George Rebane
What a happy kickoff for the new election season. Both sides are convinced they have the best position going into 2012. Our local lefties are especially happy with all the polling results and the ongoing politics here in the county and the state.
All this is happening when Congress is graded at historical lows, and 72% – almost 3 out of 4 Americans – think the nation is headed in the wrong direction. Yet both sides interpret that datum as a compelling reason to pursue their stated goals – liberals want more taxes, more spending, more borrowing, and more regulations; and conservatives want lower taxes, less spending, less borrowing, and fewer regulations. Both are convinced the citizens are overwhelmingly on their side.
Well, there is a little bit of grousing. A lot of people are “surprised” that “nothing can be done” in Congress, and there seems to be little ‘progress’ for the casual observer to see. But that is altogether not true when it comes to legislation. There is nothing written in stone that says a legislature is only productive when it passes more and more laws. American folk philosophers such as Mark Twain and Will Rogers have long warned us to hang on to our wallets when Congress is in session and mostly up to no good.
Also, as Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project have taught in their dissertation on principled negotiation, there is always the possibility that a negotiated settlement is not attainable without one side or both abandoning their core principles and/or interests. Since the country has now become historically polarized in the ideologies that seek to inform and guide its future, we should not be surprised that there is a notable pause in deciding how we want to go forward as a unit. No obvious middle ground beckons.
The President is in a quandary; he did what his progressive base wanted him to do. The citizens are balking at both the existential results and those yet to come. But his base wants him to double down and veer even more leftward, while accusing him of having “no backbone” for hesitating. They don’t seem to understand that Obama has a few things to clear up first, like the crony socialism that brought us the Solyndra, Evergreen Solar, and Spectrawatt Solar bankruptcies. (The rest of our solar energy industry is on its collective butt wondering whether more fed subsidies might be coming, or to declare early bankruptcy and avoid the rush later. This has to do with the future of American manufacturing, unions, regs, and workforce qualifications, which have been and will continue to be treated in other posts.)
There is ample reason to for him to hesitate when more of his own party like Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) are telling the Dynamic Dozen (aka super committee) to be “brave, bold, and big” in tackling issues like tax reform. That Wyden and his ilk of Democrats are talking about reducing taxes makes Obama’s choice of directions a mite confusing. Staring them in the face is a heap of historical data on the top of which is the fact that the country added 6.3M jobs in the aftermath of the Reagan tax cuts. What’s a liberal to do?
Well one thing they can do is just read the comment streams on RR where some very serious and strong arguments are advanced by local liberals who are convinced that tax cuts have nothing to do with job creation (and neither do regulation cutbacks). Wyden et al should inform themselves of this Sierra foothill wisdom, gird their loins, and charge in there, locking arms with their hard left brethren. This would make things a lot easier for President Barack Obama.
[update] From time to time the notion of American intellectualism comes to the fore in these pages. I’m an avid reader of the contemporary progressive mind, and run into a gem now and then which really illuminates their leading lights (reverse metaphor intended). A current offering in this category featured on truthout.com is an essay – Between Race and Reason: Anti-intellectualism in American Life – by Susan Searls Giroux of Stanford University. Besides being a massive apologetic for Barack Obama as Thomas Jefferson incarnate, the missive does provide a good look at the tenor and capacity of an educated liberal’s view of today’s world. It is a good thing to know.
rebanesruminations.com 
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