By Nicholas Lemann
I rarely state the title to any article because a sincere reader of the news will move past the attention-getting title quickly to the content. But, the title to this New York Times article is rather compelling and should ring familiar to many liberals in the USA. Today we call it income inequality.
The New American Consensus; Government of, by, and for the Comfortable (click here)
...They huffed and interrupted. Davis made sure to work in a reference to his military service. (Lungren didn't serve.) Lungren made sure to work in a reference to his three children. (Davis is married but childless.) The debate's tonal culmination was Lungren's use of his closing statement to advance a cheerfully out-of-left-field theory about the undetected assonance between the police unions' support of Gray Davis and the notorious incident in which Latrell Sprewell, the basketball player, throttled his coach.
But the larger end to which this fiesta of contempt was directed was the elimination of all meaningful differences between the two candidates. This debate, like the two that had preceded it, conformed to the following structure: Candidate A, with a malicious glint in his eye, accuses Candidate B of taking an unpopular position. Candidate B draws himself up self-righteously and protests that, no, in fact his position is actually almost indistinguishable from Candidate A's. Lungren wants to cut taxes on innovative new businesses. Davis wants to also, in a slightly different way. Lungren is for eliminating the car tax, Davis is for reducing the car tax. Davis supports abortion rights. Lungren insists that during the five terms he served in the House of Representatives, ''we never once voted on denying a woman the right to have an abortion.'' Lungren is for the death penalty. Davis, suspect because he used to be Gov. Jerry Brown's chief of staff, insists, ''I have always believed in the death penalty.'' They are both committed environmentalists. They are both for H.M.O. reform. They are both for establishing tough new standards in public education....
I think the New York Times needs to do this type of compare and contrast at least every two years so Americans have a clear measure of where their government is failing them.
This is ridiculous. In the year 1998, the two parties were understanding the need for a national health policy and the confrontation of the climate crisis.
What the heck happened in the decades that followed? Because we were making the right issues front and center. There was no reason to allow the RADICAL shift to the right with such direly important issues before the country. What happened?
Here is my guess. Terrorists that hated The West, rightly or wrongly, caused an enormous catastrophe in Lower Manhattan and Washington, DC and all of a sudden all the benevolent domestic programs were erased from the consensus through trauma and no one came to address them again until the Global Economic Collapse and President Obama was elected.
This vacillation between the extremist right agenda for the USA and the idea we have a right to health care that is affordable and we need to move past the internal combustion engine and natural gas to a clean energy economy with wind and solar a mainstay.
Vacillation on issues only postpones what needs to be done and today we are imperiling our children and our grandchildren's world.
Enough of this. Get rid of the lousy filibuster and pass some real reform to protect the generations of Americans that have the right to health and safety that this country promises them.
