Republican Recalcitrance

As Obama tries to win over the Republicans on his health care reform, it is worth remembering how the votes in Congress fell when Clinton passed the legislation that reversed decades of deficits. Not a single Republican voted for his plan. Gingrich led opposition in the House and Dole in the Senate, where the vote was 50-50 (Gore broke the tie).

Clinton was not, as the Republicans would now want you to believe, forced into deficit reduction by Newt. Advised to lower interest rates, he was instead reducing the deficit in order to win over the Fed (Greenspan could lower short term rates) and bond traders (who could lower long term rates). His strategy worked and helped to stimulate the greatest expansion of the last century.

When Clinton left office, the projection for the surplus through 2015 was $4 trillion. In what now seems almost comical, Greenspan was worried about what would happen when there were no T bills as an investment option. By the time Bush left office, the projection for the same period was a deficit of nearly $4 trillion, a reversal of about $8 trillion (which would fund Obama's health care plan for 80 years - an entire lifetime).

Newt's biggest play for spending reduction was to make drastic cuts to Medicare in the wake of Republicans winning the midterm election in 94. Clinton called his bluff on this, defending health care for the elderly to the point of a government shut down. The result was a rise in the polls for Clinton and a drop for Gingrich and the Republicans.

It is lovely that Obama is inclined towards including the Republicans in the formulation of a health care plan. The lesson from Clinton's presidency,though, may be that the Republicans will simply be an obstructionist party and Obama has to give them a deadline by which they should either come along or stay behind.

Religion and Politics (Alternate Title: The Devil is in the Details)

The thrice-married, at least once affaired, Newt Gingrich announced last Friday, "I am not a citizen of the world. I am a citizen of the United States, because only in the United States does citizeship start with our creator." He also told the group at the "Rediscovering God in America" conference, "The first job we have as Americans is to reach out to everybody in the country who is not yet saved, and to help them understand the spiritual basis of a creator-endowed society."

The general consensus is that Newt is positioning himself to win the vote of the religious right to ready himself for the Republican nomination in 2012. Personally, I think that the press takes the wrong approach in reporting on and questioning this approach.

One can point out that we either allow people to choose a "godless" existence or enforce religious laws, as we did in the early colonies or even more effectively in Medieval Europe or as some Muslim countries do today. We might even have the temerity to point out that as civilizations become more "godless" (as rates of church attendance drop, etc.) rates of teen pregnancy drop, affluence increases, and tolerance means more civil harmony and less violence. But that might just be the wrong approach.

Maybe it's better to heartily agree with Newt and then ask him, So what do we do? Whose God do we align with? Newt has recently converted to Catholicism. Is he wanting us to align with the God who speaks through the pope? How about the Old Testament God who suggests capital punishment for homosexuality and eating shell fish but allows slavery? Or does he suggest that we disband our military, taking seriously John the Baptist's admonition to soldiers to "do harm to no man?" Does he suggest that we not make it as hard to enter heaven as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle by not allowing anyone the spiritual burden of becoming wealthy? Which God and which verses does he recommend we turn into law or, at the least, use as a guide for our laws?

I suspect that once we put the religious right up before a national audience and pinned them down on details of what they mean by bringing the nation closer to God, it would be less appealing to anyone - even those on the religious right. We live in an age when thousands (yes, thousands) of new religious denominations spring up each year because we cannot agree on details, on issues, on what is important and what is trivial.

At this point, I'm genuinely curious about what it looks like to bring this nation back to God. If we were still 90% Catholic or Anglican or Muslim or Jewish, such a statement might almost make sense. But in today's world, it is not the least clear what this means.

I don't know what it would mean to get God back into car design or astronomy or medicine or education or politics. Such a claim makes no sense to me. Perhaps the best way to get beyond this odd desire for divinely-inspired policy is to appoint a panel with a variety of religious leaders and thinkers and have them get back to us with a comprehensive and detailed policy platform. Maybe Newt could be president of that.