The Day After

Yesterday I was really quite radioactive with rage at what was happening with the healthcare reform process in Washington. But today I find that I am just tired and a little sad.

I felt so helpless at the unraveling of reform after so many long months of nail-biting attention and noisemaking that I think like many others on the left I compensated for that feeling of helplessness by drawing on the enraged energy bouncing me from site to site online. Nearly everybody I respect seemed as angry and as disgusted as I was and for the same reasons I was. And the ease with which we seemed to be rhetorically demolishing those who disagreed with us, all the compromisers and the apologists for the Administration or the industry or the process itself, felt like something of an adrenaline infusion, staving off despair for a time. It was nice, even empowering, to immerse myself in a kind of righteous virtual reality given the debased debacle playing out for real, I suppose.

And, it's not as though I have come to think in the light of day after a night's sober reflection that my anger was misplaced or my arguments wrongheaded particularly. I still agree with everything I posted yesterday, but I am less sure what the force of all that finally amounts to.

I will say that at the height of my anger I was susceptible to entertaining the darkest fantasies about the Obama administration -- that this abortive aborning outcome of "reform," this enforced giveaway from vulnerable suffering Americans to the greediest most heartless villains of for-profit insurance, coming on the heels of an escalation of bloody warmaking (there are no worries, of course, about costs when it's about murdering people endlessly around the world in our name), on the heels of the bailouts of the financial fraudsters, and so on -- that Obama had seeeecretly wanted all this all along, corporate-militarist wreathed in vacuous poetry that he is, and so on and so forth. I daresay last night I could possibly have been nudged momentarily into becoming that most ineffectual of absurdities, a Nader voter spouting off about Republican and Democratic equivalences and the whole nine yards if I hadn't picked up Anna Karenina instead and read myself to sleep.

That there was nothing worth watching on the teevee made it worse. That this is all coming on the heels of end-of-term exhaustion and worrisome news on the job front for me made it worse still.

But be all that as it may, I cannot say what is in Obama's heart. I don't know if Rahm Emanuel is a stealth corporatist as bad as a Republican whispering bad thoughts into the President's ear, I don't know if Robert Gibbs really believes that Howard Dean is a lunatic and Joe Lieberman is one of the good guys, I don't know if Ezra Klein is a pampered prick who sold out the first second he got, I don't know if Nate Silver is incapable of taking actual insurance practices and actual human foibles into his calculations because he is actually a robot, I don't know if the Iraq war-apologists who later apologized for what they had done and are now apologists for the bloody insurance-industry sell-out Senatorial sausage we are being offered in the name of "reform" will eventually apologize for this too. I don't know any of that stuff.

I do know that razor thin Democratic majorities coupled with literally monolithic Republican obstructionism have created structural conditions in which every Senator has acquired veto power over Obama's agenda, whatever he wants it to be in his secret heart of hearts, and it is only natural that it would be those conservative Democrats and relatively "moderate" Republicans on the margins of the faultline who will be most persuadable to stymie a progressive agenda with which they have the least sympathy in the Democratic caucus or stray from right-wing crazytown a wee bit to empower what passes for "moderate" outcomes even if they can be trumpeted as "Democratic accomplishments."

Under such conditions we get legislation that tastes like a shit sandwich to the left whether Obama meant to deliver shit sandwiches all along or not. The House has a wider Democratic majority than the Senate and the House is behaving in a more progressive fashion than the Senate. Given that Obama has a governing majority in name only he has governed to the right of his campaign rhetoric (even granting that his campaign rhetoric was to the right of many of his voters and their hopes for him).

If our majority in the House dwindles and our majority in the Senate grows even more notional you better believe that things will get worse for us rather than better.

It seems likely that Obama will offer up some scalps and symbolic victories in compensation over the next eleven months or so to whomp up some kind of enthusiasm for mid-terms, but nobody should expect substance because the conditions don't much seem to be available to enable substance. Weakness and weaseliness and corruption and privilege and infantile psychology and stealth corporate-militarism no doubt make things worse in some measure, but to dwell on these things is to invite despair and defeat.

It is important to keep the pressure as high as one can without risking heartbreak and burnout in the face of serial defeats in order to maximize best possible outcomes, and it is important to keep the spotlight burning very bright on Movement Republican crazytown to minimize any benefit Democratic weakness may provide for their active evil.

More, and better, democrats.

Try to make them do it.

And don't let the bastards grind you down.