Lowering the Bar

Does it really matter who the Democrats run for president in 2008? Not when the GOP finds itself on the wrong side of the two biggest issues facing the country: the Iraq war and health care.

These folks are so out of touch. Talk about an “inside the Beltway” issue: to Democrats and Republicans in Congress, how and when to end the Iraq war is a subject of heated debate that goes nowhere. Which is why Congress polls even lower than President Bush.

Just get the war over with, bring our troops home, do something about health care. That’s the sentiment outside the Beltway. There’s no debate. Just do it.

The biggest domestic concern for voters is soaring health care costs that have left 47 million Americans uninsured and millions more worried they will lose their coverage as premiums have increased 78% since 2001. We have the most expensive and least efficient health care system in the world. That’s why the three leading Democratic candidates for President have detailed plans for universal health care.

When the GOP looks at the health care crisis, they don’t see families bankrupted by medical bills. No, in “Medicare for All” or any of its government-based options, they see a far greater threat: socialized medicine. As The Weekly Standard reported recently, the Democrats’ approach to health care “would essentially dismantle our existing insurance system and replace it with a new one with the government at its center, a grossly excessive response…”

Republicans have put forward “serious yet modest proposals” that will keep in place “a private insurance system that works quite well,” opines The Standard.

Sure it does. Profits for Wellpoint, the largest health insurer in the country, increased by 11% in the most recent quarter to $835 million. Profits for United Health, the nation’s second largest insurer, increased 22% to $18.9 billion.

Of course, these firms do have expenses. Last year the health care industry spent $350 million lobbying Congress.

Republicans are also concerned about the loss of jobs – those two million people who work hard every day rejecting claims.

Here is the best part, according to The Weekly Standard: “In recent months, without fanfare, a Republican health care consensus has emerged—reform the way health insurance is taxed.”

No surprise there. With conservatives, taxes are the root of all evils. Cutting taxes is the GOP miracle elixir that solves every problem, foreign or domestic.

Lots of GOP Texans are pushing FairTax, a proposal that Bill Buckley’s National Review calls “the biggest success story of the 2008 Republican primary season”. (Can you imagine the competition?) It would not only eliminate income taxes completely but abolish the IRS.

The Church of Scientology first came up with the plan for replacing federal taxes on personal and corporate income with a national sales tax, a scheme that would allow Fortune 500 CEOs and Joe Six Pack to share the cost of government. Perhaps actor Tom Cruise could be the Movement’s Alan Greenspan.

Backers of the FairTax modestly suggest it has the potential “to heal a divided nation.”

Like I say, with issues like these, does it really matter who wins the Democratic nomination for President in 2008?

Organized Labor--the political opponent Karl Rove feared most

Pennsylvania is a blue state that divisive GOP campaigns of God, guns and gays occasionally turn red. When Al Gore ran for President against George W. Bush in 2000, Pennsylvania was pivotal. Labor operatives in the Keystone State assured their members: “Al Gore won’t take away your guns, but George Bush will take away your unions.”

Gore won Pennsylvania but as we all now know, the Supreme Court gave the election to George Bush who has done everything in his power to do to working people just what Labor in Pennsylvania said he would: take away their unions.

In recent weeks, national attention has been focused on the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys who weren’t “Bushie” enough. But long before the politicizing of the Justice Department, White House political strategist Karl Rove set his sights on the real threat to a GOP “permanent majority”-- organized labor.

From the day the Bush Administration took office, government agencies created to help working people have been under attack. It began with the appointment of Elaine Chao as Labor Secretary, something akin to naming Typhoid Mary to the Board of Health. A department created “to foster, promote and develop the welfare of the wage earners of the United States” became a haven for unfair employers. Chao’s first move was to deprive six million workers of the right to overtime pay (she even advised employers how to exploit the new rules). Next, her department slashed funds and staff for workplace safety and repealed regulations to protect workers from repetitive motion injuries. The department continues to strongly oppose any increase in the minimum wage.

But it wasn’t enough just to keep workers down. Even more important to Bush and Rove was the need to stifle union organizing. That was accomplished by Bush appointees to the National Labor Relations Board who have manipulated the rules so that the NLRB has become a tool to penalize rather than protect workers seeking union membership. When Democrats sponsored legislation to allow workers to skip the NLRB and organize by “card check”, who was it in the Senate who stopped it in its tracks? Elaine Chao’s husband, GOP minority leader Mitch McConnell.

Why are Bush, Rove and the GOP Congress so willing to pull out all stops to deny unions the right to organize? Because unions have what the GOP can’t buy: committed grassroots political activists who leaflet, phone bank, and educate their members better than any other organization in America. It helps explain why union households vote in record numbers.

It had to send a shiver through Republican ranks when AFL-CIO President John Sweeney promised Democratic Presidential candidates at a recent debate last month that 2008 “will be our biggest election effort ever.” (Just a week later, Rove announced he was retiring.)

Fox News and other right-wing political pundits try to have it both ways: they belittle organized labor as weak and passé, and then they rail against the threat of “Big Labor”. What “threat” does Labor pose? What they ask of candidates they endorse is that they fight for universal health care, affordable housing, safer workplaces, lower college tuitions and other issues that ordinary people care about. By contrast, GOP candidates have some heavy-lifting to do on the campaign trail, justifying to voters the priorities of their corporate backers.

The grassroots election fervor created by organized labor--all those enthusiastic, placard-waving union members, a sea of brightly colored T-shirts—drives Rove crazy. Somehow he never can muster shouting hordes of manufacturers or Jaycees at his rallies where attendance is pre-screened. Bankers and realtors and corporate executives aren’t much for leafleting or phone banking either, and you can’t expect those Jags and stretch limos to car pool voters to the polls on election day.

After nearly seven years of taking the best shots the Bush administration can give them, resilient and resourceful unions and their members are upbeat and optimistic. Rove is packing up and leaving town, but workers have their rally caps on and can hardly wait for 2008.

"Let the Iraqis Decide" Oh yeah...

If embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wonders why his poll numbers are reaching the depths of his benefactor, President Bush, the answer is simple: both have the same Republican PR firm. Though it’s obvious Barbour, Griffiths and Rogers is having more success knocking Maliki down than propping Bush up.

Hardly a day goes by without the White House “Decider” pointing a finger at the Maliki’s leadership as the reason the surge isn’t surging. But he insists Maliki still has his full support. “If any change is made, it will be made by the Iraqis—it’s their democracy.”

There was a time when American presidents sent in covert CIA agents to undermine a foreign government we didn’t like. But what should we do when the government we put in place isn’t working out? Give their elected leader a taste of American-style hardball politics.

Maliki should be flattered to know that Hayley Barbour’s well-connected Republican PR firm is treating him just like it would any other party pol who falls into disfavor with the Bush White House. BG&R is being paid $300,000 to trash Maliki while writing op-eds and lobbying Congress on behalf of his political rival Ayad Allawi.

Maliki shouldn’t take it personally. There is just a nagging feeling at the White House that the surge won’t surge without new leadership in Baghdad. Bush will never admit he was wrong in Iraq, but will concede the Iraqi parliament made a bad choice in Maliki.

Other bad stuff is happening as we wait for the September Surge report. Newsweek magazine documents corruption in Iraq that is “out of control”. Contractors have defrauded American taxpayers of billions of dollars but the Bush Administration declines to take part in a lawsuit go get the money back. Little wonder that Bush appointees at the Veterans Administration are forced to cut back on funds needed by our military hospitals.

A new book Blackwater exposes the existence of a sinister mercenary force contracted to work for the U.S. not only in Iraq but on the streets of New Orleans. According to Joe Honick of GMA International, “these auxiliary armies are doing things our military would go to jail for.”

It is really getting ugly. The Iraqi parliament vacations while U.S. troops remain embroiled in a civil war. GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s five healthy, prosperous military-age sons stay out of harm’s way while their father campaigns in support of a war others must fight. First Daughter Jenna announces her engagement as a mother in northern Virginia mourns the death in Iraq of her daughter, an Army nurse. The anguished mother summed it up eloquently when she told the Washington Post: “I’m preparing for a funeral, he’s preparing for a wedding.”