I miss the rational right of center political voice that balanced the liberal leaning left.  I miss the party that had a plan.  Granted, the plan was generally business friendly and fiscally conservative, but it was the appropriate counterweight to the Democrats proposals to empower and support people and protect the environment.

There was a collective recognition of the natural ebb and flow of politics.  Power shifted back and forth between the parties, but both sides sought compromises as best they were able, and ultimately cooperated at least to some degree to solve problems.

That train left the station about a decade ago, and it ain’t comin’ back.

The GOP seems ever more focused on political power for it’s own sake.  They take it personally when they lose at the polls and they want retributions for those rebukes.  The result has become a party whose only apparent function is to demonize the Democrats and impede progress.  They have become the neighborhood kid who owns the football.  And they are not letting anyone play with it unless they get to be quarterback.  If they aren’t in charge, then no one has fun.

They correctly recognize that the coming 2010 and 2012 elections will in large part be determined by the economy.  If the economy remains stalled and unemployment remains high until 2012, then they will do well at the polls.  If the economy recovers, then they are toast.  As a result, they are committed to doing everything in their power to assure we are all still suffering two years hence.

In case that sounds far-fetched, consider what John Boehner told the Christian Science Monitor when asked what his top three priorities would be should the GOP retake the House and he becomes Speaker.  Boehner’s plan (and by extension, the GOP’s plan) is to repeal the healthcare bill, make sure no sort of energy reform is passed, and extend the Bush tax cuts.  In essence, the plan is to erase the Obama administration and go back to where we were in 2008.  Then sit there until it all gets better.

Still not convinced?  Consider the increasing calls from GOP mouthpieces to open investigations or even move toward impeachment of Obama.  If that’s not loony enough for you, consider the Iowa Republican Party platform.  Note, this is not some Tea Party fringe group, but the statewide party platform.  Among other things it advocates for ratification of the original 13th Amendment to the Constitution.  The original 13th was not the repeal of slavery, but a never ratified proposal to revoke the citizenship of anyone accepting a title of nobility from a foreign government.  Why are they advocating this?  Because there is a belief that Obama’s acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize can be used to revoke his citizenship and oust him from office.

This is insane, and it is not remotely helpful.  Following eight years of Clinton witch hunts that finally nailed the guy on lying about a tryst with an intern, the Democrats turned the other cheek and declined the opportunity to pursue Bush and/or Cheney for launching a war on fabricated data and then repeatedly violating the Geneva Convention and international laws regarding torture.  As a response, the GOP is now pledging to start the witch hunts anew on Obama if they are restored to power.  The olive branch meant nothing.  And next time it likely won’t be extended, meaning we can likely look forward to Democrats becoming less cooperative and more openly hostile to the next GOP administration.  Lovely.

Is this the world we want to live in?  These are supposed to be political parties not warring factions.  These are supposed to be statesmen, but they are acting more like a teenage girl whose BFF just dissed her on Facebook.

Two days before I was born President Kennedy issued a challenge before Congress to put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of that decade.  With six months to spare, an eight-year old me watched fuzzy images of astronauts stepping onto another world.  Mission accomplished.  In 2005 dollars, the Apollo program was estimated to have cost $170 billion.  It required the unwavering bipartisan support of Congress across four elections, and the support of three Presidents.  Add to that, the space program was commensurate with one of the most unpopular wars in US history, a time of great social unrest, and also the dawn of one of the most sweeping social entitlement programs.

Today’s question is, do you think we could possibly pull off a moon mission scale project today?  That is, if we set forth a national project that was financially non-trivial and wouldn’t see results for eight or ten years, even if that project had more direct tangible benefit to our collective welfare than Apollo, could we sustain the required momentum?  I fear the answer is, not a chance in hell.

It would seem that as a country we’ve lost our collective ability to plan more than a short time into the future.  This is most evident in politics where everyone is playing for the best leverage in the next election with little regard for what’s best for the country.  Our leaders look to polls and surveys to see what the popular position will be.

Industry isn’t much better.  Long term investment is down.  It’s all about how to maximize share price and next quarter’s balance sheet.  Executives are mostly looking to make a quick name for themselves so they can hop to the next multi-million dollar job.

And consumers aren’t immune either.  How many are putting off buying that new flat screen or living room set rather than saving for their kids’ college or their own retirement?  How many buy houses they have no hope of paying off?

What led us to this state is less certain, but it would be hard to argue that we are here.  Is our desire for immediate gratification driven by marketing messages?  You can have it all, now.  Why wait?  Alternatively, perhaps it’s the inundation with media and information.  There’s so very much to process in the here and now that’s it’s difficult to think about the future.  Or perhaps it is the uncertainty of the future itself that fuels our short attention span.  The world is changing so very fast that glimpsing the world our children will live in is very difficult.  There are so many possible futures that it’s just easier to live in the now and let the future fall where it may.

I don’t personally think it seems so bleak.  It’s not clear what has driven this change, but as long as we are this short sighted, we are unlikely to ever return to the hay-day for which we pine.  We desperately need some sort of collective vision of what we can become.  We will never be of one mind, but we can be of one goal.  At the fuzzy level, we are.  We all want this to be a great and prosperous country.  But that’s not an actionable goal.  It’s about as useful as your kid declaring that when he grows up he wants to be rich.

If history has a lesson for us it is that we respond to competition.  We rallied together against the Nazis.  The fear of communism drove enormous growth in science and technology, and in large part was likely the underlying driving force behind Apollo.  We have enemies now in Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but they are not useful as competition.  We need something larger, something that demands more of us.  I’m thinking China.  Economically, China is the largest looming threat on the planet.  Not that they are evil or anything, or that we even need to hate them.  But they may well be in a position a decade hence to just buy us for petty cash.  We could do with a healthy desire to beat them at that game.  To rebuild our own economy, infrastructure, and industrial base to out compete them in the global market.  This is a challenge worthy of the people who put a man on the moon.  And wouldn’t it be nice to be a part of something productive again?

Now, if only we had a Kennedy to inspire us…

Here’s a plan, let’s outsource a large portion of government jobs as a way of creating private sector employment.  Let that sink in for a moment.  Wait until you get the uncontrollable urge to smack yourself on the forehead… then go ahead and give in a good whack.  There you go.

Yet this is Cal Thomas’ latest proposal.  Now I grant you that I almost always find Thomas to be wrong.  In fact, I was having a little trouble coping with a column he wrote a couple weeks back on Law and Marriage because I thought he raised an interesting point.  I figured I must be missing something.  But rarely does Thomas put forth an idea which is is so demonstrably wrong as his plan to outsource government jobs.

Let’s follow the dollars here for a moment.  Taxes are collected.  Out of those taxes, money is budgeted to pay for a government service.  The government service contracts with a private company to fulfill that service.  The private company hires someone to do the job.  Connect all the dots, and that person’s wages are being paid with tax dollars.  Yet somehow this counts as private sector employment?

Keep in mind, this is the same crowd who would strictly oppose those same tax dollars being spent for that same purpose if the same person was hired by the government rather than the private company to do the job.  They would also oppose those tax dollars being given as a grant to a private company to do a function.

What if the government were to cut out the middleman and just buy the company and run it for the purposes of doing the job?  That’s textbook Socialism, and is so wrong Cal Thomas would just stroke out.

If you’re an advocate for small government, then fine.  But you can’t get there by outsourcing government jobs to the private sector.  Those are still jobs being paid for by tax dollars, and additionally, taxes are paying for the profit the private company has to make as well.  That’s not to say outsourcing is always a bad idea.  But you can’t count it as private sector employment.  Geezsh!

It is said that no one escapes death and taxes, and certainly neither are popular.  In the current political climate there is much gnashing of teeth over taxes.  Mostly because we’ve pretty much exhausted our collective political angst over death during the healthcare debate.

The prevailing wisdom is that taxes are too high and we must reduce them to provide relief for families and to provide for investment in small businesses and other economic growth factors.  But that “wisdom” defies the facts at hand.  Granted, no one like paying taxes, but tax rates are currently lower than at any time since World War II.  Under Obama, the first tax bracket has been reduced to 10%.  Even the second bracket of 15% is essentially the same or lower than the first bracket has been in 50 years (excepting a brief dip under Reagan).  Meanwhile, the top bracket is ridiculously lower than at almost any time since 1942.

But the pain is real.  Families struggle to make ends meet, and this was true even before the most recent recession and the large unemployment numbers.  Why can’t middle class America, at least the ones with jobs, comfortably make ends meet?

While taxes are a convenient demon, as we see from the data, they’re a false one.  Taxes aren’t hurting us.  However, there has been a very real erosion in purchasing power in the average American home.  If you compound the Consumer Price Index from 1990 to 2008, your income would need to have risen by 75% over that 18 year span just to be able to live at the same level now you did back then.  But average household income across that same period only rose 60%.  And that doesn’t even take into account the increase in the number of two-income households over that same period.  In many cases there are multiple people or people holding down multiple jobs just to get up to that 60% mark.

So yes, there is a definite reality to the feeling that you are working for less.  But it’s not Uncle Sam that’s killing you.  At least not the IRS part.

This morning, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is to be announced as the leader of the House’s Tea Party Caucus.  Columnist Derek Wallbank wonders who will have the big brass ones to stand up with her in this alliance?  Apparently about 10 fellow legislators have signed on, but many Republicans are wary of aligning too closely with the Tea Party.

The GOP is in a tough spot here.  The Tea Party increasingly constitutes its most fervent and loyal base, and you wouldn’t want to distance yourself from that group.  Especially when you consider how successful the Tea Party has become at dislodging Republicans off the GOP ballot who don’t cater to their worldview.  But the public perception of the Tea Party by those outside it is of a radical fringe type group that’s just a hair-trigger away from an armed revolution.  Aligning with such a group marginalizes the independent voters and leaves GOP Congressmen vulnerable in the general election.

Many, both inside and outside the Tea Party have correctly pointed out that it is the extreme teabaggers that get all the press coverage and that many in the movement are espousing reasonable positions.

I believe it’s true that the Tea Party is not all or even mostly made up of birthers, conspiracy theorists, anarchists, and white supremacists.  I further believe the press does provide excessive coverage of the loonies, because, well… it’s not news when the bus arrives on time, only when it crashes.  But it’s hard for them to claim victimhood when the most public faces of the Tea Party are people like Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, and Sharon Angle.  The press didn’t anoint these folks, the Tea Party movement did.

Bachmann in particular is so out of touch with reality that the MN Progressive Project has taken to calling her Princess Sparklepony.  She fears the census.  She’s convinced The Fed is conspiring to create a global currency.  She believes the healthcare bill promotes abortion and rations your care.  She’s not worried about global warming because Jesus will save the planet.  It goes on and on and on.  She used to frighten me a little, but it’s gone so far that it’s just comical.  Unless you’re from Minnesota, then it’s just embarrassing.

So here’s a little free political advice for the Tea Party.  If you want to be taken seriously by people who don’t have a ready supply of pitchforks and torches and a hankerin’ to storm the castle, you need to put serious people out in front of your movement.   Princess Sparklepony is perhaps not the most inspired choice.

What makes a good President?  Is Obama one?  Would Sarah Palin be?  I got to thinking about this after an innocent Facebook post of Kim’s on the Bristol-Levi engagement somehow turned into a rant that included the claim that as President, Palin “OBVIOUSLY could have done a better job than Obozo.”  Something clearly not obvious to me, but the commenter was on a tear.  While she didn’t express overall support for Palin, she made it pretty clear she thought an untrained beagle fresh off the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm would be a better choice than our current Commander-in-Chief.

The issue she had was not so much with the policies as with the man.  And this seems a fairly common theme among Obama’s detractors.  It’s not clear there is any policy he could back that would appease them.  And Sarah Palin generates similar enmity amongst her detractors.  Policy aside, she appears to them as simply an unqualified person or the job.  Yet I would venture there are pretty few people in common among those two groups.

Now in Obama’s case there is undoubtedly some latent racism going on, and in Palin’s case, some latent sexism.  But I don’t think that accounts for the vast level of personal discomfort these two polarizing figures generate.  I think it’s something more insidious.

It is perhaps useful to contrast Obama and Palin against two of our more effective Presidents in recent history.  Reagan and Clinton both had tenures including significant accomplishment while maintaining fairly good approval ratings.  Sure, they each had their scandals, but history seems to be ranking them roughly even, and head and shoulders above any other Presidents in my lifetime.

It strikes me that what these two men had in common was the ability to deal with complexity while conveying simplicity.  The issues a President must deal with are massively complex.  Not only the political process itself, but the economy, foreign policy, domestic policy, etc. all are gruesomely intricate and interwoven systems.  Sure, anyone can surround themselves with experts, but actually understanding and interpreting the information from multiple experts across a wide field of topics requires a keen intelligence.  And both of these guys could cut it.

Yet the cruel reality of American culture is that we inherently distrust intellectuals.  While we worship those who are tougher than us, thinner than us, better athletes than us, better singers than us, or even more beautiful, we can’t stand a smartypants. Ironically, while we’ll aspire to be thinner, more beautiful, or in better shape, our response to someone who is our intellectual superior is not aspiration or inspiration, but rather we try to tear them down to our level.  How dare they try to come off as smarter than us?

Reagan and Clinton both realized we like our reality pre-digested and boiled down to something we can absorb in a 30-second news feature.  They were also masters of taking the abstruse and simplifying it, then presenting it in non-threatening and inspirational ways.  They could motivate people toward the essence of a plan without burdening them with its inherent complexities.

Comparing that to Obama and Palin we see two very different things.  They are each half of the equation that Reagan and Clinton used.  Obama is clearly up to the intellectual challenge.  He’s smart enough to be President, but he lacks the ability to convey a simplicity to his policies.  He makes people feel lectured to rather than inspiring them toward a useful abstraction.  The result is that he too often inspires fear and loathing rather than action and support.

On the flip side, Palin does a great job of selling simple ideas and inspiring people toward action and support.  The problem is, she seems to really believe the world is that simple.  There’s no evidence she’s up to the intellectual challenge of being President when the cameras aren’t rolling.  In fact, there’s a fair bit of evidence she isn’t.  In many ways, this is the same failing George W. Bush had.  He was a likable enough guy, he had a certain folksy charm and did a fair job of making his points.  But he lacked the intellectual depth to perform the core duties of President, and the country and his legacy suffered for that.

In the era previous to cable news and the Internet, wonky intellectuals could roam the White House halls as effective leaders.  But Obama would seem to be the poster child for why those days are gone.  Personally, I’m not troubled by that.  I admire intellectuals.  I want my leaders to be smarter than me.  But I think people like me are in a minority.

Ideally, future Presidents will have the magic mix of complexity on the inside and simplicity on the outside.  In the meantime, I assert long and loud that we are so very much better off with an effective intellectual executive who can’t seem to get his message right than being upside-down with a shallow overly simplistic talking head who is loved by the cameras but can’t fly the desk.

The North Iowa Tea Party took the initiative to put up a billboard comparing Obama to Lenin and Hitler.  In a rare fit of sanity, other factions of the Tea Party have denounced the sign as unhelpful.  Even the co-founder of the group responsible for the billboard said, “The purpose of the billboard was to draw attention to the socialism. It seems to have been lost in the visuals.”

Still, this group was hardly unique in trying to paint Obama as the lost grandson of Hitler.  Tea Party rallies are rife with such signs, and Glenn Beck spends so much time talking about Nazis the History Channel is starting to feel encroached on.

Moreover, there is such delicious irony in the tag line, “RADICAL LEADERS PREY ON  THE FEARFUL & NAIVE.”  Really?  We can argue about naive, but preying on fears has become the cornerstone strategy of conservatives.  Karl Rove practically made a science of it.  Can you say 9/11?  And are not the comparisons to historical tyrants and despots intended entirely to prey on fears?

Even ignoring the comparisons, what no one is backing off from is labeling Obama a “socialist”.  All seem to agree this is the important message of this sign in particular, and of the Tea Party and Conservatives more generally.  We will hear this socialist chant shouted long and hard as we ramp up to the elections.  But isn’t that just fear mongering as well?  It’s pretty indisputable that the specter of socialism induces fear in the electorate.  So the only real question is whether or not the label is factual.

What is socialism?  Merriam-Webster’s defines it as: