Wake Up

Jeffrey C. Billman tells you what to think

by Jeffrey C. Billman

Sometimes, the trick is asking the right question. Credit where credit is due to Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who on July 27 wrote this on the paper's blog:

"Let me see if I've got this straight: Here we are in the smoldering ruins of an economy recently wrecked by Wall Street greed, in a country where for 30 years almost all income growth has been concentrated among the richest 1 percent of Americans. ... Meanwhile, the Republican Party defends massive tax breaks for the wealthy while blocking aid to the unemployed, fights bitterly against regulations designed to prevent a repeat of the Wall Street meltdown, blocks legislation that would at least require corporate and special interests to identify themselves when they invest in elections and does all that while proclaiming itself to be the party of the little people. Do I have that right?"

Unfortunately, yes. And if the polls bear out, the Party of Hell No You Can't stands to be rewarded for its intransigence and corporate servitude with big electoral gains in November, as its politicians rail against the deficits they created and the high unemployment numbers their obstinacy prevents Democrats from counteracting.

All the while, they deny the quantitatively obvious: The stimulus and other efforts to avert economic collapse last year worked. Last week, for instance, The New York Times reported on a paper by a Princeton professor and the chief economist at Moody's Analytics that adds to a mounting volume of evidence that the Keynesians were right: Without government intervention, the analysts asserted, the nation's GDP would be about 6.5 percent lower than it is. That would have meant the loss of an additional 8.5 million jobs, on top of the 8 million already lost to the Great Recession.

"[T]here is little doubt that in total, the policy response was highly effective," the authors wrote.

Though politically unpopular, the policies of the Democratic Congress and Bush and Obama administrations in late 2008 and early 2009 prevented catastrophe. That the economy is still struggling doesn't prove otherwise; instead, it highlights that, if anything, we should have gone bigger. But the point remains: It worked.

If the neoreactionary Republicans had had their way, we'd be stuck in 1932.

(And yet, the Republicans and their Tea Party acolytes think they deserve another shot at power. Pardon me while I roll my eyes.)

This isn't to say that Barack Obama and his Democratic allies are flawless. They've disappointed on a great many issues: Wall Street reform and the health care bill were watered down; climate-change legislation never got off the ground; progress has been infuriatingly incremental on gay rights; Afghanistan is still a mess; Guantanamo Bay is still open; and so on. On the toughest fights, there's a good case to be made that the president hasn't shown enough backbone. (On the other hand, much of the mediocrity can be laid at the feet of an insane Senate system that enables obstinacy by requiring 60 votes to do anything.)

But the Democrats' case this fall needn't be merely pointing out the GOP's increasingly tenuous relationship with sanity, or the fact that the party of Lincoln has devolved into a Reagan-worshipping self-parody. The fact is, the White House and the 111th Congress can also boast as impressive a resume as anything this side of the Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, imperfect though it may be: The stimulus, health care reform, Wall Street regulations, tougher environmental protections and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act are all landmark achievements.

The agenda was ambitious, even if the execution wasn't always so.

Still, elections tend to be decided on the state of the economy, which, needless to say, isn't good. This simple rule helped Barack Obama in 2008; it will hurt him in 2010. To make matters worse, the progressive base is demoralized, too often caterwauling about what should've/would've/could've been to recognize the actual and considerable progress this country has made over the last 18 months.

Wake the fuck up, people. This is real life, and midterms are base elections. Sure, you didn't get everything you wanted, but living in a fantasyland of ideological purity will get you Speaker John Boehner. At the end of the day, the reality is simple: The verdict is in, and we were right.

Own that, and go spread the word.

(jeffrey.billman@citypaper.net)