It’s important to remember that America exists as a nation only because its citizens were able to take up arms against a repressive government and win their freedom. Its founding fathers, quite rightfully, knew that the only true way for a populace to remain free from oppressors is for that populace to have the ability to fight back against oppressors. This bedrock principle is enshrined in our Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

That being said, the debate over gun control has been warped by Republican rhetoric for a long time now.

The 2nd Amendment reads: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” When gun-control comes up, the NRA screech that the 2nd Amendment shall know no limits. The gun-control advocates have never effectively countered this rhetoric, which is relatively easy to do:

D: Do you think that your neighbor should be able to mount a howitzer in his front yard?

R: No.

D: Then we both agree there should be gun-control. So the question is, where are we going to draw the line? Howitzers? Machine guns? Sub-machine guns? Assault rifles?

If they’re actually nuts enough to say that suburbia should be studded with howitzers, raise the stakes:

D: So do you think that your neighbor should be allowed to build a nuclear bomb in their basement?

R: No.

D: Then we both agree that there should be arms-control. So the question is, where are we going to draw the line? Nuclear weapons? Plastique? Howitzers? Machine guns? Sub-machine guns? Assault rifles?

If they’re actually nuts enough to say that nuclear weapons should be available to every Tom, Dick, and Jane, then they’ve lost all credibility in the debate.

The trick is to get this debate onto the level of yelling fire in a crowded movie theater. Only loonies believe that freedom of speech should allow people to deliberately create false panic, engage in criminal conspiracies, or perjure themselves under legal oath.

Similarly, only loonies believe that a right to bear arms should allow people unrestricted and unregulated access to nuclear weapons, plastic explosives, or biological weapons.

The legitimate debate, in both cases, comes down to: Where do we want to draw the line?

Right now, it’s impossible to have that debate because the issue is systematically reduced to extremist rhetoric. But with a little Socratic dialoguing and a handful of questions you can quickly and effectively strip away that rhetoric.

Once you’ve done that, you can start talking about the issue rationally. Here are some good questions that get to the heart of the issue:

1. What weapons should private citizens be prohibited from possessing under any circumstances?

2. What weapons should private citizens be allowed to possess only under strict regulations and controls?

3. What weapons should private citizens be allowed to possess only after being properly trained and licensed?

4. What weapons should private citizens have a right to own without limitation?

Politics isn’t a game.

We’ve seen the first full week of national politics arrive early in 2007, courtesy of a Democratic majority who understand this. And as we look back at a week which saw the Democrats in the House rapidly pass a full slate of progressive legislation, only to have their achievements essentially ignored as Bush stole the spotlight by “rolling out” his standard speech on “changing direction in Iraq”, I think it’s important to spend a moment reminding ourselves that the stakes are deadly and real. This shouldn’t be treated as a chance to count coup, score points, or exact a petty vengeance. This is a chance to fix the country, put America back on track, and correct the wrongs which have been done in our name.

One of the pervasive myths of politics, promulgated by a mainstream media obsessed with process instead of policy, is that there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats; no difference between liberals and conservatives. This myth is corrosive, reducing elections to beauty pageants and posturing. It disengages the common citizen from the political process, which only makes it easier for those with a vested interest in promoting public apathy to push their personal agendas while staying out of the public’s eye.

But leadership matters. So as we perch precariously on the razor’s edge between responsible government and opportunistic payback, I’d like to take a moment to look at the most recent and most vivid example of why we should care about politics: The maddening margin of victory which made George W. Bush and not Al Gore our 43rd president. And four key events over the past six years in which the world could have gone a different way.

9/11

On September 11th, 2001, as we all know, the United States suffered a horrific attack. It was the first act of war on U.S. soil in over half a century, and the viciousness of its barbarism shocked the world.

Could the 9/11 attacks have been prevented? As with many national tragedies, it’s easy to second-guess history with the benefit of perfect hindsight. It’s easy to look at a dozen disparate pieces of evidence and say, “Someone should have put those pieces together. Someone should have figured this out. Someone should have stopped this.”

But rather than playing the part of detective after the mystery has already been solved, let’s instead consider how the reaction to one piece of information may have changed the course of history.

That piece of information is the August 6th, 2001, Presidential Daily Brief: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S. ” It said, in part:

Al Qaeda members — including some who are U.S. citizens — have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.

[…]

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York .

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of bin Laden supporters was in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.

This document was the thirty-sixth PDB regarding al-Qaeda and Bin Laden which had been given to the President that year. It was designed to deliver a clear warning to the President that al-Qaeda was active in the United States and presented an eminent threat. After the 9/11 attacks, the President, Condoleezza Rice, and everyone else in the White House administration would claim that this “report was historical in nature”. But the 9/11 Commission Report directly contradicted their claim:

Two CIA analysts involved in preparing this briefing article believed it represented an opportunity to communicate their view that the threat of a Bin Ladin attack in the United States remained both current and serious.

President Bush’s response to the PDB – designed to communicate the threat of a Bin Laden attack in the United States – was non-existent. He spent the entire month of August vacationing.

How seriously should this threat have been taken? According to Al Gore, very seriously. In a speech delivered on October 18th, 2004, Gore said:

[T]he President himself was presented with a CIA report with the headline – more alarming and more pointed than any I saw in eight years of daily CIA briefings: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.”

Al Gore wouldn’t have been alone in his alarm. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, “most of the intelligence community recognized in the summer of 2001 that the number and severity of threat reports were unprecedented”.

And now we come to the crux of the issue: We know that President Bush’s response to this alarming report was to do absolutely nothing. He never lifted a finger, and a little more than a month later nearly three thousand Americans died.

Would the response of President Gore have been any different? Let’s listen to his words again:

The only warnings of this nature that remotely resembled the one given to George Bush were about the so-called Millennium threats predicted for the end of the year 1999 and less specific warnings about the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996. In both cases, these warnings in the President’s Daily Brief were followed, immediately, the same day – by the beginning of urgent daily meetings in the White House of all of the agencies and offices involved in preparing our nation to prevent the threatened attack.

By contrast, when President Bush received his fateful and historic warning of 9/11, he did not convene the National Security Council, did not bring together the FBI and CIA and other agencies with responsibility to protect the nation, and apparently did not even ask follow-up questions about the warning.

You’ll notice that Gore doesn’t talk about what he would have done. He simply talks about what he and President Clinton did do when faced with similar threats. (And if you want confirmation of that, you can refer to the 9/11 Commission Report for an impartial recounting of the events.)

Would the concerted and dedicated response of President Gore, unlike the lackadaisical and uncoordinated response of President Bush, have been enough to stop the 9/11 attacks? We’ll never know. But such efforts had worked in the past. And on August 16th, the FBI arrested Zacarias Moussaoui for an immigration violation. There were concerns that his flight training may have had violent intentions, but the agents involved were unaware that President Bush had been warned ten days earlier that “Bin Ladin wanted to hijack a US aircraft”. There was no heightened sense of alert because President Bush had not called for one.

We’ll never know if President Bush could have saved the lives of everyone who died on 9/11. But we do know that he didn’t even try.

ASIAN TSUNAMI

On December 26th, 2004, tsunamis triggered by an earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra devastated the the Indian Ocean . Nearly two hundred thousand people were killed in what became the world’s deadliest disaster in more than twenty-five years.

It is, of course, absurd to suggest that President Bush (or anyone else) could have prevented the earthquake which caused this calamity. But the reason the Asian Tsunami, as it came to be known internationally, proved to be so deadly was due to the lack of a warning system in the Indian Ocean .

Such a system has, in fact, existed in the Pacific Ocean since 1946. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center has probably saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives over the past sixty years. If such a system had been operational in the Indian Ocean in 2004, experts agree that tens of thousands of lives could have been saved with a timely evacuation of coastal regions.

Following the deadly tsunami, UNESCO began work on establishing a warning system which became fully active in June 2006. It’s too bad that no one thought to put such a system in place before tragedy struck.

Except that someone did: Al Gore.

In 1998, Gore attempted to spearhead the creation of the Global Disaster Information Network. This agency would have developed worldwide emergency planning and worked to advance and improve the science of disaster prediction. If Gore’s vision had been followed, it is likely the GDIN would have facilitated the creation of an Indian Ocean tsunami warning system. Unfortunately, the Republican congress – eager to prevent Gore from scoring any legislative victories which could be used in the 2000 Presidential campaign – killed the funding for the GDIN, which exists today as essentially nothing more than a website and forum.

Could President Gore have gotten a Republican congress to fund the GDIN before hundreds of thousands of people died on August 26th? Possibly. Could a President Gore working with a Democratic congress have done so? Almost certainly.

It’s like Bush says: “One of the things I learned is, the vision thing matters.”

HURRICANE KATRINA

On August 28th, 2005, less than a year after the Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina struck the southeast coast of the United States . It destroyed the levees of New Orleans and, with the ensuing floods, laid waste to the city.

But while the Indian Ocean lacked the tsunami warning system which could have mitigated the crisis, the United States had a decades-proven solution already in place to cope with the catastrophe: The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Or, at least, we should have had it.

Unfortunately, the Republicans have loathed FEMA for decades. It’s never been entirely clear to me why, exactly, they bear such hatred towards a federal agency dedicated solely to aiding Americans in the hour of their most dire need, but anti-FEMA propaganda has streamed out of conservative think-tanks and magazines for more than twenty years. Here’s a typical example from the Cato Institute’s James Bovard in 1997:

But, as the actions of the Vernon town council show, FEMA’s growth may not really be good government at all. Instead, it may be one more cause of the decline of individual responsibility—or even a semblance of respect for such responsibility — in our political culture.

Now, you might think that after 9/11 the Republicans would change their tune. After all, who could be so heartless as to claim that the victims in the World Trade Center should just buck up and accept a little individual responsibility for working in a building which had already been targeted by terrorist attacks once before. And with President Bush talking about the need to be ready and secure against the next terrorist attack, surely it would be folly to condemn the federal agency responsible for responding in the wake of those attacks.

Well, you might think that. But, instead, President Bush and the Republican Congress massively defunded FEMA.

For a specific example of the effect of this defunding, you don’t have to look any farther than Project Impact. James Lee Witt, the director of FEMA under Clinton , created Project Impact to take preemptive action and mitigate the effects of disasters before they happened. As Eric Holdeman described in a Washington Post article:

One of the best examples of the impact the program had here in the central Puget Sound area and in western Washington state was in protecting people at the time of the Nisqually earthquake on Feb. 28, 2001. Homes had been retrofitted for earthquakes and schools were protected from high-impact structural hazards. Those involved with Project Impact thought it ironic that the day of that quake was also the day that the then-new president chose to announce that Project Impact would be discontinued.

Having defunded and crippled FEMA, President Bush delivered the killing blow by appointing an incompetent political crony named Michael Brown to run the agency. Brown’s only significant management experience prior to being appointed to head FEMA was as the stewards and judges commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association. (A position he was forced to resign from due to incompetence.)

Defunded and under the hapless leadership of Brown, it took FEMA days to respond to the crisis in New Orleans . Ironically, the Cato Institute offers perhaps the most apt description of the criminal incompetency which came about as a result of President Bush following their advice:

FEMA issued a sternly worded release on August 29, the same day the hurricane made landfall along the Gulf Coast , titled “First Responders Urged Not to Respond to Hurricane Impact Areas.” FEMA wanted all the responders to be coordinated and to come when they were called. And that was one plan they followed. As the New York Times reported September 5:

When Wal-Mart sent three trailer trucks loaded with water, FEMA officials turned them away, [Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard] said. Agency workers prevented the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and on Saturday they cut the parish’s emergency communications line, leading the sheriff to restore it and post armed guards to protect it from FEMA, Mr. Broussard said.

(Of course, the Cato Institute claimed this as a vindication of their long-standing criticisms of FEMA. This is typical Republican doublethink: They take over the government and then run it like a drunk driving a demi. Then they claim that cars should be banned because they’ve been driving drunk. Thus, they defund FEMA and place an incompetent in charge of it. Having hopelessly crippled the agency, they then use its failures as evidence that the agency shouldn’t exist.

The correct response, of course, is to take away the drunk’s keys and never let them drive again.)

President George H.W. Bush demonstrated that he was out of touch with the American people when he didn’t know the price of milk. President George W. Bush demonstrated that he was not only out of touch with the American people but with the responsibilities of his office when he claimed that no one anticipated that the levees could break. No one, that is, except for the millions of people who watched CNN, MSNBC, and even the Weather Channel in the 48 hours leading up to the disaster, when that exact scenario was presented countless times and the hypothetical possibilities (which later became tragic realities) were considered over and over again. Not to mention the Clinton-era initiatives which would have improved and repaired the levees… only to have President Bush and the Republican Congress gut their funding.

Complimenting Michael Brown for having down “a heckuva job” while thousands of people died in New Orleans only served to confirm that President Bush had not only utterly failed in his duties, but was also so clueless that he was incapable of even realizing the disaster he had created through his lack of foresight and leadership.

Let me put it this way: Remember the Great Flood of 1993? It was among the most deadly and most costly floods in American history. $15 billion were recorded, extending across a flood region more than 1200 km long. Dozens of major communities along the Mississippi were flooded, with some of them remaining inundated for nearly two hundred days.

There is no question it was a disaster.

There is also no question that President Clinton promptly responded with a well-funded and well-coordinated effort spearheaded by FEMA. Private charity and public agencies worked together to ease suffering, mitigate damage, and prevent deaths.

There is little doubt that if Al Gore had been president, he wouldn’t have followed the urgings of the Cato Institute and other conservative think-tanks. He wouldn’t have dismantled FEMA and other first-response infrastructure. He wouldn’t have placed an incompetent in charge.

Words can never capture the enormity of the tragedy which gripped New Orleans as a direct result of President Bush’s failures. They can never capture the multitude of private horrors which were suffered. But here’s one small example: In the days following the breaking of the levees and the flooding of New Orleans , 16,000 people were directed to take refuge in the Superdome… and then left there to rot.

A 2-year-old girl slept in a pool of urine. Crack vials littered a restroom. Blood stained the walls next to vending machines smashed by teenagers. ‘We pee on the floor. We are like animals,’ said Taffany Smith, 25, as she cradled her 3-week-old son, Terry. … By Wednesday, it had degenerated into horror. … At least two people, including a child, have been raped. At least three people have died, including one man who jumped 50 feet to his death, saying he had nothing left to live for. There is no sanitation. The stench is overwhelming.

On Wednesday, children were being raped. But it wasn’t until Thursday that Michael Brown even realized that there were people at the Superdome… despite the fact that the national media had been carrying the story for days.

Words simply fail.

IRAQ

Just as it is impossible to find the words to describe the full tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and President Bush’s botched response to it, so it is impossible to succinctly describe the President’s failures in Iraq . Whether it was selling the war on false pretenses, not putting enough boots on the ground, failing to put in place a plan for the nation’s security following the fall of Baghdad, the lack of any coherent plan for a post-Saddam government, the false confidence of claiming the mission was accomplished when it had scarcely begun, or any of the dozens of other mistakes the Bush Administration has made in Iraq, it’s beyond the scope of this essay to document them. Entire books could be dedicated to the subject (and they have been).

Here’s what it can be boiled down to: If it was a war against an ally of al-Qaeda, then its conception was fundamentally flawed (there was never an alliance between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda). If it was a war to find weapons of mass destruction, it was doomed to failure from the start (the WMDs didn’t exist). If it was a war to stifle global terrorism, then it has demonstrably failed (acts of terrorism have increased).

And if it was a war of regime change, then one is forced to ask why President Bush and his administration failed to give any meaningful thought to the question of what they wanted to change the regime to. Words like “freedom”, “liberty”, and “democracy” are cheap. Actually achieving freedom, liberty, and democracy is the only thing with meaning – and it literally took the administration years before they could even describe the government they hoped to establish in Iraq .

Today, after nearly four years of war, it’s trivial to see the abject failure of President Bush’s war. But on September 22nd, 2002, before the war began, Al Gore saw the failure of vision and he predicted the abject futility of Bush’s half-thought war. At a speech given to the Commonwealth Club, Gore said:

I believe we should focus our efforts first and foremost against those who attacked us on September 11th and who have thus far gotten away with it. The vast majority of those who sponsored, planned and implemented the cold-blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans are still at large, still neither located nor apprehended, much less punished and neutralized. I do not believe that we should allow ourselves to be distracted from this urgent task simply because it is proving to be more difficult and lengthy than was predicted. Great nations persevere and then prevail. They do not jump from one unfinished task to another. We should remain focused on the war against terrorism.

In recent months we have seen the resurgence of the Taliban, but back in September 2002 Al Gore predicted it:

Nevertheless, President Bush is telling us that America’s most urgent requirement of the moment – right now – is not to redouble our efforts against Al Qaeda, not to stabilize the nation of Afghanistan after driving its host government from power, even as Al Qaeda members slip back across the border to set up in Afghanistan again; rather, he is telling us that our most urgent task right now is to shift our focus and concentrate on immediately launching a new war against Saddam Hussein. And the president is proclaiming a new, uniquely American right to preemptively attack whomsoever he may deem represents a potential future threat.

It wasn’t that Al Gore though that Saddam Hussein shouldn’t be prevented from developing weapons of mass destruction. It wasn’t that Al Gore thought any war designed to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime was doomed. He simply wanted to make sure that the war was being pursued for the right reasons and at the right time. And he wanted to make sure, if and when the time for war came, that it would be done the right way:

Nevertheless, all Americans should acknowledge that Iraq does indeed pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf region, and we should be about the business of organizing an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq ‘s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power. Now, let’s be clear, there’s no international law that can prevent the United States from taking action to protect our vital interests when it is manifestly clear that there is a choice to be made between law and our survival. Indeed, international law itself recognizes that such choices stay within the purview of all nations. I believe, however, that such a choice is not presented in the case of Iraq . Indeed, should we decide to proceed, our action can be justified within the framework of international law rather than requiring us to go outside the framework of international law. In fact, even though a new United Nations resolution might be helpful in the effort to forge an international consensus, I think it’s abundantly clear that the existing U.N. resolutions passed 11 years ago are completely sufficient from a legal standpoint so long as it is clear that Saddam Hussein is in breach of the agreements made at the conclusion of the Persian Gulf War.

As I write this today, American casualties in Iraq have long-ago surpassed the death toll of 9/11. No war can be bloodless. But one is forced to wonder how many of those brave men and women would still be alive today if they had served under a competent and effective Commander-in-Chief gifted with foresight and wisdom.

CONCLUSION

Bush is incompetent. People die.

That’s the story of his administration. And, in a broader scope, it’s the story of the Republican Revolution.

This isn’t radical hysteria. It’s simple truth. With nothing more than basic competency, there are thousands of Americans — and hundreds of thousands of people around the globe — who would not be dead today. But because Bush and the Republicans were incapable of exercising even that basic measure of competency – and because they believed that scoring political points was more important than relieving the suffering of real men and women – thousands have died. And that is to say nothing of those teeming millions whose lot in life would be better if Bush had not repeatedly failed in his duties as Commander in Chief, Leader of the Free World, and (most importantly) President of the United States.

To understand the nightmare scenario that plagues my thoughts, simply imagine this: What would have happened if Bush had been president during the Cuban Missile Crisis? What would happen if something like the Cuban Missile Crisis were to happen before January 2009?

We’d all be dead.

Welcome to the nightmare. Share it with all those you can. Remember it when the next election cycle rolls around.

Happy New Year!

I wanted to mention that I’m also blogging over at Daily Kos. In addition to the political essays which appear on this site, my Daily Kos blog includes more ephemeral reactions to current political events.

In this coda to my essay on Post-Election Democrats, I want to briefly talk about how the Democrats have already fumbled the ball. It’s only been a month since the election, but we’ve already seen several critical errors that could have and should have been easily avoided. Before I delve into specifics, however, I want to first re-visit a point I made last May:

Whatever you may think of its actual content, the Contract With America was undeniably a brilliant political strategy. It quickly and succinctly, on a single sheet of paper, summed up the entire philosophy of the Republican party. Because of its simplicity it could be photocopied, e-mailed, faxed, televised, discussed, bullet-pointed, powerpointed, and virally disseminated in hundreds of different ways. In an era where the media only wants to talk about how a political party is going to say something and rarely about what is actually being said, the Contract With America brilliantly combined the medium with the message: Whenever a newspaper wanted to discuss the Contract With America, for example, it would inevitably reproduce its ten bullet points.

I also want to quote a point I made earlier in this essay:

The Democrats can beat the Republicans in two ways:

1. They can actually get their legislation passed. By doing so, they’ll not only be delivering what the American people want, they’ll also be demonstrating that they’re capable of effective and efficient governance. They’ll have demonstrated that they’ll keep their promises and do exactly what they were elected to do, creating a strong argument that they should be returned to power in 2008.

2. They can force President Bush to veto their legislation. By forcing Bush to veto positive legislation that the majority of Americans want, they’ll demonstrate that the Republicans are out of touch with the nation and create a strong argument that they should be returned to power in 2008.

Really, you can boil this entire strategy down to two bullet-points:

1. Clearly and concisely communicate your goals for making America better and stronger.
2. Quickly and efficiently pass the legislation necessary to make those goals a reality.

Six for ’06 vs. 100 Hours vs. ???

I had previously spoken about the Six for ’06 agenda the Democrats put on the table during the 2006 campaign season. Here’s how that legislative agenda was announced in press release on June 16th, 2006:

SIX FOR ’06 (June 2006)

1. MAKE HEALTH CARE MORE AFFORDABLE. Fix the prescription drug program by putting people ahead of drug companies and HMOs, eliminating wasteful subsidies, negotiating lower drug prices and ensuring the program works for all seniors; invest in stem cell and other medical research.

2. LOWER GAS PRICES AND ACHIEVE ENERGY INDEPENDENCE. Crack down on price gouging; eliminate billions in subsidies for oil and gas companies and use the savings to provide consumer relief and develop American alternatives, including biofuels; promote energy efficient technology.

3. HELP WORKING FAMILIES. Raise the minimum wage; repeal tax giveaways that encourage companies to move jobs overseas.

4. CUT COLLEGE COSTS. Make college tuition deductible from taxes; expand Pell grants and cut student loan costs.

5. ENSURE DIGNIFIED RETIREMENT. Prevent the privatization of Social Security; expand savings incentives; ensure pension fairness.

6. REQUIRE FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY. Restore the budget discipline of the 1990s that helped eliminate deficits and spur record economic growth.

And here’s how it appears at “News & Views” on www.housedemocrats.gov, the top result when you do a Google search for “Six for ’06” (ironically, if you use the search function at www.housedemocrats.gov for the same term, there are no search results):

SIX FOR ’06 (Today)

REAL SECURITY AT HOME AND OVERSEAS
Reclaim American leadership with a tough, smart plan to transform failed Bush Administration policies in Iraq, the Middle East and around the world. Require the Iraqis to take responsibility for their country and begin the phased redeployment of US forces from Iraq in 2006. Double the size of Special Forces to destroy Osama Bin Laden and terrorist networks like al Qaeda. Rebuild a state-of-the-art military capable of projecting power wherever necessary. Implement the bipartisan 9/11 Commission proposal to secure America’s borders and ports and screen 100% of containers. Fully man, train, and equip our National Guard and our police, firefighters and other first responders. Honor our commitments to our veterans.

BETTER AMERICAN JOBS – BETTER PAY
Prohibit the Congressional pay raise until the nation’s minimum wage is raised. End tax giveaways that reward companies for moving American jobs overseas.

COLLEGE ACCESS FOR ALL
Make college tuition deductible from taxes, permanently. Cut student loan interest rates. Expand Pell Grants.

ENERGY INDEPENDENCE – LOWER GAS PRICES
Free America from dependence on foreign oil and create a cleaner environment with initiatives for energy-efficient technologies and domestic alternatives such as biofuels. End tax giveaways to Big Oil companies and enact tough laws to stop price gouging.

AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE – LIFE-SAVING SCIENCE
Fix the Medicare prescription drug program, putting seniors first by negotiating lower drug prices and ending wasteful giveaways to drug companies and HMOs. Promote stem cell research that offers real hope to millions of American families who suffer from devastating diseases.

RETIREMENT SECURITY AND DIGNITY
Stop any plan to privatize Social Security, in whole or in part. Enact real pension reform to protect employees’ financial security from CEO corruption and mismanagement, including abuse of the bankruptcy laws. Expand personal savings incentives.

And here’s how the agenda for the first 100 hours appears, also at www.housedemocrats.gov:

In the first 100 hours:

We will start by cleaning up Congress, breaking the link between lobbyists and legislation and commit to pay-as-you-go, no new deficit spending.

We will make our nation safer and we will begin by implementing the recommendations of the independent, bipartisan 9/11 Commission.

We will make our economy fairer, and we will begin by raising the minimum wage. We will not pass a pay raise for Congress until there is an increase in the minimum wage.

We will make health care more affordable for all Americans, and we will begin by fixing the Medicare prescription drug program, putting seniors first by negotiating lower drug prices. We will also promote stem cell research to offer real hope to the millions of American families who suffer from devastating diseases.

We will broaden college opportunity, and we will begin by cutting interest rates for student loans in half.

We will energize America by achieving energy independence, and we will begin by rolling back the multi-billion dollar subsidies for Big Oil.

We will guarantee a dignified retirement, and we will begin by fighting any attempt to privatize Social Security.

The first thing you should notice is that the Six for ’06 platform rolled out six months ago doesn’t match the current Six for ’06 platform. And this isn’t just a case of the verbiage being tweaked or the specific policies being adjusted or expanded (although those efforts should have been approached only with great care and consideration), the content itself has significantly changed: In June, the Six for ’06 included a pledge to practice fiscal responsibility. Today, that pledge has been dropped and replaced with a security agenda.

The next thing you should notice is that the 100 Hours agenda doesn’t match either of the Six for ’06 platforms. Now, obviously, the 100 Hours agenda shouldn’t include everything in the Six for ’06 platform: It’s a prioritized list of the first things the Democrats want to accomplish, not a comprehensive list of everything they want to accomplish. But why are there items on the 100 Hours agenda that don’t appear on the Six for ’06 platform? You’ll note that the fiscal responsibility pledge (dropped from the most recent version of the Six for ’06) appears along with the pledge to implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission (absent from the original version of the Six for ’06). And there’s also a pledge to break ” the link between lobbyists and legislation” which doesn’t appear on either Six for ’06 platform. How can something be important enough that you want to accomplish it in the first 100 hours of the new session, but not important enough to include on what would appear to be a definitional document for your party?

The last thing to notice are the items on the 100 Hour agenda which cannot be accomplished in the first 100 hours of the new session. I’m not talking about stuff that’s going to be politically intractable, I’m talking about long-term pledges of conduct. For example, that pledge to break “the link between lobbyists and legislations”. Well, you can certainly break that link on any legislation passed in the first 100 hours. But the promise only really means anything if you continue to abide by it well after the first 100 hours is long gone. And accomplishing “no new deficit spending” is a laudable goal, but presumably the Democrats are not going to try to pass a comprehensive budget in the first 100 hours of the new session. So that really just boils down to a pledge that they’re going to pledge to do something. And then round that out with the promise to “fight any attempt to privatize Social Security” — which is, apparently, a pledge to NOT do something during the first 100 hours of the new session. It would even seem to imply that privatizing Social Security is an option they’ll be putting back on the table once those first 100 hours is up. This is, of course, absurd, but demonstrates the problem here:

This is just plain sloppy.

The Democrats really had an opportunity here to present a simple, unified, crystal-clear statement of their principles supported by a listing of specific goals. Backing that up by focusing on a core subset of those goals as a blitzkrieg agenda for the first 100 hours of the new session was, frankly, a stroke of genius.

Instead, they loused it up. What should have been a definitive document has instead been multiply revised and rendered inconsistent. What should have been a clear-cut list of achievable goals was muddied up with fuzzy promises.

What Should Have Happened: First, the Six for ’06 should not have been revised. The whole point of issuing such a document is to have a definitive platform. Changing it mid-stream misses the whole point.

That being said, I think the addition of the security proposals (most notably the implementation of the 9/11 Commission recommendations) was a good idea. It’s definitely something that needs to be done. One way they could have achieved that without compromising the original Six for ’06 would have been to carefully roll out a Seven for ’07 at some point that would have included the security proposals as part of a general expansion of the Six for ’06 to reflect the full legislative agenda the Democrats would pursue in the new year.

Second, the 100 Hour agenda should have been a subset of clear-cut, concrete goals drawn directly from the Six for ’06 (or Seven for ’07). It should have been possible to literally treat the 100 Hour agenda as a checklist.

What Can Be Done: To understand what a golden opportunity this was, you simply need to look at the fact that it can still be salvaged despite its clumsy handling to date. The concept is that strong and the ability to communicate a clear message to the American people that palpable. Imagine if, 100 hours into the new session, Nancy Pelosi can address the nation and say:

“This was our 100 Hour agenda. We promised to break the link between lobbyists and legislation, and we have removed the lobbyists from the cloak room and given the government back to the people. We promised to eliminate deficit spending and restore the budget discipline of the 1990s, and despite the Republican failures we inherited, we have established spending plans which will allow us to achieve a deficit-free budget this year.

We have implemented the independent, bipartisan recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, making America safe again. We have raised the minimum wage as the first step in making our economy a fairer place for all Americans. We have made it possible for Medicare to negotiate with drug companies to reduce the burden placed on seniors. We have legalized stem cell research in an effort to save and improve millions of lives.

For our students we have made education more affordable by cutting interest rates, and we promise to do more.

For our security and prosperity we have rolled back the multi-billion dollar subsidies for Big Oil.

We have made promises and we have kept them. And this is merely the beginning of what we can achieve by listening to what the American people need.”

In addition to all the positive good those policies will do for this country, imagine the political effect of such a speech: The Democrats would establish themselves authoritatively as efficient, effective, and in-touch with the dreams and aspirations of the American people.

I would also argue that, in that same speech, Pelosi should go on to roll out a Seven for ’07 that establishes the Democrats’ legislative goals for the rest of the year. And at the end of the year, the party’s leaders can stand up again and talk about what they’ve achieved and what the Republicans have stopped them from achieving. And then they can roll out their Eight for ’08 and go into the elections with a full head of steam. Handled correctly, such legislative agendas could replace the party platforms (which have become bloated and pointless) as a way of clearly communicating the party’s goals and values to the electorate.

Pelosi’s Appointments

When Pelosi spoke after the Democratic victory on November 7th one of the things she said was, “We will make this the most honest, ethical, and open Congress in history.”

This was an important promise which was also incorporated into the 100 Hours agenda. It distinguished between the corruption of a Republican congress more interested in special interests than the interests of the American people and the new era which was beginning.

It was meant to be a fresh start. Unfortunately, Pelosi — through two questionable decisions — managed to muddy the carpet before the Democrats even made it through the door.

The first poor decision came when Pelosi publicly backed the scandal-tainted John Murtha to become the Majority Leader of the House. Even ignoring Murtha’s video-taped connection to the ABSCAM scandal, it was unusual for a Speaker to publicly back any candidate for the position, and there was has been a lot of speculation about what Pelosi’s actual motivation for doing so was. Whatever the motivation was, however, is largely irrelevant: Pelosi decided to make essentially her first public action as the leader of a Democratic majority the backing of a scandal-tainted candidate.

This is not the way to convince the American electorate that you’re planning to run the “most honest, ethical, and open Congress in history”.

Heck, the only way she could have made it worse would be if she decided to place another scandal-tainted Democrat in the limelight…

… which, of course, she did almost immediately by publicly announcing that Jane Harman would not be the chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Passing over Harman was not, in itself, the problem. The problem was that the next most-senior democrat on the Intelligence Commitee was Alcee Hastings, who, as a federal judge, had been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate in 1988 for taking a $150,000 bribe.

Although, to my knowledge, Pelosi never confirmed that she was considering Hastings for the position, she had effectively made him the only apparent candidate for the position.

The bungles here are readily apparent:

It was unnecessary for Pelosi to publicly announce that she was passing over Harman before she had a final candidate in mind.

It was unnecessary for Pelosi, having publicly announced that she was passing over Harman, to not immediately rule out the scandal-tainted Hastings as a potential chairman.

This is just common sense: If one of your campaign pledges is the most ethical congress in history, you can’t have bribe-takers as congressional leaders and committee chairmen. The question can’t be whether or not you’re going to allow that to happen; the question can only be how you’re going to stop that from happening.

Murtha was defeated in his bid to become Majority Leader and Pelosi eventually nominated Silvestre Reyes — a highly qualified Texas Democrat with essentially unimpeachable credentials and policy positions (at least on intelligence issues) that mirrored the party’s politics and the beliefs of the American people — to chair the Intelligence Committee.

But the damage had already been done: The story had changed from, “Nancy Pelosi is ready to lead the most honest, ethical, and open Congress in America.” It had become, “Nancy Pelosi supports corrupt Democrats for key leadership positions.”

What Should Have Happened: This one’s easy. Pelosi should have refrained from endorsing Murtha. And she should have either refrained from publicly announcing the Harman was being passed over as Chairman of the Intelligence Committee or she should have immediately announced that Hastings was also being ruled out as a candidate at the same time that she announced that Harman was not being considered.

What Can Be Done: In the short term, basically nothing. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression and Pelosi blew this one badly.

In the long term, however, the Democrats can actually follow through on their promise and make the 110th Congress the most honest, ethical, and open Congress in history while passing reform legislation to help guarantee that future congresses will follow in their footsteps. If they can do that, then Pelosi’s dreadful fumbling of this issue will become an unimportant footnote.

Half-Hearted Tax Reform
One of the most promising policy ideas I heard floated just after the election was that Bush’s tax cuts for the ultra-rich would be rolled back and the resulting revenues used to balance the budget and fund a middle class tax cut.

The beauty of such a proposal is that it finally neuters a 25 year cycle of a Republican strategy aimed at crippling the middle class in favor of the ultra-rich. The cycle looks like this (you can ignore this segue if you like):

SEGUE ABOUT VOODOO ECONOMICS

1. The Republicans cut taxes for the richest Americans (occasionally throwing in much smaller, almost insignificant, cuts for the upper middle class as a way of deflecting criticism).

2. They justify these cuts through the voodoo of trickle-down economics, claiming that tax receipts will actually increase due to economic growth supposedly spurred on by the tax cuts.

3. The massive deficit freshly created by these irresponsible tax cuts surges out of control.

4. After a few years, the economy has grown the same way it always does. It hasn’t grown any faster than it does during years when the Republicans aren’t handing off huge tax cuts to their rich pals. In fact, its frequently grown at a slower pace than it had before the massive tax cuts.

5. Tax receipts will still be down and the deficit will still be huge. The Republicans will then gut the funding of programs targeted at helping the poor and middle class (but will continue passing earmarks for their rich pals). Because they’ve cut spending, the deficit will shrink (but not be eliminated).

6. The Republicans will then declare victory: The economy has grown. The deficit has been reduced. Clearly the voodoo economics have worked! (The fact that the economy has grown at a slower rate than it would have otherwise and the deficit is still larger than it would be otherwise is irrelevant. It’s the same tactic that lets the Bush White House slash a program’s budget by $45 million; raise it by $10 million a little later; and then claim that they’ve increased funding for the program.)

7. Eventually, the budget-conscious and fiscally-responsible Democrats will come to power, pass new taxes, and manage to balance the budget. The Republicans will decry this fiscal responsibility as “big government” and “tax-and-spend”.

Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

For example, let’s take a look at the Clinton and Bush presidencies. In 2000, during Clinton’s last year in office, total tax receipts (excepting Social Security taxes) stood at $1,211 billion. In 2005, those same tax receipts stood at $1,205 billion. Tax receipts were still down, even after 5 full years of Bush’s voodoo economics. And those numbers aren’t even adjusted for inflation: The actual difference, in real dollars, is even larger.

You see a similar failure when you look at the actual growth rate of the economy. During Clinton’s years in the White House (1993-2000), the GDP grew at an average rate of 5.6%. During Bush’s presidency (2001-2005), that growth has only been 4.9%. (In chained 2000 dollars, the average rates are 3.7% and 2.4%, respectively. You’ll notice the point remains unchanged.)

Conclusion: Voodoo economics don’t work. It’s just Republican propaganda designed to justify raping the middle class to benefit the rich.

The point here is that, for the past 25 years, whenever the Democrats have tried to practice fiscal responsibility or make the economy fairer for the middle class, the Republicans have trotted out their “tax-and-spend” and “big government” talking points. These talking points have no relationship to reality (as we’ve seen), but they’ve tested great in the focus groups and the Republicans have spent three decades repeating them until you start subconsciously believing them without really thinking about it.

But you render those mindless little soundbites useless if you simultaneously repeal unpopular tax cuts given to the rich while providing much needed tax relief to the middle class. Republicans can’t just accuse you of “raising taxes” while hoping that no one looks too closely at the details, because you can just say: “No, we’re cutting taxes for the middle class. This is the difference between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats believe that the middle class is the heart of America’s strength. Republicans believe that the nation should belong only to the ultra-rich.”

And the Republicans don’t have an answer to that because there isn’t an answer to that: It’s just plain, simple truth.

This is a great proposal because it not only enacts meaningful, positive change for the nation’s economic policy, but because it also allows the Democrats to clearly demonstrate their middle class values while revealing that the Republicans are owned by their rich special interests.

But Charles Rangel, the future chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee (which would be in charge of tax policy), has recently been backing off this proposal: “It’s dumb politics to do it, especially when it’s going to get vetoed.”

This is unfortunate. Rangel is not only throwing what could have been a very effective piece of legislation into the trash bin, he’s also doing it for a completely incomprehensible reason.

What Can Be Done: The Democrats simply have to understand that, just because George W. Bush is going to veto a piece of legislation which is popular with the American people, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t force him to veto it. Quite the contrary: It means you should almost certainly force him to veto it.

Don’t be the party that failed to take action. Be the party that tried to take action and would have succeeded if only the out-of-touch and cold-hearted Republicans hadn’t stayed loyal to their rich friends and special interests and stopped you.

That’s how you build a case for sweeping the Republicans completely out of power in 2008.

Concluding Thoughts

After the 1994 Republican Revolution, the Democratic Party — after more than half a century of essentially total domination in Congress — reacted like the bully who’s gotten his nose bloodied for the first time: They ran away and cowered in the corner.

The only Democrat who didn’t run away and hide in the corner was President Clinton, who faced off against the most irrationally hostile Congress in the history of the country and won time and time again.

But the rest of the party ran away and hid, and — predictably — they just kept right on losing elections.

Ideologically, they were discordant: The Republicans had slanderously destroyed their principles by hanging erroneous buzzwords on them. Even the term “liberal” itself was turned into a curse word. But rather than fighting back and reclaiming their principles — that liberty is important; that equal opportunity is the root of the American dream; that government is the place where society comes together to solve problems too large for any individual to cope with — the Democrats splintered in a mad race for a muddy center.

Politically, they were dysfunctional: Party machinery atrophied and died. Despite the fact that, in many states, they had only just lost control of the state houses and governorships, they essentially gave those states up as forever lost.

It was only with the 2006 election cycle that we saw some of these trends reversing. Ideologically, President Bush and other extremists had so compromised the public principles claimed by the Republican party that the Democrats garnered the courage to proclaim (however tentatively) that the Emperor had no clothes. They started to find some identity for themselves, and at the same time Howard Dean’s 50 State Strategy reinvigorated party infrastructure and forced the Republicans to actually fight a truly national campaign for the first time in over a decade.

But there are still plenty of Democrats who still haven’t learned the lesson of their failure: They still think that the key to success is to try to find some sort of “Republican-lite” ideal. They still think that the best way to win a national election is to pick what parts of the nation you want to win and ignore the rest. If that section of the party is allowed to assert itself over the next two years, then the Democrats will go right back to being a minority party in 2008. (And they’ll deserve it.)

If the Democrats are going to be successful, they’re going to have to remember their principles. They’re going to have to stand by them. And they’re going to have to fight for them.

If they do that, then they can’t lose. Because if you’re fighting for liberty and equality and the hope that tomorrow can be made better than today, it doesn’t matter if you lose some political battles over the next two years. In fact, those losses will only make you stronger: Because the American people will see what you’re fighting for. And they’ll see who’s standing in your way.

There are some who have labored long and hard to make “liberal” a dirty word. But the twin principles of liberal thought are liberty and a belief in equal opportunity. So we would look long and hard at those who would consider liberty to be a dirty thing and look on equal opportunity with suspicion.