Hamburgers and Pickups

The speakers at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, including Donald Trump, took a lot of cheap but effective shots at the Democratic Party, especially the Green New Deal, the individual components of which are actually quite popular but the totality of which is political suicide thanks to the idiotic way it was rolled out.  One speaker framed quite clearly the issue for Americans who may have trouble with the Green New Deal because of its call for regulations on cattle ranching and its call for more fuel-efficient cars.  The Democrats, he said, are trying to take way your hamburgers and pickup trucks.

This claim is as asinine as the Green New Deal's botched roll-out, but, simplified for a mass audience, it has resonance.  No food could be more American than the hamburger (even though it originated in Germany), and no car is more American than the pickup truck, a manly vehicle meant to haul big stuff in a country where everything big matters.  Ford's recent commercial showing a parade of past and current Ford pickups hauling everything imaginable, including, tellingly, a trailer carrying a Bob's Big Boy sign, to the sound of Jerry Reed's 1977 country-and-western classic "East Bound and Down", sums up America better than any rap video from Donald Glover can. 

The Democrats need a rejoinder to Republican scare tactics aimed at the Green New Deal.  The Green New Deal may advocate policies to make beef production more environmentally sustainable but no one is being asked to give up beef, be it hamburgers or sirloin steaks.  And there'll still be pickups for people who need them, and a lot of folks out in the American heartland do need them, as well as carpenters and handymen in the big metropolitan areas on the coasts.  But the Green New Deal recognizes that most urban and suburban car buyers don't need a large truck, and, based on the fact that buying habits and living patterns are affected by government policy, seeks to encourage Americans who'd be better off with something more sensible than a Silverado or an F-150 to buy a smaller car or take more mass transit.

The only problem is, you can't put that explanation on bumper sticker.

As for me, I mostly eat hamburgers made out of poultry meat, and I don't need to tell you again that my car is a Volkswagen Golf - as European as a Ford F-150 is American - so I can adapt to a more environmentally friendly economic policy easily.  But I'm not like most Americans - something I've been reminded of in no uncertain terms - and if the Democrats have any shot of regaining the White House, they have to sell the Green New Deal to its skeptics rather than preach to the converted.  Too bad that is not going to happen.  While the Republicans have a perfectly succinct argument against it - "They're going to take away your hamburgers and pickups!" - the Democrats won't be able to come up with anything nearly as catchy.  Maybe that's because they screwed up the introduction of the Green New Deal so thoroughly, from its cow-fart references to suggestions of an undersea rail line to Hawaii (all graphite and glitter, apparently) to supporting people who don't want to work to the very fact that much of this was first-draft stuff that never should have gotten out, that they're stuck with defending the indefensible.  I'm sure that the Green New Deal's backers think that, with time and tact, they can make their plan in its totality popular with American voters.  Of course, they are flat-out dead wrong.  Because what's true of new vehicles is also true of policy proposals - you only get one chance to launch.   

And the launch of the all-new Chevrolet Silverado (above) has been pretty impressive!

So, Democrats, are you going to prove me wrong and sell the Green New Deal effectively?  Are you gonna do what I say can't be done? 'Cause you've got a long way to go and a short time to get there.  

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.

High-Speed Hijinks - 2019 Edition

When the Green New Deal championed by U.S. House member and hot Democratic property Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mentioned high-speed rail as part of a more environmentally friendly future, I was ecstatic, as it meant that Washington was abuzz with talk of fast trains for the first time in nearly a decade.  Then, on cue, the roof caved in.  Or so it appeared.

A sub-moronic congressional staffer apparently let out a first draft of the Green New Deal that advocates building enough high-speed rail to make air travel in the United States unnecessary, overlooking not just the fact that airliners would still be a preferred transport mode for transcontinental travel but also overlooking the fact that Hawaii - which, last time I checked, is a state - is out in the middle of the Pacific, suggesting the desire to build an ambitious undersea rail line that is the realm of science fiction.  Needless to say, Republicans, who hate passenger trains because it eats into the profitable business of selling cars, pounced and said that this demonstrates what a bunch of twerps high-speed rail advocates are.

But then California's new governor, Gavin Newsom, seemed to have dealt the biggest blow to the hope for high-speed rail in America when he announced that he was scaling back his predecessor Jerry Brown's plan to build a high-speed train line to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles because millions of dollars were spent to get it going and the state isn't one millimeter closer to finishing it than when it started.

California politicians who never wanted a bullet train in the Golden State in the first place - such as U.S. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy - applauded Newsom's announcement.  The project had been wrongheaded from the start. The route chosen bypassed too many cities and towns in between San Francisco and Los Angeles and took a meandering, indirect path so that it would go through the Central Valley and gain gain political support in that region of the state, and the contractors went ahead and started building without securing the entire route, studying the terrain, or making sure the funding was in place.  

It turns out, though, that Newsom's decision does not mean the end of high-speed rail in California.  Newsom still wants to build it, and he first wants to concentrate on connecting Kevin McCarthy's hometown of Bakersfield with Merced - two cow towns in the Central Valley - by way of Fresno, an agricultural center known for its little 5,000-watt radio stations and not much else.  The distance between Bakersfield and Merced is 164 miles - an easily manageable two-hour drive on California State Route 99.  As ludicrous as building such a line sounds, there's a method to Newsom's madness - he wants to get the easiest part of the project done while rethinking and re-configuring the San Francisco-Los Angeles connection by completing an environmental review and seeking new sources of funding.

A Newsom spokesman told a San Francisco news site that the governor hopes to move forward on the link between San Francisco and Los Angeles as "the Central Valley section demonstrates the viability of the broader project" and added that Newsom's comments about the lack of a path for the overall line was meant  merely to convey that "there isn't the funding to do the project from SF to LA under the current funding stream."

I was ready to throw up my hands when Newsom first declared his intention to scale back this rail project and the media made it sound like he was giving up on it completely, and had Newsom not clarified his comments, this blog entry would have turned out differently.  But I can't help but feel the deepest skepticism that high-speed rail will ever take root in These States, just as I've since become skeptical about the Green New Deal and the folks behind it, given the PR disaster that resulted from the aforementioned first-draft statement about getting rid of all air travel (more on my skepticism later).  I've said this once, and I'll say it again: My initial reaction to a policy proposal I'd be inclined to support, like high-speed rail, used to be, "Sounds good, I'm in!"  Now I'm more likely to say in response, "I've heard it all before."

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.  ;-)