Kemstone's Journal

America, meet Barack Obama’s new chief of staff Bill Daley:

Who is Bill Daley? Well, let’s just say if you liked Rahm Emanuel, you’ll love Bill Daley. Not only does he have a background in Chicago politics (he’s the current mayor’s brother), but he’s also got ties to Wall Street as well, having served as the Midwest chairman of JPMorgan Chase. And just like Rahm, he’s bought into the widespread misperception that the country is actually significantly further to the right than it actually is.

We all know how Rahm Emanuel pushed the president to pass any kind of Wall Street reform he could get, regardless of how strong it was. And we know he had the same attitude regarding health care reform: make deals with pharmaceutical companies and private health insurers that will increase the bill’s chance of passing, no matter how much these concessions weaken it. If you were thinking that a new chief of staff would bring a different kind of advice to the president’s ear, think again.

Regarding health care reform, Bill Daley told the New York Times:

They miscalculated on health care. The election of ’08 sent a message that after 30 years of center-right governing, we had moved to center left — not left.

Apparently he thinks the watered-down health care reform legislation went too far. He believes that when the American people voted for Change, what they really wanted was for things to stay more or less the same.

There are plenty of people who still believe that this is a “center-right” country and that liberals and progressives are just a small minority. After all, the media repeatedly and relentlessly trumpets this Gallup poll showing that when asked to describe their political ideology, 40% of Americans self-identify as conservative, 35% as moderate, and only 20% as liberal. Never mind that this poll only asks people how they self-identify and doesn’t ask for their actual opinions on a single actual issue—because more people are comfortable calling themselves “conservative” than calling themselves “liberal” (I wonder if decades of right-wing talk-radio might have anything to do with that?) they consider it an irrefutable fact that most Americans are not liberal, and therefore that most Americans are opposed to things like government-run health insurance, strict Wall Street reform, and raising taxes on the rich. Most Americans, because they call themselves “conservative” must therefore believe that fixing the deficit is the most pressing issue of our time, and that this must be done through spending cuts and under no circumstances with increased taxes for the rich.

As a public service, let me help to bust this myth for you once and for all. When you’re arguing with conservatives who say that you should accept center-right policies from your Democratic president because most Americans don’t agree with you (or when you’re arguing with progressives who say that you should accept center-right policies from your Democratic president because most Americans don’t agree with us), you can tell them that they are simply mistaken.

When you go issue-by-issue, the majority of Americans support the more liberal position on almost every single question ranging from foreign policy to gay rights, as this superb study by Media Matters proves.

When it comes to Wall Street reform, an ABC News/Washington Post poll taken in April 2010 indicated that 65% of Americans wanted reform to be tougher, not weaker.

When it comes to health care, poll after poll consistently showed widespread support for the public option (i.e. “government-run” health insurance), including this New York Times/CBS poll taken in June of 2009 in which a whopping 72 percent of respondents said they were in favor. If Bill Daley thinks most Americans believe the health care bill went too far, he is just plain wrong.

And another great poll just came out this week, and it’s one I hope did not go un-noticed by Bill Daley and the rest of the folks at the White House: A 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll asked people what the first step they would take to balance the budget would be. 4% said cut Medicare. 20% said cut defense spending. But an overwhelming 61% said they would raise taxes on the wealthy!

Center-right country indeed.

Incidentally, only 3% of respondents said they would balance the budget by cutting Social Security, but that appears to be the course of action our “representatives” in Washington are going to take. But even though nearly two-thirds of Americans would rather raise taxes on the rich, that won’t even be considered.

Since he took office, the president has been surrounded by political advisors telling him to move to the right, to compromise on the liberal agenda because liberals don’t really matter. They’ve been telling him that most of the country is to the right of the political center.

But this is simply not true. Washington is significantly to the right of the rest of America, which is significantly to the left of the political center. President Obama doesn’t seem to understand that. And sadly, his new chief of staff Bill Daley is not going to be the one to tell him.

I can’t tell you how many columns and blog entries I’ve read about the problems of the Obama administration and why we’re not getting the Change he said he would deliver, but the one I read on the Huffington Post yesterday by Steven G. Brant really stood out as one of the most all-encompassing and insightful.

It’s a bit lengthy for an online column but if you have 10-15 minutes to spare I’d highly recommend reading the entire essay.

The piece is essentially about the mind-set within the White House today, which became visible last week when Robert Gibbs insulted the “professional left”, basically saying that they want too much change and should be happy with what they get. Weber outlines the major problems facing the country, explains that their extraordinary magnitude requires far more than what is being done to address them, and asserts that the current media environment stands in the way of real progress.

With that set of problems and in that kind of media environment, what I see is an Obama Administration devoted to making things look and sound good rather than actually making them good.

The biggest danger of this kind of thinking (of, essentially, believing your own PR) is that you stop being willing to learn anything new that doesn’t fit your existing mindset. You take in new data that agrees with your mental model and eliminate the rest.

The problem in the Obama White House is that he’s surrounded himself with Washington insiders and establishment folks. Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, et al are not progressives and are not interested in implementing the kinds of real, fundamental changes we need. Obama himself may be a liberal at heart but he hasn’t been governing like a liberal, and the contempt that those in his inner circle have openly showed for liberals may have rubbed off on Obama.

And he also doesn’t seem to realize that what would have finished the job of healing the nation would have been to truly institute the course correction the American people knew was needed when they elected him. That would have been the Change that We Believed We Were Going To Get… change that produced real results. Attempting to negotiate with Republicans and failing time after time didn’t make anyone feel better, except those who want to keep the nation divided for purely political reasons.

Weber offers this excellent analogy for the current situation:

Put in more graphic terms, America is a patient that was wheeled into the Emergency Room in January of 2009, desperately in need of a team of skilled doctors to save its life. America’s life’s blood – a true accounting of its condition and required remedies – had been draining away at least since President Bush convinced the country to attack Iraq by using the 9/11 attack as justification for doing so.

I’d say that the bleeding began long before Bush, but it’s still an apt metaphor. The people who say we should just accept slow, incremental change don’t seem to recognize just how dire the situation is. America is a dying patient in need of drastic surgery by skilled professionals, but is instead merely being wrapped in bandages by a group of hospital orderlies.

Weber cites Al Gore’s book, The Assault on Reason, to make the case that the underlying problem is a media culture in which perception is more important than fact, and political power is not gained through skill or merit but by manipulating the American people.

Power gained through lies promulgated through disinformation campaigns is not power the Founding Fathers would say had been earned. The Founding Fathers were on the side of the angels. Those who would gain power through lies and celebrating ignorance and playing the victim as a virtue come from a very different place.

And if our civic culture dies, then America will disintegrate into a collection of warring tribes, each held together by their fear of “the other”… their fear of those who are different than they are… all operating under the grand, false belief that competition (not cooperation) is the natural order of things… the grand, false belief that “survival of the fittest” rules humanity as completely as it does the lowliest of creatures on Earth.

Regarding the steps that have been taken to address the enormous systemic problems facing us, Weber offers another spot-on analogy:

The quality of the legislation passed so far (health care, financial reform, stimulus package) is like the home built of straw in the story of The Three Little Pigs. It looks okay, but when the Big Bad Wolf comes along he has no trouble blowing it over. Two tries later (and with the pigs fortunately still alive), they finally build a house made of brick. And that house is able to withstand the wolf’s best efforts to blow it down.

America needs the truth. It needs logic and reason. America must solve the challenges it faces in ways that stand the test of time. We can’t afford to build houses of straw when brick is what the objective facts demand.

He closes by pointing out that in America, the business of governing is treated more like a sport than as a responsibility which demands serious work by experts and professionals.

President Obama’s skills on the basketball court get talked about a lot. He is also likened to a Zen master chess champion. Both are admirable, and neither are what America needs.

[sic]

America can be a land where political calculus is based on the truth. And given how sick the patient is, if President Obama doesn’t decide to cure this virus, his legacy will be that when America was on life support he thought he and the virus that is killing us were playing a championship game of basketball.

Put simply—America needs a government of doctors, not athletes.

I was so impressed by this piece that I left a very complimentary comment which also asked Mr. Weber what he thought we could do to make the president wake up and recognize the truth of what he was saying. Mr. Weber replied to me directly saying that he would send his essay to the White House, and updated his original post with the same suggestion:

A hand written letter physically mailed makes a HUGE difference compared to emails sent in using those automatic opinion generating web sites.

Since almost no one really sends letters any more (one reason the Post Office is having huge financial difficulties), when a real, honest to God letter actually arrives, your elected representative takes notice.

Now, of course, in the case of the President of the United States it’s a bit more work. By that I mean, it would take many hand written letters for he and his staff to take notice. But what I do know (from the Washington Post) is that Pres. Obama’s team goes through all the letters he receives and delivers 10 of them to him each day. He has this fixed routine of reading these 10 letters every day. Therefore, if he gets enough hand written letters from people (with a copy of this essay attached), I think at least one copy will get through to him.

This won’t take much time. Figuring out what to say in my cover letter will be the most difficult part, but the rest of it is just a matter of printing the pages, putting them in an envelope, and getting it in the mail. As I’ve said before, fighting for change can actually be quite easy.

Why am I bothering to do this? Doesn’t it seem hopeless already, that Obama has proved himself nothing more than a politician only interested in the perception rather than the reality of Change?

Maybe so, maybe not. There was a time when I believed that he believed in the ideals he expressed during his campaign, and those ideals were inspiring. Buried within Obama the politician may still be Obama the Human Being, a man who recognizes just how critical this moment in history is and who wants to do what’s necessary to pull the country back from the brink.

One things is for sure—voting is not enough. In the upcoming mid-term elections, progressives have nowhere to turn. Voting republican is out of the question, but voting democrat would be a tacit approval of Obama’s politics-as-usual governing strategy.

Trying to change the system from the outside is probably the only viable option, but it’s also the most difficult and potentially disastrous option available to us.

A strong leader with a clear vision in a position of power is the best hope for achieving real change, and while Obama has that position he seems to lack the strength and the clarity of vision. If he were to decide to change course and stand up to the powerful interests rather than capitulate to them, he’d have the strong support of the majority of Americans behind him—the idealists who fought so hard to put him in office and who were willing to fight with him once he got there. He decided to ignore those people, to seal himself in the Washington bubble and play for political points rather than fix the broken system.

Convincing Obama to have a change of heart may be a long-shot, perhaps even impossible, but it does no harm to try. The risk is nothing, but the potential reward is incalculable. I’m going to write to the offices of Barack Obama and Joe Biden (who is more likely to read it) and attach Steven Weber’s essay to my letter. I urge everyone to do the same.

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave
Washington D.C. 20500

I have to confess that I’m not a very good activist. Oh, I’ll sign any petition you send my way and I’ll always include a personalized message. I’ve even been known to donate money from time to time, as I donated this past week to Firedoglake’s campaign to end marijuana prohibition. I tossed a few bucks to the Obama campaign back in 2008 as well (I don’t regret it—as disappointed as I am things would have been a lot worse under the other guy). But the best way to get a message to your elected leaders is obviously to call their office and actually speak to someone, and that’s something I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t been doing.

I really have no good excuse. I just hate talking on the phone. I even hate talking to friends on the phone, let alone people I’ve never met, let alone people with political power. There’s something about calling a U.S. Senator’s office or the White House itself that I can’t help but find intimidating.

As a writer I have complete confidence. Whenever I add a personal comment to a petition signature I take the time to craft a clear and concise remark that I know will not only drive my message home but make me come across as a constituent who knows what he’s talking about. But talking is different. The words just come out of your mouth and then they’re out there and can’t be deleted or rearranged. Unless you know exactly what you’re going to say, you risk sounding like a fool.

Plus, I always figure that plenty of other people must be calling these offices anyway so what difference would my phone call make? When the staffer draws up the list of what issues people called about and how many called on each issue, my call would make the number 247 instead of 246, or 3,174 instead of 3,173. No big deal, right?

But of course I know that’s the wrong way to think. Every little digit counts. And what you really want is the staffer to tell the senator or president, “We’ve been getting calls all day about suchandsuch. You’d better take this seriously.”

So yesterday when I got an e-mail from CREDO Mobile—a company that proves not all corporations are evil—warning me about an upcoming deal between Google and Verizon that would mean the beginning of the end of net neutrality, I not only signed the petition but I followed it up with a call to the White House comment line.

Net neutrality is probably the most under-appreciated issue of our time in terms of its importance. I’ve written about it before, but it’s worth repeating that if we open the door to allowing corporations to provide faster service for certain websites and slower service for others, it paves the way to complete corporate control of the internet. Seeing as how the consolidation of power by multi-national corporations is the single biggest threat to humanity that we currently face on this planet, it is absolutely essential the internet remain out of their hands.

See how eloquently I can express that point in written words? Of course the e-mail from CREDO provided me with a script telling me exactly what to say when I reached the comment line, but I scoffed at that and figured I could make my point well enough in my own words.

At first I figured I was just going to get some kind of automated “leave your comment after the tone” thing, which I would have been much more comfortable doing. But the automated message I got told me to hold the line for an operator. No way—an actual human being is going to take my call?

I couldn’t help but feel a powerful nervousness rising within me as the phone rang. I don’t know where exactly calls to the White House comment line go—if it’s actually located in or anywhere near the actual White House—but naturally you imagine that your call is going directly to the secretary of the president himself, sitting right outside the Oval Office. I make a few clicks on Skype here in Germany and halfway around the world someone who works for the President of the United States hears their phone ringing.

I was ready to wait on hold for as long as it took. That would give me ample time to figure out exactly what I wanted to say. Imagine my shock when someone came on the line after only ten seconds. Seriously? Ten seconds? The White House must get a million calls a day—how can they have someone picking up the line within ten seconds? I can’t even call the Dell Computers service hotline without waiting on hold for a half an hour.

“Thank you for calling the White House comment line, would you like to make a brief comment for our records?” said the voice on the other line. It sounded like a nice, middle-aged black lady. I was picturing Shirley Sherrod.

Of course as soon as I’m actually speaking to someone I draw a complete blank. “Yeah…um…” I begin, now regretting that I’d tossed the script, “I’m reading about the deal between Google and Verizon on net neutrality, and um…”

Total blank. The silent pause seems to stretch on for an eternity. “Okay…” the woman says in a friendly tone. I realize I’ve already made my point—the recorded number of people calling the White House on the net neutrality issue will now be one higher than it otherwise would have.

“Yeah,” I continue, “I just wanted to comment that I really hope the president keeps his promise on net neutrality, and not to let the internet go…” I was going to say “to the corporations” but the woman said “Okay” again and I figured there was no need to go into any explanation of why I care about the issue. The president isn’t going to ask why people called to support net neutrality—I think he gets it—but he is going to ask how many people called, and whatever the final digit in that number may be it will be a direct result of my phone call.

“Okay, thanks for your call,” the lady said, and I said “thanks” and hung up. I know I must have sounded like an idiot, but the lady was friendly enough for it not to bother me. She actually gave me the impression that she was glad I was calling about net neutrality—that perhaps she cared about the issue too and was happy to have people calling in about it so she could tell her bosses that she was getting lots of call about it. I imagine that most of her calls are probably from Tea Party wingnuts screaming at her to tell her boss that he’s a filthy commie bastard who’d better stop destroying America or else. A call from a nervous liberal must be the most pleasant kind of call she gets all day.

Anyway, the whole experience was a bit of a rush, and it took several minutes after hanging up the phone for my pulse to return to normal. Damn, that actually felt really good, I realized. “Hell yeah!” I said to myself. “Civics! How awesome am I? Doing my part as a U.S. citizen and all that.”

Of course now that my “call your representatives”-cherry has been popped I plan on doing a lot more of it. Today I intend to call both of my senators and tell them they’d better throw their full support behind Elizabeth Warren to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That’s currently the most important fight going on when it comes to financial reform, and I wouldn’t feel right unless I did my part. I’ll probably call the White House again to get my feelings about that on their records as well.

So to all my fellow citizens I’d urge you to get in the habit of calling your representatives as well. The times we live in are just too important not too, and circulating online petitions just isn’t enough. Apparently it’ll only take a few minutes and the person you speak to will probably be as cordial as can be—after all, these politicians wouldn’t want their liaisons to the public to be rude assholes, would they?

The number for the White House hotline is 202-456-1111. Why not call them now?

Due to some unexpected social activity (Tuesday night in Celle) I’m a little behind on my news-intake schedule. I don’t want to write about Wikileaks and the Afghanistan documents until I’ve gotten a bit more analysis, so today I’ll just make the quickest comment I’ve made so far and save the heavier stuff for the weekend.

A small opportunity now exists for Obama to push back against the perception that his administration has Foxnewsophobia. Helen Thomas was a member of the White House Press Corps (all those journalists who sit in on the daily briefing and press conferences) for decades and had a prime seat in the front row until controversial comments about Palestine forced her to step down. Now that seat is empty.

The two biggest contenders for who to take that seat are a reporter from National Public Radio or a “reporter” from Fox “News”. Given all the backlash from last week’s Shirley Sherrod debacle, you’d think it would be a no-brainer to give the seat to NPR.

My guess is they give it to Fox News and continue with their bullshit strategy of trying to appear as centrist and moderate as possible by constantly lending credibility to the network that spends nearly all of its time attacking them. After all, if they give it to NPR instead of Fox News, what would Glenn Beck say?

Luckily, you can make your voice heard. Signing this petition will basically say to the White House: “If you give the seat to Fox News, you suck.”