So, yeah. Remember last July when Senator Jim DeMint declared that Republican’s would make health care “Obama’s Waterloo?” How’s your French, Jim? There were two great generals in that battle. I guess Obama gets to be Wellington.

But seriously, this blog has been saying for more than a year that the GOP was playing a dangerous game by betting the farm on absolute opposition to all Democratic initiatives. And now where are they?

Republican David Frum hits the nail on the head:

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Funny how circumstances can change, innit? American’s are now going to have eight months to decide for themselves how they like the reality of health care reform as law, as opposed to the spectre of Obamacare socialist fantasy. They’ll find that the red flag does not fly above the United States and that freedom has not evaporated.

Instead they may just decide that they have an expanded view of freedom; freedom from needless pain and suffering; freedom from the hideous choice between food and medicine; freedom from the fear and shame of debt and bankruptcy.

Millions will come to grips with the fact that this is what change looks like. It looks pretty much like the day before except perhaps just a bit brighter.

The sun will rise on a November morning eight months from now and millions of Americans will then cast their votes based on the realities of what has been done this week, not the fears. They will have had time to reflect on what political courage means and what it’s worth both as a matter for the pocketbook and the history books.

And history will write, not one single Republican voted for it. And if yesterday was Waterloo, might November look like Cannae?

This was a strong speech. There were some real clunkers of course, the spending freeze most notably. No one, including Candidate Obama, believes that is a serious debt reducing measure. But overall, especially at the beginning and end it was very powerful, classic Obama. It will leave little doubt among anyone inclined to give the President any benefit of the doubt that he is sincere and dedicated to accomplishing the goals he sets out. But the larger question is, as one pundit put it, “Do you think speeches can change things?”

The answer is, they can help. They can give a boost of impetus. But that has to be followed up with some strong force if one is going to move the huge mass of cynicism and fecklessness that is the US Congress. So the question that I and many who want the President to succeed will be asking ourselves is: what is he willing to do to provide that necessary force? To date, Obama has been what many of us knew him to be all along: a smart, moderate politician. But now, with the forces of cynicism and self-interest so entrenched, we need him to be the idealistic master of political jujitsu that we saw in the campaign.

I fear that we are at a tipping point in our public lives in this country. That public trust in the ability of our elected officials has eroded to the point where the legitimacy of the government is increasingly called into question. If there is to be meaningful change, then the time is now. Comes the hour, comes the man. I just hope President Obama, can be the man Americans want him to be.

Aporopos of that last sentiment. Here is Andrew Sullivan yesterday:

“[W]hen the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. … The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and Johnadams scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society,” – John Adams, as cited by Jim Sleeper.

My foreboding sense is that America may have already passed the point of no return in terms of civil, constitutional governance.

I’ve been working over recently the idea that our institutions inability to deal with our problems is the meta-problem of our day. (See here and here.) When people’s faith wanes so much in their government to govern responsibly and responsively to the nation’s needs then the entire legitimacy of the government begins to be called into question. And that gets us into some very dangerous territory.

It is interesting though that a traditional (or as I like to think of it “real”) conservative like Sullivan, when faced with the choice of McCain/Palin vs. Obama/Biden emphatically chose the Democratic ticket as the more reasonable choice.

It is also interesting that many of my friends on the progressive side look at the Obama administration’s accomplishments to date and polling numbers and begin to feel despair, and that those on the right looks at the same thing and begin to feel hope. Both of those sentiments are probably premature. First because we are only 10 months into his first term and second, as Charles Franklin at Pollster.com points out, there is a startling similarity between the first 6 month polling numbers of both Regan and Obama.

Of the ten post-war presidents in the chart, Reagan and Obama currently stand as the two lowest at this point in their first term. (Clinton fell lower early, but was recovering at this point before another decline and rise.) Reagan finished as the second lowest just before his midterm in 1982, ahead of only Truman. It happens that the economy under Reagan also bottomed out in November 1982, the worst possible time for the president and his party.

Obama in blue and Reagan in red. Obama’s line is more jagged because polling is more frequent than in the ’80’s. But the trend line is startlingly close. So, progressives: hang in there. Teabaggers: don’t get your hopes up.

It is true that many states and municipalities have made their citizen’s lives easier by putting so much information on the web. But, in too may areas there is still a fundamental misunderstanding of exactly the type of sea-change that the Internet is bringing to society and governance.

Here is an excerpt of a teriffic post by Tom Steinberg of the UK-based mysociety.org, which builds community organizing and open government websites, called What The Government Doesn’t Understand About The Internet And What To Do About It:

Current government policy in relation to the Internet can broadly be summarised as occupying three areas:

1. Getting people online (broadband access, and lessons for people who don’t have the skills or interest)
2. Protecting people from bad things done using the Internet (terrorism, child abuse, fraud, hacking, intellectual property infringement)
3. Building websites for departments and agencies.

The government does all these things primarily because it believes that the Internet boosts the economy of the UK, and that IT can reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality. Together, these outweigh the dangers, meaning it doesn’t get banned. Gordon Brown’s recent speech at Google was an exemplar of this mainly economically driven celebration of the Internet’s virtues, telling audience members that your industry is driving the next stage of globalisation”.

The first challenge for the government is to understand that whilst these beliefs are true, they are only a minor part of the picture. Tellingly, Browns’ speech contained almost no language that couldn’t have been used to explain the positive impact of electrification or shipping containers.

What is different is the way in which the Internet changes social and economic practices – the vector of attack. In the 20th century, advancement of human welfare went hand in hand with the rise of companies that used economies of scale to deliver better goods and services for customers. Technology effectively made it possible and much easier to be a big, highly productive company, to gather expertise and capital together and to target markets for maximum yields.

Now take a look for a moment at Wikipedia, MoneySavingExpert, Blogger or Match.com – all big websites, all doing different things. Each one, however, is in its own way is reducing the ability of large, previously well functioning institutions to function as easily.

These services are reducing traditional institutions ability to charge for information, seize big consumer surpluses, limit speech or fix marriages. It has, in other words, become harder to be a big business, newspaper, repressive institution or religion. Nor is this traditional ‘creative destruction’ going on in a normal capitalist economy: this isn’t about one widget manufacturer replacing another, this is about a newspaper business dying and being replaced by no one single thing, and certainly nothing recognisable as a newspaper business.

Disruption like this is scary for any institution, which will tend to mean that as a public entity which interfaces with other institutions the temptation will be to hold back the sea, not swim with it. Government must swim with the tide, though, not just to help citizens more but to avoid the often ruinous tension of a citizenry going one way and a government going another. There are various things government can do to be on the right side.

1. Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public). This means accepting that federated identity systems are coming and will probably be more successful than even official ID card systems: ditto citizen-held medical records. It means saying “We understand that letting train companies control who can interface with their ticketing systems means that the UK has awful train ticket websites that don’t work as hard as they should to help citizens buy cheaper tickets more easily. And we will change that, now.”

2. Seize the opportunity to bring people together. Millions of people visit public sector websites every day, often trying to achieve similar or identical ends. It is time to start building systems to allow them to contact people in a similar situation, just as they’d be able to if queuing together in a job centre, but with far more reach and power. This does open the scary possibility that citizens might club together to protest about poor service or bad policies, but given recent news, if you were a minister would you rather know about what was wrong as soon as possible, or really late in the day (cf MPs‘ expenses, festering for years)?

The killer app of the Internet as it relates to human politics and governance is not any sorf of enabling of direct democacy, which is simply too unwieldy for a handful of people let alone hundreds of millions. Instead it is the ability to maintain honesty in government through distributing the load of watchdogging it among millions.

Take the groundbreaking recovery.gov: “The site will include information about Federal grant awards and contracts as well as formula grant allocations. Federal agencies will provide data on how they are using the money, and eventually, prime recipients of Federal funding will provide information on how they are using their Federal funds. On our end, we will use interactive graphics to illustrate where the money is going, as well as estimates of how many jobs are being created, and where they are located. And there will be search capability to make it easier for you to track the funds.”

This is groundbreaking in the sense that this is the first time an administration has seriously attempted to embrace the Internet not as an extension of existing media but as a new medium in its own right. But it is still not up to snuff, it still shows an attitude that the primary role of the Internet is to reduce the cost of public services whilst increasing their quality — in this case making it faster and cheaper and more efficient to maintain a (albeit well-intentioned) veil of accountability for the massive spending being undertaken.

The recovery.gov site is kind of clunky. It also doesn’t go very deep. Mousing over the map of Iowa for example shows that $1,08 billion has been announced for Iowa. Clicking on Iowa takes you to a list of spending programs (of which the state budget stabilization fund is at the top at $472 million) for which money has been allocated. And… that’s pretty much it.

On the other hand, recovery.org is far more in depth. At their website, I can see that there are 291 active projects valued at $250.4 milion. I can drill down by county to see that Clinton has 2 active projects valued at $1.6 million and by drilling down further I can see that those two projects are for replacement buses for the Transit Authority.

Now, recovery.org is the product of onvia.com, a for-profit organizaiton that helps companies find state and fedral contract opportunities. They have a large research staff that combs federal, state and local media to glean this detailed information and post it not only for the benefit of their customers but free for everyone. Onvia’s information is not complete, just showing what projects are currently open for bid, instead of all projects planned, let and in progress or complete. But that’s okay, that’s not what Onvia is about.

What it does show is the power of community production and how the creative collective production that creates something like Wikipedia can be harnessed to keep our government accountable. And while things like recovery.org can scale up to the national level, they can also be scaled down to the state and local level.