A Primary Way to Stop the Tea Party

The Shutdown showed a reckless minority empowered by gerrymandering strangling government. Is there a legal way to loosen its grip?

A self-proclaimed political junkie says there is. Reid Wilson on his Washington Post blog enthuses over:

“A top-two primary system, one that incentivizes candidates in even the most conservative or liberal districts to appeal to the vast middle that otherwise plays a limited role in picking members of Congress.

“In California and Washington state, that top-two system is already in effect. And in both states, the hard right and the hard left have seen their influence wane.”

Whether or not such a change can overcome gerrymandering is problematical, but its implementation, sanctioned by the Roberts Supreme Court in 2008, could hardly produce worse results than the election of 2012 in which House Democrats nationally won by over 1.4 million votes but the GOP retained a 33-seat advantage with an overall majority of 17 seats.

In this climate, conservative Republicans are as frustrated as Independent voters. If more states were to embrace a top-two primary system, the Tea Party would no longer be able to rule in Washington with unchecked fanaticism.

It’s time for members of a Radical Middle who still believe in reason to get their chance to shape American politics.

Update: With new polls showing voters increasingly turning against Tea Party tactics, the time is ripe to push for reform of a primary process that keeps their zealots in power to browbeat a majority of Americans.

Can Paul Ryan Lie His Way Out Again?

Last year’s VP loser, like all habitual liars, must have a short memory span and expect others to as well. Otherwise how could Paul Ryan vote to send the nation crashing into default and expect to be taken seriously as a Presidential candidate in 2016?

Even sooner, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, can he go to work with a straight face on the Congressional conference to resolve differences on the upcoming budget?

Ryan’s mendacity is hard to forget, even for a politician. After years of proclaiming her as his idol, he dropped Ayn Rand in a heartbeat when questioned about her as “an outspoken atheist.”

His GOP convention speech set truth meters clanging over lies, distortions and omissions, mounting into double figures. Ryan’s indifference to truth seems more reflexive than expedient. Asked about marathons, he casually noted, “I had a two-fifty something.” When Runner’s World checked, the number was 4.0.

Now he is the Tea Party policy wonk, whose figures are expected to be sound even if his arguments are loopy. Can someone who voted to decimate the economy be a deal-maker?

Only in the same alternate reality that led Mitt Romney to pair up with Ryan, whose entire working life has been not only as one of Rand’s “moochers and looters” but in the 47 percent of Americans “dependent upon government” cited in Romney’s suicidal gaffe. Since college two decades ago, Ryan has been on government payrolls every day of his career, first as a legislative aide and then as a member of the House, never in the GOP hallowed private sector except for an off-campus stint at a fast-food joint.

Now Ryan says, “I look forward to convening the first conference on a budget resolution since 2009. And though a budget resolution by itself can’t resolve our spending problem, I’m committed to making a bipartisan budget conference a success.”

Is that a lie? Are his lips moving?

Blinks and Winks

First McConnell, then Boehner and finally Cruz turns away from the staring contest with the White House, and the 16-day government shutdown is over.

The little clocks in the corner of cable TV screens are gone, and pundits go on to the political postmortems. Next week: the World Series, where there will be only one winner and one loser.

In Washington, nothing is that simple. Paul Ryan voted no and will lead four Republicans on the conference committee on budget resolution with the Senate. Score him eyes wide open for 2016.

Mitch McConnell, facing a tough reelection campaign, did bat his eyes but only after a wink to his constituents by getting a $3 billion earmark for a Kentucky dam.

Other pork consolations, however, vanish as the final vote failed to eliminate an Obamacare tax on medical devices, which gives makers and doctors a license to steal an estimated “$26 billion in excessive spending a year.”

A New York Times editorial tallies the score: “The Republican Party slunk away on Wednesday from its failed, ruinous strategy to get its way through the use of havoc. Hours away from an inevitable market crash, it approved a deal that could have been achieved months ago had a few more lawmakers set aside their animus. President Obama signed the bill reopening the government and lifting the debt ceiling early Thursday morning. 

“The health care reform law will not be defunded or delayed. No taxes will be cut, and the deal calls for no new cuts to federal spending or limits to social welfare programs. The only things Republicans achieved were billions of dollars in damage to the economy, harm to the nation’s reputation and a rock-bottom public approval rating.”

But Boehner is still asking for instant replay: “We fought the good fight. We just didn’t win.”

No, sanity did but, like the World Series, the games will go on but without a limit to how long they will last.

An Apology (and Challenge) to My Grandchildren

The American Dream has become a comatose nightmare. Visiting it daily fills me with grief and guilt. How did my own and following generations let something of such beauty turn into an ugly political boneyard with so few shreds of decency and hope?

Worst of all, how do I explain it all to teen-aged grandchildren who should be looking ahead to their lives only with hope and joy but are beset by rage, hate and despair everywhere? What can I, what can we do but apologize to them for the mess they are inheriting and the anxiety they will have to keep facing?

It’s tempting to hide behind “All this shall pass,” but with how much conviction? The sheer mass of social and political madness is too heavy to overthrow with bromides.

One positive place to start is Thomas Friedman’s post-Shutdown hope: “Short of an economic meltdown, there is only one thing that might produce meaningful change: a mass movement for tax, spending and entitlement reform led by the cohort that is the least organized but will be the most affected if we don’t think long term--today’s young people.”

As sophisticated as they are, they may even appreciate being asked to clean up our mess. Their taste in TV and movies suggests they savor irony.

For the near term, as we foresee only more of the same selfish insanity in Washington, Friedman cites a college tour stirring excitement among the young by a 61-year-old legendary investor who challenges students to rise up against the powers-that-be as his generation did against the Vietnam War.

Accused of fomenting intergenerational conflict, he responds, “No, that war already happened, and the kids lost. We’re just trying to recover some scraps for them.”

It’s a long way from enlisting young people into such a long-term fight and changing the national political landscape, but what other choice is there?

To my own grandchildren, I can only point out that this apology is filled with question marks. It will be up to you to answer them. My money says you will.

The ultimate hope is that, when the time comes, your apology to your grandchildren will be much more benign in a far better world.

Last Station Before Default

As the train wreck nears with no one at the controls, last-ditch outsiders are trying to get to the brakes.

Fitch Ratings puts the US on “rating watch negative” in the light of impending default.

Our biggest creditor China (we owe them $1.3 trillion) calls for replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency to “permanently stay away from the spillover of the intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United States” in a “de—Americanized world.”

Even our newest winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics pauses in the midst of the champagne cork-popping to worry out loud. “When I look around,” Robert Shiller says, “I see a great deal of foolishness, and I can’t believe it’s not important economically.”

To say the least. Yet nothing, not even an impending crash of world markets and a panicky Senate, is able to loosen the death grip of the Tea Party on the House throttle.

In these nightmare days, sane Americans may just want to go back to bed and hide under the covers, while the oldest among us keep thinking about those Saturday matinee serials at the movies where you could come back next week and find that somebody or something has braked the train to a screeching stop at the very last minute.

“The Perils of Pauline” was never this nerve-racking.

Update: Surprise, surprise. Congress finally gets back on the track.

Unseating Ted Cruz

Is he legislator or conspirator? During ten months in Washington, Ted Cruz has spent more time with House members than in his own chamber, culminating last night in being caught secretly huddling with a score of them at a DC night spot just before today’s Tea Party refusal to reopen the government.

In the face of five more years, there are fringe petitions circulating in Texas to recall Cruz, but shouldn’t owl-eyed old Washington hands be searching the arcane rules of Congress for some musty old statute that forbids such House-breaking?

If he is to survive as Speaker, John Boehner had better put a crew of toadies on the case full-time. Never in memory has there been such blatant inter-chamber subversion.

Meanwhile, the hours tick away and the nation is paralyzed. When I was writing a post on Bipolar Disorder yesterday, I went to the National Institute of Health for basic information on the condition and was greeted with this heading:

“Due to the lapse in government funding, the information on this web site may not be up to date, transactions submitted via the web site may not be processed, and the agency may not be able to respond to inquiries until appropriations are enacted. Updates regarding government operating status and resumption of normal operations can be found at USA.gov.”

That sums up where America is today perfectly. Even if you want to research madness, the Shutdown won’t let you.

If we are all to get out of this trap with our sanity intact, somebody had better find a way to get Cruz out of what used to be called the catbird seat.

Update: The internecine GOP war teeters at the edge of going public as Texas' biggest newspaper takes back its Cruz election endorsement and an anonymous Senate aide mutters aloud to a liberal blog, "Ted Cruz and his Tortilla Coast Republicans are leading us to a default.” What will it take to get his cohorts to speak up loud and clear? Time is short.

Downside of a Bipolar Decade

Start with a confession: In nearly 90 years, I have found psychiatry a mixed blessing at best. “Treatment” for myself and those I love has usually led to disappointment and at times alarming damage to our lives.

In only one instance have I seen a casebook recovery through therapy and medication, and even that, I suspect, was an inflation of garden-variety resistance to growing up to depressive illness.

My prejudices aside, what can a fair-minded person make of a 40-fold increase in the diagnosis (and misdiagnosis) of Bipolar Disorder in American children over the decade following the social trauma of 9/11/2001?

First is the self-interest of mental-health professionals and the advertising power of their partners, the pharmaceutical industry with interminable TV ads for concoctions that guarantee happiness, followed by a speed-reading of terrible possible side effects.

Then broaden the lens to a view of the culture at large. As a Netflix generation migrates to an in-the-know appreciation of the worst in human nature (pace “Breaking Bad” and the overwrought portrayal of Carrie Mathison in “Homeland”), an unearned cynicism replaces the dumb-but-happy dopiness of pre-World War II Hollywood. (When today’s movies revert to that happy-endingism as in Tom Hanks’ “Captain Phillips,” web sites rush to debunk them.)

From the far end of life, all this seems such a waste: a pill-propped antidote to facing and dealing with the anxieties, ambivalence and ambiguities that always have and undoubtedly always will challenge sentient human beings.   

If I am sour about psychiatry as a profession, my life has been enriched by its most gifted practitioners as writers.

In the 1960s, the psychoanalyst-philosopher Erich Fromm was preoccupied with what he called "The Myth of Care." Amid social upheaval and rage about Vietnam, the author of "The Art of Loving" and "The Sane Society" kept searching newspapers and TV screens for images of people reaching out, helping and comforting one another. His thesis was that such impulses are deeply ingrained in all humans and waiting to come to the surface when circumstances call them up, that they are their true feelings below a surface of selfish discord.

In next decade, Willard Gaylin wrote a book titled “Caring,” in which he made the case that ”Civilization is, at least in part, a form of crystallized love.” Dr. Gaylin’s persuasive argument was that “Man survives because it is his nature to care. Man survives because he cares and is cared for.”

We need such wisdom now in our lives rather than peace of mind that can be bought at a pharmacy.

Gagging on the Obamacare Glitch

Six months ago, the chief digital architect of the Obamacare rollout was worried. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience,” he warned colleagues.

It hasn’t been. It’s been worse. Yet given a malign history and a GOP dedicated to aborting the law before it breathes, how could it have turned out otherwise?

In 2009, rather than go all out on job creation, Barack Obama went all in on health care. Then, instead of asking for up-or-down votes on key provisions, he threw it into a Congressional snake pit from which a 2000-page bill emerged, larded with a sickening display of tradeoffs for constituents. (The public saw too, and thus was the Tea Party born to take over the House the next year.)

The President's mistakes did not end there. Brushing off charges of care rationing and death panels, he kept stressing the altruism of covering millions of uninsured, expecting Americans to respond with empathy rather than fear of less care for themselves.

So many miscalculations, so much political damage. When it was over, health care reform was a Phyrric victory for Democrats. Voters didn't understand most of it, didn't like what they did and were sold a bill of goods by GOP liars that Obamacare was an expensive government takeover. Even keeping children covered until 26 and barring disqualification for pre-existing conditions were lost in the shuffle as the law’s pluses.

Now, trying to understand how the rollout turned into disaster, a New York Times report concludes: “The serious technical problems threaten to obscure what some see as a nationwide demonstration of a desire for more affordable health insurance...

“The response was huge. Insurance companies report much higher traffic on their Web sites and many more callers to their phone lines than predicted.”

What would-be enrollees got, instead of information and help, were frozen computer screens and interminable telephone holds.

Such “glitches” from the most tech-savvy Administration in American history must have more meaning than “Oops!”

Was it just too much to ask Americans to penetrate a screen of opaque choices, obscured by a cloud of partisan distortions and lies? Or is what’s happened to the Obamacare rollout just another symptom of a deeper malaise that afflicts us all. Would-be Obamacare enrollees may get a technical fix for their problems, but the prognosis is not good for the body politic.

Is the Pope Rooting for Hillary?

By now, the world won’t be surprised by anything Francis I says, but was there a subtle Papal nod to Hillary Clinton 2016 hidden in his now-famous interview?

In these ugly days, the hopeful heart searches for every bit of humanity to be found, however tenuous, anywhere. Amid all the heartless rant in Washington, Mrs. Clinton and the first Jesuit in the Vatican are among the few positive voices being heard.

In his wide-ranging talk in America magazine, one less-noted section was the Pope on women:

“The feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions,” he said. “Women are asking deep questions that must be addressed. The church cannot be herself without the woman and her role. The woman is essential for the church. Mary, a woman, is more important than the bishops.”

But, one would ask, is a woman prepared to be America’s political pontiff? Hillary Clinton’s supporters certainly think so, and there are growing signs that she agrees.

Accepting an award at her alma mater Yale Law School last weekend, she was introduced by the dean who asked if she was ready to “add one more elusive line to her resume.“

The answer is clearly yes, although she says she will decide “sometime next year.” In her talk, Clinton was nostalgic: “It’s really hard to believe it’s been 40 years. I was driving a beat-up old car. I had a mattress tied to the roof. I was wearing my bell bottoms.”

Soon afterward she met “a Viking from Arkansas,” nodding at Bill Clinton who had surprised her by turning up for the ceremony. But for the most part she talked about how Yale had opened her eyes to child abuse and poverty and the importance of early childhood development.

“Because of the government shutdown,” she said, “nearly nine million women and children will soon be unable to buy healthy food and baby formula.”

While Clinton was at Yale back then, a newly minted Jesuit named Jorge Mario Bergoglio was studying in Buenos Aires after as a seminarian having been “dazzled by a girl I met at an uncle's wedding."

"I was surprised by her beauty, her intellectual brilliance,” he recalls and, “well, I was bowled over for quite a while...I kept thinking and thinking about her. When I returned to the seminary after the wedding, I could not pray for over a week because when I tried to do so, the girl appeared in my head. I had to rethink what I was doing."

Bergoglio did, went on to minister to the poor and now he is Pope Francis I. Hillary married her “Viking from Arkansas.” Now history may bring them together in a world neither could have imagined back then.

The year 2016 could produce a final scene for one of the most fascinating boy-meets-girl scripts ever written.

Ted Cruz Wins the Shameless Olympics

Will somebody put a net over the ten-month Senator from Texas and give him a saliva test for political rabies? Under attack from Conservative Republicans of all stripes as a destroyer of his party, Ted Cruz goes to the White House and lectures the President on how he must modify Obamacare.

What’s Spanish for chutzpah and meshuga?

If there is a thin line between brilliant and balmy, Cruz keeps crossing it with no apparent awareness he is leading an invisible army into battle. With no evidence whatsoever, he has convinced John Boehner that Tea Party troops are under his command and holding the White House hostage.

Yet JohnMcCain tells Fox News that Cruz is “not representing us,” and would-be Presidential candidate Rep. Peter King tells Wolf Blitzer, “President Obama should send a campaign contribution to Ted Cruz. He has done more to boost Obamacare than anyone." Even Grover Norquist is feuding with him.

The Shutdown and debt-ceiling crisis have yet to be resolved, but Rafael Edward Cruz has won the 2013 Shameless Olympics hands down.

“It’s one thing to have a reputation as a loudmouth,” says a respected Conservative, “it’s quite another to have a reputation as a loser. That’s what the shutdown fight has done to Cruz. Among true believers he’ll be the one who was a leader in a fight that surely would have won if the squishes hadn’t sold them out. But for most party actors, including many sympathetic to Tea Partyism, he’s going to be the guy who ran up the wrong hill.”

Like the loony who huffs up the stairs in the old movie “Arsenic and Old Lace, dressed as Teddy Roosevelt, waving a wooden sword and yelling, “Charge!”

Banana Republic Burlesque

As pre-teens a friend and I slipped into a Manhattan burlesque house with high expectations but, instead of earthly delights, we found tired old strippers sashaying around amid a succession of clowns doing pratfalls on imaginary banana skins.

Republicans must be feeling that way these days. Tea Party acts by John McCain-labeled “wackos” have degenerated into a mix of low comedy with sad consequences for the GOP. The American audience is not buying.

Chief bozo John Boehner is bombing with his too-familiar patter as customers head for the exits, asking for their country back. Almost all of Washington is sour with bipartisan disapproval. Only member of the Religious Right, still in a stupor, are in their seats applauding Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

The Capital will have to book new attractions next year once the current crew loses its lease next November. If the consequences were not so tragic, we could just chalk it off as the end of an era of low comedy.

But these days it’s hard to be optimistic about whatever new talent will replace them. Can’t we just turn the whole place into a revival movie house showing classics like “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life?”

Can Politicians Be Scared Straight?

Fact-checking, a new study suggests, can be an effective club to bat down political lies. Who knew?

Experimenting on 1100 legislators in nine states, political scientists at the New America Foundation found fewer subsequent fibs by those who were warned about the existence of PolitiFact, which checks on their veracity: “Politicians who lie put their reputations and careers at risk.”

The study’s authors conclude that “the letter was an effective reminder of the potential costs of a negative rating.”

If candidates take this finding seriously, it will bolster anecdotal evidence that truth squads following them and their opponents can be an effective deterrent to bald-faced campaign lies.

In the old days, the media used to serve this function, but that was before most so-called reporters morphed into stenographers.

This study makes a suggestive bookend for another showing that Americans, particularly younger ones, lag behind their counterparts in most developed countries, not only “in math and technology, but also in literacy.”

Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan warns that such findings “show our education system hasn’t done enough to help Americans compete--or position our country to lead--in a global economy that demands increasingly higher skills.”

Latest polls show voter finally figuring out that Republicans and the Tea Party are most responsible for the ruinous government shutdown, but the lies have been coming so thick and fast that no amount of literacy or fact-checking could possibly have offset them.

 Update: Michele Bachmann is cited as a prime example of a pol finally undone by fact-checking, although she will retire holding the record for public lies. In her last days in office, PolitiFact cites her accomplishment, adding, "Bachmann isn't leaving immediately, however, so we will keep the Truth-O-Meter turned on.