"Republicans right now are just sitting back and slinging arrows," Plouffe said. "We need to infiltrate their camp and shine some light over their side of the fence."

How does Plouffe frame the argument to voters? He says that Democrats have spent the past two years trying to fix problems while Republicans are asking voters for the chance to wheel a "Trojan horse" into Washington -- out of which will spill bankers and health insurance executives.

Yet by the end of the interview, I realized he had bumped into the hidden political issue of the 2010 elections. Beneath the predictable back-and-forth between Obama and his Republican adversaries over government spending lies a substantively important difference over how the United States can maintain its global leadership.

For Republicans, American power is rooted largely in military might and showing a tough and resolute face to the world. They would rely on tax cuts as the one and only spur to economic growth.

Obama, Biden and the Democrats, on the other hand, believe that American power depends ultimately on the American economy, and that government has an essential role to play in fostering the next generation of growth.

Notice that when Obama spoke about keeping America in first place, he said not a word about the military. He referred instead to the efforts of our competitors in the public sphere of the economy, and of our past complacency.

"Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as the problems have grown worse," Obama said. "Meanwhile, China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations aren't standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs."

Suddenly, Obama's approach is not about old-fashioned Democratic spending. It's about patriotism, competing successfully, investing to maintain American economic leadership. John F. Kennedy provided a slogan for such an effort 50 years ago: "Let's get America moving again."

And that brings me to my last point:

The Man himself.

"The convention's first speaker, former Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado said that people who voted for Barack Obama could not pass a basic civics literacy test. "People who would not even spell the word vote or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House...named Barack Hussein Obama," he said.

"Yes, that's right. The president is a socialist, his supporters illiterate.

"Today, Tancredo stood by his comments. "These people didn't have the slightest idea about what America is all about, about the Constitution," he said. "And they went and voted!"

"The leader of the Tea Party convention, Judson Phillips, had no problem with it, either. "I think what Tom Tancredo was saying, he thinks a lot of people really didn't understand what they were voting for when they voted for Barack Obama," adding, "He did a fantastic job, didn't he?"

"Tancredo went even further about voters saying, "I think it should be exactly the same test that we give immigrants coming into the country. And if you can't pass a test about American civics that an immigrant has to pass in order to be here, then I don't think you should be able to vote."

Oh, I see.

Is THAT all?

Just a little civics test, to make sure you know what you're voting for, so that all those Meskins who can't speak English can't be bamboozled into voting for the colored guy, and all those ignernt ghetto thugs can't be railroaded into the voting booths to vote for the Negro.

THAT WAY we wouldn't wind up with a BLACK GUY in the White House!

I get it.

Really. 

I do.

Although, just to enlighten things a TAD bit.

First of all, I might mention, just as an aside, that it is actually EDUCATED people who are the most drawn to Barack Obama, according to the latest Gallup Poll:

"Gallup has a new poll out. What does it indicate? That smart people like Barack Obama the most...What it says is that educated people with advanced degrees tend to be Obama's most loyal supporters."

Just to clear that little point up.

And, just so we're clear on what LITERACY TESTS really are.

The Raw Story goes into a wee bit more detail:

"Southern states used literacy tests as part of an effort to deny suffrage to African American voters prior to Johnson-era civil rights laws.

"Prior to passage of the federal Voting Rights Act in 1965, Southern (and some Western) states maintained elaborate voter registration procedures whose primary purpose was to deny the vote to those who were not white," a website for civil rights veterans explains. "In the South, this process was often called the 'literacy test.' In fact, it was much more than a simple test, it was an entire complex system devoted to denying African-Americans (and in some regions, Latinos) the right to vote."

"Because the Freedom Movement was running "Citizenship Schools" to help people learn how to fill out the forms and pass the test, Alabama changed the test 4 times in less than two years (1964-1965)," the site adds. "At the time of the Selma Voting Rights campaign there were actually 100 different tests in use across the state. In theory, each applicant was supposed to be given one at random from a big loose-leaf binder. In real life, some individual tests were easier than others and the registrar made sure that Black applicants got the hardest ones."

"White applicants could be approved even if they didn't pass the test.

"Your application was then reviewed by the three-member Board of Registrars — often in secret at a later date," the site continues. "They voted on whether or not you passed. It was entirely up to the judgment of the Board whether you passed or failed. If you were white and missed every single question they could still pass you if — in their sole judgment — you were 'qualified.' If you were Black and got every one correct, they could still flunk you if they considered you 'unqualified.'"

Yeah.

THAT "literacy test."

And make no mistake about it.  THAT was the literacy test Tancredo had in mind.

Now, when I first read that, I was so horrified I literally shouted in my chair, at my computer, so loud that my husband came running to make sure I was all right.  I copied the entire Raw Story article--which I encourage you all to read--into the body of an e-mail and sent it to everybody on my list.  I put it up on my FaceBook page.

Then I opened up the Washington Post and read THEIR version of the opening day of the convention. 

Tancredo's session was given three short paragraphs at the end of an article entitled, "The Tea Party is Still Taking Shape," and was written by Ann Gerhart and Philip Rucker.

And here are those three paragraphs, in their entirety:

"On Thursday night, giving the opening address, former U.S. representative Tom Tancredo (Colo.), who ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination as an anti-immigration candidate, railed against Obama and "the cult of multiculturalism." Americans could be "boiled to death in a cauldron of the nanny state," he said. "People who couldn't even spell the word 'vote,' or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House."

"When Tancredo said, "His name is Barack Hussein Obama," the audience booed loudly.

"The race for America is on," Tancredo said. "The president and his left-wing allies in Congress are going to look at every opportunity to destroy the Constitution before we have a chance to save it. So put your running shoes on."

In other words, "the cult of multiculturalism" was the only mention made of Tancredo's loathsome call for literacy tests.

Now, according to ABC News, Tancredo's remarks brought bursts of applause, and furthermore, convention organizers defended the remarks.

And yet the Washington Post's political writers didn't even notice, or find reason to mention, them at all.

Back when I was writing and publishing suspense thrillers, I was often a keynote speaker at writer's conferences around the country, and it was not unusual for me to address hotel ballrooms packed full of hundreds of people, so I know how these kinds of conventions go. 

The keynote speaker is there to inspire and fire up the convention-goers.

But the opening speaker, the welcoming speaker--they set the tone for the entire event.

Tom Tancredo's remarks basically stated that the purpose for the Tea Party movement is to ensure that we don't see any more people of color in the White House, among other complaints.

Even one convention attendee commented to a reporter that it hurt the movement that pretty much everybody there was white and middle-aged or older and said, "We need more diversity."

Yeah well, that boat done sailed, buddy.  It left the dock about the time one of your organizers sent out a fund-raising e-mail showing our president dressed as a witch-doctor.

When the New York Times covered the opening day of the convention, it didn't even mention Tancredo's remarks at all, which is why I'm not bothering to go dig up a link to it.

What I'm saying here is that, if a major political paper like the Washington Post finds it necessary to tone down such a blatant expression of racism in their coverage of a political event, to the extent that they don't even bother to MENTION the literacy tests he clearly emphasized in his remarks, and the New York Times doesn't even refer to them at all, then what that does is, it makes those remarks palatable, acceptable.

Part of the problem, (Congressional expert Norm) Ornstein says, is that Democrats don't have a vast propaganda machine.

"When an issue emerges--how to pound away at it? You don't need to[conspire]...Republicans just kind of know how to do that," Ornsteinsays. "It becomes an echo chamber that once its out there for a bit,bleeds over to the rest of the press. If it doesn't, then thoseentities [Rush Limbaugh, etc.] pound away at the Times, the Post and the Sunday talk shows for ignoring a big story."

That echo chamber goes hand in glove with a separate advantageRepublicans have: a willingness that Democrats lack to tell hugewhoppers about their opponents.

"Republicans are wiling to take rhetoric that goes way beyondreality--continuing to talk about the health care plan as a governmenttakeover. It doesn't matter much if you can take the fact and say it'snot true." Once it's out there, it's out for good.

Fivethirtyeight.com's Nate Silver doesn't think things have to be that drastic. He says all the Dems need to do is start paying attention to a coupleof things, like, the fact that MOST Americans don't live in Washington,D.C, and live and breathe politics:

We've repeatedly highlighted Kaiser's health care polling,which revealed that only about half of the public knows about many ofthe key provisions that are in the Democrats' bill, such as coveragefor people with pre-existing conditions. Meanwhile, a Pew pollthis week found that only 26 percent of Americans know that it takes 60votes to overcome a Senate filibuster -- and only 32 percent know thatSenate GOPers voted unanimously against the Democrats' health careplan. And a Rasmussen pollof likely voters found that only 21 percent of them believe that theDemocrats have cut taxes for "95% of working families", a fact which isprobably true.

Idon't particularly blame the public for this. The number of politics"fans" probably numbers somewhere on the order of 10 or 20 million outof a country of 250 million adults. Most people have lives and havebetter things to do than to follow politics all the time. They payquite a bit of attention during Presidential elections and, I wouldargue, make reasonably sophisticated decisions. But outside of that,most people aren't watching MSNBC or Fox News every evening or loggingonto the Washington Post or FiveThirtyEight. They're developingimpressions based on limited information, often gleaned from partisannews sources and politicians who have an incentive to tell themanything but the truth.

He faults the Dems for allowing three long months to lapse whilethey--and their cable-TV supporters--fought bitterly amongst themselvesabout the public option, which hijacked the entire health care reformdebate and enabled the Republicans to sneak in and basically thieve theissue right out from under them, which has now imperiled the entirething, because what happened was that the vast majority of people don'tpay enough attention and were not aware that the term "government-runhealth care" was ITSELF a lie, and that the Dems didn't even explainTHAT, they didn't even highlight the term OPTION properly.  They letthe whole thing degenerate into a fight over details that could havebeen worked out later, frankly.  The public option was not the entirebill, but by making it seem as if it was, they lost the message war.

He stresses the importance of repetition.

He stresses the importance of repetition.

He stresses the importance of repetition: 

And all Democrats need to realize, meanwhile, thatsometimes the message isn't going to sink in until the sixth or seventhtime that you repeat it. Before Tuesday's State of the Union, forinstance, the White House had almost literally never mentioned that thestimulus contained a huge tax cut -- they shouldn't expect the publicto believe it any more than Warner Brothers should expect a ton ofpeople to go out and see their new movie if they only begin advertisingit 48 hours beforehand.

Rather, the Democrats need to figure out what their November messages are now and begin planting seeds for them now.You want to run on Republican obstructionism? Well then, don't neglectthe golden opportunities that the Republicans are providing you with today, such as when they voted unanimously in the Senate against re-imposing pay-go rules or unanimously in the House against a very centrist financial regulation package. How many people know that House Republicans voted 174-0against a jobs bill? It's probably not even 20 percent or 30 percent --more like 2 or 3 percent, at best. The DNC, DCCC, DSCC, and sympatheticgroups like unions should be blasting out advertisements whenever theRepublicans cast a vote like this.

He also mentions what I think should have beendone all along, which is more crowing needs to be done aboutsuccesses.  We all hated the strutting and arrogance and boasting ofthe Bush administration every damn time they crossed a T or dotted an iproperly, or just did their damn jobs without tripping over their owndumbass feet, but I'd like to see a lot more bragging from this WhiteHouse, and I think we're starting to.  Silver says:

But if it were me, I would err a little bit less on the side of caution in highlighting numbers like, for instance, the 5.7 percent GDP growth that the country experienced in the 4Q. It's not that I expect these messages to be winners now;rather, it's that you want to plant the seed with the public for thefall. Otherwise, it may feel like too little too late when theemployment numbers turn positive too, and the public may believe thatthe recovery occurred in spite of, not because of, the stimulus.

What he's saying is, it's all about framingfuture messages, not so much worrying about how it looks now, buttaking risks that things will improve enough in the future that you canride the wave of how they look now.  And if they look worse in thefuture...well, like Scarlett O'Hara, we'll worry about that tomorrow.

What Silver is saying about how most Americansreally don't pay enough attention to realize lies when they are hearingthem was brought crashingly home to me by another piece righthere at TPM, that, while it was based on a Republican poll taken forthe National Review--so you have to take it with a grain of salt--theresults basically say that even though most Americans know very littleabout the Tea Party movement, they like what they THINK the movement isabout.

It's kinda like thinkin' Sarah Palin would be a good president because she's "one of us."

It doesn't take a great deal of thought.  Andlet's face it--so many Americans don't put a whole lot of thought intocurrent events unless it's right up close to a big national election. This is how they get bamboozled and hornswoggled by the bait-and-switchartists of the world.

But something happened on the way to the State of the Union.

Just when I thought we were going down for the count, my Republican husband was right again.

(Psst--please don't tell him I said that.  He's just so insufferable when he hears it.)

In a previous post, AGGIE POLITICS, I wrote about how my husband, amoderate Republican but strong Obama supporter, told me that no matterhow bleak things may look at the moment for Dems, we should not give upon our President, because he's always pretty much been the smartest manin the room, and we should not count him out yet, and that, never fear,when it comes to Republicans, they always go too far.

He also said, "This Massachusetts loss may be the best thing thathappened to your party and Obama, because it will be a wake-up call. You can re-organize, re-group, come out with a new plan.  It mightactually be a good thing."

I thought about this a few days later, during the president's speech.

When I heard the State of the Union address, I heard a very, VERYsmart reach-out to Independent voters.  I heard a COMPLETE re-framingof the Democratic message.

I've seen a few op-ed writers who seem to have caught on to that butnone of them have come right out and said it, so I will, because Ispotted it immediately.  In fact, I shouted and fist-pumped when Iheard the paragraphs in question, simply because of the CHOICE OF WORDS.

See, I'm a writer by trade.  I make my living, such as it is, bylanguage.  And choice of words is CRUCIAL in just about everything inthis world.  It's crucial in diplomacy.  It's crucial in politics. It's crucial in, say, job-hunting or resume-writing.  It's crucial in,oh, say, marriage proposals.

Language matters.

And no one knows this better than this president, as he has proven time and time again.

Now, this past year, the language of governing has been robbed bythe Republicans.  They stole it pretty much during the campaign andthey continued the rhetoric throughout the Inauguration and all throughthe entire first year of Obama's presidency.  And he was just plainworking too damn hard to care, I think.

But the losses in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts--combinedwith the threat of the loss of health care reform--gave him what myhusband had predicted would be a "wake-up call."

The White House had seen the same poll numbersthe rest of us saw--that we were losing Independents to theRepublicans.  And it wasn't "populist anger" that is the ongoingconservative-driven meme in the media.

It was the message.

So they reframed it.

Consider this passage:

From the day I took office, I've been told that addressing ourlarger challenges is too ambitious; such an effort would be toocontentious. I've been told that our political system is toogridlocked, and that we should just put things on hold for a while.

For those who make these claims, I have one simple question: Howlong should we wait? How long should America put its future on hold?

You see, Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even asthe problems have grown worse. Meanwhile, China is not waiting torevamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. Thesenations -- they're not standing still. These nations aren't playing forsecond place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science.They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making seriousinvestments in clean energy because they want those jobs. Well, I donot accept second place for the United States of America.

As hard as it may be, as uncomfortable and contentious as thedebates may become, it's time to get serious about fixing the problemsthat are hampering our growth.

COMPETITION.

This is Mom and apple pie to Americanseverywhere, and is just the kind of thing that appeals to Independentsand (closeted) moderate Republicans.  It's very Kennedyesque.

Here's another fist-pumper moment:

I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelmingscientific evidence on climate change. But here's the thing -- even ifyou doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency andclean energy are the right thing to do for our future -– because thenation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation thatleads the global economy. And America must be that nation

In that way, he framed it not as a question over the science, orover the environment, but over JOBS and over America as a LEADER in theworld--again, We're Number One rah-rah!

This is a re-framing of a message that moves the Dems away from AlGore and more toward whoever your favorite sports team is.  We want tobe winners.  And we want our economy to thrive.  If, in so doing, wecan also save the planet, hey, it's all good, right?

I'm not going to isolate every incidence, although there were many,because my blogposts are notoriously long anyway, but I encourage youto read the full transcripts--this is the copy I was working off of,from the New York Times. I prefer it over the Whitehouse.gov version because this is the one heactually presented, with applause and laughter typed in, and videoincluded.

Along with the subtle reframing of the White House message is also amore aggressive push-back against right-wing rhetoric.  I had noticedthat they'd been given such a free rein for so long that evencongresspeople and senators had taken to spouting the latest FAUX-newstalking-points as graven facts before the TV cameras without so much asa peep of protest, but those days are over.

Today, for example, Robert Gibbs AND Attorney General Eric Holder each presented point-by-point pushback memos againstcomments made by Republican Senator Susan Collins and House minorityleader Mitch McConnell about the White House response to the ChristmasDay bombing attempt.  They aggressively pointed out that the policiesthey followed were put in place by and followed by the Bushadministration--facts well-known by the Republican talking-heads.

It's still responding to lies, but I did see this on the eveningnetwork news, which means that even so-called "Joe (and Josephine)Sixpack" is getting the message that his handy Republican spokesperson spokeslied or at the very least, spokesforgot.

The reframing of message is deeper and clearer than most have picked up on, although E.J. Dionne, who interviewed Joe Biden today, got it loud and clear:

Biden, more self-aware than people give him credit for, realized whathe had just done. "I've sort of gotten off the Recovery Act," he saidwith a rueful smile.

Yet by the end of the interview, I realized he had bumped into thehidden political issue of the 2010 elections. Beneath the predictableback-and-forth between Obama and his Republican adversaries overgovernment spending lies a substantively important difference over howthe United States can maintain its global leadership.

For Republicans, American power is rooted largely in military mightand showing a tough and resolute face to the world. They would rely ontax cuts as the one and only spur to economic growth.

Obama, Biden and the Democrats, on the other hand, believe thatAmerican power depends ultimately on the American economy, and thatgovernment has an essential role to play in fostering the nextgeneration of growth.

Notice that when Obama spoke about keeping America in first place,he said not a word about the military. He referred instead to theefforts of our competitors in the public sphere of the economy, and of our past complacency.

"Washington has been telling us to wait for decades, even as theproblems have grown worse," Obama said. "Meanwhile, China is notwaiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is notwaiting. These nations aren't standing still. These nations aren'tplaying for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math andscience. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're makingserious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs."

Suddenly, Obama's approach is not about old-fashioned Democraticspending. It's about patriotism, competing successfully, investing tomaintain American economic leadership. John F. Kennedy provided aslogan for such an effort 50 years ago: "Let's get America movingagain."

(emphasis mine)

The purpose of the interview had been for Biden to point outinstances of the success of the stimulus program, but this turn oftopic turned out to show him to be crazy like, well, a FOX.

Biden's insistence on "pushing back" against unfounded criticisms ofthe program was clearly part of Obama's post-Scott Brown offensive, andit's bracing that the administration has finally seen the wisdom of aNapoleon axiom that is a favorite of Karl Rove's: "The whole art of warconsists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive,followed by rapid and audacious attack."

Transforming a listless national argument about the stimulus andhealth care into a larger debate over how to maintain Americanpreeminence is both audacious and useful. Off-message, Biden found theright message.

Perhaps the Dems have been "tangled up in Blue" ever since, well,the days of what I call the Clinton Crucifixion, when the sheer galland power of the opposition's noise and nastiness overwhelmed them. They've been like that plastic clown punching-bag ever since, bouncingback with every blow.

But this president is different.  It's not that he's smarter thanPresident Clinton.  I'm not going to compare the two men, because theyhave different strengths as well as weaknesses.

But one difference that does seem to count right now is Obama'squickness in learning from, and adapting to, the opposition--outfoxingthem--if you will.

He has not given in to them.  He is still fighting for health carereform, clean energy legislation, education reform, and other things hebelieves in and campaigned on.

But what he has done is reframed the message in such a way thatmakes it much more appealing to the middle-earth voters, so to speak,those who were being frightened off by the scare tactics of the farright.

It's the same message.  Different words.

And he's presenting those words differently, in a fiestier fashion. What the surly commentators on FOX called "arrogant," most Americanstook as a fighting spirit, and by a margin of 83%, they liked it.

As Democrats, it is important that we not get so "tangled up in Blue" thatwe forget that, as Americans, most of us, as the song lyrics say, "feelthe same" about most things.  This is the beauty and the brilliance ofBarack Obama. 

He's not pretending this to get votes.  He isUNDERSTANDING this.

We want to take care of our families, find decent work we canhalfway enjoy, and have some sort of retirement with dignity.  When weget sick, we don't want to die because we couldn't afford medicalcare.  And, we care about our planet and our environment and don't wantit choked with pollution and grime.  We want a place for our childrento play safely.

We pretty much all feel this way.

The Blues feel as if the Reds tried it their way, for the most part,since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.  They had a pretty good run ofit, and from 1994 until 2006, they pretty much ran the country into theground.

Now it's the Blue's turn.

But we can't forget all those people out there who aren't payingthat much attention--at least not until they get screamed at orfrightened into it.  We have to take care not to fight so much amongstourselves that we forget all about them and they turn away from us. 

They're not "an illusion" to us now.  We have to concern ourselves with "what they're doing with their lives."

We have to talk to them.  Reach out to them.

Show them a better way.

His success rating, the study goes on to say, was 96.7%.

Think about that for a minute and contrast it with all the news stories, op-eds, and blogposts about what a failure this president's first year has been.

A success rate made possible by the votes he had available to him by a Democratic majority, I might add, even so-called "centrist" Democrats, that liberal Dems seem to think need to be tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail. 

(Or at least, given a purity test???)

*Here's another great piece, this one from Daily Kos.

It's a list--just a list--of NINETY accomplishments--President Obama has had in his first year in office.

Read them through.  It will knock your socks off.

*Also, in a quick graph, the Washington Post put up a list of 25 campaign promises Obama had made, and of these, 21 of them had either been completed or were in progress IN THE FIRST YEAR.  This is a phenomenal record.

Again, made possible because the DNC decided, after a dozen years in the wilderness, to reach out to the center, to moderates and disgruntled Republicans to run for congress and the senate, and they nominated in 2008 a candidate who, while a progressive at heart, was a pragmatist at his core, and he knew how to get things done.

Give him time, ladies and gentlemen, because he has only just begun to fight.

Yes, right now the GOP is licking its chops, certain that the "populist rage" it thinks it has captured is going to carry it into a majority and then the White House--maybe on Scott Brown's handsome naked shoulders!!!--but an essay by Charles M. Blow in the NY Times nails why it is really not a serious political movement when you try to harness the energy of a bunch of pissed-off paranoids.

The nightmare that the first "Tea Party Convention" has turned into, of hucksterism, profiteering, and inner-tea-party feuding--not to mention the fact that they can't give away tickets to see their keynote speaker, Sarah Palin, who has demanded more than $100,000 for a speaking fee--is just a glimpse of how ephemeral FOX-ed up, trumped-up rage can be as a serious political movement.

Not that the GOP has learned anything from that.  They voted down a measure to create a commission on deficit reduction, even though at least seven who voted against it had earlier actually CRAFTED the legislation, and, among other things they voted against--they actually voted against Pay As You Go legislation that requires congress to pass only deficit-neutral legislation that is paid-for upfront, which is the way congress had balanced the budget and left a surplus under President Clinton, a Democrat, before President Bush, a Republican, took office and the Republicans took over congress and squandered the surplus.

I'm not arguing the merits for or against each individual piece of legislation mentioned in the previous paragraph, but what I'm saying is that, as in the State of the Union speech, when even after the president spoke of tax cuts for small businesses, and the entire Republican block sat like stone statues rather than muster up a smattering of applause for their OWN policy--they risk looking like the obstructionist dumb-asses they are.

And he knows it, as he so brilliantly showed when he spoke--on live TV--before the Republican Caucus last night.

In fact, so rope-a-dope perfect was Obama's performance at the Caucus that, as Sam Stein pointed out in a great blogpost for Huffington, FOX news cut the whole thing off 20 minutes early.

The GOP has, in fact succeeded in boxing itself into a pretty small corner since it first took over congress in the 90's and "The Hammer" and Newt Gingrich proceeded to run off some of the best Republican congresspeople and senators they'd ever had because they were moderates and had a record of working across the aisle with Democrats on landmark legislation.

Since that time, especially after their own re-districting fiasco that narrowed a candidate's area into even more partisan zones than ever, their party has bottlenecked its focus so badly that this "Tea Party" thing is their only hope of a pretense of "populism." 

It's not real, though, not on a large scale.

It could be, though, if we think, over on our side of the aisle, that the only way to combat them is to follow their lead and, as our own Progressive Caucus recently stated, demand party purity of our own.

I've heard people insist that Obama act more like Bush, ignoring the vast majority of Independent and disgruntled Republican voters who helped to put him in office and only adhere to his "base" of progressive party purists, by "ramming through" his agenda while "he's got the chance."

I've heard people complain that the Democrats don't act more like Republicans, marching in lock-step like Stepford legislators, repeating cult-like mantras of party loyalty.

(Recently, even Sarah Palin was soundly criticized on Glenn Beck's program...why?  Because she had backed Sen. John McCain in a difficult primary against the Tea Party opponent.  McCain, it seems, wasn't "pure" enough for Beck's listeners.  The fact that Palin wouldn't even EXIST, politically speaking, WITHOUT McCain was lost on him and his viewers, and any semblance of decent human loyalty was completely tossed in the name of party purity.  THIS is what we want?)

But our own president has said that the reason he keeps reaching out across the aisle is because he wants the things that are passed in his term to LAST for GENERATIONS--not just until the next Republican administration comes in and, with the stroke of a pen, overturns everything he has done--which is pretty much what he has been doing to the bullshit Bush put in place himself when he was busy "ramming through" legislation.

And his patience, and willingness to listen and to reach out--while frustrating to his base, maybe--is working.  According to polls taken following the State of the Union address, he is beginning to win over the Independents who had been frightened away by GOP scare tactics this summer.

The Independents are the key.

So what can we do, as supporters and as either Democrats or Independents who do not want a GOP/Tea Party takeover in 2010 to rival 1994?  Not to mention a President Palin in 2012?

I suggest we follow Steven Benen's advice.  Admittedly, it was aimed more toward the Dems in congress and the Dems in the partisan media than toward you and me but those of us who do blog or volunteer or even just speak up at the dinner table or stand chatting by the shopping cart at the grocery store, let's scream bloody murder:

Just pretend that the Democrats have pulled every stunt pulled by the Republicans in the past year, such as voting against funding for the troops, in order to obstruct the president, or trying to woo a segment of the party who would actually send out a fund-raising letter that depicts the president dressed as a pimp--and imagine the howls of outrage that would dominate the FOX airwaves and everyplace else Republicans gather.

Benen thinks that the reason the Republicans continue to dominate the message and the messaging is because they do the loudest screaming.

We don't have a screamer for a president, thank goodness, and I'm not advocating same, but I'm saying that the Republicans have allowed the screamers to take over their message, to their detriment.

At the very least, we need to be ready with the fact-checking and the righteous outrage whenever these stunts are pulled, to remind voters that what the GOP stands for, right now, isn't even very Republican.

And it won't be, until they let go of the party purity tests and reach out across the aisle, first of all, to a popular president, and then, to the rest of the country.

Repeat after me, boys and girls, this mantra: PROGRESS OVER PERFECTION.

I don't give a damn whether you're so liberal you wear leaves for shoes to keep from hurting cows or so conservative you recoil at the idea of a public ANYTHING...we are SOOOOOO close, guys, to literally changing history, that we cannot, we WILL NOT...blow it at this point by bickering amongst our little Democratic selves because we're not getting every single little itty bitty solitary thing we want in a health care bill or any other bill that is before congress these days.

Furthermore, what's up with trashing our own president day and night, night and day? 

Doesn't he get anough of that crap on Faux News all the time?  Hasn't he got enough enemies?  Do you really WANT a President Palin in three years?

I mean, seriously.  I'm asking you.  Do you really, really want a President Palin, or a President Conservative Republican in a few years or even a conservative congress obstructing everything President Obama tries to do because WHHHYYYY?

Because, the Independents he so desperately needs to maintain his majority and his office have been siphoned off because whenever they turned to the Democrats or to any Democratic forum, all they saw was Obama getting ripped apart as badly as they saw him getting ripped apart by the Republicans so, therefore, they decided, he must be some kind of turd.

Time to vote Republican, eh?

Wow.  It took us less than a year to destroy everything we worked for in 2008, didn't it?

And no, before you attack, let me go into some detail on WHY I think President Obama is actually doing a helluva lot better job than many of you do, and why so much of it is under the radar of most of the media attention and most of the Talking Heads' attention on both the left and the right.

I've been stockpiling articles beside my elbow since summer on this, so I'll have Links Galore, as is my wont.  Some pretty good stuff.  I think you'll like it.  And I think that, no matter where you stand on the political spectrum, unless you are a Teabagger, you will feel better at the end of this post.

It'll be loosely divided into three parts.

First:  PROGRESS OVER PERFECTION

I've only got one source on this one, but it's so good I'm going to quote extensively from him.  That would be Paul Begala, who as we all know, was a consultant to President Clinton during the last health care battle.  His piece, in the Washington Post, came out last August but is still timely and is titled, wouldn't you know?  "Progress Over Perfection."

He writes:

Progressive politics is, in my view, a movement, not a monument. We cannot achieve perfection in this life, and if that is our goal we will always be frustrated. The right has far more modest goals: At every turn, its members seek to advance their power and protect privilege. I've never seen the Republican right oppose a tax cut for the rich because it wasn't generous enough; I've never seen them oppose a set of loopholes for corporate lobbyists because one industry or another wasn't included. The left, on the other hand, too often prefers a glorious defeat to an incremental victory.

Our history teaches us otherwise. No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt's original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers -- a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn't even cover the clergy. FDR's Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn't work, you got nothing from Social Security.

He goes on to say that, for example, if the public option does not make it into today's version of the bill, that does not necessarily mean that it never will.  But to completely derail the entire health care reform bill, to table it flat-out, simply because one aspect of it is not included, would be a tragedy that could take decades for us to recover from, as he so painfully points out:

I carry a heavy burden of regret from my role in setting the bar too high the last time we tried fundamental health reform. I was one of the people who advised President Bill Clinton to wave his pen at Congress in 1994 and declare: "If you send me legislation that does not guarantee every American private health insurance that can never be taken away, you will force me to take this pen, veto the legislation, and we'll come right back here and start all over again." I helped set the bar at 100 percent -- "guarantee every American" -- and after our failure it's taken us 15 years to start all over again.

So I am trying to find the right blend of principle and pragmatism -- ever mindful that, aside from race, health care is the most difficult domestic issue of the past century. FDR couldn't pass it. Nor could Truman, nor Nixon nor Carter nor Clinton. Lesser presidents like George W. Bush didn't even try.

The Founders gave us a standard: "a more perfect Union." It's an odd phrase; we don't generally speak of something becoming "more perfect." I believe it means that we have a duty, every generation, to make progress. For a dozen generations we have done that, in our imperfect way. Let's hope those writing the new health-reform bill can give us something that represents historic progress -- and that those of us most passionately committed to fundamental reform can celebrate progress, not lament a lack of perfection.

I don't think that anyone could question the liberal credentials of Paul Begala.  I believe he was sincere when he wrote this piece and I have also heard long-time congresspeople echo his comments that other pieces of landmark legislation, such as civil rights legislation, came in increments.

CHANGE comes in increments.

That hairy, ugly caterpiller doesn't do a pretty little whirlagig and unfurl his gorgeous wings all at once.  He builds an ugly cocoon and holes up.  If you've ever seen a cocoon busted open before its time, it's pretty ugly.

Legislation moving its way through congress is about as pretty, which brings me to the second part:

"WHY CAN'T OBAMA BE MORE LIKE LBJ?"

I hear this all the time.  Liberals criticizing Obama because, presumably, he's not twisting arms, kicking Democratic ass and taking Democratic names like Lyndon Johnson presumably did when he got the Voting Rights Act and Medicare passed in the 60's.

I always wonder, first of all...what makes you so damn sure he's NOT?

More on that, later.

First, a quick bit of history.  Keep in mind that when LBJ first came into office--and I'm not even counting that terrible day in Dallas 46 years ago; I'm just talking about after he got elected in a landslide in 1964.  Understand that he had a great deal of sympathy behind him because a lot of what he was championing had been talked about by Kennedy, but also understand that Johnson had been a congressman and then a senator (serving as minority leader and majority leader) for many years, (decades, actually), so he had many friends in both houses AND a powerful fellow Texan as the Speaker of the House in Sam Rayburn. 

All these things gave him advantages that Obama does not have.

Also, back then, there were moderate Republicans who could be cajoled and threatened and horse-traded for votes.  It was a different era, a different time.  Even a different media--remember, back then, most of the press knew about JFK's lady friends and affairs but did not write about them.  It was an old boys' club in many ways, both for the media and the government.

That said.

Let's examine what President Obama HAS been doing, and it's waaaay more than you may think.

First of all, I hear liberals, especially in places like Huffington Post, or on shows like Ed Schultz, howl that Obama has "sold out" to Big Pharma or the AMA or some other lobbyist to get health care concessions, as if making those agreements is going to leave children shivering naked in corporate doorways somewhere.

But those criticisms are completely missing the point, as was BINGOED by no less a liberal source than Mother Jones, and no less a liberal writer than Kevin Drum, in his piece, "The Long, Hard Slog Revisited"

In it, he points out that, again, in order to win over Independents, you have to go about it in an entirely different way than you would if you were reaching out to your own partisans during, say, a political campaign:

(quoting Jonathan Bernstein)

Loose partisans and true independents aren't ideologues and are unlikely to become ideologues. What you probably can do — what Reagan probably did — is to teach them....But you don't do that by reasoning with them, or with inspiring them with great speeches. You mostly do that, as crude as it sounds, by winning. You do it by creating winning coalitions that put Establishment People on your side.

....The convincing doesn't happen, either in the short term or the long term, from presidential eloquence. The convincing comes when, for example, you've been a Republican main street AMA member all your professional life, and you suddenly find that the AMA is supporting health care reform while the Republicans are attacking the AMA. Even then, you may still be resistant to Obama...until you start hearing him saying the things that you're reading in the AMA newsletter (or however the AMA communicates with doctors. I don't know).

Now, there's no question that Obama and the Democrats in Congress are doing this.  They've basically coopted the insurance companies, the AMA, big pharma, AARP, and corporate interests by giving away goodies to all of them.  This isn't exactly the Schoolhouse Rock version of how a bill becomes law, but it's certainly the real-world way.  And it works pretty well as long as you can get the coalitions to stick together and keep the bribery from stinking up the joint too badly.

But does this actually move public opinion at the same time?  Maybe! 

...There's no question, though, that winning is indeed a powerful aphrodisiac.  Healthcare reform might be controversial right now, but if Obama gets a bill onto his desk and signs it, it will become a huge triumph almost overnight.  Support for both the bill and for Obama will rise steadily, and Democrats of all kinds will reap the benefit of being seen as tough enough and savvy enough to get it passed.  This is the fundamental reason that I'm optimistic about healthcare reform.  Every Democrat in Congress knows that if reform fails, they'll be viewed as losers and they'll pay the price at the polls in November.  They have to pass something if they want to remain in power.  That's a prospect that concentrates the mind powerfully.

I hate to put it in simplistic terms like "winning" and "losing" but America seems to be on this reality TV streak these days, and they see a lot of things as winners and losers.  And they know more about what's going on in Washington than the wingnuts would have you believe.  If health care dies, the majority of Americans will know that the Republicans killed it, but they will also know that the Democrats let it die.

That the Democrats lost.

And they won't trust us with anything again.

We've got to keep the momentum going, and get health care passed.  We can work out some of our more passionate details later, as we had to do with Medicare, Social Security, civil rights, and other landmark legislation.  Would have been a damn pity not to have passed those at all just because they weren't perfect in their original form.

Win.  Lose.  It's a CHOICE.

And it's more up to us than you might think, but more on that later.

Another criticism I've seen is that Obama has not been specific enough on the bill, that he's left entirely too much up to congress, that he has not "owned" it, that he's stayed too much in the background.

But a longtime denizen of Capitol Hill sees it in far more realistic terms.  Writing for the Washington Post, Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute posited back in September that he was seeing from the administration "signs of savvy, not weakness."

Ornstein put his finger on the the fickle mood of the public when he pointed out that:

Without some guarantee that reform thus defined will be enacted for the vast majority of Americans, the likelihood has always been that the closer government gets to enacting change, the more nervous voters would get about embracing the devil they don't know. And the closer one gets to broad change affecting 16 percent of the economy and a hefty slice of the workforce, the more those whose incomes depend on the current system will fight to keep their share.

He then went into the obvious--that there IS no broad bi-partisan leadership support OR broad bi-partisan majority in either house, in any political universe, and reminded readers that this is similar to what faced Clinton in 1994; only today, the filibuster lines drawn in the sand make every issue a 60-vote battle.

How to prevail under these difficult circumstances? The only realistic way was to avoid a bill of particulars, to stay flexible, and to rely on congressional party and committee leaders in both houses to find the sweet spots to get bills through individual House and Senate obstacle courses. Under these circumstances, the best intervention from the White House is to help break impasses when they arise and, toward the end, the presidential bully pulpit and the president's political capital can help to seal the deal.

He goes on to make his final case--as did Paul Begala--that

The odds remain reasonable that a solid, if not dramatic, health reform bill can make it through this process and become law. Any bill, under these conditions, will be a major accomplishment. The odds have been improved, not damaged, by the president's approach.

Again, though, there are those who want to know why President Obama is not more the arm-twister like LBJ, and AGAIN, I ask...How do you know he is NOT?

Several articles I've come across indicate that the president is doing far, far more behind the scenes than most of us realize.

An in-depth profile of Obama's team, called "Taking the Hill," by Matt Bai, published in the New York Times magazine back in June of 2009, set up how Obama structured his White House to organize for various legislative battles.  I'll go into that first, and then, a short piece in the Times from back in September, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Taking Health Care Courtship Up Another Notch," more or less demonstrated that team in motion as it worked the phones, the restaurants, the meetings, even the gyms, during the committee process to garner votes to get the bill out of the Baucus Finance committee. 

Both are highly instructive as to how the Obama White House is far more active, alive, and energetic in the legislative process--quietly and behind the scenes--than most people realize. 

It is, in fact, a brilliant strategy, because it enables the towering egos of the House and Senate to get their moments before the cameras, their home-town papers, and their constituents, while quietly building one of the biggest legislative achievements of the past century for their president.

If, as he hopes, they are able to get this health care reform legislation passed, in its entirety, in time for his State of the Union speech in January of 2010, it will be a triumph not just for him, but for the American people.

In Matt Bai's Times Magazine piece, he points out that Obama's White House "methodically assembled the most Congress-centric administration in modern history."

Obama seems to think that the dysfunction in Washington isn’t only about the heightened enmity between the parties; it’s also about the longstanding mistrust between the two branches of government that stare each other down from twin peaks on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

And it's not just his choice of Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff, who everybody by now knows was a congressman who was largely credited with helping to build the current congressional Democratic majority and who was on the fast-track to make Speaker of the House--that was key to this strategy, but also his choice of Joe Biden for vice-president.

“I’m a Senate guy,” Biden told me bluntly when I visited him a few weeks ago in his West Wing office. “It’s been my whole life, and I’m incredibly proud of it. Other presidents I’ve worked with, they view Congress almost as a constitutional impediment, you know?”

Not only have former congressional aides been hired at the White House and used extensively for their access, but from the beginning, Obama and his team have searched for creative ways to include congressmen and women, and their families, at White House events, both formal and informal, (as of mid-May, when the article was being prepared, more than 300 congresspersons and 80 senators had visited the White House), and it has paid off.

When Matt Bai asked Sen. Baucus his impression of President Obama, he gave this thoughtful response:

“How do I say this delicately?” he asked. “President Bush, he liked being president. You know, there are be-ers, and there are doers. And I think he liked being president, as opposed to doing.” Obama, on the other hand, strikes Baucus as a doer. “You’ve really got to work at it, rather than just enjoying the job,” he said.

Rahm Emmanuel has been known to give out his cellphone number to every Democratic senator (and some Republicans too), and, like Biden, often works out at the congressional gym.

And it's not just that senators meet with the president that is important.  It's HOW they meet with him:

Obama is not the schmoozer that Clinton was, nor does he bestow nicknames like Bush. Rather, he has impressed lawmakers with a direct, businesslike manner and an outward deference to the legislative branch. As Obama mulled whether to nominate Sonia Sotomayor or some other jurist to the Supreme Court last month, he called every member of the Judiciary Committee personally, taking the “advise” part of “advise and consent” to a level that impressed some longtime senators. “This is the first time I’ve ever been called by a president on a Supreme Court nomination, be it a Republican or a Democrat,” Charles Grassley, the Republican senator from Iowa, told Peter Baker and Adam Nagourney of The Times after Sotomayor’s nomination was announced. A hallmark of Obama’s style, in these early months, has been to meet with key senators alone, without the phalanx of aides who almost always attend Oval Office meetings. Three senators with whom I spoke, including Baucus, had been impressed by this tactic; it implies equality between the branches of government and enables Obama to establish personal relationships more quickly than he otherwise might. (“You been hunting lately?” Obama asked Ben Nelson when the Nebraska senator walked into the Oval Office and found himself, much to his surprise, alone with the president.)[emphasis mine] 

All these meetings have actually angered some on the left, who claim that it does no good to try and compromise on things like the public option or the Stupak amendment, because it will only water down the bill to basically nothing; that we should simply ram it through on reconciliation with 51 votes exactly as we please. 

Simply do as Bush did with his tax cuts and get on with it.

But Sen. Baucus cautions, and President Obama has also mentioned on the stump, that the dangers of reconciliation are that a future Republican administration could far more easily dismantle the program. What the president and the Democratic congress want to do is put into place a reform package that will stay in place for the ages, even if it has to be done in increments.

(There are other, procedural problems with reconciliation that I'm not going to go into here because I've already taken up too much space for most of you to keep reading, as it is.)

In Stolberg's piece in the Times, which was published on September 27 (link up above), during the committe process when Susan Collins' vote was being heavily wooed by the White House, there are a number of people besides JUST Rahm Emmanuel who the White House sent to talk to Sen. Collins, including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, Gary Locke, the commerce secretary, White House budget director Peter Orszag, and on and on.

It was courtship by committee.

Call it what you will, it worked.

So...what were you saying about LBJ?

And last part, HOW CAN WE BE THE CHANGE WE WANT TO SEE?

In Anna Quindland's powerful cover story for Newsweek, "Hope Springs Eternal" (which appeared on the cover as "Yes He Can: A Liberal's Survival Guide"), she goes straight for the jugular when she makes the visceral point that there is, indeed, a big difference between campaigning and GOVERNING.

From time to time the American people participate in a mass delusion about how their government works. Such a delusion took place exactly a year ago, when a 47-year-old African-American who had once been accorded little chance of prevailing was elected president of the United States.

History will judge Barack Obama over the long haul. But we've learned something in the short term that is simple, obvious, and has less to do with him than with the Founding Fathers. This is a country that often has transformational ambitions but is saddled with an incremental system, a nation built on revolution, then engineered so the revolutionary can rarely take hold.

Checks and balances: that's how we learn about it in social-studies class, and in theory it is meant to guard against a despotic executive, a wild-eyed legislature, an overweening judiciary. And it's also meant to safeguard the rights of the individual; as James Madison, president and father of the Constitution, once said, "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." But what our system has meant during the poisonous partisan civil war that has paralyzed Washington in recent years is that very little of the big stuff gets done. It simply can't.

She goes on to detail promises that President Obama made during the campaign that impatient progressives fault him for not having fulfilled yet in his mere nine months in office, as if all he had to do were to wave his magic wand and POOF! it would take place.  (And although, yes, there are some things that he can cause to happen in just that way through executive order, he must also weigh the relative wisdom of such a course of action versus going about it in another, albeit slower method--again, that would be less likely to be dismantled later.  It doesn't mean it will never happen.  It just might take a bit longer.)

The president is a person of nuance. But on both ends of the political number line, nuance is seen as wishy-washy. There's no nuance in partisan attacks, soundbites, slogans, which is why Barack Obama didn't run with the lines "Some change you might like if you're willing to settle" or "Yes, we can, but it will take a while."

That's really how our government works, by inches...

Americans point to events ranging from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Voting Rights Act to show that America knows how to think—and act—big. But a stroll through actual history, as opposed to the cherry-tree-chopping sort, provides a different narrative. Many abolitionists decried Lincoln's executive order, which freed few slaves and failed to make the buying and selling of humans illegal, while conservatives thought it was radical and unwise. In other words, it was a smallish, moderate, middle-ground measure. And while it has become gospel that Franklin Roosevelt utterly transformed the public weal through the New Deal, he was so frustrated by the opposition of conservative members of his own party that he proposed to Wendell Willkie that the liberal Democrats and the liberal Republicans join together to create a liberal party.

She then goes on to quote Doris Kearns Goodwin, a historian who actually worked for LBJ, who stated that LBJ was able to accomplish what he did, in part, by promising Congress that they would be making history, and that, "This Congress has never known the joy of that accomplishment.  They haven't ever been part of an institution that moves collectively to change history for the benefit of the American people."

Which brings me to my final point:

 She also notes that the presidents who have made real change have always done so in the same way: "Each of them had the country pushing the Congress to act, the people and the press both. The pressure has to come from outside." So if the American people want the president to be more like the Barack Obama they elected, maybe they should start acting more like the voters who elected him, who forcibly and undeniably moved the political establishment to where it didn't want to go. After all, in our system, even great, audacious change is never as audacious as it seems: calls for a national health-care system can be traced all the way back to Roosevelt—Teddy Roosevelt, in 1912. When Sen. Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, broke with her party to vote a health-care bill out of committee, she said, "When history calls, history calls."

Now, this is the thing, my friends.

We've been making a fine noise on this health care reform business, but mostly, we've been making it amongst ourselves, bickering and arguing back and forth with each other, blasting our own president for not doing this or doing too much of that, threatening to boycott this or not vote for that--and that goes for our own members in the House and Senate!

What the hell is WRONG with us?

WE CAN'T DO THIS NOW!

Not NOW.

We are too close.

WE ARE IN THE MAJORITY AND WE HAVE TO FIGHT FOR HEALTH CARE REFORM EVEN IF IT DOESN'T CONTAIN EVERY SINGLE LITTLE THING WE WANT.

My daughter is 29 years old.  She works so hard she can barely walk sometimes but she does not have health care right now.  I want her to be able to have health care.  I would love for her to be able to choose from a public option, but that may not be possible.  I would hope that, at least, with millions more consumers, with checks and balances and regulations provided, that she would be able to find an affordable plan through health care reform.

She won't even have THAT option if we don't stop fighting amongst ourselves, Democrats.

Some of us don't even care, as Charles M. Blow points out in his op-ed, "Health Care Hullabaloo."  He wrote it last August, but he said that even though 8 in 10 Democrats favored health care reform, it was the right-wingnutters who were dominating the airwaves because THEY were the ones who were jumping up and getting active about it.

Now, I know many many Democrats who called congresspeople, some who went door to door or called neighbors or donated to Organizing for America or blogged or did whatever they could, but I knew about ten times as many who barely paid any attention at all, and in the time being?

The nutcases started winning over the Independents.  May not seem like that big a deal right now, but it will in a few years, trust me.

But I'll give the final word to Bob Herbert of the New York Times, "Changing the World."

It's so easy to criticize Obama because, hey, he promised CHANGE and he hasn't done it yet, eh?

But he can't do it without us.  WE are the change.  He needs us to have his back, not for us to stand around throwing rotten tomatoes at him because he's not working fast enought to suit us, or because what he's doing is not perfect enough or because he won't show us what is going on inside the cocoon, right?

Herbert writes:

One of the most cherished items in my possession is a postcard that was sent from Mississippi to the Upper West Side of Manhattan in June 1964.

“Dear Mom and Dad,” it says, “I have arrived safely in Meridian, Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy.”

That was the last word sent to his family by Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old college student who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, along with fellow civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, on his first full day in Mississippi — June 21, the same date as the postmark on the card. The goal of the three young men had been to help register blacks to vote.

The postcard was given to me by Andrew’s brother, David, who has become a good friend.

Andrew and that postcard came to mind over the weekend as I was thinking about the sense of helplessness so many ordinary Americans have been feeling as the nation is confronted with one enormous, seemingly intractable problem after another. The helplessness is beginning to border on paralysis.

He goes on to point out some of the more obvious problems facing our nation: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, unemployment and foreclosures and homelessness, the H1N1 flu virus, suicide bombings, and so on, and then

Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them.

This is so wrong. It is the kind of thinking that would have stopped the civil rights movement in its tracks, that would have kept women in the kitchen or the steno pool, that would have prevented labor unions from forcing open the doors that led to the creation of a vast middle class.

This passivity and sense of helplessness most likely stems from the refusal of so many Americans over the past few decades to acknowledge any sense of personal responsibility for the policies and choices that have led the country into such a dismal state of affairs, and to turn their backs on any real obligation to help others who were struggling.

Those chickens have come home to roost. Being an American has become a spectator sport. Most Americans watch the news the way you’d watch a ballgame, or a long-running television series, believing that they have no more control over important real-life events than a viewer would have over a coach’s strategy or a script for “Law & Order.”

With that kind of attitude, Andrew Goodman would never have left the comfort of his family home in Manhattan. Rosa Parks would have gotten up and given her seat to a white person, and the Montgomery bus boycott would never have happened. Betty Friedan would never have written “The Feminine Mystique.”

The nation’s political leaders and their corporate puppet masters have fouled this nation up to a fare-thee-well. 

See, that's what I'm thinkin', guys.  I'm thinkin' that much of the past eight years, especially amongst the Democratic side, left us with this residual feeling of trapped helplessness that we only halfway got out of with the campaign.  I say, "halfway," because so many of us imbued President Obama with some kind of Superman powers, where we sort of expected him to leap tall buildings with a single bound, so to speak.  

We relaxed.  We thought, Go for it, man. Go fix the world.

But it doesn't work like that.  He needs our help.  He can't do this alone, gang, and he for SURE can't do it with us griping and whining and arguing and bickering and finding fault with every little thing the man does, criticizing him so much on our side that people in the middle, who can't decide what to think, look to us, then look over to the right, and then think, I guess this Barack Obama guy doesn't know WHAT he's doing.

What the hell.  Sarah Palin's kinda cute...

Right now, we're soooo damn close.  Let's close ranks, get behind our president, fight for what's right, get this thing passed.

Bob Herbert writes:

We will not be pulled from the morass without a big effort from an active citizenry, and that means a citizenry fired with a sense of mission and the belief that their actions, in concert with others, can make a profound difference.

It can start with just a few small steps. Mrs. Parks helped transform a nation by refusing to budge from her seat. Maybe you want to speak up publicly about an important issue, or host a house party, or perhaps arrange a meeting of soon-to-be dismissed employees, or parents at a troubled school.

It’s a risk, sure. But the need is great, and that’s how you change the world.

It doesn't take a whole lot.

You can donate a few bucks to Organize for America, for TV commercials.  If you can't do that, you can call your senators, let them know how important health care reform is to you.  You can talk about it to your neighbors, you can fact-check viral e-mails that cross your desk and let family and friends know the truth about health care reform.

You can stand up for the president you elected and show the world you're still proud of that vote.

You can do what you can.

You can still change the world.  It's just gonna take some time, is all.  

In her thoughtful and literary op-ed for the New York Times, "Back from War, but Not Really Home," Caroline Alexander quotes an epic poem thousands of years old that perfectly captures how it feels, even today, for the man or woman, home from war:

WASHED onto the shores of his island home, after 10 years’ absence in a foreign war and 10 years of hard travel in foreign lands, Odysseus, literature’s most famous veteran, stares around him: “But now brilliant Odysseus awoke from sleep in his own fatherland, and he did not know it,/having been long away.” Additionally, the goddess Athena has cast an obscuring mist over all the familiar landmarks, making “everything look otherwise/than it was.” “Ah me,” groans Odysseus, “what are the people whose land I have come to this time?”

But if epic poetry is not your thing, then perhaps the words of the unsinkable Max Cleland, who lost half his body to a grenade in Vietnam, can sum it up better, in his op-ed, "The Forever War of the Mind":

“EVERY day I was in Vietnam, I thought about home. And, every day I’ve been home, I’ve thought about Vietnam.” So said one of the millions of soldiers who fought there as I did. Change the name of the battlefield and it could have been said by one of the American servicemen coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan today. Wars are not over when the shooting stops. They live on in the lives of those who fight them. That is the curse of the soldier. He never forgets.

It is the sad lot of the war veteran, male or female, soldier, Marine, airman or sailor, no matter what the war, that people back home (other than friends and family) seldom give them a thought unless something horrific happens like the Fort Hood shooting of the other day.  Or a patriotic holiday.  Or maybe, a movie like Rambo.

Usually, though, returning vets are slotting into the "crazy" section of people's minds when something like this happens and the media lights up like a Christmas tree with all the stories about post traumatic stress syndrome.  And then the movies and TV shows get made of returning vets flipping out and taking hostages or shooting up a bank or turning serial killer.

This used to particularly bother my husband during the Rambo craze.  It seemed to him that in just about every action-adventure movie we went to see, the crazy criminal was a Vietnam vet gone nuts.  Now we're starting to see it updated, with Iraq or Afghanistan vets portrayed as the crazy war vet.

Now, do not misunderstand.  I do not for one moment make light of the serious problems faced by our men and women who have served in these endless wars, and statistics are bearing out that it as the multiple deployments that are increasing the rates of PTSD exponentially.  For each deployment, the chances go up.

So, the stats that say that 35% of troops who have served in these wars will at one time or another be diagnosed with PTSD are very true, and that is only those who have been diagnosed; there are many more who either have not received a formal diagnosis or who have not sought out serious help for their symptoms.

And it is true that signs of stress on our armed forces are straining the military beyond belief: rising suicide rates, family violence, divorce--even things that have only recently been measured, such as post-deployment motorcycle accidents that have resulted in fatalities, and things like barroom fights.  These are all serious signs of severe stress resulting from these constant and ongoing deployments.

Because what most civilians do not understand is that, even when they are not deployed, they are TRAINING for the next deployment, which means that they are still away from their families for long periods of time and they are still in simulated war games which can exacerbate combat stress, as well as family stress when they return from training exercises.

I am very aware of all of this.  So don't get me wrong.

But what I am trying to say is that so many of these men and women--thousands upon thousands of them--are managing.  Quite well, in fact.

They complete their tours of duty; they get out of the service; they return to school and/or find jobs; they marry, start families.  They join their communities.  They thrive.

The war is always with them, okay?  It just is.  That is their reality, and it is always going to be their reality.

Sometimes they have sleepless nights.  Nightmares.  Headaches.  Irritability.  Short tempers.  They struggle with that sometimes.  Maybe they apologize to their spouses a bit more often than you or me.

If they are fortunate, they'll have a spouse who understands and will be patient with them while they work through it.  If not, well, sometimes the marriage itself doesn't work out, but then, often, the next one will.

Maybe they spend a bit more time off to themselves than we do.  Maybe, in a group of people, they are kind of quiet.  Maybe they don't often talk about what is on their minds, and maybe there is a good reason for that.

Writes Alexander:

But it is “The Odyssey” that most directly probes the theme of the war veteran’s return. Threaded through this fairytale saga, amid its historic touchstones, are remarkable scenes addressing aspects of the war veteran’s experience that are disconcertingly familiar to our own age. Odysseus returns home to a place he does not recognize, and then finds his homestead overrun with young men who have no experience of war. Throughout his long voyage back, he has reacted to each stranger with elaborate caginess, concocting stories about who he is and what he has seen and done — the real war he keeps to himself.

...

Similarly, while Odysseus is lost at sea, his son, Telemachus, embarks on a voyage of discovery, also seeking out his father’s former comrades, but those who lived to return. First of these is old Nestor, a veteran of many campaigns, now at home in sandy Pylos. No mortal man could “tell the whole of it,” says Nestor of the years at Troy, where “all who were our best were killed.” In Sparta, Menelaus, whose wife, Helen, was the cause of the war, is haunted by the losses: “I wish I lived in my house with only a third part of all/these goods, and that the men were alive who died in those days/in wide Troy land.”

Men and women who have fought in a bloody war do not usually go around brooding on those things day and night but little things can remind them or set them off, as can anniversary dates, and they usually try to keep their moods to themselves to avoid upsetting those close to them.

My son, for example, will go for a long run rather than take it out on his girlfriend.

Sometimes it is just the heedlessness of those around them that is distressing. 

I'll never forget when I visited the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.  I began to sob as soon as I saw the names at the bottom level, and the further I walked toward the center of the monument the harder I wept until I stood, utterly and completely surrounded--not by names--but by what I saw as the faces of boys I'd known, boys I'd kissed good-night on my doorstep and sent Care packages to and mailed letters to, and I couldn't stop crying...while all around me, insensitive tourists too young to have known that war laughed, jostled, and posed for snapshots in front of the Wall.

These are the things that upset veterans.

Writes Max Cleland:

War is haunting. Death. Pain. Blood. Dismemberment. A buddy dying in your arms. Imagine trying to get over the memory of a bomb splitting a Humvee apart beneath your feet and taking your leg with it. The first time I saw the stilled bodies of American soldiers dead on the battlefield is as stark and brutal a memory as the one of the grenade that ripped off my right arm and both legs.

No, the soldier never forgets. But neither should the rest of us.

Veterans returning today represent the first real influx of combat-wounded soldiers in a generation. They are returning to a nation unprepared for what war does to the soul. Those new veterans will need all of our help. After America’s wars, the used-up fighters are too often left to fend for themselves.

One thing Caroline Alexander points out is that, even in the ancient times, nations seem more comfortable honoring the war DEAD than they do the war SURVIVOR: 

In “The Iliad,” Achilles must choose between kleos or nostos — glory or a safe return home. By dying at Troy, Achilles was assured of undying fame as the greatest of all heroes. His choice reflects an uneasy awareness that it is far easier to honor the dead soldier than the soldier who returns.

You would think, as Alexander points out, that one way to honor the modern war veterans would be heroic war movies, which have been made since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars began.

And yet box office receipts tell a different story.  No one seems to want to pay money to watch them. 

What does THAT tell returning war vets?  We still read about Troy but YOUR stories don't matter?

There has been a strange disconnect from the beginning between these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the American public back home.  President Bush, who started both wars, asked nothing in return from the American people--no war-tax to help pay for them, no sacrifice of any kind.  He deliberately hid the war-dead from them, and when the public began to turn against the war, the Pentagon instituted a strict policy preventing war photographers from depicting photographs of wounded soldiers or Marines without the express written consent of those troops who, of course, were in no position to provide it, which sanitized the war even further.

And of course, there was no draft, so the same 1% of the population just kept fighting the same wars over and over again while everybody else went shopping.

At some point the war began to seem more like a video game or a movie or even a patriotic country-music song to be forwarded in e-mails to friends and family; somehow it just didn't seem real.

As Cleland points out in his piece, when it comes to funding wars, Congress has no problem coming up with billions and billions for all the Humvees and Predator drones and tanks and guns they need.

But when the soldiers and Marines who have been fighting those wars come home broken and wounded, suddenly, the dollars dry up.

We'd been at war for FIVE YEARS before the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed came to light.  Five years.

Cleland writes:

Weeks before the troubles at Walter Reed became public in 2007, my counselor put it to me simply. “We are drowning in war,” she said. The problems at Walter Reed had nothing to do with the dedicated doctors and nurses there. The problems had to do with the White House and Congress and the Department of Defense. The problems had to do with money.

When we are at war, America spends billions on missiles, tanks, attack helicopters and such. But the wounded warriors who will never fight again tend to be put on the back burner.

This is inexcusable, and it comes with frightening moral costs.

He goes on to detail the obvious, and then he points out something not so obvious:

We have a family Army today, unlike the Army seen in any generation before. We have fought these wars with the Reserves and the National Guard. Fathers, mothers, soccer coaches and teachers are the soldiers coming home. Whether they like it or not, they will bring their war experiences home to their families and communities.

In his poem “The Dead Young Soldiers,” Archibald MacLeish, whose younger brother died in World War I, has the soldiers in the poem tell us:“We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.” Until we help our returning soldiers get their lives back when they come home, the promise of restoring that meaning will go unfulfilled. 

So...you're sitting here reading this (still, I hope), and you're thinking, well, geez, what can I do?  I mean, I care and all, but I dunno...

Maybe you meet a vet or a soldier at an airport and you shake his or her hand and say, "Thank you for your service."

That's nice.  They appreciate that.

But here are some other ideas.

Once, when my son was on his last "free" night before deploying to Iraq with the Marines, he went out for a meal of sushi at his favorite place in San Diego.  Now, admittedly, that's obviously a military town, Camp Pendleton is right there, and although he was in civilian clothes he had that military bearing that is unmistakeable, and the haircut...

He got up to pay his bill, and the guy said, "Sir, your bill has been taken care of, by the couple at the end of the bar."

Dustin was so surprised, and he went to thank them, and they said simply, "Son, thank you for your service."

Now, I doubt many of you will have similar opportunities, but maybe you know a couple who might be struggling, and one of them recently served.  Do you think they could use a night on the town but are having trouble affording a babysitter?  How about you volunteer a night for free?

Or, say you get a coupon for a free meal at Olive Garden or whatever, you give it to a vet and say, Hey, I hate Olive Garden?  (Maybe you don't really, but you get my drift.)

If you're in a position to offer them a job, by all means do so--you won't regret it.  Or if you know how, help them beef up their resume and transfer their military skills to the civilian world.

Be creative.  There are a million ways you can quietly show your support for a man or a woman who are doing their best to adjust to civilian life after they have served.  You can let them know that you appreciate them just by being their friend.

That's it, really.

Just be their friend.  It doesn't matter whether you supported the war or you opposed the war.  It doesn't matter who you voted for.  This is a man or woman who stepped up, did their duty, and now, they're doing their best to adjust and fit in to a place where, let's face it, they are always going to feel different.

They just are.

Just by welcoming them, letting them know you appreciate their service and that you're there to help them move on, that can make all the difference in the world as to how well they are able to make that difficult adjustment.

In this way, you can help them give meaning to their service.  Because what you may not realize is that, each day that they are alive, they are living for their buddies who did not make it, and they want to make that life worth something, they want to make that life the best they can possibly make it.

They want to live a life their buddy would have been proud to live, if they'd only had the chance.

You can help them with that, quietly, without much fuss.

It's not Odysseus, but hey, it's a start. 

There are all kinds of blackmail in this world, and they don't necessarily all involve a demand for money.

But before I get to my point, permit me to tell a funny little family story, if I may.

My husband's sister, who I'll call Mary, is an extraordinary woman who, while pretty much straight down the line conservative in her political views, could not be a sweeter, harder working, more beloved individual, and one of the things she does is, volunteer at the airport USO, sending planeloads of troops off to war.  The mother of a former Marine who did three combat deployments to Iraq and the aunt of my son, also a former Marine who did two combat deployments to Iraq, and two other nephews, both army, who did tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively--to her, every one of those kids are HER kids.

She passes out Care packages to them with phone cards and goodies for the long flights, and smiles and laughs and comforts them and urges them to call home as soon as they get the opportunity, to let their families know they have arrived safely.

Our whole dang family is military.  My husband, Kent, was a platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, and he and Mary's older brother did two pretty hairy tours in 'Nam with Special Forces before getting shot up pretty bad (he's okay now).  Their other brother retired a few years ago from Special Forces at the rank of Brigadier General.  Both of his sons are now active duty.

So, needless to say, at family gatherings, all us Mills wimmenfolk feel pretty safe ha ha.

So anyway Mary was doing her thing at the airport one Sunday, and a general happened to be mustering out with his unit, which is somewhat unusual, and none of the volunteers knew what to do with the guy because they were all so intimidated by him, bedazzled, dontcha know, by all those stars. 

Even in their cammies, those generals are impressive dudes.

She asked the other volunteers if anybody had thought to offer the general a Care package and they stared at her, dumbstruck.  "Why NO," they practically shouted.  The very idea sounded positively stupid to them, him being a demi-god and all.

But Mary just snorted and said, "Shoot, he's just somebody's dumb ole big brother, is all."

She grabbed up a box, approached the man, and asked him if he'd like a package and if there was anything she could do for him.  He turned out to be profoundly grateful, and said, "Ma'am, the only thing is, I hate having to hang around here right by my guys, because I don't want them to think I'm checking up on them or anything.  They've got enough on their minds as it is and I don't want to make 'em nervous.  If I could wait someplace private, that would help."

So she found an unoccupied office for him, which he appreciated, and that was that.

I'm not sure what it is about generals that engenders such media and congressional worship. 

Now, don't get me wrong--I have respect for them, too.  My brother-in-law, indeed, my whole family of military men--are pretty damn cool.  My brother-in-law has, himself, been in some pretty hairy situations while in the SF, including negotiating with warlords in the Balkans during the Bosnian conflict, and he did it again with Afghan warlords. 

My son, my husband, his brothers and our nephews--they're tough men, most of them tested in the crucible of battle, honed by fire and loss, defined by courage, and I take nothing away from that, so don't get me wrong, and don't assume I'm being disrespectful to the uniform in any way.

But in order to work your way up to the point where you're pinning stars up on your shoulders, you've left the realm of the battlefield and entered the realm of politics.  You have to be a poltical creature to get those promotions at that level.  Let's face it: there are butts you have to kiss along the way, and games you have to play.  It's the nature of the beast.  By the time you've pinned on more than one star, then more than two or three, you are a consummate player.

I think, too, we must keep in mind that many of the pundits, pontificators, and point-makers have, themselves, NEVER SERVED.  Or, if they did, many of them never saw combat, and that is a crucial point.

Ditto many in Congress who are the biggest armchair warriors out there.  Time and time again, you study the backgrounds of the loudest warmongers and noisiest hawks, you will see draft deferments or otherwise, avoidance of service, or you will see someone who served in a quiet capacity for a couple of years at a desk or something.  (Or a pilot.  You see pilots.) 

It is really rare to see someone like, say, Sen. James Webb or Sen. Chuck Hagel--a real mud-and-guts combat vet--who is a vigorous drum-beater for war.  They have seen the cost, up close and personal, and have no taste for it.

So when a four-star general with his military bearing and his ascetic, monklike habits, and his lean-mean-fighting-machine physicality comes along and he says, "I need this," then the armchair warriors are just so IN AWE of him that they can't scramble fast enough to get the man what he wants.

It never occurs to them that he may be gaming the system.

Think about it.

The Pentagon "leaks" a confidential report that states that if Obama does not give the general a set number of troops WE WILL LOSE THE WAR!!!  And he needs them RIGHT NOW!!!

Oh my God!!!

(We've been at war there the better part of a decade but NEVER MIND!!!)

Right-wingers, ever on the look-out for any opportunity to show up our pussy president for the 98-pound weakling they believe him to be, leap at the red meat like a bunch of chained-up junkyard dogs and start howling GIVE HIM WHAT HE WANTS OR YOU WILL LOSE THE WAR AND THEN WE WILL MAKE SURE YOU LOSE THE WHITE HOUSE!!!

Liberals, ever sensitive to any chance that a war might be fought somewhere in the world, leap to their feet and start screaming, PULL OUT PULL OUT PULL OUT OR WE MIGHT NOT VOTE FOR YOU AGAIN!!!

And the pundits and pontificators and point-makers start running around fawning over the shiny stars on the general's broad shoulders, all about how he only eats ONE MEAL A DAY and how he works out and how he does this and says that, and meanwhile, the general takes the media reps on a full-court press, taking them up in glossy helicopter tours over parts of the country that look good, and his loyal aides are all running around fawning over how wonderful he is, and the senior officers who must report directly to him take the reporters around to parts of the country that look good and talk about how they need 40,000 more troops and then whisk them away before they can talk to any of the actual TROOPS...

And the reporters run home and write all that down and go on the talk shows and parrot all of it...

And then the good general goes to London, and he goes to NATO and he gives talks about how he needs these troops, and then President, er, Senator McCain goes on all the talk shows and tells everybody how we're going to LOSE THE WAR IF WE DON'T GET THOSE TROOPS...

Hmmm.

Now, if the media and the politicians are not aware that they are being manipulated by a Master Politician then they are waaay stupider than I thought.

Fortunately for all of us, we've got a grown-up in the White House who knows political blackmail when he sees it and is oblivious to those tactics.

He really does not care for it.

And unlike his predecessor, he does not develop man-crushes on generals.

Now.

Let's get serious here.  Let's see what the president is looking at, why he is taking so long to look at it, and what he is most likely to do, and why the general's blackmailing scheme is going to fall flat.

(Don't misunderstand.  Of course the general needs the troops.  It's the way he's going about his request that I object to.  More about that later.  Now, about the choices.)

Warning:  Nobody's going to be happy because NONE of the choices are good. 

Liberals want out, period, and anything less than a complete exit strategy will piss them off, so they might as well quit reading now, because he's not going to pull out. 

Right-wingers want at least 200,000 troops there because that's what Gen. Petraeus's manual calls for, if they are honest, which they never are, but failing that, they'd go for 80,000, which is the high end of what McChrystal REALLY wants, but failing that, then they want 40,000, period.  They're not gonna get it, I can tell you right now, so they might as well quit reading, too. 

Moderates know that the whole situation is so precarious that no matter what we do, it is fraught with risk and low pay-off, so they're going to be pretty miserable all the way around, but hell, I'd like SOMEBODY to read the damn thing.

FIRST OF ALL:

On the time he's taking to come to a decision.

Everybody needs to chill out.

We've been there going on nine years.  Another few weeks is not going to win or lose any damn thing in the Middle East, or Near East or wherever the hell it is.  These people hold grudges for centuries, and anyway, it's going to snow soon so nobody'll be fighting in the mountains anyway.

Bob Woodward and Gordon M. Goldstein wrote an incredible piece for the Washington Post called: The Anguish of Decision, in which they combined conversations each had had with Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy at the end of their lives about the decision-making process that took place inside the LBJ White House regarding the Vietnam War.

Basically, LBJ liked to make a show of meeting with advisors but not really listening to them:

Strategy meetings and conversations on the war were a facade, Bundy said. "The principal players do not engage in anything you can really call an exchange of views. . . . That was prevented by him, and the process he used was really for show and not for choice."

Not only did LBJ not really listen to what his advisors have to say, and generally intimidate them from saying what they really felt, but there were important policy decisions that weren't made at all:

Then as now, the choice of a military strategy was the most crucial decision confronting the president. As Bundy reflected, he bemoaned the failure of civilian leaders to probe and scrutinize the assumptions behind the American strategy in Vietnam -- a strategy that over time devolved into an open-ended war of attrition, an endurance contest the United States was unlikely to win. Bundy frequently observed that in 1965, when the administration decided to initiate a massive deployment of ground combat forces to Vietnam, "we debated a number, not a use."

Agreeing to Westmoreland's plan for a war designed to deplete and degrade the enemy until it capitulated, Bundy concluded, was "a major error, and we failed even to address it."

It wasn't just a matter of civilian leadership not challenging the military or the other way around, but the military leadership didn't question its own strategies:

And he singled out the Joint Chiefs of Staff for particular criticism. "I don't think you'll find any record, secret or otherwise, of the chiefs' critical analysis of the military plans in Vietnam," he said. "And that was a very serious deficiency."

...He added: "We don't have the debate and we don't ask the necessary how-strong-is-the-adversary question," or, as he called it elsewhere, the "will-it-work question."

Now, understand that I'm not including these excerpts because I want my comment section to go all ballistic with historians refighting the Vietnam war.  My purpose is to draw comparisons between the lack of debate around the LBJ Situation Room conference table and what we see taking place now in the Obama White House--the very thing that is being most criticized in the media because it seems to be taking so long, which I find ridiculously ironic.

As Woodward and Goldstein sum it up:

Viewed together, McNamara and Bundy's final reflections suggest a shared vision of some of Vietnam's most critical lessons. The two men conclude that the commander in chief must confront his advisers; the advisers, in turn, must confront the commander in chief. And military strategies proposed by the generals must be examined, deconstructed and, if necessary, directly challenged. McNamara and Bundy show how easy it is to fail at these tasks.

THE DANGERS OF ALWAYS TRUSTING GENERALS

Again, I'm not knocking General McChrystal.  He seems highly competent.  I like what I've read about the man, just as I do General Petraeus, and he seems well equipped for this particular war at this particular time.  I understand the special forces mindset and it's what we need for modern warfare.

I also believe that there was indeed a time during the Iraq war when it was clear, from Rumsfeld on down, that the brass was pressured NOT to ask for what they needed because they were not going to get it, and this resulted in a terrible, terrible cost to our guys in the field, including those in my own family, which made my hatred of those managing that war personal.

So I can understand the knee-jerk reaction now to give them what they want, when they want it.

But when it comes to blind obedience to generals, we would do well to remember that the reason Harry Truman fired General MacArthur was not just because of his insubordination, which was waaay over the top--but because MacArthur wanted to use the atomic bomb in China.

He was sure that would be the way to win the Korean war.

Just a little piece of history trivia to keep in mind.  And one more reminder why the writers of our Constitution gave us a civilian commander-in-chief.

In a great op-ed for the Washington Post, General Fallibility, Richard Cohen draws attention to Time Magazine's Man of the Year for 1965, who happened to be Gen. William C. Westmoreland.

Cohen points out that Westmoreland was supposed to be a savior to Vietnam, supposed to pull us out of the quagmire, and how when he spoke before Congress in 1967, he was interrupted by applause 19 times.

A year later, both he and President Johnson were gone.

I am certainly not advocating the same thing here, but I am saying that, as Cohen points out, a general's request should be the starting-point for vigorous analysis--as Woodward and Goldstein point out--and debate--not, as Cohen put it, "some sort of holy writ."

Another level-headed take on "surging" troops is Fareed Zakaria, who wrote, "Think Before Surging," for the Washington Post:

In January, 3,000 more troops, originally ordered by Bush, went to Afghanistan in the first days of the Obama presidency. In February, responding to a request from the commander in the field, Obama ordered an additional 17,000 troops into the country. Put another way, over the past 18 months, troop levels in Afghanistan have almost tripled. Sending an additional 40,000 troops would mean an over 300 percent increase in U.S. troops since 2008. (The total surge in Iraq was just over 20,000 troops.) It is not dithering to try to figure out why previous increases have not worked and why we think additional ones would.

In fact, focusing on the number of additional troops needed "misses the point entirely," says Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander Obama put in place this summer. "The key takeaway" from his now-famous assessment "is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way we think and operate." The quotes are from the third paragraph of his 66-page memo. These changes in strategy have just begun.

Yeah, well, that IS a good point.

We've been "surging" troops for the past year, and in fact, not all the troops who have already been ordered to deploy have even gotten there yet, so all this right-wing screaming that if Obama doesn't make up his mind RIGHT NOW THIS VERY MINUTE we will be FINISHED I TELL YOU DONE is just nonsense. 

Troops are already on their way, and in fact, we are counting on pulling out 4,000 troops from Iraq by the end of this month, and we're stuck waiting to see what Maliki does with that situation before we can act on that.  He was dragging his feet on the election for a while yet but two high-profile bombings may have lit a fire under his ass, so to speak.

Those boneheads seem to think that THE TROOPS just materializes POOF out of a magician's hat someplace but they don't.  Combat troops only number so many, and many of those troops are in rotation.  Some are already deployed and some are in training, awaiting one unit's return from deployments so they can then, deploy, you see?

Even when troops are ordered to deploy, it takes months for the deployment to take place.

You don't just yank a combat troop out of Iraq and ship him over to Afghanistan because a Republican says DO IT.

Idiots.

But I digress.

Zakaria mentions the new strategy and I'm not going to get into all the particulars here, but any of you still reading understand that McChrystal favors a "counterinsurgency" that secures pretty much the entire countryside from Taliban brutality, protecting the populace.  This increases troop casualties but cuts down on inncent deaths because, for one thing, troops do not call in air strikes and artillery, as a rule, nor do they travel as often in armored vehicles or live in big fortified bases.  They live among the people and go on foot patrols among them, and concentrate on training Afghans to protect their own.  They only engage Taliban when fired upon.  Drone strikes are used sparingly and only on absolutely accurate Intelligence.

But it will take a lot more U.S. troops to do this because Aghanistan is a large country even if it is spasely populated.

Biden is more in favor of "counterterrorism" which is more chasing al Qaeda and Taliban bad guys using Predator drones and Special Forces troops and requires far fewer U.S. forces.

Unfortunately, we've pretty much been doing that this past eight years and it's been a dismal failure, resulting in high civilian casualties, hatred toward the U.S. and NATO by civilians, and large Taliban takeover of the country.

Zakaria quotes Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent, and author of FIASCO, about the Iraq war, Tom Ricks:

One option is the idea Ricks recently suggested to me: "Why not do the Petraeus plan [counterinsurgency] for the major population centers and the Biden plan [counterterrorism] for the rest of the country?" Following that middle course might be the most practical solution; more forces could still be needed, as McChrystal suggests, or perhaps we can make do with the almost 100,000 coalition forces already there.

As soon as I read that, I sat straight up and saw the common-sense approach to it that I knew made the kind of compromise sense President Obama likes.

It's not perfect, and the right-wing would immediately start screaming that it's half-ass, but when you really study the situation, it's not, and in fact, it would appear that this might be the way the administration is, indeed, leaning, according to the New York Times:

President Obama’s advisers are focusing on a strategy for Afghanistan aimed at protecting about 10 top population centers, administration officials said Tuesday, describing an approach that would stop short of an all-out assault on the Taliban while still seeking to nurture long-term stability.

Mr. Obama has yet to make a decision and has other options available to him, but as officials described it, the debate is no longer over whether to send more troops, but how many more will be needed. The question of how much of the country should fall under the direct protection of American and NATO forces will be central to deciding how many troops will be sent.

At the moment, the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said. The first of any new troops sent to Afghanistan would be assigned to Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual capital, seen as a center of gravity in pushing back insurgent advances.

Of course, that's not the whole shebang.  There are other problems.  They're worried about major agricultural areas like the Helmand River valley, as well as what few major regional highways that do exist.

The article states that Gen. McChrystal has already briefed the president and his advisors on how he would deploy any new troops that would be considered, and in an earlier article I have since misplaced, Admiral Mullen has already conducted two Pentagon war-games using not only the 40,000 troops originally requested by McChrystal, but also a war-game using 10-to-15,000 troops as well, and the results of both have been submitted to the White House.

Meanwhile, the State Department is working closely with the Defense Department to break down the ideology of the multiplex of Taliban tribes, which have local, cultural, and ideological--not jihadist--ties.  Many of them, it is believed, can be worked with in much the same way that Sunni tribal warlords in the Anbar province in Iraq were worked with in the Awakening movement that turned the course of the war in 2007 and 2008.

What this does, in effect, is blend the two ideas put forth by Vice President Biden and General McChrystal.

It was part of McChrystal's strategy all along to withdraw the majority of troops into the major population centers anyway, so this in no way works against what he has been trying to do.

There is a great deal remaining, of course, to be worked out, and none of it is ideal, and it all remains to be seen whether any of it will help to stabilize that Medieval country of tribes, warlords, villages, and opium crops.

When President Obama asked General McChrystal for a full assessment of the situation in Afghanistan back in March, and an idea for a strategy with several options, the 20,000, 40,000, or 80,000 troop strategies were the ones put forth by McChrystal in his assessment.

However, in the ensuing time frame, and in McChrystal's own assessment, the full extent of the corruption of the Karzai government came to light, as well as the phony election results, which negated the legitimacy of the government in th eyes of the populace and gave the Taliban more room to propagandize their position.

This makes even McChrystal's own strategy tough to implement, because we need a government that supports us and that we can support, not a corrupt puppet we seem to be holding up.  He acknowledges as much, even as the president's critics ignore it.

This is what makes the choices before Obama so impossible.  Sure, we all want to just get the hell out of that place.  I don't want to lose any of my cherished family members over there, I can tell you that.  But I am a realist.

The Taliban has become powerful enough in their own right that they no longer even need al Qaeda to be their own terrorist organization, as they have proven in Pakistan.  And Pakistan, as we all know, possesses nuclear weapons.  The whole situation is a tinderbox.  We really can't simply pull out now the way we did in the 80's--the repercussions to the entire area would be catastrophic.

Nor can we start from scratch, send hundreds of thousands of troops, and build the whole country up from the ground.  Not now.  Not after eight miserable years of hemorrhaging blood and treasure.

We have to find a middle ground, some way to secure the populace, send over some civilian help, train their security forces--even if we have to pay them--buy off those Taliban who can be bought, if we can--and get the country reasonably stable.

It truly is a matter of national security.  (And yes, al Qaeda is in places like Yemen.  Special Forces is on it already, trust me.)  But this one, this one's big.

And if Obama stands up to General McChrystal and refuses to buckle under the blackmail threat that was hurled at him by McChrystal (or at least, Cheney) loyalists at the Pentagon, he will not be showing weakness at all.  In fact, he will be showing a sign of great strength.

It takes balls to stand up to those shiny stars and say, "Not this time."

The liberals will scream at him for "escalating" the war, and the conservatives will yell at him for "losing" the war or "half-assing" the war or whatever the hell it is, and Cheney loyalists at the Pentagon will howl that he is making the country dangerously weak, and McChrystal loyalists will mutter (without attribution of course) that it's going to be really tough to "win" the war now...

Yeah, sometimes, it takes more courage to stand up to a general than it does to actually BE one.