Blue Dog Reaganite

The End Of The Age

And the era ended in stunning fashion last night in Massachusetts. It might not have been as transforming as the shocking way the Berlin Wall suddenly came down in 1989. It might not have brought as much joy to the good people of the Bay State as did the Red Sox’ four wins in four days to stun the Yankees in 2004. But the Kennedy era of Massachusetts politics ended just as surely and just as surprisingly with Republican Scott Brown’s upset of Democratic Attorney General Martha Coakley for the Senate seat.

I’ll leave the contemporary analysis to the pundits, who are falling over themselves to see who can find a new and creative way of saying “Barack Obama is in trouble”, or “health care is in trouble” and still sound like they came up with something original. I’m quite convinced that both statements are true, but how many times can we say the same thing?

Make no mistake—I am happy with the result. I would’ve voted for Brown. I’ve never before felt close to tears when watching political results, but I felt real emotion last night for the town that I’ve only spent a grand total of twelve days in the course of my life, but still feel like is my adopted one. To love Boston and associate in mostly politically conservative Catholic circles leaves one on the defensive, and from anecdotal experience, I always tried (vainly) to argue that the people might be Democrats, but they weren’t as liberal or as dogmatic as the rest of the nation believed. The strong turnout for Brown in traditionally Euro-ethnic communities backed up that belief.

But as I watched Fox News last night, I also felt a real sense of anger, particularly when Sean Hannity come on celebrating the results. Because while this is a short-term victory for a politically conservative candidate, it was not the vindication of traditional Republican doctrine that Hannity would have us believe. The focus groups run on Fox never mentioned Brown’s name. It was about sending a message, of being fed up with the way the Democrats are running things. And that applies not just to Washington, but to this particular Senate race—the Democratic primary boiled down to whether Coakley or principal challenger Michael Capuano could outdo each other in their demands for federal funding of abortion. Celtics co-owner Steve Paglicua, who was reliably pro-choice, but less dogmatic on funding, was ignored. The fine congressman from South Boston, Stephen Lynch, an economic populist and social traditionalist in the very best traditions of his party was never given the backing to even start a campaign. Be it nationally or in state politics, there can be no denying that this was a massive defeat for the left-wing dogmatism that has a chokehold on national Democratic politics and within the deep Blue states. They are a minority who can be outgunned if regular people just show up at the polls, and that includes in Democratic primaries, lest Hannity’s self-righteous veneer become a regular part of our election night viewing.

What happens in Boston never stays in Boston, at least when it comes to Democratic politics, and that means we are entering a new era with a lot up for grabs. The left wing imposters that have hijacked the party won’t go quietly into the good night. The right wing will be anxious to spin the results to shape their own agenda, as Hannity already demonstrated. What happens to the traditional Democrats? The ones who were instrumental in the passage of Medicare, the program Republicans are now rushing to protect during the health care debate (hat tip to Boston’s John McCormack, who was vital in the passage of health care for the elderly in the mid-1960s). Or workman’s compensation, a program no serious Republican disputes anymore (hats off to Boston’s Tip O’Neill, who worked to extend it to longshoreman). Those fights have their own applications today. Because if Brown’s victory is used to perpetuate a health insurance company racket so lucrative that the Cosa Nostra would blush in embarrassment, it will be an empty win indeed.

In the new era, it’s long past time for the people that believe in the old Democratic faith to mount our own comeback—that government has a place, in the support of work, the traditional family and law and order, both home and abroad. That while big government must be contained, it’s not inherently worse than big business, which has shamelessly shipped jobs overseas to the lowest-paying places on the planet, cut benefits at home and then come whining to the government for a bailout. I’ve long been told by conservative friends that they’d have been with me forty years ago, but that’s not relevant today—and even if were, the Democratic Party is a hopeless vehicle. I didn’t believe it then, but there was blind faith involved. I certainly don’t believe it today. The Left’s control must be ended, but the Republican Party’s big business dogmatism on one side, hard-right libertarianism on the other, mixed with a heavy dose of anti-Catholic evangelicals will never provide anything more than temporary exile. In the fight for the new era, it’s time for traditional Democrats to ask the question Curt Schilling asked in 2004—“Why not us?”

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This is also the end of an era for Blue Dog Reaganite as well. The time commitment to keeping up a regular political blog has proven to be too much. I have every intention of continuing the battle discussed above. I hope you’ll consider taking a look at my book in the upper left hand corner of the site, which has a traditional Democratic mayoral campaign as a key part of its story. I am presently working on a trilogy that will build off the characters and themes. And I do intend to maintain some sort of web presence in the political/cultural sphere, but at this point I am not sure what. I’d like to thank all of you who dropped in, and whenever the future plans become formulated and concrete, Blue Dog Reaganite will be the place it’s announced.

Differences With The Left

Our series of looks across the political landscape concludes today with our favorite whipping boy—the political Left.

By “Left” I don’t mean everyone who thinks of themselves as liberal, and certainly not everyone with Democratic sympathies, because that includes me on a lot of issues. But I refer very specifically to the ideologically motivated group that usurped control of the party in the early 1970s and has been standing in as imposters, freezing out the authentic traditional Democrats at the grass roots and who make up the heart of the party. Their spokespeople are Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Keith Olbermann and they find their refuge in the anonymous comments section of The Daily Kos.

The opposition is ironic, because we find agreement on what I consider the core economic issue of our day, and that is the globalist economic structure that’s hotwired in favor of multi-national corporations and stockholders, and against working men and women. But even within this issue, the differences quickly arise. If the United States is to reform the global economic order that’s going to require standing up to the European Union, the World Trade Organization and the U.N. And that means dealing with nasty remarks from those bodies and perhaps antagonizing France or Germany. And the Left has a clear track record of being deeply apologetic for the defense of American interests, be it militarily or economically. I have no doubt of their opposition to the current global economic structure, but until they get past this guilt about letting American interests take the lead, they will never solve the problem. I give credit to Madame Speaker for slowing the passage of free trade legislation, that poured through the Republican Congress without hesitation, but the president has been predictably impotent when it comes to his campaign promise to revisit previously signed agreements.

And we have deep disagreement on the moral and cultural questions. To them, any defense of natural marriage is “hate-filled” and “homophobic”, reflexive words they spew out very quickly with little actual thought. Any defense of the right to life marks one a fanatic, no doubt capable of blowing up an abortion clinic at any time. Those in the Left who get politically active have been marked by a deep intolerance and hatred of anyone who doesn’t toe their line all the way. A sense of humor is often the first casualty.

They repeatedly demand Blue Dog Democrats fall into line behind them, while making zero effort to really understand any of our concerns—the reason some of us take temporary refuge in voting Republican while we’re held in exile. In the 2002 version of the film The Count of Monte Cristo, a story about a political prisoner in Napoleonic France, a character is accused of treason. He replies “treason is just a question of dates.” Indeed. We are the authentic Democrats, and we need our own Napoleon to come off the Isle of Elba and bring down the establishment. I guess since Napoleon ended up losing and back in exile, maybe that’s not the greatest example. But as traditionalist Democrats we’re used to finding our consolation in being right, not having the muscle.

Differences With The Right

Our series of examining different strains of political thought continues today with a stop at the Protestant Right, the movement heavily concentrated on the south with a strong influence over the Republican presidential primary.

Regular readers know that Blue Dog Reaganite places primary emphasis on the right to life, and is also a supporter of the natural order of marriage. As such, I’d be often bracketed in with the Religious Right. While there is a certain truth to it, the notion is too simplistic however and I would also suggest that other ethnic Catholics need to be wary of too entangling an alliance.

We share a short-term political alliance because of the current primacy of the issues above. But an ally is different from a friend. The former is a temporary arrangement, the latter is permanent. And we are very different from the Protestant Right, in our history and in the present day. The issues are primarily cultural, but over time those tend to become political.

Put simply, Blue Dog Reaganite stands in the ethnic Catholic tradition of light-heartedness, while the Protestant Right has a piece of charcoal stuck up their butt. Just as it was the Right who stood in favor of Prohibition in the 1920s, they back the modern-day Prohibition on gambling, fighting against lotteries, casinos and a highly successful campaign against sports betting and online poker.

The charge thrown against all of us is that we want to regulate everyone’s moral behavior. I reject that charge, because I really don’t—I just want to protect fundamental rights and the natural order of society, and from there let people do their own thing. As noted in the posts below, I’m not a pure libertarian, but as the long as the basics of the social order and basic human rights are protected, I have no desire to regulate how much people drink, gamble or who they sleep with. All right, and I’m a little bitter, because if sports gambling were legal, I’d have cashed two tickets on the Overs on the Ravens-Patriots and Packers-Cardinals on Sunday and am ready to come back with Indianapolis (-6.5) on Saturday night.

I also believe that the Protestant Right’s rhetoric from their leaders does step beyond “hate the sin, love the sinner” and into too much of the former, particularly when it comes to people who suffer from homosexuality. Jerry Falwell’s comments after the 9/11 attacks, that America was being punished, are a prime example. It’s just the Right’s way of co-opting a tactic used by the Left, which is to take every bad thing that happens and look to pin it on a political adversary. And it’s a cheap shot either way. When it comes to the issue of prayer in the schools, let’s not forget that this was originally a way for the Protestant majority to try to wean immigrants off Catholicism.

In the short-term, I can support candidates often identified with the Religious Right. I backed Mike Huckabee for president in 2008—though it should be noted that Huckabee is an example a charcoal-free person, and even though I disagree with him on gambling, I liked him a lot personally. But over time, what divides us is greater than what unites us, and while we ought to work with them, let’s do it with caution.

Differences With The Neo-Cons

“Neo-con” is a phrase that’s been tossed around casually with such frequency that it’s lost all meaning. In our contemporary political parlance, it’s come to just mean mainstream Republican. But in reality it’s a school of thought that came into vogue in the late 1960s and early 1970s by a group of Democrats, disaffected with the results of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, a series of social programs they’d generally supported, but had gone awry.

There are key historical convergences that the neo-conservative movement has with Blue Dog Reaganite. Namely, the fact they are not knee-jerk against the use of government in the domestic sphere, but want it used more creatively. In the years that followed, this would give rise to domestic proposals like the ones championed by the late Jack Kemp, a former House member, Cabinet secretary and vice-presidential nominee. Ideas like enterprise zone tax breaks to re-vitalize the inner cities and expanding freedom of choice in education. I am generally supportive of these efforts, and believe they represent a real desire to get to a healthy balance when it comes to government’s role in helping people get started on the way to prosperity.

But in the foreign policy realm, that same sense of balance has gone astray. The movement that knew government’s limits when it came to domestic policy, has given itself over to hubris when it comes to doing good abroad. Launching global crusades for democracy, even building an American Empire, are accepted models of thought. One prominent neo-conservative (Ken Adelman, former defense official in the Reagan Administration) went so far as to say the Iraq takeover would be a cakewalk.

Furthermore, neo-conservatives have become increasingly intolerant of anyone who doesn’t toe their line in this global push for democracy. They have hidden behind “the troops” in their rhetoric all too frequently in the attempt to cover over policy failures—or in the case of Iraq, gross misjudgments on how easy it would it be.

Neo-conservatism is an area where there’s potentially a lot of agreement. But only if they return to their roots, drop the crusading rhetoric, get an attitude adjustment and re-develop a cohesive approach to the problems and possibilities with government at home and abroad.

Differences With The Reaganites

This is the second post in a five-part series that outlines how Blue Dog Reaganite stands vis-à-vis other contemporary political schools of thought. In the post below I identified where I disagree with my fellow traditional Democrats. In this post, I’m going to the second half of the equation that outline where I disagree with the Reaganites.

Ronald Reagan unleashed a tide of entrepreneurialism that made this country better off. From the small businessman on Main Street to the Silicon Valley tech industries, moving up and ahead was the order of the day. It still is in rank-and-file conservative circles. But the movement has trended away towards any sense of collective responsibility in the domestic sphere at all. Rank-and-file conservatives tend to be among the more generous people I know, and as individuals are great. Where I disagree with them politically is that “rugged individualism”, to borrow Rush Limbaugh’s term, is not a healthy formula for society.

The former president may have celebrated entrepreneurialism and deplored Nanny State government, but the movement bearing his name has begun to take on an individualistic bent that does not appear in his diaries. In his own writings, Reagan speaks of the obligation for the government to help out those down on their luck—in his autobiography he goes so far as to define it as the assistance the rest of us “owed them.” I don’t know if even I’d go that far. Reagan recalled the frustration he experienced with the California right-wing who wanted to end welfare altogether, rather than just reform it to make work part of the equation. Even his famous phrase “government is not the solution, government is the problem” had an important precursor to it—“In the present context…”, Reagan said at his 1981 Inauguration, before leading into his well-known phrase. For an understanding of that context, read through the post below. Ronald Reagan didn’t hate government. He just knew its limits.

This misreading of who Ronald Reagan really was finds its most extreme form in the Libertarian Party. I’m currently reading the book “The Conscience of A Libertarian”, by its 2012 presidential hopeful Wayne Root. The book, written by a resident of Las Vegas and sports handicapper (as an aside, I cross paths with him in my work, and he is a genuinely good football handicapper) celebrates the individualism of Vegas, with its legalized prostitution and also advocates for legalization of drugs. I do agree with him on the need for legalization of all gambling. The notion of any collective responsibility at all is written off. Most Reaganites don’t go that far—especially on drugs, prostitution and other key human rights questions, such as the sanctity of marriage and the sanctity of life—but they are on an increasingly libertarian path that I can’t go along with. Big government has screwed up its share of things, but so has big business and so has big labor. Balance is what's important and the libertarian path upsets that delicate balance.

Differences With The Blue Dogs

What is a Blue Dog Reaganite? Both terms are well-known in politics, but what do they mean? In the past ten months I’ve attempted to put those values to paper, on both contemporary issues, as well as on all the issues of the day. What I’m going to do in the next couple weeks is to try to articulate those values on a broader scale, in terms of how they relate to other common ideologies into today’s politics. With one term identifying with the Democrats, the other with the Republicans, this series of five posts will seek to answer the question “Whose side are you on?”

I’m going to start by defining differences among my own. A value system is just that—agreement on what is most important and the orientation a society should have. But it doesn’t always spell out agreement on individual issues. The foundation of my political life is that I’m a pre-1968 Democrat, before the party was wrested off its moorings by the Left. The best politicians of the 20th century were men like James Michael Curley (the former mayor of Boston whose photo you see on the right), Al Smith and John McCormack. They believed that the government should lift up the poor and give them a real shot at planting their feet in their middle class. But their belief in government didn’t stop there. They also strongly supported the police and the military, believing in the preservation of the traditional social order. And they believed in the value of work. It was unthinkable that someone would get government help, yet just get a free ride. They were the true values of the middle class, somewhere between the Ivy League Left and the Wall Street Republican financiers.

There were areas where the traditional Democrats still went too far however, and foremost among them was the area of taxation. At one point the top income tax rate in this country hit a stunning 91 percent. To the credit of America’s most famous Boston Democrat, John F. Kennedy recognized it and scaled it back to 70 percent with his tax cut proposals that were passed shortly after his death. But the overall tax rate showed an inability to recognize when a good movement was going too far. In the early 20th century, taxes had been virtually non-existent, big business all-powerful and the government unable to help anyone out. The push for higher taxes to fund government programs was a good and necessary idea back then. It hit its limit and the tax rate began to suffocate the very economic growth that would provide the tax base necessary for continued public action. And on the human level, stifling economic growth restricted the ability of people to work for their bread and to gain middle-class prosperity. Without some sort of change, the traditional Democratic movement would have devoured its own goals.

Fortunately, one traditional Democrat recognized the problem and began to speak out and do something about it. An actor-turned politician named Ronald Reagan traveled across the country on the speaking circuit talking on a variety of issues, but high taxes being foremost among them. Reagan would switch parties and become governor of California in 1962, setting the stage for his rise to the presidency. There he initiated two separate tax proposals (1981 & 1986) that scaled top rates all the way back to 28 percent. Even with recent increases by Clinton & Obama, the top rate stays at 43 percent rate that is still nowhere near the standards of the old days and no one dares even propose it go back that high. Ronald Reagan changed the course of American political dialogue on taxes and with it spawned a new movement of its own. And it’s that movement—the Reaganites—that we'll look at on Saturday.

Submerged In The Noise Machine

The family was here for Christmas, and a conversation came up early that underscored a lot of the frustration I have felt during the health-care debate—indeed, in political discussions generally. I came home from work, my mom, brother and wife were there, and I was informed that it was decided that the house was 3-1 against the proposed health care reform bill—with me being the supporter. Regular readers of Blue Dog Reaganite know that I’ve made it clear I would vote against this legislation. I wondered how I managed to get tagged and his supporter.

The answer was clear—it’s because I have not chosen to be a part of the knee-jerk opposition to every last facet of the bill, I have not chosen to be a part of overstating what certain parts of the bill are. Even though the public option was not part of the final bill, my repeated “defenses” of this surely set the stage for what I heard over Christmas. I put “defenses” in quotes, because all I did was say that a public option is not socialized medicine any more than a state public option on car insurance is a government takeover of that sector. I also said the bill took reasonable safeguards to prevent tax dollars going to abortion—not as far as I’d like, but I don’t think pro-life people who like this legislation otherwise, should feel compelled to oppose it on moral grounds.

Politics has always run by noise machines, and our day is no different. Today you have the blogosphere on the left, headlined by The Daily Kos, and on the right you have Fox News. Each consistently stays on the attack, demonizes its opposition and has a cultish “you’re with us or against us” mentality. Apparently when it comes to health care, it’s not enough to vote no, you must also declare that this is a referendum on socialized medicine, there’s not a single good thing in the entire bill, it’s a payoff to the abortion mills and by the way, Barack Obama is the anti-Christ.

Today my problem is with the right, but if we trace it back to the debate over the Iraq War, it was the reverse. I was opposed to the invasion back in the heady days of 2002 when it was being debated. I felt the security interests of the United States would have been better served by stronger border control in the short-term and space-based missile defense in the long-term, rather than using up resources fighting overseas, particularly given the likelihood that Iran would prove a bigger long-term threat then a thug who could be felled by death—natural or not—at any time. Yet the attitudes of the left-wing noise machine were so appalling, that I began to feel like a supporter by the time it was over. It wasn’t enough to say you would vote no on the war resolution. You had to declare that there wasn’t a single rational reason for the invasion, that it was a payoff to the oil companies and by the way, George W. Bush is Adolph Hitler reincarnated.

In both cases, you had ideas I was opposed to, but ended up feeling like a supporter, at least in discussion. It’s something advocates of different ideas might want to consider. If you demand people toe the line completely, you’ll make converts—but maybe not in the direction you want.