CLUELESS
The New Republic
November 5, 2007
Forget "liberal": Given a few more weeks like the ones congressional
Democrats just endured, and the dreaded L-word they’ll be struggling
to shake is "losers." Children’s health care, government spying,
the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire, the toxic ramblings of
Representative Pete Stark–you name the issue, Dems managed to get
their clocks cleaned in the p.r. battle with a fractured Republican
minority led by a lame-duck president only marginally more popular
with the American public than Chinese toy manufacturers.
Indeed, watching Democrats’ political advantage dissolve virtually
overnight has been a bit like sitting through one of those Very Bad
Day comedy movies, in which the hapless hero loses his job, his wife,
and his faithful dog all before dinnertime, getting himself arrested
for drunk and disorderly conduct in the process. On October 17,
backed into a corner by the fancy procedural footwork of Republicans,
House Democrats were forced to pull legislation aimed at scaling back
the expanded wiretapping powers Congress granted President Bush in
August. That same day, Speaker Nancy Pelosi felt compelled to walk
back her pledge to call a House vote on whether the Ottoman Empire’s
slaughter of Armenians during World War I officially qualified as
genocide–a matter of little interest to American voters but of such
intense concern to our Turkish allies that even many Democrats had
abandoned Pelosi on the issue. The next day, Pelosi’s caucus also
failed to override President Bush’s veto of the bill reauthorizing
and expanding the wildly popular s-chip program that provides health
care to poor children. More galling still, in the heat of the s-chip
debate, California Democrat Pete Stark let loose a tirade about how
Republicans refused to fund health care but were content to let our
military men and women be shipped off to Iraq to "get their heads
blown off for the president’s amusement." As a result, rather than
spending their post-vote hours spotlighting the uncompassionate
conservatism of today’s GOP, Democratic leaders found themselves
beset by Republican calls for Stark’s head. All told, it was enough
to make you long for the comparatively carefree days of September’s
"General Betray Us" scandal.
Not to kick a party when it’s down, but what in God’s name is wrong
with congressional Dems? It’s one thing to lose all your battles when
you’re the beleaguered minority crushed beneath the boot heel of a
well-liked commander-in-chief and a power-mad congressional majority.
But, when you can’t manage to win even one lousy spin cycle under
the current politically felicitous circumstances, voters are going to
start wondering if you simply don’t have what it takes to govern–if
perhaps you really do deserve that 25 percent approval rating.
To be fair, the party is in a tough spot, having essentially regained
power on a promise to get us out of Iraq, only to find that ending
a war isn’t exactly an easy task. And some Dems are whining about
the continued difficulty of getting anything done when the party has
only a slim majority in the House and an even narrower edge in the
Senate–while dealing with a president who doesn’t seem to understand
that he is supposed to quietly sit out the rest of his term in the
White House gym. If the Republicans aren’t willing to play nice,
what’s a well-intentioned Democrat to do?
Grow a pair–that’s what. Whatever concrete challenges Democrats
face, there is no excuse for the party being repeatedly, consistently
outgunned in the area of pure public relations. In part, this can be
blamed on Dems’ talent for picking the wrong battles. Yes, genocide
is a terrible thing. But sticking one’s finger in the eye of a major
(and temperamental) Muslim ally for the sake of symbolically denouncing
atrocities committed nearly a century ago by a political entity that
no longer exists suggests a troubling inability to prioritize. Worse
yet, when a majority of Armenian-Americans reside in the home state
of the House speaker, it opens one up to charges of naked pandering.
Equally disturbing, you get the sense that Democrats still don’t
grasp the extent to which Republicans regard congressional politics
as war. Or maybe they do get it (one would hope so, after the past
few years) but lack the stomach for the fight, whether because of some
high-minded notion of congressional comity or some self-congratulatory
sense of their superior character. Either way, they need to wake up and
smell the napalm. House Republicans are proudly committed to thwarting
Dems at every turn, and their success in tying up the wiretapping bill
was no fluke. Minority members have assembled a working group known
as the Floor Action Team–or FAT–charged with learning how to use the
House’s most arcane rules to derail legislative progress. Classy? Not
especially. Effective?
Clearly.
It’s not as though Dems are completely clueless. In the midst of her
Very Bad Week, Pelosi sent a letter to her caucus announcing a p.r.
push to improve the party’s image before the accelerating presidential
race pushes Congress off stage. Hoping to remind the public of
all the things the 110th has achieved thus far–ethics reform, a
bump in the minimum wage, an increase in student aid–House Dems
are being instructed to hold more town-hall meetings and press
conferences, as well as to up the flow of e-mail and snail mail to
constituents. Majority Whip James Clyburn will track which members
are the most enthusiastic cheerleaders.
But the next few weeks are likely to bring more heated confrontations
than outright victories. (Bush has, among other things, vowed to veto
upcoming spending bills.) And, unless Dems get better at the crucial
spin battles– especially in cases when things don’t break their
way–they aren’t going to have a majority to squander for very long.
Hot Heads
Congratulations to Al Gore, whose Nobel Peace Prize–shared with
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc)– is certainly
well-deserved. Unfortunately, the festivities have overshadowed some
of the past month’s less cheery climate news.
Last week, researchers at the University of East Anglia announced,
in what they called a "tremendous surprise," that the world’s oceans
are no longer absorbing as much carbon dioxide as they used to–a
development that would vastly accelerate the rate of global warming.
If that wasn’t scary enough, worldwide carbon dioxide emissions
seem to be growing much faster than had been assumed in even the
ipcc’s worst-case scenarios, according to a study just published by
Stanford’s Chris Field. And that’s not to mention the recent news
about Arctic sea ice, which appears to be melting more rapidly than
many scientists expected.
Recently, in The Washington Post, Danish political scientist BjØrn
Lomborg argued that climate change was nothing to fear and that the
effects–rising sea levels, species extinction, changes in rainfall
patterns–were likely to be mild. Although that piece received
prominent play in the paper’s "Outlook" section, readers would be wiser
to trust Judith Curry, one of the nation’s top climate scientists, who
penned a scathing reply a few days later. In addition to noting that
Lomborg played fast and loose with scientific evidence, Curry pointed
out that it is foolhardy to dismiss the possibility of "catastrophic
outcomes" just because there is a relatively small probability they
will occur. Indeed, the past month’s worth of climate news makes one
wonder if the probabilities are really all that low. While global
warming skeptics often scoff at the ipcc’s projections on the grounds
that climate science can be uncertain, that uncertainty, to the extent
it exists, cuts both ways: Things may ultimately turn out to be better
than the ipcc predicts, but they also could turn out to be worse.
To a large extent, carbon emissions are growing so quickly because
China and India are booming. Any attempt to mitigate global warming
will have to address that fact. But there is still much room for
improvement here at home. A recent Post piece brought the striking
news that the Washington, D.C., area alone belches out more carbon
than countries like Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, or Finland, all of
which have more people. (Sweden has twice as many people yet emits
80 percent as much carbon dioxide.) What’s more, Washington-area
residents are actually some of the "greener" folks in the country,
producing 13.2 tons of carbon per capita each year, compared to a
national average of 20 tons.
The good news: Politicians seem increasingly aware that action is
necessary. Just this month, Joe Lieberman and John Warner introduced
an emissions-reduction bill in the Senate–a "centrist" measure
that should get bipartisan support. The bill is far from perfect:
Environmental groups have rightly criticized it for setting too-loose
targets for curbing emissions. And the bill gives away too many
tradable emission credits for free, offering a windfall to certain
industries–such as Big Coal–and giving them too little incentive
to reduce pollution and innovate. Democrats who care about global
warming will have to fight hard to improve it. Still, the proposal
is a step in the right direction–and, in a month full of bad news,
hardly unwelcome.
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