Perfect Metaphor

Exactly correct. Exactly.

Unknowns

I've read it several times, several places: People who are outraged over the money spent on the stimulus bill have no idea what was actually in it; and when they are informed, they like pretty much everything about it. Except, I guess, to the extent they still believe the Reagan/Bush lie that they can have it for free, that we can survive as a nation without even the teeniest of sacrifices.

Along those lines, there's an informative piece in a recent Time Magazine:

.....Yes, the stimulus has cut taxes for 95% of working Americans, bailed out every state, hustled record amounts of unemployment benefits and other aid to struggling families and funded more than 100,000 projects to upgrade roads, subways, schools, airports, military bases and much more. But in the words of Vice President Joe Biden, Obama's effusive Recovery Act point man, "Now the fun stuff starts!" The "fun stuff," about one-sixth of the total cost, is an all-out effort to exploit the crisis to make green energy, green building and green transportation real; launch green manufacturing industries; computerize a pen-and-paper health system; promote data-driven school reforms; and ramp up the research of the future. "This is a chance to do something big, man!" Biden said during a 90-minute interview with TIME.

For starters, the Recovery Act is the most ambitious energy legislation in history, converting the Energy Department into the world's largest venture-capital fund. It's pouring $90 billion into clean energy, including unprecedented investments in a smart grid; electric cars; renewable power from the sun, wind and earth; cleaner coal; advanced biofuels; and factories to manufacture green stuff in the U.S. The act will also triple the number of smart electric meters in our homes, quadruple the number of hybrids in the federal auto fleet and finance far-out energy research through a new government incubator modeled after the Pentagon agency that fathered the Internet....

...The stimulus is also stocked with nonenergy game changers, like a tenfold increase in funding to expand access to broadband and an effort to sequence more than 2,300 complete human genomes - when only 34 were sequenced with all previous aid. There's $8 billion for a high-speed passenger rail network, the boldest federal transportation initiative since the interstate highways. There's $4.35 billion in Race to the Top grants to promote accountability in public schools, perhaps the most significant federal education initiative ever - it's already prompted 35 states and the District of Columbia to adopt reforms to qualify for the cash. There's $20 billion to move health records into the digital age, which should reduce redundant tests, dangerous drug interactions and errors caused by doctors with chicken-scratch handwriting. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius calls that initiative the foundation for reform and "maybe the single biggest component in improving quality and lowering costs."

Any of those programs would have been a revolution in its own right. "We've seen more reform in the last year than we've seen in decades, and we haven't spent a dime yet," says Education Secretary Arne Duncan. "It's staggering how the Recovery Act is driving change."

..... .... Obama has spent most of his first term trying to clean up messes - in the Gulf of Mexico, Iraq and Afghanistan, on Wall Street and Main Street - but the details in the stimulus plan are his real down payment on change. The question is which changes will last. Will electric cars disappear after the subsidies disappear? Will advanced battery factories migrate back to China? Will bullet trains ever get built? The President wants to extend transformative programs like ARPA-E. But would they be substitutes for the status quo or just additions to tack onto the deficit? And would they survive a Republican Congress?

Polls suggest the actual contents of the Recovery Act are popular. But the idea of the stimulus itself remains toxic - and probably will as long as the recovery remains tepid. "Today, it's judged by jobs," Rogers says of the act. "But in 10 years, it'll be judged by whether it transformed our economy."

There's enough meat in the quite-long article to feed both sides of the debate -- if, that is, it actually were a debate. Needed? Necessary? Let's argue. But where is there evidence in any of it -- ANY OF IT -- that this is some sort of evil plan to take down America? The opposition, rather than adding value, is reduced to hyperventilating and making up ghost stories; taking words out of context, sending paranoid emails back and forth among themselves (having to use their non-dominant hands, I'd assume.) Manipulating sheeple at will.

So who is more likely to take us down? Those that are actually trying to improve education, energy, health care, transportation, all of it, effectively or not; or those making stuff up and screaming about it, without proposing a damn thing other than tax cuts for the wealthy? Which, y'know, worked out so well when Ronnie and GWB tried 'em.

Disappointed

Today two people are dis-appointed (Daschle and Killefer), the Senate is debating the stimulus bill in very discordant terms, and I'm left -- I admit it -- disheartened, dispirited, disillusioned, disgruntled, discouraged, dismayed.

Surely at some point Obama knew the trouble his appointees had, before he actually nominated them. And whereas I think each of them indeed had impressive credentials and were -- problems aside -- excellent choices, there must have been people similarly ready for the job but less encumbered. Or is it that in Washington everybody is dirty, and it's just a matter of relative spoilage? Failure to pay unemployment tax for domestic employees hardly seems fatal compared to the Daschled doings, but the timing was unfortunate. Is the best one can say.

This stuff is bad, but what bothers me far more are the troubles of the "Recovery and Reinvestment Act," the stimulus package. During the transition period, I was under the impression -- because Obama said his team would be working with Congress to have a bill ready to sign on that fabled "Day One" -- that there'd be some sort of working group, inclusive, business-like, able, coming up with a sensible and smart plan capable of bipartisan support. Instead, what seems to have happened is that the House bill was produced nearly single-handedly by David Obey, Chair of Appropriations. I don't know a thing about him, really; but for whatever reason he saw fit to fill the bill with complexities and pet projects.

In a charged political climate -- or even in a level-headed one -- there will never be common ground in all matters: Republicans think tax cuts are the one and only solution for any problem, and Democrats want spending programs. Never mind that the tax cuts of Reagan, Bush, and Bush all led to economic calamity and that the Clinton tax hikes led to balanced budget and soaring economy. Some things will never change.

Still, it's my impression that the Obama team has been much more hands-off than it ought to have been. It's surprising and even shocking to me that there is so much chaff in the stimulus bills and so little consensus. To me, it speaks of hypomanagement.

Before my more oppositional readers (two among, what, ten?) get a four-hour problem and have to seek medical attention, let me say I think the Republican leaders and followers in Congress are a pathetic bunch of losers who see a chance to bring down Obama's approval numbers and will stop at nothing -- not even the collapse of the economy -- to achieve it. They push the same tired tax cuts with no basis for belief they'll work -- since they never have. Their delight in gumming up the works knows no bounds. It's not as if I think they deserve much credence.

But surely there was a way to have avoided the current stalemate. Or to have made the plan so clearly smart that the Republicans -- many of whom would vote against anything -- would simply look like idiots in opposition. With active leadership the bills could have been far more streamlined, comprehensible, and defensible. President Obama is heading to the airways tonight to drum up support. I hope he makes the case. Meanwhile, what I really hope is that behind the scenes he'll get in there and get dirty: it's less about accomodating the tired Republicans than it is about getting the Democrats to slim down and wise up.