Rogue Columnist

His Waterloo

"If we're able to stop Obama on this (health care), it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." — Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina

You didn't think the best Supreme Court that money can buy was going to let Obamacare go into law, did you? From the questions asked of lawyers and the dismal performance of President Hoover's Solicitor General, it doesn't seem likely. Now the question is not merely whether the court will strike down the individual mandate but also use this as a springboard to go after more, beginning with Medicaid. Roberts, Scalia, Alito and Thomas have waited their careers for this moment. Anthony Kennedy is a Reagan appointee. The Federalist Society and the entire right-wing infrastructure have built themselves for it. Now we will get another lesson in why it has been a calamity to have 30 years of mostly Republican presidents packing the federal judiciary. Activist judges? You ain't seen nothing yet.

The so-called Affordable Care Act has been a trainwreck from the beginning. Mr. Obama didn't make it a centerpiece of his campaign, so he had no mandate to do it. Most Americans don't understand it. Like the Dodd-Frank financial "re-regulation" legislation, it is compromised to appease the plutocrats, in this case the insurance industry. About the only clear benefit I can parse is the prohibition against denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.

Worse, he wasted a precious year on "health care reform" that should have been spent in very obvious and effective measures to save an economy in free fall (and loudly claim credit). To address the worst domestic crisis since the Great Depression and reset the economy for a prosperous, sustainable future. "Never let a crisis go to waste," my ass. Instead, Mr. Obama chose health care. Here his constant template was revealed, alternately passive and ineffective, helped along by a spineless Democratic majority in Congress. The result: The triumph of the Tea Party in the 2010 election shellacking. He would rather be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-termer? Were he not running against Willard Romney, he would be consigned to the Jimmy Carter dustbin — and he might yet be, for the Republican, whose health-care program in Massachusetts became Obamacare, has unlimited money.

Our appetites

A reader has demanded that I write about The Hunger Games. I had never heard of the young-adult novels by Suzanne Collins or the new movie until this. I doubt I will see the film; a few years ago, Hollywood stopped making much that appeals to my "demographic." The old entertainment writer in me will simply say that Jennifer Lawrence, the lead, is a remarkable young actress. Her self-assured, perfect-pitch performance in Winter's Bone makes her one to watch.

Of course this isn't that the reader was asking. He's convinced that America is on the brink of mass starvation brought on by a lack of jobs. Here's the deal: Until Paul Ryan and the GOP Boyz defund them, 15 federal food and nutrition programs, including Food Stamps, are offered to those in dire straits. It would be obscene to compare the plight of Americans, however heartbreaking, with people in the developing world who are genuinely starving to death. That said, the Agriculture Department tracks "food insecurity," defined as "at times during the year, these households were uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food." Nearly 49 million people lived in food-insecure households in 2010, 6.4 million in the most serious circumstances.

A future with lethal, televised gladiatorial games — that I can believe. It wouldn't require the "destruction of North America," only a little slippage in the ratings and a few more miles down the road of national decadence. A situation where the starving unemployed — which is where I think the reader was going — rise up in revolution against the plutocrats and their lackeys in D.C.? Nope.

State of extremism

Arizona may not be competitive in much — cheap housing and hot weather come to mind. But it seems determined to "out-crazy" other states in its rock-ribbed, doubled-down reactionary politics. Almost every day comes a story that speaks to the core concerns of today's right wing. For example, Joe Arpaio, High Sheriff for Life, is "investigating" the "fraud" of President Obama's birth certificate, claiming it is a cover-up "ten times worse than Watergate." Can Arizonans hear America laughing?

Other issues are not so funny. The assassination attempt on Rep, Gabrielle Giffords, inspired by the climate of hate, remains a huge stain. The Legislature long ago went from, let us say, liberalizing the laws affecting firearms to encouraging situations where firearm violence is inevitable. Salon, internationally read, has begun an entire archive devoted to Arizona and the entries are not sunny! Scottsdale! or championship golf! Among the headlines: "How Breitbart and Arizona seized on 'critical race theory' " and  "Arizona's vicious war on workers." The New York Times specifically established a Phoenix bureau to cover Arizona crazy when the anti-immigrant, Jim Crow, voter-suppression SB 1070 debate was emerging. From Daily Kos : "Arizona out-crazies other contraception bills. Use birth control, get fired." Talking Points Memo reports on the violent neo-Nazi groups congregating in the state.

This is not an image problem. It is a reality problem, no matter the many Arizonans who are not crazy or extreme. In a state that already ranks so low on virtually any measure of social or economic well-being, it is a bright red "DO NOT COME HERE" alert, whether to companies deciding where to make quality investments or talented, educated people choosing their home.

Killer nation

The surprise is not that an American soldier walked off his base and murdered 16 Afghan villagers, including nine children, but that it hasn't happened more often, including in the United States. This is what happens when we keep our armed forces at war for an astounding 10 years. No wonder Gen. George Marshall was so eager to finish the Second World War, fearing that a democracy couldn't survive a war that went past five years. And no wonder Americans who now "support the troops" have historically been wary of a standing army and unimpressed by a chest-full of medals.

This is what happens when our wars have no front lines and no conventional armies as enemies. The war is everywhere and nowhere. Combatants are hidden in a civilian population already tired of our occupation, our disrespect for their customs and religion, and willing to supply information to the enemy. Soldiers in these circumstances learn to despise and dehumanize the ungrateful civilians they are supposed to be protecting. Even conventional wars coarsen nations, destroy young people, encourage atrocities.

This happens when Americans have slipped norms of decency, abandoned books in favor of homicidal video games, dress (and act) like adolescents, joined the military because the union blue-collar jobs they once could count on have moved to Asia, and found themselves defrauded and lied to by every institution in our national life. And guns, guns, guns everywhere.

Green shoots in the desert?

Some old timers still blame a December 1988 Barron's article ("Phoenix Descending") for the collapse of the city's real-estate boom. This is fantasy, of course: The market caved in on its own, pulled down by too many hustles, too much overbuilding and the savings and loan scandal driven by local steward Charles H Keating and his pet senators. Now Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones has tried to make amends with a Wall Street Journal story about Phoenix's "nascent real-estate rebound." Indeed, it "holds lessons for the rest of the country." Another fantasy?

The Journal continues:

Phoenix has found a viable formula. Low prices are igniting demand from first-time buyers and investors who are converting the homes to rentals. The local economy is on the upswing with several big employers like Amazon.com Inc. and Intel Corp. hiring again, which is further increasing demand for housing. And the region is benefiting from a surge of buyers from Canada who are using their favorable exchange rate to scoop up bargains in the desert.

Could this be true? Has long-suffering Phoenix "found a bottom" and is beginning a rebound? As Zhou Enlai may have said when asked about the significance of the French Revolution: It is too soon to say. What it means about the metropolitan area's real competitiveness and future is murkier still.

Mesa stirring?

Something is happening in Mesa. Light rail is being extended three miles along Main Street from Sycamore to Mesa Drive, reaching downtown and putting it within walking distance, on a decent day, of the Arizona Temple. A brewery is coming to Main Street. Pioneer Park might get a botanical garden, pushed by a citizens committee that also proposes extending light-rail to Gateway airport. (Building an inspiring city hall would be nice, too). Officials brought in 50 developers to show off potential downtown sites. Council members actually expressed hesitation about some senior housing projects, worried they would get in the way of efforts to attract market-rate, transit-oriented residential development downtown.

The "city with wide streets and narrow minds" is actually attracting higher education: the A.T. Still University branch offers osteopathic medicine, dentistry and health care; Benedictine University is expected to open a campus downtown. This is on top of the downtown branch of Mesa Community College and ASU Polytechnic. When metro Phoenix saw itself in the running for a new Apple campus, which not surprisingly went to Austin instead, it's no secret the company was looking most at Mesa. The Mesa Arts Center has stopped trying to compete with Phoenix and is doing well with, among other things, community festivals.

Could this be Mesa, Arizona? A city more populous than Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Minneapolis, etc. with nothing to show for it? Something seems to have changed.

The asterisk presidency

Now is the time when all good progressives and people with brains are supposed to line up behind President Hoover. After all, where else can we go? The Republican theocrats and plutocrats have made their dangerous irrelevance clear through an endless series of "debates," and Willard Romney still can't close the deal with his own party. Washington Monthly tries to rehabilitate Mr. Obama in an article that contains this paragraph:

Measured in sheer legislative tonnage, what Obama got done in his first two years is stunning. Health care reform. The takeover and turnaround of the auto industry. The biggest economic stimulus in history. Sweeping new regulations of Wall Street. A tough new set of consumer protections on the credit card industry. A vast expansion of national service. Net neutrality. The greatest increase in wilderness protection in fifteen years. A revolutionary reform to student aid. Signing the New START treaty with Russia. The ending of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

And if you missed it, "he shifted counterterrorism strategies to target Osama bin Laden and then ordered the risky raid that killed him." Another Washington Monthly piece lists the president's top 50 accomplishments. Yet each one requires an asterisk.

Phoenix 101: Pinal County

Dorothea Lange captures Coolidge on cotton harvest day, during the Depression.

Pinal County today is known for many things, mostly appalling. It was mauled by the housing crash of the Great Recession, a "bedroom community" to Phoenix with cheap, shoddy tract houses and miserable commutes, the place whose lack of planning or sense of decency allowed subdivisions to profane one of the most glorious mountains in the West. This lack of any respect extends to consenting to a Super Wal-Mart right next to the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument. Pinal boasts one of the ugliest drives in America, on Interstate 10 between Phoenix and Tucson.

And, of course, it was where Paul Babeu was sheriff. Babeu was disgraced, not because of his department's racial profiling, whoppers about beheadings, anti-immigrant hysteria or allegations that Babeu threatened to have his Mexican ex-lover deported. No, this once rising star in the Arizona Republican Party was forced to admit he's gay, torpedoing his hopes of being elected to Congress.

Yet these 5,365 square miles — five times the size of Rhode Island — contain so much Arizona history. Personal history, too: I attended kindergarten in Coolidge. We lived there for a year, for reasons too complicated to deserve a detour, but ultimately coming down to Arizona's fight against California for Colorado River water — what else?

The GOP's last stand?

"The GOP has reason to be scared. Obama’s election was the vindication of a prediction made several years before by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Despite the fact that George W. Bush then occupied the White House, Judis and Teixeira argued that demographic and political trends were converging in such a way as to form a ­natural-majority coalition for Democrats."

So writes Jonathan Chait in New York magazine, as good a barometer of elite progressive opinion as one will find. His article looks at the fear driving the Republican Party this election season, specifically that the nation is getting less white, more diverse and the GOP is betting everything on a "Hail Mary" pass this year to defeat President Obama — or face being on the losing end of a long-term realignment.

Somehow this piece came to be twined in my mind with a recent New York Times article about how illegal immigration has lost its power as an issue in Arizona. It begins, "The angry protests over Arizona’s tough policies focused on illegal immigrants are mostly gone. The sponsor of the state’s touchstone immigration bill has been recalled, while two sheriffs who championed the crackdown are enmeshed in legal difficulties..." So the state's more interested in, say, real-life economic issues. It's also conventional wisdom in the political press that Arizona could be in play come November.

But is any of this real?