WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA?

whenever you are ready to come back.

Whenever a parent dies, and whatever the circumstances, it always comes too soon for those who survive.

Your father always stuck me, across the electronic divide, as a good and decent and gentle and wise man. Perhaps as a country we are back on the path to admire virtue again.

What happened in the last election was the end of 40 years in the electoral wilderness that started with LBJ.

40 years ago,LBJ sacrificed his political career to push through the Civil Rights Act. He knew then that he was losing the south for a generation. There had been that disagreement at the 1948 convention that briefly created the Dixiecrat party, but up until 1968 the Democrats still relied on the old FDR coalition, which required that they look aside from the racism in the south, and accept the votes of yellow dogs for whom Abe Lincoln was still a despised demon lurking outside the bedroom window. There was plenty of Joe the Plumber racism in the north, but it pretty much was trumped by union control, and the south was the reliable block.

What Lyndon Johnson effectively said in 1968 was that, someday, the Democratic party would no longer need to rely on the votes of white racists to govern. The Carter and Clinton administrations, for all that I admire both men, were not the new day because Jimmy and Bill ran as the Democrats most likely to resemble Republicans, both catering to the south in their own way, which may well have been the only way they could have gotten elected.

What Barack Obama has proved is that it is no longer necessary for a Democrat to fear the code words for racism like redistribution and socialism (even though the average voter is clueless that the Republicans have redistributed enough wealth from the middle class to the wealthy since the days of Saint Ronnie to put us back in the days before the Great Depression, and that it was George Bush's administration that nationalized the credit industry, and made it necessary to do so).

Perhaps some time in the future, it will no longer be necessary, at least on the national stage, to kowtow to those who would use the power of the law to punish those citizens who disagree with their religious beliefs, and would force women to bear children they do not want, and would dictate to parents the prayers their children must pray in school. Perhaps, someday, it will no longer be necessary to pretend that corporate profits and executive bonuses are a sacrament delivered from the deity.

One step at a time.

It is time to quit calling it the Bible Belt, that narrow (minded) strip of counties from Oklahoma to South Carolina that voted more Republican this time than 4 years ago. What it is, is the Backward Belt.

That narrow strip of counties is an iceberg that has calved from the mainland of rational thought, and is now slowly (too slowly) melting into the sea. The calls of the marooned will get louder.

Didn't they used to call the course of study "political economics"? And don't they still offer college degrees in political "science"? The fact is, what some of us enjoy calling the dismal science is much more dismal than it is scientific, and never mind that Krugman can communicate ideas better with the efficiency of numbers than most of us could with the entire Oxford dictionary.

As with Hallmark, it is still the thought that counts.

Economics is very much about the art of the possible in the present, and delayed and too often unanticipated consequences in the future. For most of the last century, the social justice movement, the rising tide that has lifted all boats that is at the foundation of the wealth of modern America, has been driven by the out-sized egos of Silverback politicians like FDR and LBJ.

Until unanticipated consequences force me to reconsider, I am going to enjoy the faith that BHO is out-sized not just in ego but in intellect (for all that he is too young to be a full Silverback), and that his election marks the end of the 40 years in the wilderness where LBJ sent us when he sacrificed the remainder of his political career, having secured Medicare, and announced that the party of decency would some day no longer rely on the votes of white southern racists to govern (as did FDR) by hammering through the Civil Rights Act, without which the Obama candidacy would have been unimaginable.

Party politics will someday make theme parks, as do the quaint practices of the good christians of New England who killed the daughters of their neighbors (never their own) to save them from witchcraft.

There will be oscillations about the upward mean, as we try to transition from a late-70's economy whose main engine was lo-mid income consumers going into unpayable debt to buy houses they did not need and pre-landfill consumer goods that Wal-Mart imported from China.

With any luck, Obama or his successors will have us stimulating the economic engine with public monuments like the Interstates that Ike built, and the WPA and CCC sites in my adopted way-red state that are too valuable to share with the rest of you.

Predicting the economic future is not scientific, but for the first time in 40 years, it is not necessarily dismal. It will always be political.

Wake up.

Those who would respond to this ad probably have defective brains, but fine organs.

Why is that a bad thing for the donees?