The latest right-wing craziness to erupt onto the political scene is truly revealing: hysteria over a planned presidential speech to school children encouraging them to stay in school, work hard, and accept responsibility. The speech, slated for next week, sounds about as anodyne–and if anything, conservative–as any speech Barack Obama has ever given. Participation by schools is voluntary. The President is doing what presidents do when addressing kids: setting an example and encouraging them to be good students and good citizens.
But that’s not how it’s being interepreted in the fever swamps, of course. Led by Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck, conservatives are shrieking about some White House conspiracy to indoctrinate children and enlist them in Obama’s godless hordes of brainwashed totalitarians.
It didn’t take long at all, of course, for this looniness to get picked up by “respectable” Republicans. Here’s what the chairman of the Florida Republican Party had to say in a press release yesterday:

As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology. The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power.

Worse yet, conservative gabbers are actually encouraging parents to keep their kids out of school on September 8. Of course, we are talking about people who often denounce public education entirely as a socialist plot, but it’s still a new low, and a rather ironic way to deal with manufactured allegations that the president is trying to politicize children.

Progressives tired of the sense that controversy and misfortune are hounding Democratic politicians exclusively these days should be forgiven for indulging in a bit of schadenfreude at the continuing travails of one-time 2012 presidential aspirant Mark Sanford. Though he’s disappeared from the national political radar over the last few weeks, down in South Cackalacki, he just won’t go away, as detailed in a Wall Street Journal report today by Valerie Bauerline:

To resurrect his image, Mr. Sanford is on a forgiveness tour, criss-crossing the state and imploring civic-club members to join him in pushing for dull but substantial changes to South Carolina’s state constitution. He said he is eager to regain the confidence of his constituents, one fried-chicken luncheon at a time.

But despite his doughty efforts to bore Palmetto State residents into disinterest in his scandals, Sanford can’t help but notice the buzzards circling his path from Rotary luncheon to Kiwanis breakfast. He’s still in deep trouble over allegations of illegal use of state funds for personal and political travel. His former chief political strategist, his wife, has vacated the Governor’s Mansion and split to the coast with his sons. And most recently, in a fine piece of political jiu-jitsu, his Lieutenant Governor (and bitter intra-party enemy), Andre Bauer, greased the skids for his departure by pledging to drop a planned 2010 gubernatorial run if Sanford soon resigns, thus giving his own rivals a tangible incentive to shove the incumbent out the door.
Knowing that the legislature can’t impeach him until January, Sanford’s trying to gut it out, but doesn’t seem to be winning many converts; fully half of the state’s voters now favor a resignation. In a fine kicker, Bauerlein’s account of Sanford’s travails ends with this quote from an audience member at a Kiwanis appearance:

Bill Taylor, the 75-year-old owner of a hotel and apartments, said he listened to Mr. Sanford, whom he had voted for twice. “He kept saying, ‘We’re going to do so-and-so.’ How many ‘we’s does he think he’s got behind him?”

Not enough.

Bob McDonnell, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, has been in full backpedal mode in denying that he still holds the reactionary cultural views he expressed in a 1989 master’s thesis at Regents University. Fair enough, I guess, though there’s a rough justice in anything that raises questions about the long-time Christian Right ally’s current efforts to depict himself as this nice moderate man who’s mainly interested in transportation policy.
But someone needs to ask him if he’s ready to repudiate some far more recent comments from 2003, when he suggested that anyone who had violated the Commonwealth’s sodomy laws—which proscribe any sort of oral sex–probably wasn’t qualified to be a judge. Most interestingly, when asked if he had ever violated said laws himself, McDonnell said: “Not that I can recall.” Poor guy.

A lot of Democrats look at Republican efforts to alienate Medicare beneficiaries from health care reform and think it’s all a matter of misinformation: if seniors really understood that their own health insurance was “government-run,” they’d be less inclined to oppose an offer of similiar insurance to others.
I”m afraid this interepretation misses something fundamental about the conservative assault on health care reform: the idea is to convince seniors that the uninsured don’t deserve similar federal benefits. In essence, they’re bringing back the old “welfare wedge” in a new form, this time aimed at stigmatizing the working poor and at middle-class families trying to stay in the middle class.
I’ve got an article up at Salon that goes into this in some detail, and examines how “welfare” rhetoric began characterizing Republican attacks on Obama’s policies back during the presidential campaign. This is something progressives need to get a grip on, because this divisive strategy is by no means limited to, or likely to end with, health care reform.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It’s becoming more obvious each day that the conservative assault on Barack Obama’s legislative agenda, including his incrementalist efforts towards universal health coverage, isn’t much about the details. It is, instead, a counter-revolutionary campaign to revive 1980s-era middle-class resentments of particular beneficiaries of government social programs. Beneath the hysterical talk about Obama’s “socialism” or the “Democrat Socialist Party,” conservatives are actually revolting against the ancient targets of the New Deal and Great Society, and indeed, against the very idea that “interference” with the distributional implications of free markets is ever morally legitimate.
Consider a long, classic column published at National Review last week by the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, entitled “Obama and Redistributive Change.” It’s an angry screed against the egalitarian underpinnings of progressive politics, past, present and future. It goes over-the-top in suggesting that Obama is determined to wipe out absolutely every distinction in wealth and status among Americans. But the self-righteous fury against any “redistributive” activity by government seems perfectly genuine, representing as it does a rejection of virtually every way of ordering society other than laissez-faire capitalism:

When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.

Hanson is clearly looking beyond our current political debates at much of the history of civilization, and it infuriates him. But if Obama’s health care reform efforts represent a drive to “enforce equality of results,” what existing government program can’t be described the same way?
Social Security is redistributive. Medicare is redistributive. Public education is redistributive. Public investments in highways, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure are most definitely redistributive. The land reforms that accompanied the rise of every society, dating back to feudalism, are inherently and overtly redistributive. Even defense spending is redistributive, insofar as the benefits of national security are rarely captured by current taxpayers.
Beyond government and politics, it’s not only “socialists” who have embraced “redistributive” thinking. The Hebrew lawgivers and prophets; Jesus Christ; Mohammad–all were blatant redistributionists. All denied that wealth or status was invariably the product of productivity and virtue, and rejected the idea that redistribution was theft.
If Hanson and the many conservatives who so often sound like him want to openly take the posture that much of American–not to mention, world–history is a long, disastrous saga of tyranny in the pursuit of “enforced equality,” they are free to do so. But they should at least acknowledge that the rage against Barack Obama is really just displaced rage at democracy; at the mild forms of collective social action embraced by most Americans during the last century; at the longstanding policy positions of both major political parties; and at many of the very people they are calling upon to kill Obama’s agenda–including Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries, people with government-protected mortgages, farm-price-support recipients, military veterans, and public employees tout court. At an absolute minimum, Hanson should rush to publish a column savaging Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele for trying to position the GOP as the Party of Medicare this last week.

I know it’s the last week before Labor Day and all, when the higher-status pundits are by tradition esconced (with the First Family) at Martha’s Vineyard, but it sures seems like the conservative commentariat, so excited by town hall protests and declining presidential approval ratings just last week, is kinda dialing it in right now.
This very morning, you had a George Will column sniffing that Barack Obama and his allies are “unserious;” a Robert Samuelson column lecturing everyone about federal budget deficits and entitlements; a Max Boot column warning that America’s enemies are chortling in derision at America’s newfound delicacy about torture; and even a “historical” Michael Barone column that manages to suggest the the “royal status” of the Kennedy family was spoiled by its growing liberalism.
And just to prime the pump, there was even a snarling Dick Cheney interview on Fox yesterday.
It was all so predictable and by-the-numbers that it could have been, and may have been, filed a week ago, or even a year ago.
Looks like Barack Obama’s not the only one who needs some batteries recharged.

The most interesting aspect of American media coverage of Japan’s startling “change election” is that nobody much knows what to make of it. Yes, it’s assumed that the opposition Democratic Party, which dislodged the Liberal Democratic Party by a landslide, will be cooler to the United States, even as its leader, soon-to-be Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama makes it clear nothing much will change on the foreign policy front. Maybe Americans just don’t understand Japanese politics.
But Matt Yglesias is definitely on to something in suggesting that systems in which one party dominates for long periods of time don’t tend to be terribly ideological:

One consequence of this prolonged period of one-party rule is that the LDP is not an especially ideological political party. It’s essentially a “party of government” patronage machine that contains diverse factions and different points of view. The Democratic Party, consequently, is more of a generic umbrella opposition grouping than a clear ideological alternative. Thus the Democrats are riding in on a tide of public discontent, but don’t seem to have articulated much in the way of a policy agenda beyond the obscure issue of bureaucracy reform.

Back in the late 1990s, I participated in a international conference in Taiwan sponsored by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the long-time opposition party to the reigning Kuomintang (KMT). The purpose of the conference was basically to draw on center-left experiences elewhere to help devise an ideological and policy agenda for the DPP, which had long been defined as simply the opposition party, and as the preferred party of ethnic Taiwainese who had long resented the domination of “mainlanders” from China. After a period in government beginning in 2000, the DPP (and for that matter, the KMT) has a somewhat sharper ideological focus these days.
Come to think of it, the same dynamic was evident in the “Solid South” of my childhood in Georgia. The governing Democratic Party was a catchment of all sorts of people from serious progressives to hard-core segregationists, and the Republican Party was a motley assortment of transplanted Yankess, older African-Americans, and people interested in federal patronage during Republican administrations in Washington. Ideology was not a particularly clear or important partisan differentiator until the Civil Rights Act, and even then it took a decade or two for the parties to sort themselves out.
So maybe Japan’s parties will make more “sense” to us foreigners once the LDP has been out of office for a while. Serious competition has a way of clarifying things.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It’s debatable whether the latest incarnation of Mike Huckabee represents a turn to the dark side by the genial and amusing 2008 presidential candidate that a lot of Democrats admired, or a revelation of what the man has always really been.
But ever since he became a radio and TV gabber, the Bad Huck has taken over. Aside from his early charges that Barack Obama’s agenda was aimed at creating a Union of American Socialist Republics, and his more recent arguments for a displacement of Palestinians to a homeland somewhere outside Palestine, Huck really went over the brink today, as reported by HuffPo’s Sam Stein:

The 2008 Republican presidential candidate suggested during his radio show on Friday that, under President Obama’s health care plan, Kennedy would have been told to “go home to take pain pills and die” during his last year of life.
“[I]t was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don’t have as long to live might want to just consider taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them,” said Huckabee. “Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for.”

This despicable rant should disqualify Mike Huckabee from any further liberal sympathy, no matter how much he tries to joke or rock-n-roll his way back into mainstream acceptability.

Over at TNR, Jonathan Cohn asks whether the Obama White House should have promoted a different message on health reform from the beginning, and makes a point that should be pretty obvious by now: administration efforts to respond to demands for cost control measures by deficit hawks earlier this year led to all the rationing talk that reform opponents are now using to scare Americans.

The trouble for Obama is that, in getting serious about cost, he gave critics lots of fat, juicy targets. Obama proposed to tie payments to quality; Betsy McCaughey said he would be giving doctors money for pulling the plug on grandma. Obama proposed to put a board of experts, using clinical evidence, to set Medicare payment rates; Sarah Palin interpreted that as creating a “death panel” that would declare the sick and disabled unworthy of treatment. The great irony is that by trying earnestly to craft a plan that could control costs, as well as expand coverage, Obama has provoked a political backlash that will make cost control harder in the future. He’s tried to tackle health care like a grown-up and, at the moment, he’s suffering for it politically.

The long-range political implications of what’s happened on cost control are, as Cohn suggested, pretty troubling. Right now it appears a lot of Americans can’t distinguish between quality-and-cost based second-guessing of doctors’ decisions, and euthanasia. If for years to come, any suggestions for questioning provider costs or treatments are greeted with shrieks of “Rationing!” Rationing!” we’re going to have a real hard time ever getting a grip on health care costs. It’s ironic that Republicans are the ones who have promoted the backlash against cost control, even as they still wail about deficits and costs.