Obama's Smackdown of House GOP

It was entertaining to watch President Obama take on the hapless GOP House caucus last Friday. It was basically 140 vs. 1....and the 140 fell one-by-one to blistering defeat. Unfortunately, it was no more than that....a two-hour intellectual mismatch between scores of obstructionist hacks fighting to control the levers of power once again and one intellectually superior man desperately trying to govern a nation in decline. In no way does it change the political scorecard beyond a couple news cycles. But the unfortunate reality is that it would if we were able to see the Barack Obama that we saw last Friday more than once a year. Regretably, we won't.

Paul Krugman's 2008 primary season criticism of Obama proved right on one front. Obama lacks the fight in him to effectively take on a city as cynical as Washington. Obama underestimated the opposition's obsession to destroy him and went into office the way so many before him did, extending the hand of "bipartisan cooperation" only to have it slapped. Obama's problem is that he let that argument define his candidacy to the point where he can't now respond to Republicans with the Nixonian partisan bloodlust needed to put fear in them. He threaded the needle about as well as possible last Friday, but the Republicans can be expected to continue rebuking him at every corner on every issue because Obama has not yet given them a downside to doing so.

With every two-year political cycle, Washington gets more partisan, even when it seemed at points in the recent past that it would be impossible for the town to get more partisan. Hard to see what can change this and the country has become almost ungovernable as a consequence, but it's a reality Obama needs to come to terms with if he has any hopes of saving his Presidency. The opposition party wants to ruin him and will never bargain in good faith no matter how many olive branches he extends to them. He should use Friday's smackdown as a stepping stone to heightened aggressiveness and more persistent reminders to the American people of how badly the opposition is playing politics. It's painfully clear that if he doesn't, those playing politics so cynically will be rewarded by a confused and angry voting public looking to make the most convenient target pay, and that convenient target now happens to be the majority party that Obama belongs to.

The End of Obama's Presidency?

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Tuesday's election represented an effective end to Obama's Presidency. When it comes to passing any major legislation the he campaigned on, that ship has now sailed. It's not just losing the 60th vote that makes things tactically difficult, it's the psychological defeat that will, and in fact already is, prove to be the undoing of a party that's full of nervous bed-wetters even in the best of times. At this point, if a President as radioactive as Obama supports something, the majority in Congress will oppose it.

Controversial and arguably counterproductive measures like comprehensive immigration reform and cap and trade were DOA long before anyone heard of Scott Brown, but a stake has officially been driven into the heart of health care reform at this point too and any efforts to funnel desperately needed government money into jobs programs will be obstructed by the chuckleheaded descendants-of-Hoover worried about the deficit in the middle of a depression. Had these people gotten their way on TARP, the auto bailout, and the stimulus, we'd be looking at 25% unemployment and a $5.4 trillion deficit this year rather than 10% unemployment and a $1.4 trillion deficit, but you can't reason with crazy.

It's also amazing to listen to teabaggers and naive "moderates" whipped up into a frenzy over anti-health care reform propaganda cheer on the prospect that we can now "start over" with health care reform. THIS IS IT, FOLKS! This was our only shot at health care reform in the next generation....and you blew it. Public gullibility fueled by right-wing hacks and insurance industry barons turned once-promising reform legislation into a pale shadow of its former self and has now officially doomed it.

Presidents and Congresses for 60 years have been trying to reform our increasingly dysfunctional health care system and everyone has failed because of the complexity of the issue and the fact some front-end sacrifice is needed from the health care haves in order to help the health care have-nots be able to live. We don't do "sacrifice" in America, and the very possibility of it is enough to derail any health care reform plan worth having by turning the majority of the public against it. We guess what, you Scott Brown-supporting geniuses. There ain't gonna be another one. The magic elixir health care reform legislation that lowers premiums, costs nothing to implement, and requires no sacrifice does not exist and it'll be another generation before the next naive President and Congress are willing to destroy themselves by trying. Bottom line: we're stuck with the worst-run health care system in the world for many years to come, and sure as the sun rises in the east, said system will continue to get worse and worse and worse with each passing year.

Angry rants aside, the political reality is that this is where the country is at. They demand improved health care but think it should be free. They want the government to focus exclusively on the economy but won't accept a rising deficit to get there. They insist we need to create "jobs, jobs, jobs" and that we need to do it by running budget surpluses, voting down auto bailouts, and opposing economic stimulus plans. But as toxic as the political environment was on January 18, it became that much worse on January 19.

The only reason 1994 wasn't even more devastating for Democrats is that they mostly held their ground in the northeast. Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts means Republicans are winning places in 2010 that were out of their reach even in 1994. With that in mind, my long-standing prediction that Republicans would win 70 House seats and eight Senate seats now seems too timid. Right now, I'm looking at GOP gains of nearly 100 House seats and 11-12 Senate seats. Knowing that this is coming, Obama can be officially certified a lame-duck President 10 months before even Clinton's Presidency was effectively ended in November 1994. Like Clinton before him, Obama's only prospects of bouncing back is to govern like a lame duck and merely looking less crazy to voters than Mitch McConnell and John Boehner will when they attempt to ram through $3 trillion tax cuts (not a hypothetical....the GOP minority actually tried this in February 2009). Any chance of governing on the offense and passing legislation that could conceivably reverse this country's decline has passed.

Will Congress Change Party Hands Over and Over Every Few Years?

Looking at the indisputable data pointing to a likely GOP takeover of the House this coming November, it got me thinking about two things. First, it was just four years ago that the Earth was shaking in favor of Democrats, who swept into power winning seats nobody would have imagined winnable for Democrats two years earlier. Second, at this point in 2004, the 95+% reelection rate of incumbents of both parties in the previous five Congressional elections was considered "scandalous". My how times have changed.

For the foreseeable future, I envision Congressional race volatility of historically unprecedented levels. A landslide GOP win in 2010 will complicate my prediction a little because the Republicans would have disproportionate influence in configuring district lines for the decade ahead following the 2010 census results and thus giving themselves a serious decadelong advantage. Even so, Republicans largely had the same advantage after 2000 when all the stars were aligned for them for the 2001 district reapportionment, yet in 2006 they still managed to lose what was thought to be an impenetrably Republican House....and then managed to lose an additional 20+ seats to Democrats in 2008.

Expect that every two years, control of Congress will be up for grabs as American voters have become increasingly impatient in their leadership expectations in permanently troubled times. The reason for this voter impatience in contrast to their deference to incumbents in the decade past: America is a nation in decline, most likely irreversible decline, and voters refuse to accept it.

The lack of easy answers available from politicians today that were advanced by incumbent politicians in flush times have not made them many friends, and the would-be easy answers that are proposed ("we can have universal health care and not add one penny to the deficit") are met with understandable cynicism. Yet in 2012 or 2014, when Republicans are likely to control the House and offer delirious and plutocratic solutions of their own which will fail to quench the populist rage sweeping the country, the Democrats will probably be poised to retake Congress again. And then the tables are likely to be turned again by 2016. Rinse and repeat.

Again, this volatility is poised to be endemic because, barring a wholesale transformation of our economic infrastructure back to something sustainable, America is poised to continue failing. The seeds for our decline were sown back when globalization was at its infancy, as we were never gonna be able to compete with the developing world when the playing field was leveled or at least more level. Nonetheless, creativity in the financial industry produced a mirage of continued American exceptionalism for another generation, artificially increasing American's expectations of continued vitality. The only problem: the empire was not real, constructed with cheap credit and bottomless consumerism, and as a consequence, was unsustainable.

Add to all of this our entanglement in multiple foreign policy quagmires and we have the mess that America faces in 2010, a mess poised to grow much worse with the coming demographic shift which will force even more hard choices and broken promises. Is it any wonder why so many voters are so angry and so fickle in their political leanings?

For Those Who Thought The Last Decade Was Bad....You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet!

For the past couple of weeks, as the 2000s approached their sunset, countless columns have bid the decade a sneering good riddance, looking back unfavorably on the bad news that has kept clubbing us over the head, from 9/11 to the multiple wars it triggered to the worst-since-the-Great-Depression economic collapse. Fair enough. It was a lousy decade, with promise after promise after promise conveyed to us by the "experts", common sense be damned, failed to materialize and America became the nation in decline that was inevitable to anyone who was paying attention to our economic and cultural trajectory since at least the Reagan years. But the mistake that so many are making is looking to the decade ahead with optimism. The almost certain reality is that the 2010s will make the 2000s seem like the good old days.

It's hard to gauge what's in store for us on the terrorism or foreign policy front. It's hard to see the situation in either Iraq or Afghanistan fully dissolving at any point in the decade ahead, but it's conceivable the worst is behind us. History suggests that periods free of military entanglements are usually pretty short-lived though, so even if we get those two wars behind us, it's a safe bet another headache will be right around the corner. And with terrorism, I don't think anybody is capable of coordinating our intelligence agencies in the way necessary to thwart attacks. The mindless agency turf wars will transcend whatever "reform" happens to be passed by fist-waving lawmakers demanding change. So will a major terrorist attack occur this decade? Hard to say, but I think the odds are better than even.

That brings us to the economy, where continued American decline is an almost certainty. The dirty little secret that few talk about but which the 2000s proved to us is that the American economy no longer produces anything of value. Our political leaders sold the American working class into endemic poverty a generation ago by expediting the global market forces that exported our production economy to the globe's lowest bidders. Much of the high-value service economy has more recently followed suit. Last year's bailout that saved, for the time being, the final throes of the American auto industry should have served as a terrifying wake-up call about just how much we've lost. Instead, it led to the same mindless cretins who helped engineer the decline to complain about "the government taking over the auto industry", an industry that would not exist in America in January 2010 had the bailout not occurred 12 months ago, thus leaving our national unemployment rate 3-5% higher than its current 10%.

America's economy since the 1980s when so much of our industrial base headed overseas has been based on finance and credit, neither of which was sustainable. The finance industry thrived with Ponzi schemes made possible by reduced levels of regulation and growing numbers of Americans thrust into the "investor class" vis a vis 401Ks, a class of financial amateurs who were easy to take advantage of by financial sharks seeking to turn a huge profit at their expense and leave the wreckage for someone else to clean up. They orchestrated two giant economic bubbles, in the tech industry a decade ago and in housing this decade. Most everybody acknowledges this, but what they don't acknowledge is that these artificial bubbles are the only source of economic growth that can be produced in a nation that produces less and less in the form of raw, tangible goods every year, choosing to let these industries head overseas and telling us America is somehow better for it.

Down on Main Street, the economic bubbles even at their peaks failed to trickle down in the way that a production-based economy did in the past. The only way the peasantry could maintain the rampant consumerism needed to fuel the economy was through credit, another way in which financial sharks were able to thrust their fangs into our exposed necks. And that's how we ended this decade. The excesses of the financial industry final took their toll and the credit card-financed consumer binge of the average American family was no longer sustainable. And after all that, we still don't make anything people want to buy and which may renew economic growth.

So where do we go from here? Barring a miraculous and unforeseen return to a production economy, we either continue our fast decline or we start blowing the next bubble. The next bubble is almost certain to come from "green technology", with the same not-ready-for-primetime investor class desperately seeking to refill their emptied 401Ks with the "next big thing", buying into irrationally exuberant rhetoric from every nickel-and-dime green energy upstart with fork-tongued corporate pitchmen. Many of these new companies will be offshoots of the same energy industry barons already fleecing us. But a financially desperate people seeking vitality any way they can get it will surely take the bait, enlarging an unsustainable green economy bubble that will leave us at the dawn of the next decade with hundreds of thousands of wind turbines sitting idle in Midwestern fields, or even sold for scrap at pennies on the dollar.

Now there may be real sources of economic growth in the decade ahead. I doubt anybody could have imagined 20 years ago how much mileage the economy would get from the Internet. But whatever impact the next big thing in technology, or even the Internet up to this point for that matter, it's unlikely it will translate to anything that benefits the American economy proportionate to the rest of the world. It may very well exacerbate the pace in which the rest of the world gains at our expense.

And on top of all this, the 2010s will be the decade where the wolf finally starts knocking on the door about our retiree entitlements. Baby Boomers will begin retiring by the tens of millions, rapidly draining the Social Security trust fund and bankrupting Medicare outright. This will require either extending retirement ages, cutting benefits, or dramatically raising payroll taxes, none of which will go over well and all of which will hurt yonger Americans. Even raising retirement ages will make it harder for younger Americans to penetrate the fading job market. There are incredibly few good options for the generation ahead, and the extent of resource redistribution to our parents and grandparents will make it even harder for America to find its footing in the global economy. Meanwhile, instead of preparing for the demographic time bomb ahead, our clueless political leaders are encouraging and even mandating "healthy lifestyles" that will dramatically magnify the already monstrous problem we face of being a nation of economically unproductive geriatrics.

So despite all the cheering crowds at Times Square, there is very little to look forward to at the dawn of this decade. Thankfully, you can always count on "Mark My Words!" to give it to you straight no matter how bad the news.