Fantasies Here, Fantasies There, Fantasies Everywhere

Since this is an election year, we can all expect a great deal of scrutiny on the issues. The remaining five candidates in the GOP field as well as the president are going to be under a microscope for the better part of the next ten months so we should buckle up and start getting used to it.

Yet the candidates aren't the only ones that are going to be examined and with good reason. Recently, Andrew Sullivan and Thomas Frank are taking a look at exactly what is driving the folks that are rabidly against the reelection of President Obama. I've been doing that as well. For me, it all starts with this. I can't think of a finer example that illustrates the mentality of the conservative movement.

Thomas Frank, in his latest book Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, makes some points that perfectly illustrate my monumental frustration. In looking at the aftermath of the collapse in 2008, we saw the greatest example of  the failure of free market principles that most Americans have ever lived through. Instead of a move towards a balance between regulation and free markets, we got the Tea Party, a hardcore anti-government movement. To Mr. Frank, it's as if "the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the wake of the Three Mile Island disaster."

From a recent review of Frank's book.

Until Obama's election, this kind of purist market worship was the preserve of political and economic elites – "propaganda," to use Frank's blunt term, to keep wealth in their own hands. Who knows if even they believed it? And yet in 2009 and 2010, a whole swath of Americans turned to "the sole utopian scheme available" to them, with effects that can only be called perverse. It's one thing for a CEO to declare that "corporations are people," if such an obscene claim leads to greater profits or power. Now, amazingly, the same line could be heard from ordinary voters. Even more strangely, middle- and working-class Americans were defending precisely the multinationals that had triggered the crisis and received the universally reviled bailouts. In the trough of the 2009 recession, Americans whose livelihoods had been destroyed by far-off bankers were actually rallying "to demand that bankers be freed from 'red tape' and the scrutiny of the law." At one surreal moment, Glenn Beck urged his followers to give away their cash to the US Chamber of Commerce, "the biggest, baddest business lobby in all of DC." They donated so much that they crashed its servers.

Indeed. The inmates are running the asylum. But how did all this happen?

If you wanted to learn about the Great Depression you once went to the library to read Arthur Schlesinger; now, your first Google results will teach you that the New Deal was an utter failure and that "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" is a Hooverite screed against government handout). By this binary logic, everyone trying to make a buck is united against big bad Washington and its attendant elite institutions. The absurdity that such elite figures as bank CEOs, four-star generals, and Alaskan governors are somehow men and women of the people goes unmentioned.

There is hope, however, and it's this very hope that is starting to piss off the right wing blogsphere. It's simply a matter of people responding to this lunacy and calling it out for what it is. More folks are starting to listen. Andrew Sullivan's recent piece on Obama's Long Game details this quite nicely.

But this time, with this president, something different has happened. It’s not that I don’t understand the critiques of Barack Obama from the enraged right and the demoralized left. It’s that I don’t even recognize their description of Obama’s first term in any way. The attacks from both the right and the left on the man and his policies aren’t out of bounds. They’re simply—empirically—wrong.

No shit, Sully. They are wrong and it's far past time to say it that plainly.

The right’s core case is that Obama has governed as a radical leftist attempting a “fundamental transformation” of the American way of life. Mitt Romney accuses the president of making the recession worse, of wanting to turn America into a European welfare state, of not believing in opportunity or free enterprise, of having no understanding of the real economy, and of apologizing for America and appeasing our enemies. According to Romney, Obama is a mortal threat to “the soul” of America and an empty suit who couldn’t run a business, let alone a country.

Exactly right and I've said as much on here (oddly to be accused recently of bearing false witness). Let's test this theory. I'm going to go and pull a quote from Kevin Baker's site and post it here. Shouldn't take me too long...be right back....

Ah, here we go...here is a quote he put up the other day...

Detroit is North Korea … with the Unions holding the same pride of place as the North Korean Army—keep them happy and they keep the kleptocracy in power. No matter who else starves. -- 

followed up this comment

But the Obama economic model will make Detroit the model for the rest of the U.S. THAT is what we need to worry about. Later on there will be no other place to leave to.

So, Sully's assessment is accurate. (side note: what is a kleptocracy?)

Now, what actually happened...

Obama did several things at once: he continued the bank bailout begun by George W. Bush, he initiated a bailout of the auto industry, and he worked to pass a huge stimulus package of $787 billion. All these decisions deserve scrutiny. And in retrospect, they were far more successful than anyone has yet fully given Obama the credit for. The job collapse bottomed out at the beginning of 2010, as the stimulus took effect. Since then, the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration. In 2011 alone, 1.9 million private-sector jobs were created, while a net 280,000 government jobs were lost. Overall government employment has declined 2.6 percent over the past 3 years. (That compares with a drop of 2.2 percent during the early years of the Reagan administration.) To listen to current Republican rhetoric about Obama’s big-government socialist ways, you would imagine that the reverse was true. It isn’t.

Correct. I highlight this last bit because one would think that the anti-government types would be happy about this. Nope. He's still a socialist who wants a European style government. How can anyone fucking talk to these people?

This next bit I dedicate with love and affection to last in line.

The right claims the stimulus failed because it didn’t bring unemployment down to 8 percent in its first year, as predicted by Obama’s transition economic team. Instead, it peaked at 10.2 percent. But the 8 percent prediction was made before Obama took office and was wrong solely because it relied on statistics that guessed the economy was only shrinking by around 4 percent, not 9. Remove that statistical miscalculation (made by government and private-sector economists alike) and the stimulus did exactly what it was supposed to do. It put a bottom under the free fall. It is not an exaggeration to say it prevented a spiral downward that could have led to the Second Great Depression.

Sully goes on to talk about how a third of the stimulus was tax cuts, another fact ignored by the mouth foamers. And how about that spending?

Under Bush, new policies on taxes and spending cost the taxpayer a total of $5.07 trillion. Under Obama’s budgets both past and projected, he will have added $1.4 trillion in two terms.Under Bush and the GOP, nondefense discretionary spending grew by twice as much as under Obama.

Yep, correct. Health care?

The Congressional Budget Office has projected it will reduce the deficit, not increase it dramatically, as Bush’s unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug benefit did. It is based on the individual mandate, an idea pioneered by the archconservative Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and, of course, Mitt Romney, in the past. It does not have a public option; it gives a huge new client base to the drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also pioneered by the right. It’s to the right of the Clintons’ monstrosity in 1993, and remarkably similar to Nixon’s 1974 proposal. 

Embedded in it are also a slew of cost-reduction pilot schemes to slow health-care spending. Yes, it crosses the Rubicon of universal access to private health care. But since federal law mandates that hospitals accept all emergency-room cases requiring treatment anyway, we already obey that socialist principle—but in the most inefficient way possible. Making 44 million current free-riders pay into the system is not fiscally reckless; it is fiscally prudent. It is, dare I say it, conservative.

Yes, you should say it because that's what it fucking is. Good grief am I tired of people's general ideological delusions and/or paranoid hatred of the president leading to insane and completely untrue accusations.

Sully goes on to talk about Obama's foreign policy successes as well as the equally ridiculous accusations by the left which I may address at a later date but for now I think it's important to reflect on all of these points because they are what actually happened. And the American people need to understand that. But will they?

And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.

Man, I love Sully, but I'm afraid I don't share his optimism.