There has been much controvercy in the news recently about the Australia Education Union's bid to boycott the NAPLAN tests in schools. The government is accusing the Union of wanting to "gut" the website, and headlines in daily papers have screamed that the Union is against MySchool and wants it offline. The government has threatened to bring in strike breakers in the form of parents. The logic of this is silly - no parent will want to break a strike and then turn up to the parent teacher night just to defend a website.
What has been lost in the media haze are the specific questions that the Education Union has raised. Instead of reading what's in the newspaper, I would encourage everyone to check out their proposal paper on their website, which is actually a good read and raises some very important points that most of the news media haven't decided to cover.
Personally I think the best points the AEU makes are about the methodology of MySchool and the reporting of school funding. Contrary to popular belief, They don't even say that the site should be taken offline. In addition, many of their proposals Julia Gillard said would "gut" MySchool are actually very sensible suggestions, especially around statistical inaccuracies.
The unfortunate thing that gets lost in the media haze is that the facts have been brushed aside. Part of the reason has been the Union's own tactics of refusing to administer the tests. the story has become one about a Union taking industrial action, rather than a union supporting policies that would lead to better schools. Perhaps the Union should have considered different tactics. Never the less, the story is about a website - about the disclosure of information to the public.
Should data have been published in the first place? I believe the answer is yes.
One of the reasons why this idea has become so popular is that it appeals to both the right and left, and can be justified by both. Supporters of open government will always support the disclosure of this information. Right wingers want the info so they can attack the education department for being somehow useless.
Left wingers can also use the data for several purposes - where a school is underperforming, communities can organise and demand a better deal for their local school, either from school administrators or the government. This model has apparently been tried in the US, especially in New York, in black schools and areas of high disadvantage.
Besides all the Unions criticisms about the methodology of the website, the thing that struck out to me most was the tragic link that still exists between academic performance and socio-economic disadvantatage.
In an odd way (and perhaps this is why Gillard supports it), the site has given life to a truth that everyone knows but not enough people acknowledge - kids from poor areas do less well on overall academic performance than people in well off areas. It may be ugly, and it may have an impact on the mentality of kids, but it's the truth and we absolutely have to fix it.
Yet the role of a school is to advance standards of learning and achievement - so the only fair comparison of how students at a school progressed over time.
But you cannot deny that poorer kids are behind the eight ball when they get started at school. If socialist and social-democratic parties around the world are truly committed the the principle of equality, they have to do something to fix this uncomfortable fact. Lifting poor kids out of poverty through education requires a high level of committment and attention by governments everywhere.
If the government was serious about improving education, it would also publish statistics on the total level of funding recieved by each school, including a breakdown of how much public and private money was used by each. It should not use microeconomic reform, or union bashing as an excuse for poor levels of funding. The Union supports this disclosure on the MySchool website, and I think most families would too.
I honestly believe that the biggest single factor influencing the performance of a school is the level of funding that goes into running the school. Administering schools is one thing - but administration can be made incredibly difficult when you don't have enough money.
Mark Latham was ostracised for his policy of creating a "hit-list" of private schools that would lose some, or all of their public funding. To this day, I continue to believe that most Labor party members would still support and defend this policy. Labor isn't necessary against private education - but when Labor's base is as the party of workers, the poor, and the frugal middle class, it's entirely legitimate to ask whether the direction of public money is being used efficiently to benefit those in most need of help.
Clearly, giving money to fund elite school infrastructure is a scandal that shouldn't exist. When I was at Sydney Boys High - a public selective school - we played in sports competitions against elite GPS schools like Kings, Shore and Newington. When we had an away game, we would play on their perfectly maintined turf cricket pitches. I quite liked it actually, I was able to get prodigious turn on my off spinners. But when we had a home game at centennial park, cricket balls would get lost down rabbit holes or get hit into the swamp.
I didn't have a problem with GPS schools having good facilities - in fact I greatly enjoyed the experience of playing there. What I did object to was that our facilities remained mediocre for years, while governments paid little attention. In 2001, Our music rooms had poor or outdated equipment, our outdoor tennis courts and cricket nets had been poorly maintained, and some of our commerce textbooks pre-dated the the 1996 workplace relations act.
After the 1999 Sydney hailstorm, at least two of our classrooms at Sydney boys sat idle for a number of semesters waiting to be repaired. Yet only a few years later, rumours abounded that Brendan Nelson (the then education minister and a Kings School old boy) had found a million dollars of your tax money to give to Kings to build a new rowing shed. I don't know if that rumour was true, but it was certainly believeable. And it is certainly the truth that the Howard government gave public money to elite schools.
You never heard anything in the pages of The Australian about how much of a rort that was. This, I believe, was a misallocation of resources - not only was millions of dollars in public money being used on elite schools, they may not have even been used for academic purposes.
This funding was partly raised by taxes paid by the parents of working class kids who would never hope to get within cooee of an elite private school. They are also raised by the tax dollars of the middle class - some of whom shell out for a private school that has more modest facilities, and probably would be a bit squeamish to see the very rich get more money.
The Education Union makes a fantastic point when it says the levels of funding should be published. I think this would be a very positive step and a great leap forward in accountability. The federal and state governments have limited resources - and it's entirely legitimate to have a look at whether these funds are being distributed equitably. Because the fair and equitable distribution of public funding is a key component of the goal of a more equal society.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
Our Political Parties Have to Be More Democratic
One of the most common complaints about our political system in Australia over the past 30 years has been that the two parties are too close together.
Personally, I think this is dubious- there remain some significant differences between the two parties. Consider the financial crisis - The Labor government responded by growing spending, giving out tax bonuses, a bank deposit guarantee, building schools and by doing an insulation program. Notwithstanding the problems with the insulation scheme, these policies demonstrate a belief in the power of government to solve problems - a marked shift from the Howard era.
If the liberals had been in charge during the financial crisis, their policies would have been much different. I believe that they would have cut taxes, cut spending, and passed another round of workchoices to help "save jobs".
If anything, the difference between the parties is probably a bit bigger than it was 20 year ago, when both parties swallowed the neoliberal agenda as a whole. But despite this, it's probably a valid criticism to say that the divide between the parties on policy matters no longer resembles a grand canyon as it did 40 years ago. When people feel that they have less of a choice, or that there aren't big things at stake, they are less motivated to participate in democracy.
Look at the US election in 1996 - a voter turnout of 49%. Or the UK elections of 2001 (59%) and 2005 (61%), down from 71% in 1997 when Blair swept to power.
It's easy to measure the health of politics in other countries, because the level of engagement can be measured easily by the turnout at elections.
But that shouldn't be our only measure. Indeed in Australia, we can't measure it this way because voting is compulsory. We have to look elsewhere, to other things. Other countries are plagued by deeper structural problems, and Australia shares them.
Decline in participation can be measured a number of ways:
- the decline in trade union membership, community organisations and clubs
- an increase in the amount of voters who don't identify with one party, or say they are "uncommitted"
- a decline in participation in community events or religious institutions
And above all things in my opinion, a decline can be seen in the levels of membership of all our political parties. With the exception of the greens, membership of all major and most minor political parties over the past 20 years has been falling.
The common thread to all of this disenfranchisement is one thing: every single one of these political parties has all too regularly defied the popular will of their membership and support base - and has lost members and valuable funding in the process.
The Nationals have spent the better part of the last 25 years losing their rural base, firstly to the liberals, then to one nation, then to Independents and the liberals again. A party of agrarian socialism, they regularly refused to stand up to the liberals in government when free market tendencies or service cuts damaged rural constituencies.
One Nation gained its relevance when racist working class voters wanted to voice their disapproval of Labor's social progressiveness. One Nation lost its relevance when John Howard stole many of their policies, like temporary protection visas.
John Howard drove small L liberals out of the liberal party starting in the 1980's and the job became nearly complete after he scuttled the republic and exploited the Tampa crisis. Now the party has been taken over by extremists. A young Liberal MP, Alex Hawke, has stated that "nobody joins the liberal party if they believe in compulsory student unionism, legalising drug injecting rooms or lowering the age of consent for lowering the homosexual age of consent". Nor is it a place for people who believe in a market-based response to fight man-made Climate Change, as Malcolm Turnbull rudely found out. Many small l liberals could support some of those policies.
20 years ago, progressive individualists would have joined the Australian democrats - but now they no longer exist. The reason for that is the Australia democrats breached their trust with the public and their members, after they voted for the GST. Meg Lees defied the wishes of party members, and they duly responded - by leaving.
Which leaves us with the labor party. This is a party that has suffered plenty of setbacks for the ordinary party member. ALP members starting in the mid-1980's had to first deal with the party's adoption of neoliberalism and the corresponding decline of trade unions. They then had to deal with mistreatment at the hands of factions, branch stacking, and a decline in respect for the rights of the ordinary party member.
In most cases, labor governments these days produce policies that are often far to the right of the wishes of rank and file members. The parliamentary wing regularly adopts loose interpretations of the platform. Rank and file power over policy and preselections has also withered away. If this wasn't enough, the party had to then deal with the many wedge issues of John Howard - many people exited political involvement completely over the tampa issue - others ran off to the wide open arms of the greens.
The greens? They're growing, mainly through grassroots activism and standing on principle. And family first? Well that party gets propped up by Evangelical churches. Both of these parties grow because they share one thing - they are rare in that they have not yet seriously defied the policy wishes of their members.
Yes, the state of our political parties is a sad place indeed. Is it any wonder that people don't want to get involved in politics?
Usually, if something is drastically wrong, people will join political parties. But that hasn't been happening - despite the financial crisis, despite big issues like Iraq and Global Warming, people stay switched off. The push factors are there for people to want to join political parties, but he pull factors aren't. Where are we going wrong?
I am convinced that the problem lies with our political parties themselves. They are undemocratic and their internal structures are mostly an embarrassment. Most of them would be in debt. Some barely have enough members to run a campaign - in one sad example, the liberals actually pay people to man booths on election day.
When people don't join political parties, it robs them of two things - money, and people. Usually every strong organisation needs both of these. But eventually, some clever political party staffers worked out that:
a) less people meant it was easier to run an undemocratic organisation exactly how you wanted
b) if you needed money for campaign contributions, the private sector would gladly open its wallet, but only a price.
So what was the point of having pesky rank and filers? Why put up with them when you could operate instead what Carmen Lawrence once called a "Political Corporation"?
The problem with this is that big donors expect big favors. Look at the influence of property developers in NSW - they give big bucks to both parties, but particularly Labor. Why? Because Bob Carr had a philosophy that Sydney was already full, so any land that did get released was very valuable. So the big developers lobbied the government for more land release, or they bought land that they then lobbied to have rezoned.
These developers made a killing - they then built and sold big houses on big blocks and made even more cash. Bob Carr ironically helped create the mcmansion and with them came the stubborn voters whose fear of interest rates kept John Howard in office.
Corporations have sought to buy interest for a long time, especially in NSW. The answer to this has been the call for public funding of elections. Certainly preferable to government by donation. But hang on a second - taxpayers then pay tax so a party can run an election. Why should parties get access to the public purse when they could be raising that money through higher membership? Look at Obama's campaign - he was the more left wing candidate, and yet he was able to refuse public funding because the average individual donors gave money and support.
Political parties are an institution of democracy, and thus a public good. Parliamentary democracy as we know it can't function without them. So therefore it's totally legitimate to ask what we have to do to fix them. Parties simply MUST make themselves a more attractive product otherwise they won't survive. People these days won't join a party just so they can rock up to a branch and talk about things. Any old amateur with internet access can discuss politics online. What people do care about is power - the power to influence events, policies and the selection of candidates. When our political parties don't give that to them, they zone out, or they join some sort of fringe lobby group with no structural power, leaving people further frustrated. .
The ordinary citizen must have rights when they join any political party. Rules must be democratic and should encourage debate and criticism. And the right to exercise your vote on policy and candidacy matters should be paramount.
Since this a blog of social democracy, and I'm a labor supporter, Labor must also rediscover it's mass-based past. The Liberal Party will always have the backing of wealthy individuals and business. What the Labor party needs is a strong membership that is organised en masse and participates wholeheartedly.
The Labor party was not founded as a political corporation. In fact, it was formed because it believed the opposite about itself and about society. It believed that collectively, we are stronger. It believed in engagement, participation, and above all things, it believed in mass-collective organisation. Because the working class protected itself when it stuck together. And the working class had power when it stuck together. The strength of the early Labor parties and trade unions was not in their money, but in their mass membership.
This is how politics should be - not a one way conversation from the TV speakers into your ears. It's a discussion. It's about participation and involvement. It's about ordinary people shaping the movement, the policies, and ordinary people choosing their candidates, and ordinary people running the campaign. We have lost sight of our collective consciousness - through parties and trade unions. Plenty of working class people have never joined unions, and have in turn never understood that their living standards are best advanced through collective action. As a result, many turn to the opposite vision offered by the liberals, which says to poor workers that an individual can get ahead simply if they work hard, and that liberals would help you do so by preventing immigrants from stealing your job and by keeping the economy strong. We must break that chain and focus attention where it should be - greedy banks, polluters, monopolies and corporations.
And for goodness sake, lets end the madness of the nation's major social democratic party not even being internally democratic.
Personally, I think this is dubious- there remain some significant differences between the two parties. Consider the financial crisis - The Labor government responded by growing spending, giving out tax bonuses, a bank deposit guarantee, building schools and by doing an insulation program. Notwithstanding the problems with the insulation scheme, these policies demonstrate a belief in the power of government to solve problems - a marked shift from the Howard era.
If the liberals had been in charge during the financial crisis, their policies would have been much different. I believe that they would have cut taxes, cut spending, and passed another round of workchoices to help "save jobs".
If anything, the difference between the parties is probably a bit bigger than it was 20 year ago, when both parties swallowed the neoliberal agenda as a whole. But despite this, it's probably a valid criticism to say that the divide between the parties on policy matters no longer resembles a grand canyon as it did 40 years ago. When people feel that they have less of a choice, or that there aren't big things at stake, they are less motivated to participate in democracy.
Look at the US election in 1996 - a voter turnout of 49%. Or the UK elections of 2001 (59%) and 2005 (61%), down from 71% in 1997 when Blair swept to power.
It's easy to measure the health of politics in other countries, because the level of engagement can be measured easily by the turnout at elections.
But that shouldn't be our only measure. Indeed in Australia, we can't measure it this way because voting is compulsory. We have to look elsewhere, to other things. Other countries are plagued by deeper structural problems, and Australia shares them.
Decline in participation can be measured a number of ways:
- the decline in trade union membership, community organisations and clubs
- an increase in the amount of voters who don't identify with one party, or say they are "uncommitted"
- a decline in participation in community events or religious institutions
And above all things in my opinion, a decline can be seen in the levels of membership of all our political parties. With the exception of the greens, membership of all major and most minor political parties over the past 20 years has been falling.
The common thread to all of this disenfranchisement is one thing: every single one of these political parties has all too regularly defied the popular will of their membership and support base - and has lost members and valuable funding in the process.
The Nationals have spent the better part of the last 25 years losing their rural base, firstly to the liberals, then to one nation, then to Independents and the liberals again. A party of agrarian socialism, they regularly refused to stand up to the liberals in government when free market tendencies or service cuts damaged rural constituencies.
One Nation gained its relevance when racist working class voters wanted to voice their disapproval of Labor's social progressiveness. One Nation lost its relevance when John Howard stole many of their policies, like temporary protection visas.
John Howard drove small L liberals out of the liberal party starting in the 1980's and the job became nearly complete after he scuttled the republic and exploited the Tampa crisis. Now the party has been taken over by extremists. A young Liberal MP, Alex Hawke, has stated that "nobody joins the liberal party if they believe in compulsory student unionism, legalising drug injecting rooms or lowering the age of consent for lowering the homosexual age of consent". Nor is it a place for people who believe in a market-based response to fight man-made Climate Change, as Malcolm Turnbull rudely found out. Many small l liberals could support some of those policies.
20 years ago, progressive individualists would have joined the Australian democrats - but now they no longer exist. The reason for that is the Australia democrats breached their trust with the public and their members, after they voted for the GST. Meg Lees defied the wishes of party members, and they duly responded - by leaving.
Which leaves us with the labor party. This is a party that has suffered plenty of setbacks for the ordinary party member. ALP members starting in the mid-1980's had to first deal with the party's adoption of neoliberalism and the corresponding decline of trade unions. They then had to deal with mistreatment at the hands of factions, branch stacking, and a decline in respect for the rights of the ordinary party member.
In most cases, labor governments these days produce policies that are often far to the right of the wishes of rank and file members. The parliamentary wing regularly adopts loose interpretations of the platform. Rank and file power over policy and preselections has also withered away. If this wasn't enough, the party had to then deal with the many wedge issues of John Howard - many people exited political involvement completely over the tampa issue - others ran off to the wide open arms of the greens.
The greens? They're growing, mainly through grassroots activism and standing on principle. And family first? Well that party gets propped up by Evangelical churches. Both of these parties grow because they share one thing - they are rare in that they have not yet seriously defied the policy wishes of their members.
Yes, the state of our political parties is a sad place indeed. Is it any wonder that people don't want to get involved in politics?
Usually, if something is drastically wrong, people will join political parties. But that hasn't been happening - despite the financial crisis, despite big issues like Iraq and Global Warming, people stay switched off. The push factors are there for people to want to join political parties, but he pull factors aren't. Where are we going wrong?
I am convinced that the problem lies with our political parties themselves. They are undemocratic and their internal structures are mostly an embarrassment. Most of them would be in debt. Some barely have enough members to run a campaign - in one sad example, the liberals actually pay people to man booths on election day.
When people don't join political parties, it robs them of two things - money, and people. Usually every strong organisation needs both of these. But eventually, some clever political party staffers worked out that:
a) less people meant it was easier to run an undemocratic organisation exactly how you wanted
b) if you needed money for campaign contributions, the private sector would gladly open its wallet, but only a price.
So what was the point of having pesky rank and filers? Why put up with them when you could operate instead what Carmen Lawrence once called a "Political Corporation"?
The problem with this is that big donors expect big favors. Look at the influence of property developers in NSW - they give big bucks to both parties, but particularly Labor. Why? Because Bob Carr had a philosophy that Sydney was already full, so any land that did get released was very valuable. So the big developers lobbied the government for more land release, or they bought land that they then lobbied to have rezoned.
These developers made a killing - they then built and sold big houses on big blocks and made even more cash. Bob Carr ironically helped create the mcmansion and with them came the stubborn voters whose fear of interest rates kept John Howard in office.
Corporations have sought to buy interest for a long time, especially in NSW. The answer to this has been the call for public funding of elections. Certainly preferable to government by donation. But hang on a second - taxpayers then pay tax so a party can run an election. Why should parties get access to the public purse when they could be raising that money through higher membership? Look at Obama's campaign - he was the more left wing candidate, and yet he was able to refuse public funding because the average individual donors gave money and support.
Political parties are an institution of democracy, and thus a public good. Parliamentary democracy as we know it can't function without them. So therefore it's totally legitimate to ask what we have to do to fix them. Parties simply MUST make themselves a more attractive product otherwise they won't survive. People these days won't join a party just so they can rock up to a branch and talk about things. Any old amateur with internet access can discuss politics online. What people do care about is power - the power to influence events, policies and the selection of candidates. When our political parties don't give that to them, they zone out, or they join some sort of fringe lobby group with no structural power, leaving people further frustrated. .
The ordinary citizen must have rights when they join any political party. Rules must be democratic and should encourage debate and criticism. And the right to exercise your vote on policy and candidacy matters should be paramount.
Since this a blog of social democracy, and I'm a labor supporter, Labor must also rediscover it's mass-based past. The Liberal Party will always have the backing of wealthy individuals and business. What the Labor party needs is a strong membership that is organised en masse and participates wholeheartedly.
The Labor party was not founded as a political corporation. In fact, it was formed because it believed the opposite about itself and about society. It believed that collectively, we are stronger. It believed in engagement, participation, and above all things, it believed in mass-collective organisation. Because the working class protected itself when it stuck together. And the working class had power when it stuck together. The strength of the early Labor parties and trade unions was not in their money, but in their mass membership.
This is how politics should be - not a one way conversation from the TV speakers into your ears. It's a discussion. It's about participation and involvement. It's about ordinary people shaping the movement, the policies, and ordinary people choosing their candidates, and ordinary people running the campaign. We have lost sight of our collective consciousness - through parties and trade unions. Plenty of working class people have never joined unions, and have in turn never understood that their living standards are best advanced through collective action. As a result, many turn to the opposite vision offered by the liberals, which says to poor workers that an individual can get ahead simply if they work hard, and that liberals would help you do so by preventing immigrants from stealing your job and by keeping the economy strong. We must break that chain and focus attention where it should be - greedy banks, polluters, monopolies and corporations.
And for goodness sake, lets end the madness of the nation's major social democratic party not even being internally democratic.
The Importance of Obama's Health Care Bill
So Obama has finally done what every American president since Lyndon Johnson has failed to do - expand health care coverage to more Americans.
The bill that has passed congress isn't a radical reform - it is not a single payer universal health care system, and it does not include a public option. It also doesn't allow people to buy into medicare, except for those at the very bottom.
However the changes in the bill do more tightly regulate the health insurance industry in terms of what it is and isn't allowed to do. The expansion of coverage relies on individual mandates, tax breaks and direct subsidies, to be phased in over four years. All of this stuff is still significant reform and most democrats would see it as an essential first step.
The victory he secured in congress was significant not just for the reforms themselves, but how they were passed. Much of the credit must go to Obama and Nancy Pelosi, who refused to see the entire health care bill go down in flames. Obama understood that his success on getting a health bill passed would greatly impact on his credibility to deal with other issues. No member of congress would want to side with what they saw as a "losing" president on tight votes about major reform. So instead of giving up the game when he couldn't get everything he wanted, he pushed on, twisted arms and did some heavy lifting.
Now, regardless of how effective the bill itself is, he will now be known as someone who refuses to give up until he can squeeze something - anything - in the direction of reform out of a conservative, stubborn and corrupt congress. This bill passed with only 4 votes in hand, many in his party defected, but still he pushed on anyway.
The impact on the rest of his agenda will be immense - he can start the work of other things like the Employee Free Choice Act, Emissions Trading, Financial Reform and a jobs bill.
This bill was as much about sending a message about the proper role of government as Obama sees it. Obama is a pragmatic liberal who is prepared to accept weak, incremental change if that's all he can muscle through congress. There is only one thing he refuses to accept, and that's the status quo.
It's as much about the direction of government and Obama's agenda than it is about the policies. Obama is trying to push back 30 years of ideologiical orthodoxy in government which said it should butt out of economic affairs - this ship of state is taking a long time to turn around. But his hope will be that by turning it around, step by step, he can set the tone for progressive government through the next decades. Obama once described Reagan as a "transformational president" - someone who changed the terms of the political debate. Obama wants to be the liberal version.
He has already taken a gigantic step forward. Political pundits have already come out and said this could cost democrats seats. This is complete crap. If the democrats had failed to pass a health care bill, the base that propelled them to victory would have stayed home, and independents would have thought of them as a waste of time. Now, Obama has a concrete achievement to stand on. Many of the measures in this bill will start before the election. Republicans may kick and scream, but once Democrats and Independent voters start seeing change flow directly to their families, they will not appreciate calls to get rid of it. The republicans are on the wrong side of the issue and are only playing to their crazy conservative base. Indeed, ten years ago this might have been a health care bill the republicans could have supported. Now Obama gets to gift wrap it for himself.
If anything, the democrats have shored up their political coalition by passing this. I think their majority is headed nowhere - not forwards or backwards. With a few more bills through congress, they will definitely be back for more. For 30 years, the democrats have been looking for their soul and their spine. Obama has given it back to them, and if he keeps demonstrating that same tenacity, he will win himself a second term and the democrats will win many more congressional elections.
Keep in mind that this is just policy number one - more is to come. Much of FDR's most sweeping legislation came in the second half of his first term - after the 1934 congressional elections. THe Social Security Act was passed in 1935. Obama has more to do.
The bill that has passed congress isn't a radical reform - it is not a single payer universal health care system, and it does not include a public option. It also doesn't allow people to buy into medicare, except for those at the very bottom.
However the changes in the bill do more tightly regulate the health insurance industry in terms of what it is and isn't allowed to do. The expansion of coverage relies on individual mandates, tax breaks and direct subsidies, to be phased in over four years. All of this stuff is still significant reform and most democrats would see it as an essential first step.
The victory he secured in congress was significant not just for the reforms themselves, but how they were passed. Much of the credit must go to Obama and Nancy Pelosi, who refused to see the entire health care bill go down in flames. Obama understood that his success on getting a health bill passed would greatly impact on his credibility to deal with other issues. No member of congress would want to side with what they saw as a "losing" president on tight votes about major reform. So instead of giving up the game when he couldn't get everything he wanted, he pushed on, twisted arms and did some heavy lifting.
Now, regardless of how effective the bill itself is, he will now be known as someone who refuses to give up until he can squeeze something - anything - in the direction of reform out of a conservative, stubborn and corrupt congress. This bill passed with only 4 votes in hand, many in his party defected, but still he pushed on anyway.
The impact on the rest of his agenda will be immense - he can start the work of other things like the Employee Free Choice Act, Emissions Trading, Financial Reform and a jobs bill.
This bill was as much about sending a message about the proper role of government as Obama sees it. Obama is a pragmatic liberal who is prepared to accept weak, incremental change if that's all he can muscle through congress. There is only one thing he refuses to accept, and that's the status quo.
It's as much about the direction of government and Obama's agenda than it is about the policies. Obama is trying to push back 30 years of ideologiical orthodoxy in government which said it should butt out of economic affairs - this ship of state is taking a long time to turn around. But his hope will be that by turning it around, step by step, he can set the tone for progressive government through the next decades. Obama once described Reagan as a "transformational president" - someone who changed the terms of the political debate. Obama wants to be the liberal version.
He has already taken a gigantic step forward. Political pundits have already come out and said this could cost democrats seats. This is complete crap. If the democrats had failed to pass a health care bill, the base that propelled them to victory would have stayed home, and independents would have thought of them as a waste of time. Now, Obama has a concrete achievement to stand on. Many of the measures in this bill will start before the election. Republicans may kick and scream, but once Democrats and Independent voters start seeing change flow directly to their families, they will not appreciate calls to get rid of it. The republicans are on the wrong side of the issue and are only playing to their crazy conservative base. Indeed, ten years ago this might have been a health care bill the republicans could have supported. Now Obama gets to gift wrap it for himself.
If anything, the democrats have shored up their political coalition by passing this. I think their majority is headed nowhere - not forwards or backwards. With a few more bills through congress, they will definitely be back for more. For 30 years, the democrats have been looking for their soul and their spine. Obama has given it back to them, and if he keeps demonstrating that same tenacity, he will win himself a second term and the democrats will win many more congressional elections.
Keep in mind that this is just policy number one - more is to come. Much of FDR's most sweeping legislation came in the second half of his first term - after the 1934 congressional elections. THe Social Security Act was passed in 1935. Obama has more to do.
I'm Back.
I went quiet for a number of months. But on the urging of my girlfriend, I have decided to restart this blog. She is sick of me bitching about politics and wants me to start writing about it. So I'll do that.
I've been writing a bunch of things in word files and notepad files over the past few months, so I hope you don't mind if I unload them here in one big dump over the next few days.
I've been writing a bunch of things in word files and notepad files over the past few months, so I hope you don't mind if I unload them here in one big dump over the next few days.
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