My time-space continuum warped when I heard that Dennis Kucinich had talked to tea partiers and found common ground.
After the Democratic defeat in Massachusetts last month, Kucinich said, “There’s nothing liberal about the bailouts. There’s nothing liberal about standing by and watching banks use public money to get their executive bonuses. There’s nothing liberal about giving insurance companies carte blanche to charge anything they want for health care…Since when did that become liberal?”
A lot of citizens who once stumped for Obama – for change and hope, they thought – feel betrayed.
Says one man, “I was a volunteer for Mr. Obama during the first Iowa caucus back in December 2007. I walked around risking frostbite for lack of adequate winter clothing, and had overdrafted on my checking account for want of gas money…America is on a downslide. Obama was the pressure point to reduce that trend. Nobody thought he was a God, but MY God I never thought he’d be such an inutil.”
Inutil is Spanish. It means good-for-nothing.
That opinion came from the comment section of Paul Krugman’s recent column “America Is Not Yet Lost,” in which he proposes that America’s current trajectory is not so much like the fall of Rome as it is like 18th-century Poland, in which it took only one obstructionist legislator to paralyze lawmaking.
“This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory,” wrote Krugman. “By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.”
These days the united part of United States seems more like a quaint construct from olden days than a reality.
The 2000 presidential election gave us a clear graphic, with blue forming an arch over a red interior: California, Oregon, Washington, the upper Midwest, New England (‘cept for live-free-or-die New Hampshire) New York and the Atlantic coast until we get to Virginia.
But a lot has happened since the year 2000 – September 11, the Wall Street meltdown, a stock market crash, skyrocketing job losses, and epidemic foreclosures.
Don’t worry, the government says. It’s just a recession. With recessions like these, who needs depressions? Many have gotten hip to the government’s massaged numbers and tortured semantics.
Some people are stocking water, nuts, dried berries, beef jerky, guns and, of course, ammo. Read a few of the comments on the Wall Street Journal sister site MarketWatch: “When the gold standard no longer works, the lead standard will.” Oh ha ha.
The political landscape used to be the Austrians (survival of the fittest) at one extreme and the Commies (100 percent taxes) on the other. Now things aren’t so clear. We seem to be suffering the “socialist” hangover of giant deficits and taxpayer bailouts of failed banks and corporations, but we never got to play the drinking game of free markets.
Democrats and Republicans are now so divided and partisan that no legislation can move forward. And yet, with a few notable exceptions, it seems both Democrats and Republicans represent not the small investor or the average homeowner or the laid-off worker, but rather banks and big business. That’s a conundrum if I ever saw one. The Poland analogy – a government that cannot govern – sounds apt to me.
In catastrophe is opportunity, as the saying goes. Ten years ago a third party could not work, but now, just maybe it can. A third party that stands for campaign finance reform, a balanced budget, full employment, the break up of companies “too big to fail,” health care reform that looks after people instead of insurance and pharmaceuticals, an end to pork, and a one-way ticket out of town for every lobbyist in Washington.
Imagine a 2012 ticket of libertarian-leaning Ron Paul and socialist-leaning Dennis Kucinich, where they run on their common goals rather than their differences.
As long as we’re dreaming, how about comedian and Daily Show host Jon Stewart and Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor, TARP oversight panel chair, and outspoken champion of the middle class? Don’t laugh. Try and tell me that such a pairing is any crazier than the charisma black hole of the Democratic tickets in 2000 and 2004.
Jon Stewart and Elizabeth Warren are smart. People like them. People trust them. And, best of all, they’re not political hacks or nihilists.
In his State of the Union speech, Obama alluded to a breakdown in trust of the American people. He wants to restore that trust. But only con artists should worry about trust. If you deliver results, trust will naturally follow.
President Obama, you have not delivered, but it’s not all your fault. Congress made sure you could not and would not deliver.
A new third party will need a good name, one with no baggage. A name that suggests a democratic republic, but of course Democrat and Republican are already taken, not to mention ruined.
Green Party would be fine if it didn’t conjure up granola and saving baby seals as its political philosophy. As for Libertarian, in most people’s minds, the word suggests not liberty but gun-toting anarchy. Populist has, unfortunately, the air of a musty attic in your grandmother’s house. And Independent has already been claimed by the flag-waving, Second Amendment crowd.
The Public Party? The New Millennium Party? Whatever you call it, keep the platform simple and stay away from abortion, forevermore a deal-breaker between conservatives and progressives.
Start from your common ground. The whole country is angry, and rightfully so. To everyone who ever dreamed of a real choice on Election Day: This is your chance. Seize it.
[originally published by Politics Daily in 2010]
