POOR MR. BOEHNER

POOR MR. BOEHNER

John Boehner is near tears, not because he's worried about his reelection as his seat was bought and paid for years ago and is locked up in his safe. What he is fretting about is being Speaker again. If he found it a thankless job last time, woe to the fellow who bangs the gavel in 2013. Little doubt it'll be a Republican as current projections give them 237 seats to the Dem's 195. What scares him is that the GOP caucus will follow Nancy Reagan's advice again and “Just Say No!”

With Democrats in control in the Senate and Obama back in the White House, it's that “deja vu all over again” thing all over again. But with the Tea Party's tea having grown cold and the 2014 mid-terms just around the corner, Boehner knows two more years of obstruction will cost them the House and give the Democrats two years to pave Hillary's way back home to 1600 Pen. Ave.

What John's trying to figure out is how Republicans can cooperate with Obama without looking like wusses. If he's half smart he will hit on the slogan, ”Country First!” And maybe he can talk one of the Tea Party mouthpieces into shouting, “No representation without taxation!” (Fat chance!) But there is another way his caucus can keep the evil Grover Norquist from having a stroke: Don't vote.

Can you hear him announcing the vote to raise taxes of billionaires? “Ayes, one ninety eight, Nays, two. Not voting, two thirty five.”

There is another thought that keeps popping up in Mr. B's head at night. Let Eric Cantor get his hand on the gavel he's long dreamed of, and then he and fifty or sixty other Republicans can go back to their old jobs as plumbers, roofers, and pimps (i.e lobbyists) come the mid-term election and old Johnny B can keep his seat.

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WHAT I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS

THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

Under the Christmas tree in the White House there is a gift box from the Republican National Committee, but there's nothing in it. The gift won't come for weeks, maybe not until Super Tuesday, or the GOP convention. But eventually Obama will opening it to find who the GOP nominee is, and what he finds will be just what he asked Santa for. Meanwhile, back at the campaign headquarters in Chicago, the staff is packing goodies into three boxes. One is labeled Romney, one Gingrich, and one just has a black “? “

These days the polls are looking good for Obama in 2012. In them, he's ahead of Romney or even with him, he easily tops all the others, and the campaign hasn't started. And there is the possibility that multi-billionarie New York Mayor Bloomberg will toss his fedora in the race as a third parry canaidate, which would be a fatal blow to the GOP.. But none of this has stopped the professional whiners from attacking Obama for not giving them what they wanted in their Christmas' stockings.

The latest of these prompted me to cancel my subscription to Harper's magazine. The publisher of that once-responsible magazine, John MacArthur, recently wrote that Obama should not be reelected because he has “lost his moral authority.” It strikes me that anyone who says that has lost his, and his common sense too. Obama got bin Laden, ended Bush's Iraq war, got his health care bill passed, has cut taxes on the poor and middle class, killed “Don't Ask,Don't Tell,” and has restored true “family values” to the White House.

But the MacArthurs of the country, few as there are, will have zero affect on the 2012 vote. Before November of next year it will be Obama versus one man, and whoever that is his campaign is ready to launch block buster campaigns against him. (And it will be a Him now that Backmann has turned to dust.) There will be a southern campaign that reminds Evangelicals of Governor Romney's support of gay marriage and a woman's right to choose; a mid-west campaign that focuses on Romney's record as a jobs killer when he ran Bain, a company that is still paying him; and an east and west coast campaign that focuses on the recently “born again” Tea Party reactionary. All of those Romenys will loose and a truly moral man, who has read the Constitution, will be reelected.

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FAST FORWARD?

Less than a month to the 2016 election and it's all over but the vote counting. Of course it already was the day the Democrats wound up their convention in Phoenix The nomination of Hilary Clinton and Julian Castro cinched the election and the GOP seemed almost to accept the fact. Their once vaunted SuperPacs were now called SuckerPacs, and they had a devil of a time finding

any suckers. By mid-September all the polls agreed that the Clinton-Castro ticket had won and the Republican party was in debt for more than a million dollars. .

When the history of the 2016 election is written, the account of President Obama's speech nominating Hilary Clinton may well be the lead paragraph, and the video of President Bill Clinton's tears will be remembered by everyone who saw it. But those histories will quickly move from the Democrat's victory to analysis of the final days of the Republican party.

Political junkie Leland Nichols (who voted for Harry Truman in 1948!) has written that the death kneel of the Republican party was sounded when they adopted what was then called “the southern strategy.” He argues that had they taken a hard look at the nation's demographics they would have taken Horace Greely's advice and gone west, “A party that depended on southern white Evangelical men was bound to starve to death,” he's written. “As the number of Hispanics and non-believers exploded, the fate of the GOP was sealed.”

What Nichols and other junkies now fear is that the currently unified Democratic party will again split as it did in the George McGovern era. As fears of terrorism subside and the economy maintains its up swing, the zealots on the far left will rise up again and split the party. However it seem clear that that will not happen during the Clinton-Castro years. Nichols ended his blog post by saying he was glad he wouldn't be around for the 2024 election.

RADICAL IDEAS

GETTING TO KNOW OBAMA

I knew Saul Alinsky, and – to paraphrase Senator Bentson – Obama is a Saul Alinsky. He spoke at UCLA back in the early fifties and afterward six of us had coffee with him at the cafe across the street from the movie theater in Westwood. One of us, I've forgotten who, asked Alinsky what he could do to make America a better country. The author of Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals said there were only three things; vote, organize, and peacefully assemble to petition the government. That was how to make radical change.

Alinsky is most famous for his work, called the Back of the Yards movement, to improve the terrible conditions under which Blacks were forced to work at Chicago's infamous stock yards. But the trip that brought him to UCLA was supposed to take him to Oakland where he would try to help the growing Black population. The idea that he might be successful so frightened the city that the Council voted to ban him from entering the city – for life.

Obama, like Alinsky, suffered from prejudice. He because of his color, Alinsky because he was a Jew at a time when Antisemitism was more common than a cold, and far more deadly. Obama believes, as Alinsky did, that the people truly have the power, but often must wrestle it from the clenched fist of corporations and entrenched politicians. In his State of the Union speech, Obama called on Americans to wrestle control from Big Oil, corrupt banks, the filthy rich, and from a paralyzed Senate and the House divided against itself, and against America.

The morning-after blogs, paid pundits,”liberal” whiners, and rabble rousing Republicans all found little but fault with President Obama's State of the Union speech, but Saul Alinsky would be one damned proud man as he listened to the radical call to action.

BACK TO COLLEGE

IT'S THE NUMBERS, STUPID!

There is all but universal agreement among pundits that 2012 will be another year in which, “It's the economy, stupid!” But recent polls predict the likely Electoral College vote – the only one that counts (as Al Gore discovered) – give Obama 242 votes from “safe” blue states, so he's only 28 short of the 270 he needs to win. So it's time to start yelling, 'It's the numbers, stupid! These polls also have him picking up the swing states of Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, and Ohio, which add a total of 40 more for a total of 282, 12 more than are needed to give the family dog, Bo, another four years to run around the rose garden. Team Obama also has a good chance of picking up Colorado and Virginia which would have his daughters chanting, “Three-oh-four, three-oh-four, three-oh-four!” Or maybe, “Three-oh-four more years!”

Then, of course, the question of who he'll run against adds an important factor. Most of the polls cited above were based on the assumption Romney would be the (un)lucky winner of the GOP slug fest, but were it to actually be Gingrich, Obama would garner another ten to twenty votes. And the more damage Newt does to Mitt (and Mitt does to himself,) the more it adds to Obama's total. I ought to abide by the dictum “It's too early to predict the outcome!” but a Republican victory in the Electoral College does seem neigh on to impossible.

That conclusion must, of course, be whispered in closed rooms (or sung in the shower,) since it could lead some to decide their votes aren't needed. But as Al Gore and Tom Dewey learned painfully, every one does. One thing Obama could do to snatch many of Ron Paul's young supporters to his side would be to dramatically reduce the Fed's war on marijuana. He doesn't have to inhale, just get the DEA to hold its breath.

WINNER TAKES WHAT?

TOO MUCH or TOO LITTLE?

GOP voters face odd choices. Does Romney have too much money or pay too little tax? Does Newt have too little morality or too many wives? One would think the debate would be about the economy, the threat from Iran, or how to power our country, but those issues are being flushed down the debate toilet. Call Roto-Rooter!

All the wannbes are yelling that Obama is the problem, but he has only one wife and he's paid the IRS what he owes. If the contest between their candidate and Obama ever turns to issues that actually matter, Obama will have a very easy ride back to sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue. If you doubt that, read once-conservative Andrew Sullivan's article in Newsweek. Following Allan Lichtman's list of the thirteen keys to the White House, (Red his book!) he ticks off President Obama's truly amazing first term successes As Wordsworth put it, “:The world is too much with us, looking back.” What Americans want to know is what's 2012, 2013, 2015 going to be like?

Now that the Newt has beaten the Mitt in South Carolina the old guard of the GOP is looking forward to Tampa as if they already knew another Katrina was going to hit it. There are even whispers, in closed rooms of course, of a brokered convention. That is to say, one where primary and caucus votes are ignored and the masters of the party pick a candidate. Jeb Bush? No, not another Bush. Chris Christie? No, he's too fat. Tim Pawlenty? No, he's got pawlenty of nothin'. Meanwhile Obama's team is sitting around giggling.

I've covered four national conventions and until now I haven't been sorry to miss the more recent ones, but I sure would like to go to Tampa to watch the GOP tamp down Mitt and Newt as they search for somebody who isn't too rich, hadn't paid too little tax, who wasn't a multi-wived philander who took millions from the mortgage giant, and, just maybe, could beat Obama. The smoke in those smoked filled room will have to be weed ti they're going to hallucinate a win in 2012.

PLAY BALL!

VOICES FROM THE RIGHT

The battle for the Republican presidential nomination often triggers memories of lines from the opening of Longfellow's classic Evangeline: “The deep voice neighboring ocean speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.” Or Shakespeare's lines: “Full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.” They talk and talk but I don't learn much.

As much as Romney tries to maintain his performance as a patient teacher confronting of a bunch of ill behaved loud children, he comes across more as the crossing guard holding a Stop sign as the students run back and forth across the street yelling insults at him. Soon, I've no doubt, the class will come to order and proceed to the playground where the game of kick ball will be played. .The final score of that game will be determined by voters who will be forced to chose between Washington and Wall Street. It is, at present, unclear whether Americans dislike Robber Barrons or “bureaucrats” more, and whom the poor, unemployed, and underpaid will blame for the sorry state of the economy. The GOP shouts that the mob should just go get a job, but to paraphrase Patrick Henry, they may cry jobs, jobs, but there are no jobs. .

And, of course, there lurks the ugly possibility that before November 6 events may conspire to make threats to our national security the overriding issue. The Obama campaign is surely not hoping our enemies will attack, but if they were to, the crossing guard better run for cover as his party is no longer viewed as the stronger defender of our freedom. For now, however, Obama's crew in Chicago is undoubtedly planning a campaign that will focus on the sins of Wall Street and Romney's admission that he pays a lower tax rate than the school janitor, or the maids that clean his many houses, makes him vulnerable and it's not clear how he can kick that ball back at the other team.