Boehner's Dilemma

John Boehner has a problem. Well, okay, he has several problems.

First, despite his nominal leadership of the Republican party, he can't control the troops. Given his long history in the House, this must have come as a surprise to him — if there was anything Republicans have been good at for the past thirty years, it's been party discipline. The Tea Parties seem to have ruined that.

Second, he can't help but feel Eric Cantor's dagger poking at his side, looking for a good soft spot between the ribs. Cantor really wants to replace Boehner as Speaker of the House, and he doesn't seem to mind keeping his party divided against itself to get there.

Boehner is a corporatist, but also a pragmatist. As a corporatist, he prefers not to mess around with the possibility of creating financial meltdown. As a pragmatist, he follows Reagan in the belief that when you get 80% of what you wanted in a negotiation, you've won. When Obama offered up large chunks of Medicare and Medicaid on the altar of "moderation," Boehner was willing to go along with closing a few tax loopholes for the rich.

Cantor saw Boehner's "weakness" as an opportunity to run up to the front of the Tea Party parade with a large bass drum. Although he's been sounding more and more like a Grover Norquist ideologue lately, I suspect Cantor is much better understood as a pure opportunist — a man whose personal ambition far outweighs any party loyalty

After a few drinks the other night, I had this really neat fantasy. It won't come true, of course, but a lot of us would be supremely amused if it did.

John Boehner has lots of friends with money and power. Suppose he quietly encouraged some of them to start a "draft Eric Cantor" campaign for the 2012 presidential race. After all, the current crop of candidates is not especially impressive, and even the Tea Partiers have to be able to see that Cantor has a lot more on the ball than the intellectually challenged Michele Bachman.

I know, very unlikely — but what if Eric Cantor's hubris was great enough to get him to go along with it, and what if he won the nomination?

Why, then you'd have a black man running against a Jew for the highest office in the land! Oh no! Crisis in Redneckland!

As for me, I'd still be poking around the available third-party candidates looking for a place to cast my protest vote — but at least I could have a few good laughs.

State of the Bullshit

Obama got off to a good populist start last night when he suggested taking away the tax giveaways to the carbon companies and using the money for alternative energy development. It went downhill from there.

If I hear any more blather about "competitiveness" I'm likely to go out of my mind. I can't see any way we're in direct competition with China, India, Europe, Russia, Brazil, or any other country. We can't compete against China, our current boogeyman, in any sort of labor intensive manufacturing sector, and they can't compete with us when it comes to our most important industry, finance. Speaking of labor intensive pursuits, I heard the President mention that the United States has the most productive work force of any country in the world. A little later, he went on to say how we had to become even more productive.

Hmm... How did we get so productive? Easy. Our captains of industry just lay off workers, don't replace them, and insist the remaining workers pick up the slack for fear of losing their jobs too. It's getting to look more and more like the age of sweatshops in the American workplace, but calling for even more productivity will not do much for our unemployment crisis.

High speed rail won't happen unless major Republican contributors can be assured of getting all the contracts. The President's other big priority, more money "invested" in his Race to the Top education "reform," won't happen either. Personally, I'm happy about that. Race to the Top forces states to compete against each other for a few extra federal bucks, with most of them (and their unionized teachers) coming up losers. With Democrats like Obama, who needs Republicans?

Paul Ryan's response for the Republicans was described by the pundits as "measured," mostly because he didn't sound nearly as crazy as Michelle Bachman, who also delivered a speech last night. It was carried only by CNN — even Fox wouldn't touch it — so it follows that almost nobody saw it. I watched it, though!

Bachman gave what I guess is her standard Tea Party stump speech. Her delivery reminded me of the teacher's pet running for class president, and her remarks were addressed to a space somewhere above the viewer's head and off to the left. Dick Armey, whose group arranged her appearance, should have hired technicians who know where to place the teleprompter.

Frankly, it all makes me sick. There is nobody speaking for the poor, the unemployed, the exploited, the underwater, or the foreclosed. Anybody too young to remember Lyndon Johnson has no experience of liberal government, and so what passes for liberalism today is anything that wouldn't have qualified as fascism in the 1960s.

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I'm starting to feel more and more sympathy for the Tea Partiers. They're totally ignorant and working against their own self-interest, but they've got good reasons to be angry — even if they're entirely ignorant of what those good reasons are.