4 Congressional recess approaches, the committees having jurisdiction in both houses are proposing legislation that Obama promised on health care, energy and financial reform while education legislation is moving more slowly.
Health care continues as the first priority and the President is now in the thick of the campaign and negotiations to get the legislation he wants to his desk to sign.
There are two Senate Committees with jurisdiction: in Health, Labor, Education & Pensions ((Kennedy/Dodd) and Finance (Baucus). Each has a draft bill about ready. The three House committees: Ways and Means, ( Rangel), Energy & Commerce (Waxman) and Education & Labor (Miller) have released a Tri-Committee outline. Some of this was to be made public this week but differences are hard to reconcile - particularly when so many stakeholders are pushing to be taken care of and the Republicans are trying to derail the process without leaving finger prints on a health care reform corpse.
The basic issue is money while the arguments designed to conceal this reality are numerous and constantly being invented - or re-invented.
The major stakeholders are hospitals, pharmaceutical and medical device companies, doctors, employers, employees and government itself.
The Obama Administration has justified its demand for a comprehensive health care overhaul on the grounds that the present system is driving the mounting federal deficit which will only worsen without reform. It, therefore, proposes a number of changes that will cost some of the stakeholders money. That is the basic objection of hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical and medical device makers. They justify their opposition to the proposed reforms as depriving patients of choice, of Washington bureaucrats dictating to doctors, of taking over the medical system, of imposing rationing on patients and depriving them of some treatments, or adding to the federal deficit, socializing medicine or "Europeanizing" our health care system.
Whatever their justification for opposition, it boils down to who is going to lose existing financial advantage.
Congress is the biggest stakeholder with competition between reformers who want to assure health care to all Americans and deficit hawks who are more worried about how to reduce the federal deficit. There is support in Congress to help cover the costs by taxing some part of the presently tax exempt health care provided by employers - the biggest single tax exemption in the IRS code. Trade unions and employers are against this approach which McCain proposed during the campaign and which Obama opposed. But, Obama has implied that if the Congress forces it on him, he will acquiesce.
At this hour, the delay in getting a fully fleshed out bill on the floor for debate in either house is last-minute tinkering to make the numbers more palatable to conservative Democrats and potential Republican supporters.
The President has begun to play an aggressive role as the detailed texts are being hammered out. On June 2, he reiterated his position on the content of the legislation in a letter to both Senate committees. Among his fundamental requirements is the inclusion of a public insurance option to compete with private insurers, that there must be a measurement of treatment effectiveness and that the system be deficit neutral - it must not add to the deficit. He also endorsed increasing the power of the Republican created Medicare Payments Advisory Commission (MedPAC) to establish payment scales subject only to a Congressional veto - a system like the military base closing system which helps to insulate objective decision making from political pressures.
Four days later, Organizing for America, the former Obama campaign machine now grafted on to the DNC, began a 50 state campaign to support the Presidentâ€TMs proposals. On June 11, Obama went to the public with a campaign style speech in Green Bay WI plugging his concepts. On the same day, the AMA, one of the leaders of the defeat of the Clinton health care legislation, told the Senate Finance Committee that it opposed a public insurance option. In his weekly radio and Internet address on June 12, Obama continued his campaign for prompt Congressional action on health care reform and reiterated his insistence on a public insurance option. And then, on June 15, he went to Chicago to take his case directly to the AMA.
The AMA speech was vintage Obama. He told them both what they wanted to hear and what they did not want to hear. He got cheers and boos. He pleased them by recognizing that malpractice suits were a real problem that needed to be addressed (cheers) but not with a cap on malpractice awards-an AMA and Republican article of faith (boos) . He told them that a public insurance option was to their benefit and he argued that his reforms would let them escape from being bean counters and paper pushers so that they could practice healing. In an hour long presentation he ran through the entire health care case from the need to stop spiraling health care costs to improving treatment outcomes. No one could doubt that he had a complete command of the issues nor that he was unfamiliar with the concerns of stakeholders.
The US Chambers of Commerce went public on June 16 with its uncompromising rejection of nearly every central feature of the proposed reform. It opposed making employers provide insurance or contribute to an insurance fund; it rejected an agency to measure medical outcomes and a public insurance option as well as rejecting subsidies for low income families, inter alia. And, it announced a $100 million campaign to have its way.
We are approaching the moment of truth. The opponents are now drawing their guns. The Democratic leadership in both houses is committed to delivering a health care bill to the President and they have the votes to do so after the usual last minute compromises. And, it is during this frantic, behind the scenes bargaining that the Obama White House, heavily staffed with officials drawn from the Congress, will lean on anyone in the way to get a reform package that Obama will be able to claim as fulfillment of his prime campaign pledge.
He will get a better bill to sign if his supporters let their senators and representatives know that they back the President. 30
Comments: demsabrd@...
Thomas W. Fina
Executive Director Emeritus
Democrats Abroad
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