POLITICS, THE NEW DISMAL SCIENCE
It has been a rather discouraging day, both in politics and policy.
The front page of our local paper prominently displayed the election predictions of Prof. Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, who projected that the Republicans are likely to capture 47 additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in the next Congress. Further, he said that the GOP may pick up 8 or 9 seats in the Senate. There has been a lot of speculation, including one from White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, about a GOP takeover of the House but today's story went on to point out that Sabato has a very good reputation for accuracy in predicting election outcomes. The numbers of Sabato's projects are depressing enough, but it gets even worse if you personalize these results and envision John Boehner (with his multiple shades of tan) as the next Speaker of the House. Also, even if Republicans don't win enough Senate seats to make Mitch McConnell Majority Leader, he will have strengthened his leverage immensely for control of the flow of legislation.
Add to this the likely fact that both the House and Senate will become significantly more conservative, thanks in part to Tea Party activism which has pushed even moderate Republicans further to the right. So, on what is a bad day for this blogger, politics had replaced economics as the dismal science. About the only good news is that the Tea Party and the Republican party in Delaware have gotten into a shootout over the choice of a candidate to fill the Senate seat formerly held by Vice President Joe Biden. The state party leaders are backing U.S. Representative Mike Castle while the Tea Party is behind Christine O'Donnell whom the GOP state party chairman has said "could not be elected as dog catcher." After the huge upset in the Senate primary in Alaska, one shouldn't bet against the chances of a "dog catcher" victory.
At the policy level, further efforts to deal with the very slow economic recovery and the high jobless rate seems to be rapidly shifting from Democratic-preferred spending solutions to tax cuts, the favorite playing field of Republicans. Gone also, despite fading rhetoric, seems to be any likelihood of increasing the tax rates of high income earners. It should be added, however, that there is now some murmuring about raising the $250,000 definition of high income for a married couple to $1 million. A very likely result seems to be that the "temporary" label of the tax cuts of President George W. Bush will be extended, at least until the outcome of the 2012 presidential election is known. If Sabato is correct, the only thing standing in the way of making the Bush cuts permanent is President Obama's veto power.
It is important to note that there may be other tax work to be done in this Congress, either when it returns for its regular session or in a post-election special session. Obama has been pressing for a tax cut package aimed primarily at small businesses, but GOP obstructionism in the Senate has stopped that proposal so far. Now the rumble seems to be of broader business tax cuts, meaning any tax cut package may add more breaks for big business. Obama said today (Sept.3) that he would be discussing a broader job-creation package next week, but not hinting whether "broader" means inclusion of a spending plan, an expanded tax-cut-only proposal, or a combination of both. In any case, it will be important to see how much trading off the White House and Democratic congressional leaders will have to do to squeeze anything through before the elections now just over two months away.
Maybe the news will get better tomorrow, or the next day . . . week . . . month, whenever.
Maybe President Obama needs better speech writers to bring back that ol' excitement factor to the midterm elections. An article about one of his writers, Adam Frankel,in today's LA Times notes this:
ReplyDelete"Now, with the president's approval rating plummeting, the White House faces mounting scrutiny and speechwriters aren't immune. A president who rose to office on the strength of his eloquence is facing criticism for delivering speeches that lack memorable turns of phrase — speeches that fail to inspire people to listen and act on what they hear.
"Frankel brushes off the critique. He describes an Obama speech as a reasoned argument that hangs together from start to finish. Points build on one another in logical sequence. Swap in a spicy phrase just to get a headline and the speech falls apart.
"'I once helped a political figure whose aide said to me that speeches should be sound bites slung together,' Frankel said. 'What I admire about Obama in terms of his rhetoric is his insistence on preserving the integrity of a speech as a speech. Not jamming in sound bites…if they don't work.'"
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-na-speechwriter-20100903,0,6521311.story
Boehner is more of a sound-bite kind of guy. Let's hope the sound bites don't win out over reasoned arguments but I won't hold my breath.
Read the Frankel story. He certainly has the pedigree for his job. If he is the writer for grievous events like the coal mine diaster, then they better keep him around for Nov. 3, because everything points to another disaster coming our way. Hate to be too much of a Cassandra about Democratic election prospects, but right now thinking in terms of a glass half empty may even be too optimistic. It's an interesting linkage between Kennedy and Obama speech writing because it seemed to me that Obama was trying not only to pattern his speech delivery after Kennedy, but also his body language.
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