Reply With Quote
It's all coincidental. Really.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/op...=2&ref=opinion
We know because he said so, in the first of many famous speeches, that Barack Obama doesn’t see Red America or Blue America — he only sees the United States of America. But as the president contemplates his faltering poll numbers and his stalling health-care push, he might want to consider a more colorful perspective.
The red-blue contrast is often overdrawn. But it’s a sensible way to understand Obama’s summer struggles. On health care, energy, taxes and spending, he’s pushing a blue-state agenda during a recession that’s exposed some of the blue-state model’s weaknesses, and some of the red-state model’s strengths.
Consider Texas and California. In the Bush years, liberal polemicists turned the president’s home state — pious, lightly regulated, stingy with public services and mad for sprawl — into a symbol of everything that was barbaric about Republican America. Meanwhile, California, always liberalism’s favorite laboratory, was passing global-warming legislation, pouring billions into stem-cell research, and seemed to be negotiating its way toward universal health care.
But flash forward to the current recession, and suddenly Texas looks like a model citizen. The Lone Star kept growing well after the country had dipped into recession. Its unemployment rate and foreclosure rate are both well below the national average. It’s one of only six states that didn’t run budget deficits in 2009.
Meanwhile, California, long a paradise for regulators and public-sector unions, has become a fiscal disaster area. And it isn’t the only dark blue basket case. Eight states had unemployment over 11 percent in June; seven went for Barack Obama last November. Fourteen states are facing 2010 budget gaps that exceed 20 percent of their G.D.P.; only two went for John McCain. (Strikingly, they’re McCain’s own Arizona and Sarah Palin’s Alaska.) Of the nine states that have raised taxes this year, closing deficits at the expense of growth, almost all are liberal bastions.
The urban scholar Joel Kotkin has called this recession a blue-state “meltdown.” That overstates the case: The Deep South has been hit hard by unemployment, and some liberal regions are weathering the storm reasonably well. And clearly part of the blame for the current crisis rests with decisions made in George W. Bush’s Washington.
But in state capital after state capital, the downturn has highlighted the weaknesses of liberal governance — the zeal for unsustainable social spending, the preference for regulation over job creation, the heavy reliance for tax revenue on the volatile incomes of the upper upper class.
And, inevitably, the tendency toward political corruption. The Republicans have their mistresses, but the Democrats are dealing with a more serious array of scandals: the Blagojevich-Burris embarrassment in Illinois, Senator Christopher Dodd’s dubious mortgage dealings in Connecticut, the expansive graft case in New Jersey, and a slew of corruption investigations featuring Democratic congressmen.
This helps explain why the Republican Party might be compe ive in the Northeast for the first time in years. Chris Christie is easily leading Jon Corzine in the race for New Jersey’s governorship. Rob Simmons might unseat Chris Dodd in Connecticut. Rudy Giuliani, who has experience with blue-state crises, is pondering a run for the statehouse in New York.
And it also helps explain Obama’s current difficulties. The president is pushing a California-style climate-change bill at a time when businesses (and people) are fleeing the Golden State in droves. He’s pushing a health care plan that looks a lot like the system currently hemorrhaging money in Massachusetts. His ballooning deficits resemble the shortfalls paralyzing state capitals from Springfield to Sacramento.
“Never let a serious crisis go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel remarked last fall. But in a crisis, all the public tends to care about are jobs and economic growth. It’s not the ideal time to pass costly social legislation that promises to reap dividends only in the long term, if at all.
That’s why Franklin Roosevelt waited until 1935, when the Great Depression seemed to be waning, to push Social Security through Congress. It’s why Lyndon Johnson established Medicare at the peak of the long post-World War II expansion. And it’s why Massachusetts’s health care plan and California’s cap on greenhouse-gas emissions both passed at the height of the recent boom, rather than the bottom.
Obama is still broadly popular, and the public is still broadly sympathetic to his administration’s agenda. But the money has to come from somewhere. You can’t have a bold new liberal era without the growth to pay for it.
The president wants to govern America like a blue state. But for that to work, he’ll need the nation’s economy to start performing more like Texas.
It's all coincidental. Really.
Right, since Texas is spending federal stimulus money while sitting on a rainy-day fund inflated by high oil prices, it would be easy for the US to act just like Texas.
Great time for cap'n trade. That'll help.
Eh, something will need to slow the hyperinflation everyone is predicting.
And Cap and Trade does this how?
Slows the economy, just like raising interest rates will.
We're all going to be killed by Professor Gates anyway so who cares?
It'll sure help me get a job in the energy sector when I'm out of school
But can't we be like Turkey and just drop a zero or two off to fix it? The dime could be the new penny!
In seriousness, there's got to be something better to do this job than the Cap-and-Trade BS. Damned if I know what though.
Something like it will happen sooner or later. It can always be weakened or repealed when Republicans are back in power. It's not like an amendment or anything.
LOL, I just noticed chumps quote under his name.
Just the concept of cap-and-trade is idiotic. We need to get away from declaring value on non-tangible assetts. Pretty much impossible to do when our money is based on a non-tangible assett, but hey, a guy can dream.
It'll sure help me get a job in the energy sector when I'm out of school
Is it Al Gore driving that truck?
How the you gonna let a truck carrying a load that big pass you on a two lane highway?
What a pussy.
what's the povery rate in red-states?
what's the per-capita income?
What are red-states' K-12 standings in the 50-state ratings?
How many red-states are net beneficiaries of federal funds? (they pocket more than they pay)
Douthat is worse than Billy "Always Wrong" Kristol.
This is a pointless question by itself. Unless you're normalizing across the country, cost of living makes a huge difference for that.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
