Today the Worcester T & G carried Clive McFarlane’s column, Reversing Course To Disaster.

The only significant disagreement that I have with the column is his closing paragraph:

If this reversing of course is what the Republicans plan to do for the next two years, the president can only hope that the country in two years speaks the way Massachusetts voters spoke in this midterm election — that they may be afraid of the present and concerned about the future, but they are not stupid.

My response tried to show that stupidity on the part of the electorate is not the issue. The issue is the idea that the only thing President Obama can do is to hope for a sudden awakening.  Here is what I wrote:

The President said that the Republicans have been politicking for the last two years while he has been trying to govern.

For Barack Obama, that shows an unusually bad understanding of something so basic.

What the Republicans know that Obama doesn’t seem to grasp is that part of the job of governing is to get the electorate to be enthusiastic about your governing agenda.  Not only do you have to get them there, you have to keep them there.

For two years the Republicans have been aggressively selling their point of view, while Obama quietly went about his business.  With his lack of salesmanship, the following that he established in 2008 started slipping away.

For the majority of citizens who do not follow politics closely, the only message they get is the one that is most loudly thrust upon them.  If the message is one sided, you cannot blame them for succumbing to it.

I used to blame the media for not providing the balance.  All they seem to do is report what the various sides say.  Now I realize that the Republicans have figured out how to play in that environment while the Democrats have not.  So the blame really does have to fall on the Democrats for not knowing how the political world works.

If you want the media to represent your side of the issues, you have to say something about your side so that the media has something to report.  If you don’t say it, the media aren’t going to dig it up and feature it all by themselves.

Oh sure, the media might run the occasional story to set the record straight.  However the opposition is out there on a daily if not hourly basis trying to tilt the record in their favor.

This reversal in fortune shows how tenuous political accomplishments can be if you don’t foster enthusiastic backing from the electorate for the programs you put in place.

The article I found on Yahoo! Finance, Financial Improprieties Abound as Stocks Rally, is dated November 04,2010. After you see the quotes below, you might understand why I have told you that the article is a current one.

It seems like survival of the fittest like forces have turned a government of, by and for the people into a government of, for and by special interest groups.

As stocks quickly tumbled to Dow 7,500, the government became desperate. Real estate related losses were piling up; investors lost confidence in the financial system and drove Washington Mutual out of business.

The problem was too big to fix, so the administration forced the Financial Accounting Standards Board to change rule 157. Obviously, the fix is only topical. If it wasn’t, why would Fannie and Freddie need an additional $215 billion in aid?

The ‘new and improved’ rule 157 allowed Banksters to value assets at what they might be worth in the future. If bank A purchased a portfolio of real estate (NYSEArca: IYR – News) for $10 million in 2006 and lost $6 million because the assets turned toxic, bank A is allowed to value the portfolio just below $10 million. The very real loss is not included in the current earnings numbers.

The real question is whether you can trust reported earnings? If Berkshire, along with most banks and financial conglomerates, has the legal right to fudge their earnings we may rightly wonder who else is employing this convenient accounting trick? Some would call them stupid if they didn’t.

To emphasize, Citigroup reducing its bad loan reserves would be like an insurance company reducing its natural disaster fund right before hurricane season.

Five days before the election.Rachel Maddow had a commentary on the prospects for compromise between Republicans and Democrats.

I did not post it then because it made me too angry to think straight.  I got angry not because she was wrong, but because she was right.  I got angry not because she had divined the hidden meaning in what Republican politicians were saying, but because she put together a montage of the obvious.  She made it even more painful by adding to the montage the words of various Democrats that showed how deep into denial they were.

I have seen a few headlines about what she is saying today, but that may be even more painful to watch.

Thinking about these items and comparing them to what Obama had to say in his press conference shows that the denial did not end election night.

The question now should be what will it take for the Democratic politicians to wake up?

I have relented and started looking at her comments tonight.

I stumbled across “Bill Moyers speech at Boston University on October 29, 2010, as a part of the Howard Zinn Lecture Series.”

Just to give you a flavor, here is one revelation he made:

On another site –“thinkprogress.com” [thinkprogress.org – ssg] – you can find out how the multibillionaire Koch brothers – also big oil polluters and Tea Party supporters – are recruiting “captains of industry” to fund the right-wing infrastructure of front groups, political campaigns, think tanks and media outlets. Now, hold on to your seats, because this can blow away the faint-hearted: Among the right-wing luminaries who showed up among Koch’s ‘secretive network of Republican donors’ were two Supreme Court Justices: Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. That’s right: 2 of the 5 votes to enable the final corporate takeover of government came from justices who were present as members of the plutocracy hatched their schemes for doing so.

I have seen a lot of the TV shows and writings of Bill Moyers over the years, but this may be the most hard hitting thing I have seen from him.

If you suffer from high-blood pressure, don’t read the rest of his speech. I don’t want to be blamed for anyone’s stroke. Instead, you might want to view the shortened version from his last TV broadcast in the clip below.

I realize now that I did not make this post at all clear as to the extent of the ground that Bill Moyers covered in his speech. The part of about Scalia, Thomas, and the Koch brothers was but a teeny part of it.

The essence of the speech was more about how the age of the Robber Barons is returning and how far this is from what the founders of this country had wanted.

In his column in The New York Times, Mugged by the Moralizers, Paul Krugman gives the usual explanation for increased government spending during a recession.

The key thing to bear in mind is that for the world as a whole, spending equals income. If one group of people — those with excessive debts — is forced to cut spending to pay down its debts, one of two things must happen: either someone else must spend more, or world income will fall.

Yet those parts of the private sector not burdened by high levels of debt see little reason to increase spending. Corporations are flush with cash — but why expand when so much of the capacity they already have is sitting idle? Consumers who didn’t overborrow can get loans at low rates — but that incentive to spend is more than outweighed by worries about a weak job market. Nobody in the private sector is willing to fill the hole created by the debt overhang.

So what should we be doing? First, governments should be spending while the private sector won’t, so that debtors can pay down their debts without perpetuating a global slump. Second, governments should be promoting widespread debt relief: reducing obligations to levels the debtors can handle is the fastest way to eliminate that debt overhang.

He further goes on to mention the President’s failing:

John Boehner, the House minority leader, was widely mocked last year when he declared that “It’s time for government to tighten their belts” — in the face of depressed private spending, the government should spend more, not less. But since then President Obama has repeatedly used the same metaphor, promising to match private belt-tightening with public belt-tightening. Does he lack the courage to challenge popular misconceptions, or is this just intellectual laziness? Either way, if the president won’t defend the logic of his own policies, who will?

Perhaps it is time to look for better explanations if this one seems to fall on deaf ears.

Of course my explanation probably won’t fare much better.

The American Society of Civil Engineers in its 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure estimates that we need to spend $2.2 trillion dollars over the next 5 years repairing our infrastructure just to prevent it from failing.  If we know we need to spend this money at some point in the future, when would be the best time to spend it? I claim that now is the best time.  When private spending is underperforming, there is no better time for public spending.  There is little competition for the borrowing capacity.  The infrastructure use is at the lowest ebb that it is going to be (not that it is low, but relatively it is).  There is idle labor, equipment, and raw materials, so construction prices are low. There is little risk of inflation because there is so much idle capacity in the system

It is much better to do the work now than wait until the economy booms.  Borrowing will be expensive then as the private sector is competing for loans as they are borrowing to increase capacity.  Workers will be scarce and therefore expensive.  Raw materials will be costlier. Adding government spending to private spending at that time will stoke the fires of inflation.

Why would we pass up such a golden opportunity to do work that we know has to get done?

This video and accompanying text is on the Whitehouse Web site

I see that the President is still struggling to learn what I was saying in my previous post, Explain! Explain! Explain!. I hope he gets it soon. If you have to get fewer specific programs accomplished, but you have more of the people with you on the ones you do accomplish, then I think that is an excellent political trade-off. The President may actually have to try to do less, but explain more.

In my previous post Interview of Klaus Schwab, Chairman, World Economic Forum, I said that Schwab’s last sentence finally convinced me that he got it. I didn’t post it then, but that last sentence was:

I would say political leadership today is very much an educational job

This came in response to Charlie Rose’s lead in:

The best leadership I know has the capacity to level and have a conversation with those people it wants to lead. The ability to take complex issues so that the vast majority of people can understand what’s at stake for them and what’s the challenge for them as participants in the process

Before he got to his very last sentence, Klaus Schwab replied to Charlie Rose:

I fully agree. I think we have now a tendency where politicians have a tendency to simplify the issues instead of being straight forward.

We have to get the message to President Obama, the entire executive branch, and all the Democratic office holders, their staffs, and their volunteers.

Every program you want to promote has to be explained to the voters relentlessly.  You have to explain what you want to do and why it is the best thing to do.

The opposition is taking pot shots at your efforts every moment of the day.  President Obama once said that while the Republicans were politicking he was governing.  That is a very mistaken notion.  An essential part of governing is getting the people on board and supportive of what you are trying to do.  You must explain every chance you get.  Then you have to make chances to explain to make up for the people trying to keep you quiet.

Every time someone says that you are doing the wrong thing, you must explain why what you are doing is the right thing.  You do not have to say a word about the person doing the detracting.  Just stick to the positive message about why what you are doing is the right thing.

You do not have to say nasty things about the opposition.  To do so is counterproductive. If the opposition has a crazy idea, it is counterproductive to call it out as a crazy idea.  Just explain again why the right idea is the one that will work.  If the opposition’s idea is obviously crazy, then let its craziness work against it.  Your explanation of why your way is the workable way will expose the opposite idea as the one that will fail to work.

When I was managing the development of software, I tried very hard to make sure all the features we created were well documented for our users.  I used to tell everyone in the group, if you create a feature and don’t document it, it’s as if you never created the feature.  There  shouldn’t be any pride in an accomplishment of a new feature  if the customer is not aware and thus not able to use that feature.

In politics the parallel is that any initiative you work on and even get enacted is useless if you don’t have a lot of support among the voters.  The only way to get that support is to explain and then explain again.  Remember, your explanation has a very short lifetime, becuase the opposition is working to undercut you.

Explain, and explain again, until you run out of words.  Then take a deep breath and explain some more.  Until the public is able to make the explanation themselves while they are sleeping, you have not explained enough.

Another good thing comes out of the explain, explain, explain mentality.  If you do explain, but fail to convince, then you don’t understand what you are trying to do well enough to communicate it.  You need to keep refining what you are trying to do and the message that explains it until most people get it.

As a manager of software development, it was a fair amount of work to get everyone on the documentation band wagon.  The next step was to get the team doing what I really promoted (and practiced).  Write the documentation first. If the eventual user doesn’t really understand what they are going to get, how are they going to tell you if it is what they really want?  Any number of times, I have made significant changes and improvements to what I was planning to do because of what I learned from trying to explain it to prospective customers.

Can it be that Republicans can only attribute to others the evil motives that the Republicans have themselves? In psychiatry, I think they call that projection.

From Dr. Sanity:

Projection – attributing one’s own unacknowledged feelings to others; includes severe prejudice, severe jealousy, hypervigilance to external danger, and “injustice collecting”. (EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE , EXAMPLE (remember that projection is a primitive form of paranoia, so it is common in today’s world)

See the clip on Comedy Central