November 18, 2004
Senate Bombast
1. John Kerry comes back to the Senate floor, with national attention like never before, and here's what he manages to say (in opposition to raising the national debt limit): "We have a fundamental responsibility to restore fiscal responsibility rather than merely voting again to raise the debt limit as if there is an endless credit card at the expense of the American people."
"Fundamental responsibility to restore fiscal responsibility"???
"Endless credit card at the expense of the American people"???
Who writes this guy's crap?
Oh, I forgot.
If you read further into the speech, you'll notice that he uses the phrase "birth tax" to describe the burden the national debt is imposing on the next generation, a smart Lakoffism that, to my knowledge, never made it into Kerry's campaign rhetoric.
2. Fritz Hollings gave his farewell speech yesterday, as he is stepping down from his longtime perch as Senator from South Carolina. Someone I know tells of a
Hollings staffer who described working for Hollings as being the ground crew trying to steer one of the huge balloon floats in the NYC Thanksgiving Macy's Day parade - you can do your best, but the wind will ultimately dictate the balloon's direction...
That said, Hollings did have some strong things to say about how life in the Senate has changed (fewer drunks and more women), especially in the way that money dominates everything. Here's what he said:
But the main culprit, the cancer on the body politic, is money: Money, money, money. When I ran 6 years ago, in 1998, I raised $8.5 million. That $8.5 million is $30,000 a week, every week, for 6 years. If you miss Christmas week, you miss New Years week, you are $100,000 in the hole and don't you think we don't know it and we start to work harder at raising money.
As a result, the Senate doesn't work on Mondays and Fridays. We have longer holidays. The policy committee is adjourned and we go over to the campaign building because you can't call for money in the office. So we go over to the building and call for money and obviously we only can give attention to that. We don't have time for each other. We don't have time for constituents, except for the givers. Somebody ought to tell the truth about that.
Unless and until we excise this cancer, the Congress and Government is going to languish alone because it has to be done.
When I helped write the Federal Election Campaign Practices Act in 1973, we said each Senator would be limited to so much per registered voter. That meant that Strom Thurmond and I were limited to $637,000. Fast forward 25 years, add in inflation, and give me $2.5 million. Quadruple it, $2.5 million but not $8.5 or $10 million that you have to spend because all your time is on the campaign and not the country. I can tell you right now we are in real, real trouble.
I worked with John McCain and Russell Feingold on the McCain-Feingold. I worked with Senator Biden on public finance. What really needs to be done, and I tried 20 years ago, is to put in a constitutional amendment that Congress is hereby empowered to regulate or control spending in Federal elections. Then we can go back to the 1973 act: So much per registered voter. When you are limited to $2.5 million, you have limited the campaign. You have limited the time of the campaign; you have limited the expenditures of the campaign. Then you have time for constituents. Then you have time for problems.
When I came here, Mike Mansfield would have a vote at 9 o'clock just about every Monday morning and we would work to Friday at 5 o'clock. We all stayed here on the weekends and we didn't have all of these long holidays we have now..
But if you want to limit campaigning and if you want to change -- as Abe Lincoln said -- disenthrall ourselves of the dogmas of the quiet past that are inadequate for the stormy present of money grubbing, then we have to think anew and act anew. We need to disenthrall ourselves from this money grubbing and go to work finally for the country instead of the campaign.
That is our situation. I have watched it. I have studied it. I have seen it. They don’t have me going to meetings. They have me going to the telephone and calling and calling, traveling all over the country for money. Money is a cancer on the body politic.
November 17, 2004
Think like a mountain
Here's a shot from the plane as I flew home from Portland last week, after leaving the Public Campaign staff retreat. Mt. Hood is in the foreground; Mt. Adams in the back. We had our meeting in a renovated log cabin more-or-less right in between the two mountains, on the top of the plateau overlooking the Columbia River valley.
November 14, 2004
Post-Election Delayed Dejection Rejection
Of all weeks to quit smoking...or rather, of all weeks for my blog to quit working!
Since I don't smoke you'll have to take that metaphorically.
But frustratingly for me, this blog has been on the fritz. I have been posting some of my thoughts on the election over at Personal Democracy Forum, a new site that I am proud to be nurturing along with Andrew Rasiej. But it's not a place for partisan rumination, more a place for pondering how technology is changing politics. (For the latter, I believe, as you'll see from reading my latest article in The Nation, called "The Rise of Open-Source Politics.")
That said, here are some quick thoughts, written as I rushed off for a weeklong Public Campaign staff retreat.
While it's true that you can't beat something with nothing, the presidential elections showed that you can't beat nothing with nothing, either.
Bush had nothing. So he ran hard (like a challenger) against Kerry, using Terror as his open weapon and gay marriage as his not-so-secret weapon. The Big Lie held--by 52-44 the final exit poll (the only one anybody should pay attention to) showed voters saw Iraq as part of the war on terror. And in 12 states, anti-gay marriage ballot questions (carefully cultivated by Rove) did the job of motivated the religious right base.
Against that, Kerry presented nothing. His vote for the war AND his failure to admit that that was a mistake made his Iraq critique ring hollow. He also failed to deliver a coherent message on the economy, Bush's biggest weakness and his strongest issue. In Ohio, 62% said the economy was not good, but they split 48-48 on who they would trust to deal with it. The anti-gay measure there passed 2-1, by the way.
See my friend Doug Ireland's blog for more along these lines. He had been predicting precisely this kind of debacle for about the last two years, forecasting clearly how the anti-gay initiatives would stir up the religious vote and pinpointing the many weaknesses in Kerry's hapless campaign. For more on those, be sure to pick up the post-election issue of Newsweek for a blow-by-blow.
The bottom line: claiming that we're descending into fascism is really quite facile, but explains nothing, and it's an insult both to the victims of real fascism and a way to reproduce the pattern of behaviors that got our side into this hole. It's time to admit that the Democratic party is in a real crisis, one that won't be solved by a restoration of the Clinton family. (Marc Cooper's dissection of Democratic self-denial is a must-read, in that vein.) Some folks understand that and have been trying in various ways to foster new initiatives and new thinking. It's critical that that continue.
Bonus link, cuz it made me laugh: David Weinberger's "Democratic Grief Advisory System."