Pornography for Progressives

Spoiler alert for any rabid right-wingers who may have wandered in here: What follows could be bad for your blood pressure.

Amid all of today's babble and bluster, it's like a short stay at a sanity spa to listen to former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who might have been President, talking to Paul Krugman, the Princeton professor/New York Times columnist, about politics past and present. They were brought together by the British paper, the Guardian, to discuss Krugman's new book, "The Conscience of a Liberal."

Along the way, they touched on Aristotle, Keynes, Lincoln, health care, Iraq and the 2008 elections. For those who want to remember what public discourse could be, a small sample:

Cuomo: You said we're going to have a lot of rich people who inherited wealth and power...Then you're going to have a lot of miserably poor people who want to kill the rich people because of jealousy and so you need to have that buffer between the two of them that aspires to a better life by figuring out ways to get themselves more property and more wages, and...the first real middle class for a democracy was ours, the first real middle class that worked.

Krugman: (I)n the 18th century, you could say America was the first truly middle class society and then we lost it for a while there, during industrialization. Then we got it back because we had the political movement that made getting it back its goal, and now we've lost it largely again because we had a political movement that made getting rid of it its goal.

You can read or see/hear the rest of it here.

Bragged About Any Good Books Lately?

The news today is that even reading has been politicized. A new poll finds one of every four Americans has not cracked a book in the past year, and that leads to a brouhaha about whether conservatives or liberals are the most avid readers.

Former Democratic Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, now president of the American Association of Publishers, started it by saying, "The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: 'No, don't raise my taxes, no new taxes.' It's pretty hard to write a book saying, 'No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes' on every page."

"Obfuscation,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto shot back, “usually requires a lot more words than if you simply focus on fundamental principles, so I'm not at all surprised by the loquaciousness of liberals."

As a spectacularly unsuccessful book publisher for a brief time, I can mediate this with a few words of wisdom: Who knows? People buy books for all kinds of reasons: from self-help advice about diet, money, etc. as promises to themselves to improve their lives, which they may read or skim but just feel better about possessing, to serious works, which may serve the same purpose on an intellectual level.

Conservative blogger Jonah Goldberg today confesses his “dirty little secret: I'm a terrible book nibbler, reading the introductions and then grazing from the tasting menu called the index.”

Figures in the AP poll found that 22 percent of liberals and moderates said they had not read a book, compared with 34 percent of conservatives. But there are books and books: Ann Coulter and Al Franken do their stand-up routines between hard covers, Rove admits that he and President Bush sometimes cheat in their reading contest by counting murder mysteries, and then there are all the vacuous best sellers that, as Flannery O’Connor once observed, could have been prevented by a good teacher.

In the age of YouTube and blogs, what may be the real news in all this is that the politically persuaded are still so touchy about their intellectual credentials. It would be helpful if they showed some signs of brain activity in what they said and did, instead of arguing about what’s on their night stands and coffee tables.

Liberal, Progressive, Whatever

In the YouTube debate, Hillary Clinton said she would rather be called “progressive” than “liberal.” As usual, her judgment is poll-perfect.

Later in the week, the Rasmussen Reports asked voters and found:

“Just 20% said they consider it a positive description to call a candidate politically liberal while 39% would view that description negatively. However, 35% would consider it a positive description to call a candidate politically progressive. Just 18% react negatively to that term.”

Irving Kristol, father of Bush’s best media friend William, famously described a neo-conservative as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality,” a snappy definition with a touch of sly racism. In today’s political atmosphere, a progressive might be defined as a liberal who has changed his (or her) name out of ambition.

Until the Ann Coulters of the world worked so hard to make it a synonym for godless and goofy, liberal was a badge of honor for those who valued people over property and, in the last century, helped create Social Security, unemployment insurance, civil rights for minorities and opposed the war in Vietnam on the same principles that they now oppose the war in Iraq.

Even today, the most-educated Americans, including college professors, describe themselves as liberal and (hold the snickering from the cheap seats) so do I.

It’s saddening that Hillary Clinton, as her husband did, feels compelled to change her political name.