What’s Fun About Failure?

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for March 15, 2010


Observations:


1) Tina Brown thinks that the elected officials about to fail regulating banks and medical care fail because the are incompetent. Not in an insulting way where they are stupid, just that the level of complexity and comprehension required to see that simplicity is the real answer is not readily available as a commodity to the pool of electable politicians.



In this scenario, the people we should be putting in charge are in fact unelectable. Imagine for a second Elizabeth Warren dressed up as Kay Bailey Hutchinson, or Dylan Ratigan trying to make nice with Wall Street donors. Imagine for a second Howard Dean, well, wait, that one doesn’t work.


As we path down the road towards fecklessness, this concept becomes even more important, as the newscaster-ization part of political candidates removes the people most likely to govern. In fact, in many local governments, this was realized and thus came the concept of the city manager, a guy who had less demands of kissing babies and more demands of the sewers working.


Dylan Ratigan thinks there will be a voter revolt. I’m not so sure. What would result? Some more Kucinich’s and Sanders’? The hybrid of the shared concept that the job is beyond the employed in our legislature, as shared between Dylan and Tina, is more the newest evolution of the Morning Joe consensus rather than either of their distinct theories.


There is also the distraction principle that Joe Scarborough brought up a few weeks back. You will never know if there is a Paul Volker level competency in your candidate if you spend 50% or more of the vetting process talking about purity tests and seceding from the union.


2) Nancy Pelosi ceded the public option in between today’s and last Friday’s show, and her opponent John Boehner did nothing to warrant the action. In fact, Boehner is really peaking in his appearance as the bent on obstruction do nothing that represents the people we all voted against in 2008. Like Romney, all we really have to do is give that guy a microphone to find out just how few ideas he has.


A Republican party that can’t be trusted to shrink government in a country that is already undertaxed to historic levels is in fact a non-entity. So who killed the public option? Was it really conservative people? Not really, in fact the Stupak’s and ultra conservative southern Democratic house representatives are more finding their lockstep as a result of election climates in their districts. They are Democrats, but no one ever counted on them for any whip count for this bill.


Someone at some point will have to be accountable for this. All indications continue to point that if the move doesn’t match the whip count, the fix is in. The fix likely comes from the administration. And the strategy is to create the false public perception that the ‘votes’ weren’t there, when we know otherwise.


So a year later, we are back to the ‘we tried hard’ charade.


Are you listening Mr. Obama? Trust is an issue amongst your most ardent 2008 and 2010 supporters. We voted for you to avoid the ‘insider’ feel of a Hillary Clinton regime, but you are actually governing as an ‘insider’ to a greater degree than we would have expected from her, in absolute defiance of your 18 months of self description otherwise prior to your election.


3) The eight o’clock panel was the best and brightest that we have, and that conversation could not have occurred with Joe Scarborough in the room. The fact that they don’t agree on the mechanics, the reality on the ground, not just divided by 2 but divided by 3, is astounding. Scarborough would have been a 4th division, mainly on platform grounds, and we would have had to sit through ‘we can’t afford it’ and ‘% of people don’t want this bill’, both of which when gone from the conversation point to their own obsolescence in the real debate.


Deutsch believes that Ratigan is unrealistic in any expectation of a voter revolt while he agrees that the fixes in the bill are bleedingly inefficient. Deutsch wants the bill to pass to be a basis of incremental reform, a strategy I support given the options, and explains it just that way. Ratigan is correct that the bleeding inefficiencies are present and instead of accepting, he wants to see the bill go down so that the government is forced into real reform. And O’Donnell is convinced that neither road is certain currently and that we are getting ahead of ourselves in having a postgame conversation about feckless when the outcome is still in great turmoil.



All three agree that the current outcome is diluted most towards outright failure by the interference of campaign finance on behalf of commercial interests.


Which bill are we talking about?


Every bill since 1982.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.