Another Dynasty Bites the Dust

This past Tuesday, U.S. Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III, Democrat of Massachusetts, lost his bid for a U.S. Senate seat in the Bay State to incumbent Democratic Senator Edward Markey in the state's Democratic Senate primary.  His defeat - the first Kennedy defeat in Massachusetts after 26 Kennedy election victories spanning nearly 75 years - has all but ended the lifespan of the greatest political dynasty of the past sixty years. 

Kennedy, who turns 40 in October, sought to get himself a Senate seat largely on the basis of his youth and his pedigree.  But the grandson of Robert Kennedy found out the hard way neither of those things are enough in a Democratic Party less enamored by either - especially in Massachusetts, a state so liberal it makes Democrats in other so-called blue states look like Reaganites.  Markey, 74, is more staunchly progressive than Kennedy, supports Medicare for all, signed on to the Green New Deal, and, like his fellow New Englander Bernie Sanders, has demonstrated that progressives care less about new blood than about old ideas with new life. 

In fact, I would argue that Kennedy's pedigree, like Hillary Clinton's, offended more progressives than it inspired.  Bear in mind that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who collaborated with Markey - who has been in Washington longer than either Kennedy or Ocasio-Cortez has been alive - backed Markey in the Massachusetts Senate race, as did the Bay State's other Democratic U.S. Senator, Elizabeth Warren. I can imagine that AOC, who was working as a bartender just a few years ago, and Warren, the daughter of department store clerks, thought that JPK 3 had a lot damn gall to run or a U.S. Senate seat he seemed to feel entitled to just because of his name.  Because Kennedy, a conventional liberal who prefers not to rock the boat with big ideas, had nothing to offer progressives who knew Markey and trusted him.  I'll come right out and say it; AOC and Liz must think he's a real jerk.  I even know of one progressive who referred to Kennedy as "a putz."  "Putz" is, I believe, Yiddish for a word in the English language that you can't use on American broadcast television.

The funny thing is that Markey was once dismissed as a Kennedy manqué, someone who wanted to emulate the Kennedy mystique.

Joseph Kennedy III made a foolish decision to give up his House seat on what turned out to be a quixotic gamble for a more prestigious Senate seat.  As for his political future, he doesn't have much of one.  He could run for governor against Republican incumbent Charlie Baker - who will be able to go for a third term and probably will - in 2022, but Baker is actually quite popular in the Bay State for a Republican.  Elizabeth Warren's Senate seat, up again in 2024, is also out of the question, as Warren will be 75 in 2024 - one year older than Markey is now - and will likely run again.  2026, when Markey is up again and turns 80?  Hah!  I wish I had a nickel for every U.S. Senator who stayed in office past four score years.  Best for JPK 3 to hope for junior Cabinet position in a potential Biden administration.  

It appears that the storied Kennedy political dynasty is no more, an inevitability in the growing disdain for powerful political families.  That's why Barack Obama, and not Hillary Clinton, was elected President in 2008; after two Bushes and a Clinton, no one wanted to keep the Presidency going back and forth between two families.  That didn't stop the Washington elites from trying to engineer a Bush-Clinton matchup in 2016 between Jeb and Hillary, only to cause voters to rebel and give us Donald J. Trump . . . who is now trying to make plans for his family to hold on to the White House for the next several decades.

Not going to happen. Everyone's sick of dynasties in These States.  And several of our greatest political families have already fallen by the wayside.  No one talks about the political relevance of the Adamses, the Harrisons, or the Roosevelts anymore, and in New Jersey, the Frelinghuysens finally gave up the ghost with Rodney Frelinghuysen's retirement from the House.  

The Kennedy story isn't over just yet, though.  Amy Kennedy, the wife of former Rhode Island congressman Patrick Kennedy (Ted's son), is the Democratic candidate for the House in New Jersey's Second House Distinct.  She may yet win.  But, of course, she's only a Kennedy by marriage.   

Green Raw Deal

Four out of five people in a recent survey expressed support for the Green New Deal environmental/economic program  sponsored by U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and U.S. Senator Edward Markey (D-MA).  Numerous Democratic presidential candidates have also expressed some level of support for it.  Its goals are quite popular.

So why have the Republicans been able to turn it against the Democrats and use it as an issue to ensure a GOP election victory in 2020?

I'll give you a hint: Six-letter word for the program's sponsors, rhymes with "Cupid."

Not since Franklin Roosevelt's original New Deal had there been a more important program proposal in Congress than the Green New Deal, which seeks to encourage the creation of new middle-class jobs and switching to renewable energy while combating a pattern of climate change that has brought heavy snow to Arizona and may bring a severe windstorm to Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  Never has such an important program proposal been so thoroughly botched in its rollout that politicians who should be for it are fleeing it like vampires from a cross.   Ocasio-Cortez and Markey blew a great opportunity to move the debate over the environment and the economy forward and turned the very phrase "Green New Deal" into a punchline.

The trouble started when, as noted earlier on this blog, an early draft of the proposal suggested developing sufficient high-speed passenger rail service to the point where airplanes would no longer be necessary, a condition even high-speed rail advocates know is impossible in America even without having a state out in the middle of the Pacific.  Some Democratic presidential candidates backtracked on their support for the proposal and insisted that they had no problem with air travel - they loved it, in fact.  Left unmentioned was the fact that the airlines want more passenger trains to alleviate congestion in the skies. 

Then there was the provision about working with cattle ranchers to reduce methane emissions in the beef industry, caused by the overpopulation of livestock.  Although this is a serious concern, the emphasis on the cause of methane - the cows themselves - led to talk about "farting cows," which provided more laughs and snickers from the Republicans.  No one who wrote up the Green New Deal was apparently smart enough to deal with the methane issue in ranching in a way that wouldn't produce a surefire set-up for Dennis Miller.

The guts of the proposal place a good deal of planning and regulating in Washington, not in state local governments.  Rather than appearing to be a program designed to encourage an environmentally sustainable economy, the Green New Deal has been cast as a program designed to exert government control over the American people, which jibes nicely with some of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's stands as a Bernie Sanders-type socialist - but not so much with the less extreme liberal pragmatism Americans prefer.

Needless to say, critics have pounced on the Green New Deal, a proposal that has become so disrespected people keep transposing the words in its name ("New Green Deal").  Conservative columnist David Brooks of the New York Times has dismissed it as a centrally-planned economic system that has no chance of working, and Mark Shields - no conservative like his pal David Brooks - called it a classic case of Democratic overreaching.  Others have cited the cost involved in retrofitting existing buildings and infrastructure to make them more environmentally friendly by the Green New Deal's 2030 target date for implementation.  And Senate whip Dick Durbin, the second-most powerful senator of his party, dismissed it with this comment on MSNBC - "At this point, I would be - I can't tell ya, to be honest with you. I've read it, and I've reread it. And I asked Ed Markey what in the - what in the heck is this?"

Durbin is the Senate Democratic, not Republican, whip.

Representative Ocasio-Cortez carries a lot of blame for this foolishness.  She's a freshman congresswoman with no prior experience in government who went to Washington hoping to hit the ground running but ended up hitting the ground - because she forgot to learn the rules of the House first and failed to understand the need for building consensus. And Markey is no genius either, having developed a reputation when he was in the House to rush headlong into something without considering the risks.  In the 1984 elections, Markey encouraged Democrats to campaign on the nuclear freeze issue, a proposal to halt the manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons outright, but he also discouraged them to get into the specifics of the proposal.  "Don't bother with the complicated details," he told them.  "The issue is hot and it's ours."

And, it went nowhere.

I hate to bring up Martin O'Malley again - no, actually, I don't - but when he proposed a similar program in his 2016 presidential campaign, he was more measured and pragmatic about how to support an environmentally friendly economy. For one thing, he proposed that the U.S. economy go completely carbon-free by 2050, a more realistic target date than 2030 (though it still would have made serious inroads by 2030, when climate change is supposed to go full tilt boogie on us), and he presented climate change as a business opportunity rather than a problem only government can solve.  Had O'Malley run for President in 2020 - and dammit, I wish he had - he would have presented a Green New Deal that would have been more politically palatable and more pragmatic than the Green New Deal that's out there now.  He could have sold it.  But without O'Malley's restrained temperament and cool-headed thinking (the sort of qualities you want in a leader), we instead have jokes about banning airplanes and flatulent cows. And we have Mitch McConnell planning a vote on the Green New Deal in the Senate to make Democratic senators running for President choose between voting for it and alienating centrist voters or voting against it and angering their base.

Nice going, Alex and Eddie.

I give up. The planet is dying, we need a strong, workable plan to fight climate change, and Washington Democrats have just poisoned the well of the environmental policy for several election cycles to come with a proposal that was not entirely thought out.  I still support the idea of the Green New Deal - it's "aspirational," we are told - but I no longer have confidence in anyone involved in it.  And to think I believed in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and thought she knew what she was doing. And this is what happens?  And I put her on my beautiful-women picture blog?

Alex, I am as of now withdrawing my marriage proposal.

The Ghost Of Martin O'Malley

You knew I was going to bring Martin O'Malley up again eventually.  Because the more I consider the Democrats running for President in 2020 and the Democrats who may be running, the more I miss him.  I happen to think he made a big mistake by choosing not to run for President in 2020 after he was laughed out of the 2016 campaign with no real chance to make his case.  

So far, I haven't seen a single Democratic presidential candidate who's impressed me, at least not among the announced candidates, and I have one misgiving or another about the prospective candidates who haven't entered the campaign yet.  That includes Beto O'Rourke, whom I call Hamlet-on-the-Rio Grande.  It seems that none of them have the right mix of policies and purpose that I saw in Maryland's former governor.

I do see some of what he advocated in 2016 surfacing among Democratic members of Congress.  The Green New Deal that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) proposed sounds a lot like the economic program O'Malley ran for President on.  Point being, when it comes to promoting an environmentally sustainable economy, Ocasio-Cortez, Markey and others are spreading the word.  O'Malley's word.  And I applaud him for letting others take the credit for an idea he championed when it's an idea that must be discussed and debated.  If no one will listen to O'Malley, they'll bloody well listen to Ocasio-Cortez, one of the biggest rising stars in the Democratic Party. 

But what if no one is listening to your ideas because no one is advocating them?  Just as the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, the only thing worse than an idea that gets mentioned and rejected without discussion is an idea that doesn't get brought up at all, and that's where O'Malley's all-payer health care proposal from 2016 comes in.  I mentioned this plan before; it's a system that sets hospital fees to a global standard by having all third parties pay the same for services, which can increase the power of insurance companies to lower health care costs.  While other countries have used this system successfully, Maryland is the only U.S. state that uses it.  Unfortunately, because it's only used in Maryland, no one running for President - okay, except maybe O'Malley's fellow Marylander and fellow Irish homey John Delaney - is talking about it.  Democratic presidential candidates either champion Medicare for all - which may not work all that well - or tweaking the Affordable Care Act, although I don't know how you tweak a tweak.  All-payer sounds like a good step toward a real single-payer plan, yet there's no one out there to advocate for it. There wasn't even anyone to advocate for it in 2016; O'Malley tried to, but when he attempted  to  bring it up in a CBS Democratic presidential primary debate, moderator John Dickerson cut him off and went to a commercial break; when the commercial break was over, Dickerson moved on to another issue, and O'Malley didn't get much of a chance to bring it up in the two debates that followed before he withdrew as a presidential candidate. 

O'Malley's decision not to run for President in 2020 for what were likely trivial reasons involving his lack of pizzazz and his lack of melanin or a pair of X chromosomes still sticks in my craw, and his voice is sorely missed.  Well, I miss it.  O'Malley has become like Marley's ghost, witnessing debates he can't take part in but might have taken part in, had he chosen to walk among the likes of Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.  But maybe, just maybe, Beto O'Rourke - whom O'Malley has been encouraging to run for President - might be the antidote to those of us suffering from O'Malley withdrawal.  At a rally in his hometown of El Paso in which he corrected Donald Trump's lies about immigration and border security - lies Trump told at his own rally in El Paso that same night - O'Rourke came out as a passionate man of conviction who wants to do right by those who come to this country, and that's precisely the reason O'Malley wants him to run. Stay tuned.  Despite my doubts, Beto may be the one after all.

But if Beto doesn't run for President, I would hope that O'Malley reconsiders and reverses his decision. 

It's Not Easy Being Green

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a woman on a mission.  With a brazen effort to seize the moment and hit the ground running, she unveiled a proposal for a Green New Deal - a Roosevelt-style economic policy that emphasizes the creation of jobs and the implementation of policies to benefit the environment and fight climate change while putting people to work.

Her proposal, which she put out with climate hawk and congressional veteran Edward Markey, the junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, would incentivize the creation of jobs to help the poor, underemployed and unemployed - jobs to expand renewable energy, get the United States on track to depend entirely on a 100% renewable, zero-emission energy grid, encourage the development of electric cars and high-speed passenger rail, and promote sustainable farming.

In other words, Ocasio-Cortez wants America to do what other countries have been doing for quite some time now.

Let's get something straight.  This Green New Deal proposal is not going to become law in this Congress, so long as the Republicans, who still control the Senate and the Presidency, scoff at anything that cuts into the profitable businesses of refining oil and selling SUVs.  Even if there is a Democratic sweep in the 2020 elections, we might still have to deal with moderate Democrats who laugh off the idea of going all-renewable and call it a "green dream" (to cop a phrase from Nancy Pelosi's reaction to the Ocasio-Cortez/Markey proposal).  But it does do something Republicans detest - it gets an issue they don't want to talk about in the public discourse.  Ocasio-Cortez is betting on the Green New Deal  to galvanize progressive, millennial and minority voters to become more politically active and demand change to our insane energy and transportation policies, which gave us electric-power plants belching carbon into the sky and an unsustainable overreliance on cars.  Not to mention the incentivization of mechanized farming based on petrochemical fertilizers.  The idea is to get enough voters riled up to the point where they make Washington pursue a path to a cleaner and greener economy.

Of course, some of these ideas have been around for awhile (*cough cough*, high-speed rail, *cough cough*), and the political realities of the present make the Green New Deal a heavy lift.  But it's not impossible to get it done; it's just difficult.  Here are a few other things that were heavy lifts - health care reform, civil rights legislation, old-age pensions, women's suffrage . . . I could go on.  I won't, because we have to start getting the Green New Deal off the ground.  And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the perfect person to instigate it.  This is not unlike the idea of putting a man on the moon within ten years, which, you'll remember, happened.  Ocasio-Cortez's and Markey's plan happens to envision a ten-year transition to an all-renewable energy grid. And Ocasio-Cortez is firing up voters and inspiring the American people to find their can-do spirit and get this thing done.

With a little luck, we can make this whole damn thing work out. A little push, please.  ;-)