Kay Cunningham's List: News

• I'm no religious zealot, but I do like the idea of atheists being introduced  to another perspective. After all, there are plenty of smart people who also are  religious. And there also are plenty of highly acclaimed scientists - Francis  Collins, to name just one - who have found faith after achieving great academic  success and who are outspoken defenders of the compatibility of science and  religion. Yet just a few weeks ago when Professor Satoshi Kanazawa of the London  School of Economics announced research showing those identified as atheists had  higher IQs, atheists smugly held up the data as proof positive that people not  confined by the dogmatic structure of a religion are best able to soar  intellectually. Never mind that the differences in IQ were too small to draw  sweeping conclusions.

• Not much shocking about it all, really. "Texas education" has never exactly  equated with "intellectual range and nuance."
• What they don't usually add is how history is then revised by the politicians,  gutted by the church leaders, molested by the power mongers, skinned alive by  paranoid militants, poorly codified by the speechwriters and then spun, torqued  and diluted by countless mealy "experts" before being shoved down the gullet of  unsuspecting youth, where it is partially digested like so much liquefied school  lunch meat, only to be wrongly half-remembered later in life by the most insane  among them, who then quickly gets his own talk show on Fox News. And lo, the  circle of life continues.

• Verily, health care reform will go down in history for many things -- Catholic  nuns kicking ass, Ted Kennedy not having to roll in his  grave, Democrats actually vaguely unifying -- but few are as amusing as the  creation of the silliest political movement in recent American history, the Tea  Party, a group barely cognizant of what it even stands for, with zero grasp of  the history it's named after, who nevertheless will doubtlessly grab every tax  benefit, housing subsidy, COBRA extension, Restoration Act moneys and (now)  health care benefit that evil socialist Obama hands to them and their sniveling  home states, even as they spit tobacco juice in his face. Adorable.
• Perhaps the saddest idea of all, however, is the general lament I've heard  repeated countless times on the left, this sense that if Obama can't do it, if  this astonishingly calm and assured, rock solid, deeply reasonable president  can't bridge the divide or at least hack through some of that barbed wire, we  are, if not completely doomed, then certainly stuck deep in a sociocultural  abyss no one has a clue how to navigate.

• The radical center is “radical” in its desire for a radical departure from  politics as usual. It advocates: raising taxes to close our budgetary  shortfalls, but doing so with a spirit of equity and social justice;  guaranteeing that every American is covered by health insurance, but with market  reforms to really bring down costs; legally expanding immigration to attract  more job-creators to America’s shores; increasing corporate tax credits for  research and lowering corporate taxes if companies will move more manufacturing  jobs back onshore; investing more in our public schools, while insisting on  rising national education standards and greater accountability for teachers,  principals and parents; massively investing in clean energy, including nuclear,  while allowing more offshore drilling in the transition.
• Obama won the presidency by tapping the center — centrist Democrats,  independents and Republicans who wanted to see nation-building at home “to make  their own lives and those of others better,” said Tim Shriver, the C.E.O. of the  Special Olympics. They saw in Obama a pragmatist who could pull us together for  pragmatic solutions. But hyperpartisanship has frustrated those hopes.

• The Democrats held hands, held their breath and jumped over the cliff — not  that it was a radical bill. And, mirabile dictu, nothing awful happened. The  markets went up. The polls went up. Their confidence went up.

• But David Frum, the former W. speechwriter, conceded that in trying to turn  health care into Obama’s Waterloo — a replay of the Clintons’ disaster in 1994 —  Republicans may have made it their own Waterloo.
• Some base members of the Republican base showed themselves as the racist  Neanderthals they are.
• But at long last, when push came to shove, he shoved (and let Nancy push). He  treated politics not as an intellectual exercise, but a political one. He  realized that sometimes you can’t rise above it. You have to sink down into it.  You have to stop being cerebral and get your hands dirty. You can fight fear  with power.
• The Chicago pol in the Oval has had to learn one of the great American truths:  You’ve got to slap the bully in the face. He’s a consensus-building “warrior,”  Axelrod boasted to Charlie Rose.

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• A party that promotes ignorance (“Just say no to global warming”) and provides a  safe house for bigotry cannot serve the best interests of our country.

• This is a bill that an Eisenhower Republican of old would have gleefully  endorsed, following the lead of the American Medical Association and the  hospital industry, but such moderates no longer exist in the GOP. If they did,  they would have backed this bill and claimed its very limited stab at health  reform as their own. Instead, they are now recast as tea party zealots and  naysayers, and while that may bring a short-term electoral advantage, in the  long run it defines the GOP as incapable of moderate governance.

• But the cynics may be mistaken this fall. Americans are hurting and know the  country is in trouble. They are looking for answers. They know Washington is  busted, dominated by entrenched corporate lobbies, big money, and partisan  politics. Republicans have linked arms with the worst special interests to stave  off reforms. They've stood with the insurance companies against health care  reform. They are soliciting Wall Street money while fighting to gut consumer  financial protection. Their plan for jobs is to peddle more of the conservative  policies that put us in this hole.

• No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored  a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open  the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many  votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing  condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance  coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a  repeal?
• We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led  us to abject and irreversible defeat.

• But that’s not the point I want to make today. Instead, I want you to  consider the contrast: on one side, the closing argument was an appeal to our  better angels, urging politicians to do what is right, even if it hurts their  careers; on the other side, callous cynicism. Think about what it means to  condemn health reform by comparing it to the Civil Rights Act. Who in modern  America would say that L.B.J. did the wrong thing by pushing for racial  equality? (Actually, we know who: the people at the Tea Party protest who hurled  racial epithets at Democratic members of Congress on the eve of the vote.)
• This is, of course, a political victory for President Obama, and a triumph for  Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker. But it is also a victory for America’s soul. In  the end, a vicious, unprincipled fear offensive failed to block reform. This  time, fear struck out.