Welcome back to politics
Did you enjoy your Labor Day weekend? I sure did. And maybe it’s the thousands of clams and clam accoutrements bouncing around in my enormously pleased stomach tonight, but I feel moved to reenter blogging with this simple reminder:
none of what has happened in politics since June matters even a little bit.
It’s a truism in election years that swing voters don’t pay attention to campaigns until after Labor Day. Summer is filled with too many family vacations, beach trips, late-afternoon stick-tossing games with the dog, and (around here anyway) clamboils, for your average non-politically-obsessed citizen to spend much energy on politics. Well, I maintain that the same holds true in off years; for all the rackets at “town halls” and the endless congressional posturing, nothing of political significance has happened this summer.
Think about it this way. The central question of our politics is health care, just like it was in June; most people are still utterly clueless about what Obama’s plan is and what the options are, just like they were in June; Congress is divided between liberals, blue dogs, and intransigent Republicans, with competing bills and no clear message, just like it was in June. Poll ratings for Obama and for health care reform have been slowly dropping, yes, but at about the rate that any political figure or policy loses its artificial post-inauguration popularity and regresses back to the mean. (Look at the trendlines — they don’t jump suddenly, as though the public were responding to events, rather they slide slowly and more-or-less consistently.) About the only real change since June has been that Glenn Beck has found the magic formula to stoke right-wing insanity, which will have about the same impact on real-world health care politics as intense optimism among Kansas City Royals fans will have on the AL standings.
The actual health care debate starts tomorrow. (Or, if you want to be poetic, with the President’s speech Wednesday night.) Now, I don’t mean to ignore the extent to which Democrats have lost momentum in the past couple of months, but that’s an inside-the-beltway matter; the level of public pressure for/against reform, which will ultimately define a significant number of congressional votes, will be much more dependent on the events of the next couple of months than it has been on the past few. So put this politically-miserable summer out of your mind, watch what happens next, and in the meantime — go eat some clams!
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