Watching CPAC is never great fun for progressives. It wasn’t last year, when Rush Limbaugh made his now notorious call for President Obama to fail; and it wasn’t again this year, when Marco Rubio brought the conference to its feet with his denunciation of the direction of White House policy.

The Obama administration, he told delegates in his keynote address, “is using this downturn as cover, not to fix America but to try and change America, to fundamentally redefine the role of government in our lives….They are asking us to abandon the very things that separate us as a nation from the others…And so now, we must decide, do we want to continue to be exceptional, or do we want to be like everyone else? It is a clear choice between two very different futures.”

The future that Marco Rubio wants is one full of social mobility and entrepreneurial spirit: America as the “one place”, as he put it, “where the individual is more important than the state…. where people with a better idea and a strong work ethic can put rich people out of business in the competition of the marketplace.” READ FULL POST

Michele Obama’s initiative on child obesity is to be welcomed as long overdue. Like so much of what emerges from this White House, however, the intention is laudable but the impact will be small. Mobilizing the great and the good to improve the labeling on processed food, to redesign physical education programs, and to get more fruit onto the school dinner menu, are all worthy endeavors. However, they just scrape the surface of a problem which is embedded in the very core of our economy and therefore in the way that most of us are currently obliged to live our lives. Individuals cannot easily be healthy in an economy and a society that is not.

We need to start with individual diets and exercise regimens, but if we want real progress on health we certainly must not stop there.

We should start there, of course. As Americans we are becoming obese: obese at an ever earlier age and obese at a growing rate.  In June 2009 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the direct medical costs of obesity now total $147 billion a year, 9% of all American medical costs. (You can add to that $116 billion to treat diabetes and billions more to treat the cardiovascular and cancer conditions linked to the Western diet.) American fast food not only feeds us fast. It also kills us fast.[1] There are serious life-style issues in play behind the health debate. There are serious issues about agribusiness, about farm subsidies, and about the dangers of industrial food production. There are serious moral hazard issues for all of us to face. We need to ask ourselves some very basic questions that so far many of us have ducked, to our very serious cost. Are we breeding a generation of ever greedier eaters; or are we (and they) the victims of a food industry determined to supersize their profits by supersizing us? Possibly the answer is a little of both, since corporate America creates markets as well as responds to them. But either way, we certainly need to get back to smaller portions – and to get back to healthy eating as a matter of urgency – and food labeling alone will not take us on that journey. READ FULL POST

When judging the Obama administration, both now and in 2012, there is (and will be) some virtue in remembering that progressive governments, both here and abroad, are always in some sense a disappointment to their more committed supporters. One trick for mental health is to remember how much better they are, even as they disappoint us, than their conservative alternative would be. The other is to work diligently to make sure that they don’t disappoint too much.

Why do they always disappoint?

They disappoint partly because on entering office they always inherit a poison chalice. They always come into power facing great problems that are tough to solve. That is why they are elected.  Normally, voters turn to them in sufficient numbers only when their conservative opponents have been thoroughly discredited by the failure to do the same thing. But the electoral coalition that progressive parties mobilize in the pursuit of office, and the governing coalition they are obliged to use when in office, are never quite of the same order. The electoral coalition they mobilize is invariably made up of outsiders – the powerless, the people, the ones requiring change. But when elected, progressive administrations have to govern through existing centers of power. They become insiders. They have to work with privileged elites embedded in the system whose problems brought them to power in the first place. Conservative administrations rarely have problems governing as insiders. Progressive administrations invariably do. READ FULL POST