Paul Krugman Wants To Know If The U.S. Will Turn Into The Next California-- Ask Ben Nelson

The senior senator from Nebraska-- no better than the junior senator

When I retired from the world's most wonderful job (running a record company), I was eager to move out of L.A. I sold my home and bought a wonderful old house outside of New York City. Just when I realized I had made an awful mistake-- and that I loved L.A. and wanted to live there and not back East-- the people who bought my L.A. house called me and said they couldn't complete the sale and that they were terribly sorry but that I should keep the deposit and find a new buyer. I couldn't wait to move back in. I used their deposit to build an indoor swimming pool and rented then sold the house in Pennsylvania. I've thanked my lucky stars every day since.

Last week someone offered me a job as good as the one I retired from. Two caveats: I would have to work (full time) and I would have to locate to the East Coast. I was thrilled with the offer and it took less than a nanosecond to turn it down. Any negative feelings I had about living in Los Angeles disappeared once I removed myself from the entertainment industry. (The closest I come is that I occasionally go see a movie and that I spent the entire last week listening to the new Green Day album, 21st Century Breakdown, and marveling at how they managed to make the best record of their career, and, so far, the best record of 2009.)

While listening to "Viva La Gloria!" this morning, I turned to Paul Krugman's column, State of Paralysis. Not only was it an accurate assessment of the political condition California finds itself in, it ponders if it is the destiny of the U.S. to follow in California's path. Krugman identifies the problem that is keeping the state from pulling itself out of a manmade morass:

For California, where the Republicans began their transformation from the party of Eisenhower to the party of Reagan, is also the place where they began their next transformation, into the party of Rush Limbaugh. As the political tide has turned against California Republicans, the party’s remaining members have become ever more extreme, ever less interested in the actual business of governing.

And while the party’s growing extremism condemns it to seemingly permanent minority status-- Mr. Schwarzenegger was and is sui generis-- the Republican rump retains enough seats in the Legislature to block any responsible action in the face of the fiscal crisis... [T]he political problems that have plagued California for years are now increasingly apparent at a national level.

To be blunt: recent events suggest that the Republican Party has been driven mad by lack of power. The few remaining moderates have been defeated, have fled, or are being driven out. What’s left is a party whose national committee has just passed a resolution solemnly declaring that Democrats are “dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals,” and released a video comparing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Pussy Galore.

And that party still has 40 senators.

The behavior they're exhibiting now-- the doctrinaire extremism and the mindless, lockstep obstructionism-- is hardly new to them. Last time they abandoned governing on this scale and took up this old right-wing playbook was back when Roosevelt was trying to clean up the catastrophe decades of reactionary, corporatist rule had left in its wake. On the eve of the Great Depression-- the 1929 Stick Market Crash-- there were 56 Republicans in the Senate and 35 Democrats. The Republican response to the Depression was to do nothing at all. In 1930 they lost 8 Senate seats, giving them a one-seat majority. It would be their last majority for a very long time. In 1932 the voters tossed the GOP out of power in a big way. The incumbent president, Herbert Hoover, carried six states for a total of 59 electoral votes. FDR too 472 electoral votes. At the same time, the Republicans were swamped in Congress. They lost thirteen more Senate seats. That's when the serious obstructionism set in. They opposed everything Roosevelt tried, including Social Security. Not a single Republican voted for it in the House and only one, George Norris (R-NE), voted for it in the Senate and he quickly quit the GOP as was re-elected as an independent with Democratic backing. By 1934 the GOP was desperate and more radical and fanatic then ever. Obstructionists had taken over the party and they had clearly lost their way entirely. They lost another 10 seats in the Senate, leaving them with 25 radical lunatics screaming about... socialism. They figured the American voters would come to their senses in 1936 but the American voters re-elected Roosevelt and the Republican candidate, Alf Landon not only lost his own state (Kansas, he lost every state but two and wound up with 8 electoral votes. There weren't many more Republican seats to lose, but they managed to eke out defeats in eight more, bringing their seething and frustrated rump of obstruction to a meaningless 17 seats. It wasn't until 1952 that they finally regained a slim (2 seat) majority, which they promptly lost in 1954, holding onto to minority status for another 3 decades.

The conservative cause, for all the years between 1930 and into the 80s, was dependent on right-wing Democrats, first a pack of vicious unreconstructed racists like Strom Thurmond (SC), John Stennis (MS), James Eastland (MS), Lister Hill (AL), John Sparkman (AL), George Smathers (FL), and Herman Talmadge (GA) and more recently reactionary jackasses like Phil Gramm (TX), Zell Miller (GA), Joe Lieberman (CT), Evan Bayh (IN) and today's clown du jour, Ben Nelson, who is getting worse and worse by the day. Yesterday Nelson was on TV threatening to join the ritual Republican filibuster of whomever President Obama nominates to fill the Supreme Court seat, a filibuster meant more to fill depleted Republican Party coffers, rally their base and obstruct governance, than to actually block a nominee. Maybe its time for Senator Nelson to wake up and find out his office has been moved to a fixer-upper over in Anacostia. It's a tragedy that Democratic Party allows a contemptible, self-serving worm like Nelson to stoke his own ego by opposing the entire Democratic Party value system while watering down the president's entire agenda. His participation in the GOP Supreme Court filibuster should come with serious consequences-- but there's no chance whatsoever that that will happen. Here's are 3 of the ads the far right has prepared to poison the atmosphere around the nomination. Ben Nelson should be ashamed. Someone should expalin what shame means to him.