Funneling taxpayers' money to Wall Street, AHIP, PhRMA, AHA; now SS on chopping block

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) lavished praise on President Barack Obama’s education policies on Thursday, telling ABC News that the Democrat who succeeded his brother in the White House has broken from the teachers’ unions and should be applauded by conservatives.

“The fact of the matter is, the guy is on the right track, and his (Education) Secretary is as well,” said Bush.

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Shortly after Obama took office, Bush told the Wall Street Journal that the new president should break with an interest group allied with the Democratic Party.

“I hope it’s the teachers’ union,” said Bush.

Since Bush made those comments, union officials have alternately criticized and praised the new president’s education policies.

"It looks like the only strategies they have are charter schools and measurement," Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told the Washington Post last month. "That's Bush III."

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The sticky issue of ethanol is driving a wedge between two of Obama’s cabinet secretaries, and it’s about to come to a head.

In the next couple of weeks, the administration needs to decide whether it will support legislation that would encourage automakers to produce more cars that run on the biofuel. Deciding where the administration stands on this already contentious issue is even more challenging because there’s significant disagreement within the cabinet.

On one side is Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who has been a long-time opponent to the corn-based gas. When asked about his favorite “blue-sky technology” in a Newsweek interview released today, Chu listed “a new generation of biofuels that are direct substitutes for gasoline—so, better than ethanol—using agricultural waste: weed straw, rice straw, corncobs, wood surplus.” Ouch.

That puts him at odds with USDA Sec. Tom Vilsack, an Iowan and fervent ethanol supporter, and with the American Coalition for Ethanol, a powerful lobby and strong Obama backer.

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I recall a remark made by Studs Terkel in 1980, about the liberal Republican John Anderson, who was running as an independent against Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter: “People are so tired of dealing with two-foot midgets, you give them someone two foot four and they start proclaiming him a giant.” In the unstinting and unanimous adulation of Barack Obama today, one wonders if a similar dynamic might be at work. If so, his is less a midgetry of character than one dictated by changing context. Gone are the days when, as in the 1970s, the U.S. Senate could comfortably house such men as Fred Harris (from Oklahoma, of all places), who called for the breakup of the oil, steel, and auto industries; as Wisconsin’s William Proxmire, who replaced Joe McCarthy in 1957 and survived into the 1980s, a crusader against big banks who neither spent nor raised campaign money; as South Dakota’s George McGovern, who favored huge cuts in defense spending and a guaranteed income for all Americans; as Frank Church of Idaho, who led important investigations into CIA and FBI abuses.

Today, money has all but wrung such dissent from the Senate. Campaigns have grown increasingly costly; in 2004 it took an average of more than $7 million to run for a Senate seat. As Carl Wagner, a Democratic political strategist who first came to Washington in 1970, remarked to me, the Senate today is a fundamentally different institution than it was then. “Senators were creatures of their states and reflected the cultures of their states,” he said. “Today they are creatures of the people who pay for their multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns. Representative democracy has largely been taken off the table. It’s reminiscent of the 1880s and 1890s, when senators were chosen by state legislatures who were owned by the railroads and the banks.” Accordingly, as corporate money has grown increasingly important to candidates, we have seen the rise of the smothering K Street culture and the revolving door that feeds it—not just lobbyists themselves but an entire interconnected world of campaign consultants, public-relations agencies, pollsters, and media strategists.

All of this has forged a political culture that is intrinsically hostile to reform. On condition of anonymity, one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a “player.” The lobbyist added: “What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?”