dagblog - Comments for "A Dose of Truth from David Frum"

seems to be pleased with the

jollyroger — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 03:55:48 +0000

seems to be pleased with the outcomes,

This was a real component of the stimulus debacle--even as it was apparent that he had been flummoxed by the political arm of his team and set his sights too low, he was unwilling to forthrightly come out and say "this sucks--the pugs have forced an inadequate remedy and we won't get the needed result"--there was a pollyannish insistence in 2010 on pretending that the "green shoots" were bustin out. Thus, he ended up getting the bad jobs outcome hung around his neck, and was subject to the repeated refrain "your shit didn't work--it stinks" (sorry for bad pun...)

You've done a good job of

Red Planet — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 01:34:30 +0000

In reply to even when he winsHe won

You've done a good job of expressing the concerns about Obama. It isn't that he needed to win one for us on every issue. It's that there is no evidence he put up a fight, and he seems to be pleased with the outcomes, even when those run counter to the best interests of working people. Counter even to the prospects of the Democratic Party.

The rich can always find ways

Resistance — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 22:45:04 +0000

In reply to The goal should be to get the

The rich can always find ways to opt out, including leaving the country, or buying a private this and a private that.

YEAH ....They are leaving, and so are corporations.

That leaves only one choice ..............the poor and the middle class have to live within our means.

The rich dont need us, they have the whole world, ready to bow before them.

We'll sell them the raw materials and we'll have to buy their imports.

Who else can afford to build a large corporation in America, when Americans don't support them anyways?

America got what it paid for.

I heard Costa Rica is a good place to live.

But we've had corrections

AmericanDreamer — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 16:35:17 +0000

In reply to I would have thought that

But we've had corrections repeatedly in our history when things went too far in one direction. As during the Gilded Age, as an example. Enough people saw what was happening and organized and acted and there was a correction. They didn't say to themselves "it's impossible to turn things around because citizens are arational creatures driven by emotions and can't be reached by appeals to reason or through education."

To what do you attribute earlier corrections in our history?

I think you hinted at an answer to that in your comment--the trick is to figure out how to win people over by being better at appealing to emotions--or, more broadly perhaps, just the kinds of ways ordinary people think--than the opposition. (It helps make the case if there are real-life, large scale events everyone knows about which lend themselves well to the story you want to tell. Which is part of why I am surprised that with Katrina, Gulf oil spill, financial meltdown, etc.,---so many major major events everyone knows about that would seem to lend themselves to a relatively simple narrative storyline--that we haven't had a correction yet.)

This is what folks saying liberals/progressives need to do more story-telling and less policy argumentation, such as Drew Westen and George Lakoff, are saying. Westen has lambasted Democratic presidential candidates such as Mondale, Dukakis, and Gore for talking policywonk language to the public instead of using narrative language to convey simple, compelling messages or tell interesting, digestible stories that don't bore or lose ordinary folks.

I think different things work with different individuals. The kind of a factually-based, "rational" policy argument that might work with one person won't work with another person. There are folks I know who, if I tried to talk to them about politics by telling them a story would think I was a complete flake.

And then they talk about how

AmericanDreamer — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 16:21:10 +0000

In reply to This is my experience too.All

And then they talk about how the rich are paying 51% of all income tax..

And when you reply to that GOP talking point that that's because the rich are taking virtually every dollar of increased earnings generated in the economy over the past few decades? But that even with what they are paying, they are continuing to do better and better and better, after paying said taxes, while the rest of the country is stagnating, hanging on by fingertips, or has already fallen off the cliff? And maybe, maybe it might be a good idea to work together, smartly, to rebuild the middle class job base in the country, which ain't gonna happen with the Republicans who don't give a rip whether the middle class can make it any more or not, or on account of the rich and the wealthy corporations making it their business to do that when almost all of the pressure on wages and compensation continue to be downward ones, even as a very few are awarding all the profits that are going to compensation for themselves?

As a citizen, I don't know of any way around challenging and pushing back on the kind of thinking exhibited by folks such as this. It being a given that there are better and worse times and places for doing that, that different individuals respond to different approaches, some harder, some softer/subtler, etc., etc.

Maybe you two are right in your assessments and I'm wrong. And in this threatening situation with much unease about what the future holds, what we are witnessing is our fellow citizens increasingly just turning on one another, dog eat dog. Are we really, in the last analysis, that far gone? In the aggregate, I mean. When there is much anxiety, now and about the future, and the perception is that the Top Dog is, at best, a nice man, but does not appear to be up to the moment, then power/confidence vacuum dynamics can start to take over and things can pretty quickly go in a dog eat dog direction in a society. That just has to be stopped and reversed.

The alternative seems to me to be a (some would say further) descent or collapse into authoritarianism, including the continued erosion of limits to government's police powers. The voters will elect a tough, mean, uber-decisive son of a gun who promises to create order out of perceived chaos.

That's the alternative--not sure how long a period of time it would take to play out--that I see unless the authoritarian, blackmailing, treasonous, anti-democratic thugs in Congress and today's GOP are confronted, faced down, and thrashed decisively at the polls. Soon.

If it sounds like I'm hyperventilating a bit here, well, sure, people who say things like I just said get written off pretty readily as kooks. It's not nearly that bad. Don't worry, be happy. The dust will settle. We'll get back to normalcy.

I say no to that line of thinking. I see it as blinkered and complacent in the face of the brazen conduct of today's GOP, enabled as they are by a minority of our fellow citizens who are prone to extremism and demand ever-escalating levels of demagoguery and "action" to provide the sense of order their panic and desperate, heavily stoked fear of a society out of control demands. Because I really and truly believe that bit about eternal vigilance being the price of liberty.

Obama made no changes in

Dan Kervick — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:26:55 +0000

In reply to um, this is what's at the top

Obama made no changes in policy at the press conference. He just tried to spin the current approach with a little bit more left curve. He's still claiming that the big economic issue facing the country is the public sector deficit. And his philosophy of job creation is still basically a Republican philosophy of job creation, including more deregulation to "get the government off the backs" of business.

I would have thought that

Peter Schwartz — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 13:27:20 +0000

In reply to On thinking about your

I would have thought that there would have been a pretty strong public reaction by now discrediting pretty hardline laissez-faire governmental policies which contributed to each of these happenings. Not so. Not yet, anyway. Laissez-faire, market fundamentalism is like a creature from one of those monster movies that never seems to die but keeps coming back to wreak havoc, in increasingly mutilated forms.

My theory and, like evolution it's only a theory, is that the Reagan Revolution really did change the thinking of this country in ways that even his opponents support.

What you are talking about is logic. I do, too. It seems, well, logical. But as a copywriter, I know that people buy or act on the basis of emotion. They then use their rational minds to support and justify decisions they've made on an emotional basis.

Conservatives make their appeals based on emotion. That's how they're able to make totally crazy statements and not get thrown out on their ears. For example, Steven King IA actually said that if the country got the abortion thing right, the economy would take care of itself.

How can he get away with this? Because he's defending the sanctity of life. That's more important than any theory about how the economy works.

Similarly laissez-faire government policies have been discredited based on the evidence, but what is that compared with the sacred principle of individual freedom? Wanting a bigger government, like Dan does, smells unAmerican in principle, if not in fact.

Conservatives use very basic, common sense arguments and analogies that everyone can easily relate to based on their own lives. "You can't keep spending more than you take in. That's not sustainable." And since it's hard to impossible for the average person to increase his revenues, especially right now, it feels more logical to cut spending. And in the abstract--which is how the argument is often framed--$14 trillion in debt!--the average person can't make the connection between "government spending" and his own life.

Liberals got a hoot out of that proto-Bagger who yelled, "Keep the government away from my Medicare." But actually this is pretty close to how the average person thinks, IMO. And if government is cut and services are curtailed, then the average person see that not as a failure to provide sufficient revenues to government, but as a failure of government, once again, to do what it has promised to do. Which will only fuel the anti-tax fervor even more.

Liberals need to recapture the emotional side of the argument and reclaim basic bedrock American principles and symbols.

This is my experience too.All

Peter Schwartz — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:44:12 +0000

In reply to Normally I'm in complete

This is my experience too.

All those old arguments and stereotypes have come roaring back.

I can't tell you how many of my HS classmates talk about the "undeserving" who are too lazy to work and just want to collect UE.

I keep asking them: Who do you think these people are, the undeserving and lazy who won't work? They really can't say, but they are sure they are there.

And then they talk about how the rich are paying 51% of all income tax...and on and on.

The goal should be to get the

Peter Schwartz — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:41:17 +0000

In reply to I dont know how to query this

The goal should be to get the rich to pay up.

It's the poor and middle class (who pay the taxes) who are most dependent on what those taxes buy. The rich can always find ways to opt out, including leaving the country, or buying a private this and a private that.

There was certainly no love

stillidealistic — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 04:25:42 +0000

In reply to Curious to hear more about

There was certainly no love lost for Clinton, but I don't remember it being so venomous. We snorted and laughed at what ever his latest problem was, but I don't recall the "hatred" that I'm hearing now. I don't remember people talking in such a hostile manner about poor people and the help they needed. I don't remember being embarrassed as a Christian that my fellow Christians were sounding hateful.

So, I don't know, Dreamer. Seems to me that neither Nixon or Reagan could get elected as republicans in today's environment. Reagan raised taxes 11 times in 8 years...he'd get skewered today! State governments are turning on state employees in a way I don't remember ever seeing. The attack on women and women's issues seem to be increasing dramatically. The ideas of getting rid of the EPA and trusting corporations to do what's best for the country are laughable. And yet the poll tracker at TPM for generic repub over over generic dem is on the rise. WTH? If the country is not tacking right, wouldn't that be going the opposite direction?