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What happened to Chuck Grassley’s relevance? Such a shame. I don’t know how we’ll get through health care reform without him.

So Chuck Grassley decided that he’s going honor his healthcare-industry campaign donations and, along with the “Quitta from Wasilla,” drum up fear instead of rational debate on the ever-shrinking healthcare reform we were promised last November. It’s not that I don’t think Senator Grassley is probably controlled by Republican handlers I’d find appalling, it’s just that he’s seemed somewhat rational in the past. His harping on the Sotomayor nomination, and now his “they’re going to pull the plug on grandma” show a decline in his previously-perceived-as-centrist speech. I feel like he’s marching, lock-step with the looniest of the loons. So much for Grassley attempting to curry favor from anyone but the hard-right. I suppose when you’re not worried about re-election, you cater to your base.

So, Senator Grassley, your remarks just got me to pony up money for your inevitable downfall. I really hope Tom Fiegen or Bob Krause pulls the plug on Grassley. Both campaigns (@tlfiegen & @krauseforiowa) managed to figure out that Twitter is worthwhile. Heck, I now know that Bob Krause will be on the Rachel Maddow Show, waiting for me on DVR, thanks to Twitter. Krause has an ActBlue fund raising page which you ex-Iowan’s might consider tossing money at. Maybe Grassley should consider following some of his own advice and taking the “Japanese-way out.”

So, y’know how the right wing keeps getting crazier and crazier in their hatred for the President? I’d assumed it was just because they’re, well, crazy, and unrepentantly racist and just generally bad people. But it suddenly occurs to me that it’s not just that they’re getting carried away with partisan opposition, craziness, unrepentant racism, and general malevolence. Consider the following scenarios:

1. Particularly harmful elements of Party A controls all levers of government for close to a decade. Nearly all of the worst fears of a particular segment of Party B are realized, thanks to the avarice and misanthropy of the ruling portion of Party A. For this wing of Party B, it’s as if their society is completely turned on its ear, everything they hold dear is being crushed, and there’s little cause for optimism. Suddenly, Party B wins control of the government in a landslide, thanks in large part to Party B’s sudden interest in the aforementioned segment of itself. Things start to improve immediately, and Party B rejoices. Unfortunately, a horrific economic crisis explodes at pretty much the same time, and the outlook is extremely dire. However, given the demonstrated competence of the leader of Party B, as well as the widespread acceptance of the idea that recovery will mean a dramatic structuring of society in a way that the recently empowered part of Party B has been working toward for decades, there is cause for optimism. So members of this particular segment of Party B find themselves simultaneously relieved, exhilarated, and terrified.

2. Party A has controlled government for close to a decade, and despite early popularity, the segment of Party A that seems to be running things becomes increasingly reviled by the majority of the citizenry, even as all the things they fought to see happen for decades are implemented. As it turns out, they were wrong about pretty much everything. To make matters worse, Party B is getting much more popular at the same time that it is coming under the sway of the worst enemies of Party A. And, on top of all of this, the economy has completely collapsed (probably as a result of the implementation of Party A’s favorite fantasies), which is setting the stage for massive changes that happen to resonate strongly with the worst fears of Party A’s suddenly unpopular wing. There is nothing for these Party A stalwarts to feel other than defeat and hopelessness. They are utterly crushed and humiliated, perhaps permanently, probably for decades to come, but certainly for the next several years. There is no room for optimism.

Things are really bad for wingnuts right now. You remember in late 2001 how all us progressives started to feel a certain dread about what was to come? And how reality ended up much worse than we were expecting? And how each new day brought fresh horrors that could barely be believed? That’s where they are right now: everything they’ve ever believed in is blowing up in their faces, they’ve become completely politically marginal, their enemies are in power, and they’re afraid that Barack Obama will use the economic meltdown in the same way that George W. Bush used 9/11: as a political cudgel to smash in the brains of anybody who stands in the way of a radical agenda.

Of course, for most of us, Obama’s agenda isn’t nearly radical enough, but remember that the wingnuts think Karl Marx was an avatar of Satan. They have no idea what socialism is, except that it’s roughly synonymous with evil. And they’re proud of this ignorance: to know Marx/Satan is to become him. So, armed with willful ignorance, an alarming capacity for cognitive dissonance, and only the merest seed of empathy (though only in the form of “it could happen to ME!”), they go nuts. Barack Obama becomes their George W. Bush (which, given their dedication to dualistic thinking, makes perfect sense to them).

It’s not that I have any sympathy for the wingnuts (how could anybody?), but I’m trying to feel a little bit of empathy for them, if for no other reason than it’ll make it easier to keep beating them. Plus, right now we’re where the wingers were in 2002, and maybe if we understand them better, we can avoid their fate, or at least learn how NOT to lose when we’re inevitably tossed from power.

Here’s a juicy quote from some corporate tax lawyer from a recent AP story on how Senate Republicans are blocking efforts to tax the AIG bonuses (surprise, surprise). It appears in the context of a discussion of the possibility that legislation preventing bonuses will lead to corporations raising salaries to match what employees lose in bonuses.

Here it is:

“‘If the vast majority of bonuses become fixed salaries that would harm the institutions because they would have higher fixed costs,’ Willens said. ‘What happens if the bank suffers through a poor year? It has all these fixed obligations they have to meet. That’s the beauty of the bonuses.’”

Um, I’d say the bank has suffered through a pretty poor year. A year so poor that it needed to accept billions of dollars of government bailout money to stop it from utterly collapsing. And yet it still felt obligated to pay out these ludicrous bonuses. How is that ANY DIFFERENT from what he’s talking about?

Seriously, how does this guy have a job?

Here’s a gem from Bush’s latest media interaction that deserves more daylight:

“I’m going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there’s an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened.” [emphasis mine]

Oh, I love that he doesn’t know how to use big words. Now that he’s out of power it’s almost cute, especially when his little slips are more accurate than he intends.

i woke up this morning to the sound of birds singing outside the window. no shit — birds. i’m trying hard not to find undue significance in every little thing i see today, but it’s seven degrees. nothing should be alive out there, much less creatures capable of making music.

has it only been a year since we sat in that booth at the brewpub, waiting for obama’s iowa caucus victory speech to begin?

it had been a day like this one, bright and clear and cold as hell. night had fallen hard, and early, as it does this time of year. amy and i were still warming our fingers and toes after the trek across town from our caucus location. it was amy’s first iowa caucus, and she still wore the sticker numbered “1,” proof  she was first in the door out of the hundreds who at our precinct, and a mark of pride for a newly registered Democrat. as we learned over the next few days, she was one of thousands statewide who’d attended their first party caucus, pushing turnout numbers to all-time record heights. this was no surprise, based on what we’d seen in our neighborhood: a veritable riot of twenty- and thirty-somethings, absolutely on fire for barack obama. i had seen enough caucuses to know something was up.

charlie arrived shortly and settled into a beer. he gave a similar account of his precinct across town. rubbing our hands together and sipping pints of OCBW honey hemp ale, the three of us sat there watching the results and pondering the meaning of it all.

this time last year, i wasn’t an obamaphile. i had generally favorable impressions of the guy, sure, but i was still holding fast to that skeptical-pessimist posture we’d all learned to adopt, like whipped puppies, over the past seven years of bitter experience. who the hell was this dude, anyway? i wanted to believe that the smart antiwar candidate whose buttons adorned the backpacks of my favorite students was viable. but this wasn’t 2000 or 2004, and i was in no mood to dick around with another pyhrric victory of a doomed-liberal campaign. even with the tentative victories of ‘06, the wounds were still too fresh.

that uncertainty was echoed by a friend we ran into at the caucus, a long-suffering lefty of our parents’ generation who’d “been burned too many times” by charismatic and impressive Democratic leaders who tended either to become corrupt and ineffective over time, or to be assassinated before ever getting the chance. her perspective lent a sad poignancy to the spectacle of the political neophytes who surrounded us that night, too hopped up on optimism and adrenaline to even fathom the outcome that seemed most likely to us at the time — another humiliation for progressives, and a white house ultimately occupied by, if not a republican, then another weasely self-serving empty suit of a democrat who would continue carrying out bush’s disastrous policies from sheer inertia. still, it was hard not to be a little intoxicated by all that energy, unexpected as it was, not to wonder in the back of the mind: what if?

i wish i could say i allowed myself to get swept up in the obama movement then and there, but it took a couple more months. the only outcome i had hoped for on caucus night was a decisive defeat of hillary clinton, who struck me as exactly the kind of pro-war, corporatist political parasite who would guarantee another four years of the odious status quo. (i needn’t have worried; at our precinct, at least, hillary didn’t even reach viability, her supporters all but laughed out of the auditorium with zero delegates to show for their troubles.) throughout 2007 i’d been more or less equally impressed by obama, edwards, richardson and biden, and was prepared to caucus for obama if it came down to a close contest between him and clinton. but i also liked john edwards’ message and wanted to see him stay in the primary race a while longer, so when the register poll that week showed obama with a strong lead it seemed safe to caucus for edwards. (i’ve since come to regret that support, not because i give a shit about his pissant marital infidelities, but because of his monstrous act of political malpractice — when i think about the fact that he would’ve allowed himself to be the democratic nominee in 2008 knowing that bombshell could drop at any time and blow the whole election, i could kick the bastard’s teeth in.)

 back at the brewpub, watching the coverage and comparing notes with friends reporting in from other precincts, a picture was emerging: the obama thing was bigger than we’d thought. he wasn’t just winning decisively among the same old caucus stalwarts who dutifully pull on heavy coats and boots every four januaries and trudge out into the night to pick a candidate. obama was driving huge turnout among new, never-followed-politics-before voters. lots of them. that was my first inkling that in some ways maybe it didn’t matter who barack obama was or what he stood for; the important thing, the interesting thing, was the movement he represented. the people who’d been primed for politicization by a decade of republican farce and atrocity and were just waiting to be mobilized.

more precincts reports rolled in, interspersed with bemused commentary on the evening’s proceedings on the GOP side — miserable attendance, and a surge of support for mike huckabee, of all people. you could almost feel the collective shrug as the room’s attention drifted back to what was obviously the Real Story. we ordered another pitcher. charlie fiddled with his iPod, trying to pull down county-by-county numbers from the pitiful wifi signal that would waft into the pub from time to time. edwards and clinton, in turn, each marched out and delivered chipper concessions, eagerly looking forward to new hampshire.

by the time obama took the stage, there was silence throughout the bar. people on their way out stopped and stood there in their winter coats, listening. i don’t remember much of what he said, but the way he said it and the way his crowd responded was like nothing i’d ever seen before. the word “alchemy” comes to mind. i’d heard he was good, even seen him work a crowd in iowa city the year before, but this was something altogether singular to behold. and it hit me like a frying pan to the head.

“he’s going to win,” i said, twisting around in the booth to see amy and charlie. “he’s going to be president.” it wasn’t  a prediction. it was a sudden jolt of crystal-clear perception, spoken with the slack-jawed guilelessness of one who has just processed the punchline to a joke told five minutes earlier. a simple extrapolation of facts and processes already in motion: right time, right place, right guy. and he was simply too smart and competent to fuck it up.

there followed several weeks of campaign sturm and drang, during which my impressions of obama as a political supergenius grew stronger, though i still withheld judgment as to whether this was necessarily a good thing. for a while there i suppose i rooted for him more out of animosity toward hillary clinton, who had morphed before our eyes from an unreliable, underprincipled and entitled but otherwise more-or-less capable leader, into nothing short of a political horror show.

but that’s water under the bridge. obama made a believer of me in march, when i heard the “a more perfect union” speech — an epiphany already well documented here. a few other moments from the campaign stand out… the feeling i had, watching the speech in berlin, that it might soon be possible once again to venture out into the world with a U.S. passport and my head held high. the calm and reason he exuded amidst the abject panic of september’s bank implosions. the people i met while out door-knocking in godforsaken flooded-out little post-farm-economy towns and shitty section-8 apartment buildings along the highway, or humping voter registration forms up and down the ped mall. and the eyeball-popping euphoria of election night, after ohio was called… all indelible memories. but this morning, watching the inaugural festivities on TV, wishing i was there in the capitol freezing my ass off with ben and the gajillions of others who are witnessing this moment firsthand, it’s last january that’s on my mind. it’s cold — ungodly, unmercifully cold — but spring is coming.

happy new year, america! i love you all.

At approximately 9:20 a.m. Mountain Time tomorrow morning, I will be boarding a commercial jetliner bound for Washington’s Dulles airport. My final destination, however, is the eastern end of the Mall in our nation’s capital, which I should be reaching sometime Tuesday morning ceremony ticket in hand.

I’m absolutely certain this rather expensive trip will be memorable — though I’m not wholly convinced those memories will be fond, given the crush of humanity and security I’ll be dealing with while there. I have a pretty full agenda from arrival to departure: staying with a friend (and sort-of-ex-coworker) Sunday night playing Wii; picking up my two “silver” tickets from Sen. Udall’s office; meeting up with old high school, college, and graduate school friends; attending the Netroots Nation “Yes We Can” party; introducing myself in person to a potential, deep-pocketed client; biking across the Potomac to the Jefferson memorial on Tuesday.

Stay tuned to this space to follow my exploits. You may learn whether it’s possible to trade or sell a spare ceremony ticket; you may vicariously experience what it’s like to bike through an urban area swarming with tourists in 15-degree weather; you may see photos of the swearing-in of Barack Hussein Obama taken with my brand-new Nikon 70-300mm VR lens. Or you may discover that I’m far too busy running around Washington to actually post anything.

Wish me luck!

you know what america needs now? more bush!

a shame that hillary’s defeat in the primary ended our twenty-year streak of presidential dynasticism, but we could still bring the american aristocracy back by electing the just-as-evil but possibly-more-competent brother.

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(the “result” numbers here are based on MSNBC’s map.)

on the overall result, i’m astonished to see that i out-pessimisted ben on this one, posting the most conservative and — to my great delight — least accurate electoral prediction of the panel. gray’s cockeyed optimism, meanwhile, turned out to be scary-accurate: he nailed the EV count, assuming these numbers are stable. if we should happen to see NC shift to mccain in the final count, charlie would take over the title of Supreme Handicapper, with mark a close second in either case.

for individual states, the entire panel called PA, VA, CO, NM, GA, AZ & IA correctly. charlie was all alone in picking indiana for obama, as was gray with north carolina. charlie & gray also both nailed ohio, which the rest of us were afraid to believe was winnable (i’m still a little shocked). ben was the only one who ventured a guess on nebraska’s 2nd district, which was correct, though counting continues with a mccain lead of less than 600 votes at last check.

though we all accurately predicted the winner in pennsylvania, we significantly underestimated obama’s margin, and as a group we tended to lowball colorado and new mexico. the spread in nevada was also a big surprise — for me especially; i was way off.