Meg Whitman has emerged from her Atherton bunker with a series of appearances around the state designed to begin making her politically relevant again after her madcap spending spree during last year’s California governor’s race was trumped by her thick-headed and ill-advised firing of a long-time but illegal housekeeper mid-stream.  Whitman’s campaign spending topped 162 million dollars, the bulk of which came from her personal fortune, while Jerry Brown, the eventual runaway winner, spent 26 million and didn’t fire a Mexican nanny or drop his pants in any other embarrassing gaffe and thereby won the race by 15 points. 

In an unsurprising move, political novice Whitman has chosen to lend her support to putative republican front runner and fellow milquetoast conservative, Mitt Romney, more evidence of her questionable but orthodox political judgment.   Doing so in a democratic stronghold like California is a little like backing Finland against the Nazis in World War II – admirable on principle but futile as a practical matter.

Naturally she came out with gun blazing, criticizing Obama in the same vaguely disingenuous but familiar way as most republicans, saying, “"This president ran on the platform of bringing people together, meeting in the middle ... and it has not worked out that way at all," she said. "There's a big hunger for new leadership; he has not been a good leader on the economy." 

Of course when the republican leader in the senate has a stated goal in the first days of the new administration of seeing that it fails, it doesn’t bode well for the spirit of cooperation and collaboration needed to actually accomplish anything bi-partisan and “bring people together” and “meet in the middle”.    Inconsistencies like this have never been a hindrance to political speech in the past, of course, and one expects this kind of rhetoric these days when getting something accomplished takes a back seat to winning for its own sake.   And except in rare cases – like Bill Gates and some notable others – billionaire business people seem naturally inclined to ignore the larger social issues of providing a minimum level of existence to everyone in favor of a modified Ayn Rand meets Marie Antoinette political philosophy of pushing those unfortunate enough to be weaker to one side so they can get the good seats in the life boats.   

Which leads to a clearly frustrated Obama – attempting to “meet in the middle” - in front of the microphones yesterday trying to make the case for compromise in raising the debt ceiling – the esoteric emergency that has sadly dominated both parties’ limited attention span lately.  The democrats have suggested that perhaps continued tax breaks for oil companies – the executives for which, in their private moments, do the Scrooge McDuck backstroke through their basement rooms bulging with cash – might be a place where some revenue reform could happen, only to immediately be shouted down by republican mobs screaming, “tax increase, tax increase, tax increase…”.  

Only in the land of the politically ignorant can such posturing pass for intelligent representation.  I saw republican Senator Grassely from Iowa yesterday warning ominously that any attempt to make oil companies share the obscene profits into which they have fallen ass-backwards as a result of the threat that a disruption in oil supplies will cause gas prices to go up at the pump, harming average Americans.  This is, or course, unmitigated bullshit but consumers already wondering where their money has gone are susceptible to this kind of scary fairy tale and so republican corporate apologists persist in telling it, like a campfire story intended to make sure the kids don’t get out of the tent during the night.

Blaming someone in the other party for anything that goes wrong is normal operating procedure so Obama gets blamed for our misery, much like – dare I speak his name – Jimmy Carter was blamed for the economy in 1977. The person who happens to be present when something occurs isn’t necessarily to blame.  Obama is no more to blame for the great recession / economic crisis / financial house of cards than Bush was.  Blaming Bush for 9/11 was also simplistic political horse shit - Bush was a hapless dupe who happened to be the guy reading “My Pet Goat” in the wrong place at the wrong time and, if not for those two monumental events, would have gone down in history like Rutherford B Hayes – on the list but a complete cypher.    

What neither party seems willing to talk about is a very simple calculus; the government IS too big, there IS waste, inefficiency, fraud, graft, corruption, duplication and incompetence – the democrats need to start the conversation with those basic cards on the table.   And the republicans, instead of slashing and burning like Sherman marching to the sea, need to recognize and admit that taxes are necessary, some are better than others, but you can’t start to cut government spending by pillaging the poorest and least able to defend themselves while acting as ersatz lobbyists for the defense department and every single corporate interest willing to send a check.   The middle ground is actually in the middle, and the sooner these knuckleheads figure that out the sooner we can cut out this woebegone pissing match and get something accomplished.