There are quite a few words that seem to have changed their meaning as a result of recent political discussion. For example:
Maverick I used to think that "maverick" meant "someone who defies convention." Now, I'm pretty sure Natasha is correct when in thinking it means "irresponsible rogue."
Oversight In the not to recent past, "oversight" meant "careful supervision." Now, the proper definition of the word is "meaningless promise."
Pragmatist For a while, "pragmatist" described someone who took the real-world outcomes to be the ultimate determinant for the meaning and / or value of an action, idea or policy. Now, I'm almost certain it means "someone who considers challenging the status quo to be too great a risk."
Ideological At one time, called something "ideological" meant it related to a large system of values or beliefs. Now, it is almost exclusively used to call someone or something "non-centrist."
****
While I am trying to be funny, I am not trying to be snarky. The meanings of words are contextual, and they can change as their use changes. The definitions of these words really are changing as a result of their use in our political discourse. How do you see the meaning of these and other words changing?
Per my earlier post on Obama's economic speeches of late, let me add one note about his declarations about Social Security and Medicare reform. Dean Baker doesn't think Obama's declaration on Social Security and Medicare automatically means he's looking to cut those programs. I agree that it doesn't automatically mean that - but I disagree with Dean that Obama's statement explicitly "does not indicate any intention to cut Social Security." Obama explicitly tied his goal of reducing the deficit to entitlement reform (not to tax increases, etc.) - which logically at least suggests the consideration of Social Security cuts to reducing the deficit. That is, unless someone can produce a magic pony and explain how alleviating the deficit mostly through Social Security "reform" (rather than tax increases) means not using money from Social Security to pay down the deficit (ie. a cut in Social Security).
A pure, unadulterated optimist (which I sometimes can be) might say that it is possible Obama's reference to entitlement reform was a veiled reference to him fulfilling his campaign promise to raise the payroll tax cap so that it applies to income over $100,000. I don't think he was referring to that, considering his current focus on talking about tax cuts rather than tax increases (which is what the elimination of the payroll tax cap would be). But I'll concede that it is certainly possible, considering he promised to lift the cap when he ran for president.
The key here is making the progressive possibility (ie. Obama-led entitlement reform equaling the elimination of the payroll tax cap, not a benefit cut) into a reality. And as I said in the original post, that's going to require sustained movement pressure.
Democratic senators are still emerging from their closed-door briefing with Obama economic adviser Larry Summers ... but a senior Democratic senator, Iowa progressive Tom Harkin, just gave me a dire buzzword: trickle-down.
"There's only one thing we've got to do in this stimulus, and that's create jobs," Harkin told me. "I'm a little concerned by the way Mr. Summers and others are going on this ... it still looks a little more to me like trickle-down."
In this post, I am not going to discuss the validity of the tax cuts themselves. I consider them worrying just as Harkin, Conrad and Kerry do, but there is another pattern emerging today that I find just as worrying: progressive concerns being intentionally ignored and / or snubbed by the transition. Here is the last line in the TPM article (more in the extended entry):
Doc Brown: Tell me, Future Boy, who's President of the United States in 1985?
Marty: Ronald Reagan.
Doc Brown: Ronald Reagan? The actor? Then who's vice-president, Jerry Lewis? I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady? And Jack Benny is Secretary of the Treasury!
That's the famously hilarious interchange between Marty McFly and Doc Brown from Back to the Future, when Marty tells young Doc that Ronald Reagan - in 1955, a B movie actor - is president in 1985. It's the first thing I thought of when I read this story about CNN's Sanjay Gupta potentially being our next Surgeon General. I thought I was reading an Onion story.
Now, I say all that not to make a direct comparison - obviously, Gupta's experience as a physician, White House fellow and public voice on health care makes him more qualified for potential consideration as Surgeon General than Jack Benny for Treasury Secretary. But the key phrase is "potential consideration" - because once you actually consider Gupta more fully, his potential nomination becomes more questionable.
With a new House at work in DC, Democrats are now back up to their pre-1994 election numbers, and we can make a direct comparison of the composition of the parties. For this year, below, I show a distribution of the seats held by each party according to how their district voted in 2000, with a smooth curve drawn through the data:
Click to enlarge.
Below, you'll find the comparisons going back to 1994 as well as some info on where the representatives come from. Here's a preview:
To continue an almost comic run of bad luck, following my broken arm, Matt's departure from the site, and the Soapblox crash, last night my glasses broke. As it is impossible for me to function without my glasses, in uber-geek fashion, they are now taped together:
I take is as a symbol both of how much of progressive infrastructure is truly run on a shoestring, and of how we continue to press forward no matter what happens.
Together with Paul Preston and several Soapblox-dependent state blogs, BlogPac is finalizing a plan to save, secure, and improve Soapblox over both the short and long-term. For us, Soapblox is simply too big to fail, and we will not allow it to happen. The plan, along with an action alert, will be presented tomorrow. In the meantime, the situation has improved dramatically, as a new press release from Saopblox indicates. We are going to fix this problem, and continue to build a vibrant progressive movement.
For more information on why Soapblox matters, read this diary. For Paul's full press release, check out the extended entry.
In accordance with the plan laid out last week, I have looked over the 224 bills introduced to the House, and referred to committee, on Tuesday. After removing bills introduced by Republicans, bills that only ask for commissions or studies, and bills that are hopeless parochially for a blog and an organization with a national audience, 47 remained. You can view them here:
The links don't work yet, and the text of almost none of these bills are actually online as of this writing. This list also does not include the 63 bills introduced to the House yesterday, but I will sift through those tonight. You can see the complete list of House bills here. Natasha will have a list of bills introduced to the Senate soon.
Broadly speaking, the goal of this project is to identify progressive legislation that is stuck in committee, find out why it is stuck, and see what we can do to get it passed. With that in mind, here are some thoughts on the forty-seven pieces of legislation listed above.
Aim High: At the outset of the project, I think we should aim high, rather than limiting our possibilities in advance. In this light, I am partial to H.R. 193, which is Pete Stark's Americare bill for universal health care coverage (seepage 9 of 10 above), or H.R. 59, which is Shelia Jackson-Lee's bill to ensure that people who have served their time in jail are guaranteed the right to vote (page 3 of 10 above). I would love to call members of the relevant committees to see if they support or oppose legislation like that. It would be great information, and help us learn a lot about support for progressive issues that are rarely voted on in Congress.
Small is beautiful: At the same time, perhaps our best chance to pass legislation will come from small, smart, targeted bills. This includes, for example, H.R. 106, Chaka Fattah's bill to increase tax deductions on higher education expenses, or H.R. 179, Jose Serrano's bill to allow federal syringe exchange programs. There are a lot of good, small pieces of legislation like this that we might actually be able to help pass, even if it lacks the overt ideological statement of the bills in the first bullet point.
Bad bills?: There are a small number of bills that, even though they were introduced by Democrats, we might want to work against.. This includes H.R. 173, John Salazar's bill to exempt certain farmland from the estate tax, or H.R. 111, which is a bill introduced by Paul Kanjorski. Now, I don't even know if these are bad pieces of legislation, since they are not online yet. However, hypothetically speaking, if they are bad legislation, do we want to spend time trying to block bad bills in addition to pushing good ones?
How many can we do at once? An important structural question for this project is to figure out how many of these bills we can track in a given week. Tracking a bill will require contacting the offices of all the members on the relevant committees, and asking if a member supports, opposes, or is unsure on our chosen legislation. How many bills is too many to ask each member about? I have a had time believing they will respond if we ask about more than three. Also, how many phone calls can we realistically make? Each bill will require at least 30 phone calls, just for the Democratic members of the committees. Can we do more than three in a single week?
There are other good questions, too.
Do we bother to track legislation that doesn't have any co-sponsors? If the member introducing the legislation hasn't made the effort to find supporters for his or her bill, should we?
Should we bother to track legislation that is certain to be voted on by the full House, such as the Lilly Ledbettter bill (H.R. 11) or the D.C. voting rights bill (H.R. 157)? We might not be needed to track such high visibility legislation.
Anyway, please tell me what you think we should do next. In addition to these questions, there are a lot of very good pieces of legislation I did not mention. I have to head off to a doctor's appointment, but I will be back in full force (I hope) this evening. I found sifting through this legislation to be very exciting and illuminating. This is the range of policy possibility offered to us. What do we push, oppose and ignore?
Note: Per Chris's introduction, I'm thrilled to be starting full-time here at OpenLeft. As you may know, I hold down a few jobs - syndicated columnist, fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, editor of In These Times magazine - and now OpenLeft blogger. Working on this site is really a perfect fit for me, as I'm excited to be able to integrate all my other work into the kind of movement-building we're doing here. So a big thank you to Chris, Mike, Matt and the rest of the OpenLeft team - and to you, the community that makes this site so great. Onward! - D
With President-elect Barack Obama's dramatic speech today, he is sounding the economic alarm that the Bush administration needed to sound long ago. While Bloomberg News reports that Bush "is using the waning days of his presidency to implement a raft" of corporate giveaways, Obama plans to use the first days of his term to confront this crisis head-on - and that's critically important because as any psychologist might tell you, the first step in solving a massive problem is to admit that it exists. But, as always, the devil will be in the details. So without further ado, here's the good, bad and ugly of what we know about Obama's economic recovery proposal.
Continuing with our series of major announcements on Open Left, this morning I am very excited to welcome David Sirota as Open Left's new full-time blogger. David will be joining me as the second regular weekday blogger, as Matt Stoller is now working in the House of Representatives, solving the rootsgap.
Matt can never be replaced-and we will always await his return--but David will be a force in his own right. As the author of two books, as a nationally syndicated columnist, as a regular presence on a number of blogs, as a freelance writer and as an editor for In These Times, David's accomplishments as a writer are impressive (and enviable). But beyond his accomplishments as a writer, it is what he writes, and the passion with which he writers it, that makes him such a good fit for Open Left. David has consistently, forcefully, and insightfully advocated for a broad, populist, progressive shift away from our aristocratic, top-down, right-wing, corporatist institutional structures. It isn't a stretch to say that his vision is what Open Left is all about.
So, welcome aboard David! It is an great honor to have you with us. I forsee great things for our community in the coming months and years, and this is a big step in that direction.
An exciting new piece of progressive infrastructure is emerging to help progressive candidates in federal campaigns: The Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Rather than focusing on large, independent expenditures, ala the Club for Growth, it seeks to help progressive federal candidates, such as Tom Geoghegan, by providing them with expert staff, advice, strategy and connection to the netroots. The focus will be on open seat primaries, and progressives who face competitive general elections, but primaries against conservative Democrats might also come into play. From a Huffington Post story today:
A group of progressive operatives from MoveOn and labor circles have teamed with a prominent Internet pioneer to try to give the Sam Bennetts of the world the final push they need -- and send even more Perriellos to Congress. The organization will be the first of its kind exclusively to focus on electing progressive Democrats in congressional elections.
It won't focus its energy on unseating conservative Democrats, but Green, a cofounder, didn't rule out the possibility. Instead, it will prioritize competitive open-seat primaries and help general election candidates like Bennett and Perriello run effective campaigns.
The group's first forays are likely to be in the Illinois district vacated by Rahm Emanuel, who left to become Obama's chief of staff. Green says the group is in talks with a progressive labor lawyer, Tom Geoghegan, in that district. Another potential target: the California district emptied by Hilda Solis, who's been tapped to be labor secretary.(...)
The PCCC aims to be something of a guiding resource for first-time candidates like Bennett. By helping candidates find good campaign staff and make more effective use of the Internet, the group thinks candidates could save tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in consultant fees. Whereas consultants might charge thousands to record and pump out robo-calls, for instance, the PCCC could show a candidate how to do it in-house, online, for a fraction of the cost.
The organization is for real, composed of former campaign staff, MoveOn.org staff, and labor organizers. It is also on track to raise $650,000 this year, and has MoveOn.org backing. It should hit its fundraising targets no sweat, and it's experienced team knows what it is doing in a campaign setting. This is an exciting new piece of progressive infrastructure that should combine nicely with other emerging efforts, such as the primary project that I mentioned last month.
Organizing energy is clearly with progressives right now. Since noon Wednesday, 47 members of the Open Left community have raised over $2,200 $2,600 for Tom Geoghagen and BlogPac. Now, the PCCC has been added to Better Democrats 2010 as well. While it may seem shocking early to start a 2010 campaign page, the early bird gets to govern.
Help us sustain our work by taking our reader survey. If you've already taken it, just click on the link, and your responses will be added to our results.
