A Long Post About Last Night’s Election Results

Let’s start with the obvious: In the two high profile races last night, the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, the Democrats got spanked. There isn’t a committed Democrat in America this morning who isn’t a bit concerned about those losses. And with good reason. In both votes, independents broke decidedly for the Republican candidates, reversing the trend that had swept Democrats back into power in 2006 and 2008. In both states, young voters and minority voters — key elements of Barack Obama’s winning coalition in 2008 — stayed home, voting in small numbers compared with other demographic groups. In Virginia, a state that has been shifting toward the Democratic column for the past twenty years, the Republican, Bob McDonnell won in a landslide, and carried Republicans to victories in the lieutenant governor and attorney general races as well. In New Jersey, a solidly blue state that voted overwhelming for Obama last year, Chris Christie beat the incumbent, Jon Corzine by a small but significant margin. None of this is good for Democrats. It seems that reports of the death of the Republican party were somewhat exaggerated.

That said, the night was not an unalloyed success for the GOP or an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats. First of all, let’s keep a few things in mind about these gubernatorial races.

Spite Makes Right

Here’s a link to a terrific editorial by Paul Krugman on the spitefulness of conservatives in the Age of Obama.  As Jon Stewart put it last night onThe Daily Show, it turns out, for all their talk about patriotism and “Country First,” that those on the far right “hate Obama more than they love America.”

Banned Books Week!

September 26 through October 3 is Banned Books Week. Sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of College Stores, this nationwide celebration of the freedom to read and the right to self-expression began in 1982, when there was a sudden upsurge in challenges to the books made available in classrooms, bookstores and libraries.

For more on Banned Books Week and ways you can affirm your own right to read books of your choosing, please visit this site.

Of all the many freedoms we enjoy in this nation, none is more precious or more vital to the health and survival of our democracy than the right to express ourselves and share our ideas with others. Book censorship strikes at the very heart of our liberties.

So read a banned book today. You might enjoy it. You might learn something.

What if Joe Wilson Was Right?

Okay, let’s try this for a moment: Let’s suppose that the premise underlying Congressman Joe Wilson’s unconscionable outburst during the President’s address to Congress last week has some truth to it. Yes, I know: FactCheck.org points out that the bills before Congress all contain provisions that would prevent any Federal health subsidies or benefits from going to illegal aliens.

But Republicans counter that illegals might slip through cracks in a system that doesn’t have enough enforcement mechanisms to make those provisions effective. And, they say, illegals might also receive emergency room care that would wind up being paid for with Federal funds (as opposed to the current system which pays for all ER visits — by citizens, legal residents, AND illegal aliens — by increasing insurance costs for all of us).

And Republicans might be right about this. There, I said it. Joe Wilson might be right.

So what? What’s the alternative? Are we actually going to adopt a government health care program that denies all medical care to illegals living in the United States? Are we going to turn away the the sick and the wounded from our hospitals if they can’t come up with documentation? Really? Is that what we’ve become? Is that the America in which any of us wants to live?

Many of those who are in the country illegally right now receive health care at ERs. You and I pay for their care through higher health care premiums, and public health costs that are passed along to taxpayers. Given Wilson’s outburst and the ugly xenophobic frothing at the mouth of the Glenn Becks, Rush Limbaughs, Sean Hannitys, and Bill O’Reillys of the world, this is clearly unacceptable. So what should we do? Stop more people from entering the country illegally? Yes, of course. Deport those who are here illegally now? Yes, fine. But what do we do tonight, at the hospital in L.A. or Phoenix, New York or Chicago, Miami or Atlanta? What do we do with the young Latino kid who shows up at a hospital with swine flu or meningitis? What do we do with the farm worker who is having chest pains? What do we do with the little girl in the barrio who shows up with a gunshot wound after being caught in the crossfire between two gangs? What do we tell the father or wife or older sister who brings a loved one to the hospital, desperate for help?

“Sorry, but we would rather let her die than pay for her treatment.”

I don’t think so.

Here’s the point, and there’s really no way around it. We have a choice as a people. We can make our health care system so restrictive that we endanger lives. Or we can try to make health care as affordable and accessible as possible, even if it means treating the sick and injured among those living in the shadows. We can be correct and cruel, righteous and arbitrary. Or we can be humane. We can do our best to avoid rewarding illegal behavior, while also being flexible and generous enough to look past the law and see the humanity of those who are suffering.

Personally I think it’s an easy choice.

Joe Wilson’s War

A follow-up to yesterday’s post, for those of you who might not have read all the comment threads.

While Joe Wilson is being lionized by Rush Limbaugh and other wing-nutters for calling his commander-in-chief a liar (Wilson is veteran of the Guard), others are digging a little deeper into Wilson’s background and finding out all sorts of cool things.  Turns out, Ole Joe is not only a disrespectful, loudmouth thug.  He’s also a hypocrite.

Check this out:  http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/thegaggle/archive/2009/09/10/joe-wilson-s-dirty-health-care-secret.aspx

Last Night’s Speech

I’m not going to go on and on about Obama’s terrific speech last night, nor I am going to spend too much time or energy dissing Congressthug Joe Wilson, the imbecile who called the President of the United States a liar, in the House Chamber, while Mr. Obama was actually correcting conservative lies (When you follow the link, the facts about illegal immigrants and access to health care — the issue that provoked Wilson’s outburst — is pretty close to the top.  Scroll down to the reference to “Page 50″).  I will say this:  I found it amusing listening to NPR this morning and hearing Republican Senators and Congressmen complaining that Mr. Obama had been “too combative” and “too partisan.”  This after a summer of Republican attacks on “Obamacare” and the use of phrases like “Death panels”, “Socialized medicine”, “Huge government takeover of health care,” and the like.  The President is being too partisan?  Too combative?  No doubt they’d prefer a President who will roll over and allow them to do anything they want with health care legislation, a President who will ignore the fact that Americans elected him by a large majority and gave him equally large majorities in both houses of Congress, based in part on his promise to reform the health care system.  During the campaign, Republicans tried to portray Obama as an inexperienced naif who would be steamrolled by foreign leaders.  Turns out they were wrong.  This man won’t be steamrolled by anyone, including Mitch McConnell and John Boehner.

Two links for you.  One is a great YouTube video that I found at the blog of my friend Christopher Rowe.  Very entertaining.  The other is aterrific article about last night’s address by Paul Begala.  Enjoy!

The Right Wing Unhinged

I don’t know who started it.  Maybe it was wack-job conservative columnist Thomas Sewell.  Maybe it was one of the idiots on Fox News.  I do know that Uber-wing-nut Glenn Beck has made it a staple of recent broadcasts, and that protesters at recent health care town halls and “tea parties” have written it on posters, printed it on t-shirts, included it in leaflets, and repeated it in chants and TV interviews with local news people.  I know that parents are now using it as an excuse to keep their kids away from school this coming Tuesday when — gasps of horror, please — our President is to address the nation’s school children on the importance of education, the dangers of drug use, and the need to stay in school and apply themselves to their studies.

What is “it”?  ”It” is the comparison of Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler.

As a Democrat, an American, and a supporter of the President, I find the comparisons both laughable and troubling.  As a Jew I find them deeply offensive.  You disagree with Barack Obama on health care?  You think the stimulus was a mistake (despite mounting evidence that it has saved this country from an economic catastrophe unlike any seen since the 1930s)?  You oppose him on cap and trade or taxes or even education reform?  Fine.  This is a free country.  No one says you have to support his policies.  Argue against his initiatives.  Protest all you like.  But do not compare him to Hitler.  There is no basis for such a thing.

Obama is trying to make health care accessible to millions who don’t have it.  He’s trying to pull the country out of a financial and economic mess that was not of his making.  He’s trying to tell kids to take some responsibility for their educations and their choices.  He is a mainstream Democrat who is doing EXACTLY what he told us he would do when he ran for President.  He won.  Your side lost.  By a lot.  Deal with it.  Protest all you like.  Argue the merits of the issues.  But if all you can think to do is compare him to a madman who was bent on world domination, who started a war that led to the deaths of tens of millions, who exterminated six million Jews, then you are fools, idiots, and, yes, traitors.  He is not a Nazi.  He is not a Socialist.  He’s a Democrat.  Get a grip on yourselves.  And if you can’t, then shut up and get out of the way. This country needs a serious discussion of the issues among informed, patriotic, reasonable people.  Clearly those of you comparing Obama to Hitler don’t qualify.

Teddy Kennedy

I’m not looking for a fight or an argument.  I know that Ted Kennedy was a flawed human being, that his flaws cost a young woman her life, that he hurt his children and his first wife and others with his drinking.  I don’t presume to make excuses for him.  He had to live with his flaws and following the tenets of his faith, he believed that he would have to answer for them before he would find rest.

I also know that he made this country a better place.  The countless pieces of legislation he authored improved people’s lives.  They brought justice and freedoms to those who were desperate to throw off the burdens of prejudice and poverty; they shone the light of education into places darkened for too long by ignorance and neglect; and they offered comfort and healing to those who couldn’t have afforded a doctor’s care or a pharmacist’s cure without the government’s help.   He was the very embodiment of public service.  When Republicans turned the word “Liberal” into a epithet and Democrats ran from the label, fearing for their political lives, Teddy Kennedy proudly embraced it.  He remained committed to his ideals throughout his career.  He was a patriot in the truest sense of the word, devoting his life to his country, criticizing her leaders when they deserved to be criticized, and fighting always to protect the weakest and poorest and most vulnerable among us.

I slept better at night knowing that Teddy was in the United States Senate working tirelessly for causes in which I believed as passionately as he.  I wish he had lived to see the passage of a health care reform bill, and I hope that when the bill does pass that it will bear his name.

The world is a slightly darker place tonight because he’s gone.

Tom Ridge Comes Clean

Former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is now saying that he felt pressured by others in the Bush Administration to raise the nation’s terrorism threat level on the eve on the 2004 Presidential Election.  The only thing I find surprising about this is that anybody could be surprised by it.  The worst kept secret in America during the seven years four months between 9/11 and the end of George W. Bush’s Presidency, was that the Bush Administration used fear of another terrorist attack as a political tool….

But good for Ridge for finally speaking out.

An Open Letter to my Congressman

To Congressman Lincoln Davis (D-TN4):

I attended your town hall forum today in Winchester, Tennessee, eager to hear what you had to say about health care reform, hopeful that you might offer some much needed clarity in a debate that has been muddied by lies, distortions, and misinformation. I cannot begin to describe for you the disappointment I felt when I left the forum a mere fifteen minutes after you began speaking.

You were asked about provisions that are supposedly in the pending health care bills that would grant government funded health care to illegal immigrants. You were asked about provisions that are supposedly in the bills that would allow for on-demand, federally-funded abortions. You were asked about provisions that are supposedly in the bills that would euthanize elderly patients who were deemed by government bureaucrats to be too ill to warrant treatment. In other words, you were presented with the full panoply of lies currently being propagated by opponents of health care reform and conservative critics of your party’s President.

It’s true that each of these questions was greeted with applause. Approximately half that people in that room believed the things they’d heard from Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. But you had an opportunity to present these people with the truth. You’d made a point of telling us all that you had read the bills currently under consideration in the House of Representatives. You know what’s in them; that’s what you told us. You could have stood before us all and answered the lies and distortions head on. You could have said, “There is no provision in any of these bills that would give health care to people who are in the country illegally. There are no provisions that would provide free abortions to anyone. There are no death panels. There is no talk in Congress of euthanizing anyone.”

That would have been the courageous thing to do. That would have demonstrated true leadership.

Instead you pandered. You took the coward’s way out. “I will not vote for a bill that allows government money to pay for abortions,” you said. “I will not vote for a bill that gives government health care to illegal aliens. . . I won’t vote for any bill that would allow anyone to be euthanized.” And the people applauded.

Then you said, “There are 47 million people in this country who don’t have health insurance, and to tell you the truth, I think most of them want it that way.” People clapped for that, too. I couldn’t take any more. I left.

You took several minutes at the beginning of the forum to tell us that you’re neither a conservative nor a liberal, that you rank right in the middle on the National Journal’s ideological scale. You said it with pride. You’ve also made a point of declaring yourself undecided on the question of health care reform. Apparently, you equate vacillation with strength; you believe that by following the vicissitudes of public opinion you show yourself to be a leader. You’re a political weather vane who thinks he’s a meteorologist.

Sometimes, sir, a politician has to show some backbone. Yes, you were elected to represent us in Congress. But you were also sent to Washington to educate yourself on the issues and then to educate us in turn. And if we refuse to learn, then it is up to you to act on our behalf. If you read the history of our Constitution, if you read the FEDERALIST PAPERS, you will find that Madison and Hamilton saw a dual role for members of Congress. You were to be representatives AND delegates. You were to represent our views, but you were also to act on our behalf when issues were too complicated to be readily understood by the people at large. Sometimes you must do what is right, even if it is unpopular, even if it might cost you an election.

You had an opportunity today to show us what kind of leader you are. It turns out, you’re not a leader at all. You are Tennessee’s Cowardly Lion. You are an empty suit. You don’t care about doing right, about making decent laws that will actually help the people of your district or state or country. You care only about what will prove to be good politics. I am ashamed to call you a fellow Democrat and embarrassed to have you as my representative in the United States House of Representatives. You will not have my vote next year or ever again.

Sincerely,

David B. Coe