Channel surfing at the White House

I went to the White House Friday week for a full day listening and talking back to top White House officials with about 100 Democratic activists and organizers from California, organized by the Courage Campaign.
The White House folks seemed to listen hard. Gathered in an auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, we heard from top staff including chief of staff Bill Daley, senior advisors David Plouffe and Valerie Jarrett, EPA chief Lisa Jackson, and Labor secretary Hilda Solis, along with other staff on specific issues. They asked us not to offer specific quotes from people, but they didn't offer up any juicy secrets or stray from the administration talking points we've all heard before.
They got an earful of what they have certainly heard before as well: like many others across the country, we wanted the president to fight harder for bolder programs to reduce unemployment and address the foreclosure crisis.
There were a series of breakout sessions on a variety of issues: immigration, lesbian and gay rights, labor and environment. But the concerns were the same. Would the president fight harder? When would he compromise and how much would he give away? I was disappointed that the White House didn't offer a breakout session on a especially critical issue for Californians: the foreclosure crisis.
According to the White House, President Obama doesn't get credit for how he hard he has fought against tough foes and and an economic crisis he didn't create. They cited his recent, trip to the bridge between Rep. John Boehner's and Sen. Mitch McConnell's districts where he channeled former president Ronald Reagan, exhorting the Republican leaders, "Help us repair this bridge."
I keep wishing President Obama would channel FDR, who thought that government could actually work with people to solve problems, instead of Reagan, who preached that government was itself the problem, and that it should be starved, shrunk and gotten out of the way.
Channeling one of Reagan's pithy phrases might be OK, but we'll never reduce unemployment right now using the Gipper's approach.
For that, we'll need the fearless, positive, can-do approach of FDR, who knew that government could help when the private sector wouldn't. He never achieved his goal, according to William Leuchtenberg, in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. That was to put ALL unemployed Americans in the Depression to work. His programs only created jobs about a third of them, but not for lack of trying.
Not all of his program was so simple, but some of it was. For example, he gave unemployed white-collar workers jobs teaching people to read.
While he didn't face the monolithic, intransigent opposition President Obama faces in Congress, he offered a bold and pragmatic vision that included vilifying the bankers whose wild speculation threw the country into Depression, and acknowledging that the country was a in a deep crisis that would require dramatic, sustained government action.
Measuring Obama's Jobs Act by the standard of what FDR was able to accomplish, you can see how his proposal falls short. If Republicans passed it whole, which is unlikely, it would create at most 1.9 million jobs, providing work for nowhere near one-third of the nation's unemployed.
Obama's plan appears to be motivated by fear - fear of failure, fear of Republican rejection, fear of alienating independent voters, when what we need is audacity.
It does not seem to be motivate by an audacious vision of government action that would actually get the country back to work.

The jobs plan still might not pass, but what people are hungry for, more than bipartisanship, is that audacious vision that Obama promised and FDR delivered.
Has President Obama been so busy channeling Reagan that he forgot what FDR said about fear?
Mr. President, tune in to the right channel!

Martin Column / Outrage / Uncategorized - 09/26/2011

Going to the White House

I've been a politics geek since I was about 10 years old and I went from reading the sports page of the Detroit News to the front page. I've been reading about it, arguing about it, covering it on some level as a journalist, and some times writing about it as an advocate, ever since.
So getting invited to the White House as part of a delegation of California activists, organizers and bloggers, organized by the Courage Campaign, is a big deal. A lot of us have expressed frustration with the Obama administration for it’s unwillingness to focus on jobs and housing in a more effective way, for its embrace of the austerity agenda, and its failure to hold bankers accountable in any meaningful way for the financial collapse that the whole country is still suffering from.
I was ambivalent about going at first, because this administration has sometimes seemed so determined not to get to it, to prize elusive bipartisanship over a strong fight for what’s right, for its cluelessness about the depth of the unemployment and housing crisis that continues to cause so much misery across the country.
That cluelessness was on display again in the past few days, when the president proclaimed no deficit deal would be fair without “shared sacrifice” that would require hedge fund managers to pay higher taxes while the government cut Medicaid. Does the president really believe that the sacrifice is equivalent – millionaires having to get by on a little less while people who are dependent on the government for health care get less care?
Even in planning our visit, the White House doesn’t seem to get it. We’ll have break-out sessions on education reform, the new health care law, lesbian gay transgender bisexual issues, the environment and labor – but no session on the foreclosure crisis and housing. The administration’s efforts in this area, so crucial to California’s economy, have been particularly lame. Whether or not the president’s staff wants to focus on it, I’m sure they will get an earful.
What I will suggest to the president’s people is that he’s vulnerable because he hasn’t done enough to reduce unemployment or to address the foreclosure crisis, and because too often he has accepted the Radical Republicans’ and the deficit hawks’ terms of the debate. When the president debates on those terms, he loses. We all lose.
Still, I don’t want to give up on the administration or the people who continue to put their faith in him. I’ll go in memory of my father, Irving Berg, who would be 90 this year. He saw great promise in Obama and wouldn’t allow frustration to cause me to give up on him, or fail to participate in some effort that might set Obama on a firmer course.
We meet with the president’s top staff on Friday all day. Any messages you want me to deliver?

Action / D.C. Disconnect / Foreclosures / Martin Column / Outrage / President Barack Obama - 09/22/2011

Warming up to the Deficit Commission

Back in 1894, Nobel Prize-winning writer Anatole France made an astute observation:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

If he was around today, he might update his observation like this:

“In their wisdom, the co-chairs of the deficit reduction commission suggest that the rich and the poor wait until they’re 69 years old to collect their full Social Security pensions and to live with reduced cost-of-living adjustments.”

He might also note that the co-chairs, one a former Republican senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, and the other former Democratic presidential chief of staff and Morgan Stanley board member Erskine Bowles, think it would be a good idea that both the rich and the poor learned to get with less help Medicare, give up their mortgage interest deduction and pay for admission to the Smithsonian Museum for the good of the country.

This is 21st century America’s contribution to the evolution of shared sacrifice. The rich will have to suffer cuts in their Social Security benefits right along with the poor in order to achieve the greater good of reducing the deficit.

Of course there’s good news: under the co-chairs’ proposal, neither rich nor poor will have tp pay additional taxes on the profits they make speculating on the economy.

Simpson and Bowles’ recommendations are being hailed in the upper reaches of the establishment. David Broder intones from his perch at the Washington Post that the proposals are like “a cold shower after a night of heavy drinking. It’s time to sober up.”

Meanwhile President Obama acknowledged he’s facing “tough choices.”

Translation: he would really, really like to help the middle-class and the less fortunate if only the other bad politicians (and the deficit commission he himself appointed, stacking it with members who have advocated cutting social security) would let him.

The deficit commission chair’s proposals are nothing more than a continuation of the bailout and the financial crisis policies started under the Bush administration and continued under the Obama administration, with the by now familiar cast of winners and losers. These proposals require the middle-class and less affluent to bear the burden of decades of disastrous policies, while those who benefited from those policies continue to avoid paying any costs for the consequences.

Simpson and Bowles are just the latest advocates waging a massive propaganda campaign in an attempt to convince people that Social Security is the main drag on the deficit. While the deficit is a serious problem, it’s not the fault of Social Security. And the deficit is not even the most serious problem facing our economy – it’s high unemployment and the foreclosure crisis. In their proposals, Simpson and Bowles don’t acknowledge that economic reality.

The full deficit commission issues its report in less than 2 weeks. Why not contact them here and let them know what you think? If they don’t want to stop peddling propaganda I know a couple of bridges where their reports could be put to good use, keeping away the cold.

Martin Column - 11/15/2010