Sheryl Jean of the Dallas-Morning News ‘Economy Watch Blog’ reports that the National Small Business Association has launched a new website, “Health Reform Today.”
In his Alternet article, “Health Care Reform in Critical Condition,” Roy Ulrich discusses whether it is still true, as former HEW Secretary Joseph Califano said that “real health care reform in this country could not become a reality until we accomplished the goal of enacting campaign finance reform at the national level.”
Former Senator Tom Daschle has a WaPo op-ed urging Americans not to get distracted by conservative fear-mongering about the ‘who’ of health care reform, and instead keep focused on the ‘what’ and the imperative of making reform a reality.
Also at WaPo, Karen Pallarito takes a look at the Obama Administration evolving health care reform proposals in light of a recent national opinion survey by Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health (toplines here).
Salon.com columnist Joe Conason’s “The questions our health care debate ignores” puts America’s health care system in global perspective in terms of universal coverage and cost.
Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, takes an interesting look at current reform options facing Obama and the Democrats in “An Election, a Budget, and Two Summits = A Bold Obama Strategy for Health Care Change.”
On March 3rd, I suggested that the failures of health care system are as much if not more of a real threat to national security in terms of protecting the lives of Americans than terrorism. Imagine, for example, the outrage if the death toll for our troops was 60 per day in Iraq or Afghanistan, because 60 per day or about 22 thousand Americans per year die from “the lack of health insurance,” according to the Institute of Medicine.
The Atlantic‘s Marc Armbinder reports that The Obama Administration will pursue health care reform through the 2010 budget resolutions, if they can’t forge a bipartisan consensus. Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com riffs on Armbinder’s article, noting the additional leverage Dems get in the struggle for health care reform as recession deepens and arguing that “it’s a fight where the White House ought to be favored.” Ezra Klein also has a post up today at The American Prospect on the legislative strategy of health reform via the budget process.
Ezra Klein also has an In These Times interview of Steffie Woolhandler, co-director of Physicians for a National Health Program, and Richard Kirsch, the national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now (HCAN) on the topic, “Which Way to Universal Healthcare?.”
A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted 3/12-15 found that nearly three out of four adults are “happy with their overall health care coverage,”but more than three out of four respondents are “dissatisfied with the total cost of health care in this country” and only 29 percent say they are “very confident” they could pay their bills in the event of a major medical emergency.
Single-payer advocates will find americanheathcarerreform.org a bountiful source of links to insightful articles on the topic.
Month: March 2009
It has taken several days for the full implications of Obama’s budget and message to sink in among conservatives and Republicans, but now the surprise has passed and the gloves are coming off.
The conservative hope that Obama might actually be the timid, dithering, “split the difference” centrist that some progressives feared he was has now evaporated. On the contrary, the scope of his ambition to be a solidly progressive Roosevelt-style president makes him appear as a genuine threat–not just for committed Republicans, but to a substantial group beyond.
Read the entire memo here.
In an article by Peter Beinart, he argues that Obama might be presiding over an end to–or at least a pause in–the culture wars of the last couple of decades.
This is actually a proposition that merits its own discussion. Has the Cultural Right begun to run out of steam? Will the economic crisis radically reduce the salience of issues like gay marriage or abortion or church-state separation? Is there something about Barack Obama’s style and substance that tends to calm the cultural waters? And what if any accommodations should Obama or progressives generally make to neutralized culture-based opposition?
Read the entire memo here.
This week, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed its last issue. Last month, the Rocky Mountain News ceased to exist. Across the country, newspapers and magazines are cutting staff, reducing coverage, and scaling back.
Journalists feel like they’re living in a crisis, and rightly so. A respected profession that has been supported by a stable, profitable business model for more than a hundred years is about to be upended.
But it’s the business model which has been given the death sentence — not the profession. The end of print is not the end of journalism.
In a brilliant essay published online this week, Clay Shirky writes:
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
The future offers plenty of alternatives — we just don’t know what they are yet.
The newspaper business is dominated by the fact that owning and operating a printing press is an enormously expensive endeavor. Those production costs are so high that newspapers rely on a combination of advertising and paid subscription to turn a profit.
The Internet poses an incredible threat to print journalism because it reduces production costs to nothing. That in turn provides competition for both advertiser dollars and story coverage.
Classified advertising — which used to be the lifeblood of newspapers all over the country — has been replaced by Craigslist. Print journalists are so frequently scooped by online competitors that many newsrooms have shifted their production schedules to meet the demands of the Internet (which means publishing stories online immediately), and it seems like every beat writer in America has her own blog and Twitter feed.
Perhaps no fact better demonstrates the absurdity of print production than this: The New York Times could buy each of its subscribers a new Amazon Kindle — the popular e-book reader which offers Times content — for half the amount of money that it costs to print and deliver its newspaper each year.
Today’s Wall Street Journal features a novel conservative argument about comparisons between Barack Obama and FDR. The standard fare is that everybody knows FDR failed to do much about the Great Depression, which was actually ended by World War II (never mind the contradiction between claims that stimulating demand through government spending always fail–except when that stimulus is via the Department of Defense!).
But George Bittlingmayer and Thomas W. Hazlitt, two conservative academics, have taken a different tack: FDR’s 100 Days policy blitz, which focused on a banking crisis, was actually “conservative,” and depended in no small part on rhetorical attacks on government spending that assuaged the concerns of bankers and other investors.
In making this case, Bittlingmayer and Hazlitt don’t much try to compare the nature of the 1933 banking crisis and today’s, and also don’t comment at all on how or why FDR departed from his wise conservative course in subsequent months and years. They do sneak into the argument the assumption that Obama’s (and, as anyone who reads polls can tell you, the public’s) concerns about the behavior of corporate executives seeking public subventions are disastrously undermining investor confidence:
Limiting corporate jets and CEO salaries may play well to the crowd. But every rational shareholder knows that jets make sense if (and only if) they help increase profits, and that arbitrary pay limits don’t protect company assets or owners. Instead, failed managers need to be replaced, at competitive wages, by superior ones. New shareholder protections that made that easier would attract bipartisan support and be cheered by investors.
I guess that these gents think investors are “going Galt” in their own small way out of disgust at public anger over their “rational” perks, and depressing the markets. By suggesting that current psychology, not past policies and events, are responsible for the current crisis, this is a clever means of shifting blame from Bush and the GOP to Obama and Democrats, which is an obvious objective in virtually all conservative agitprop these days.
But it’s interesting the extent to which the profs rely for their argument almost exclusively on the accounts of the 100 days by Raymond Moley, the brain-truster who left the Roosevelt administration midway through 1933, and then devoted much of the rest of his long career to New Deal-bashing, contemporary and revisionist. It’s a bit like citing Dick Morris as the definitive chronicler of the Clinton administration. Like Morris, Moley was indeed briefly a shaker and mover in a presidential administration. But like Morris, he chose to go into opposition, and his bitterly expressed interpretation of the deeds and thoughts of his one-time chief have to be taken with a shaker of salt.
Note: this item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on March 17, 2009
If there is one topic that Democrats come back to over and over in electoral analysis, it’s the party’s persistantly weak performance in recene years among non-college-educated white voters, a.k.a., the White Working Class. And there are some obvious reasons for this debate. As Ruy Teixeira’s new study for CAP (“New Progressive America“), Democratic weakness among WWC voters persisted in 2008, although the impact was mitigated by the steady decline in that demographic’s share of the electorate. And that bugs Democrats a lot, since these are voters who should be (and in opinion if not sometimes in voting behavior actually are) responsive to the progressive economic message. There’s even a moral argument that a progressive party which struggles to connect with working-class voters isn’t adequately representing a core constituency.
But as this debate continues, a parallel debate is developing on the other side of the partisan divide, as some Republicans are beginning to argue against the targeting of WWC voters, urging instead a refocus on the upscale voters who have been sharply trending towards Democrats over the last 20 years. In some respects, this point-of-view is the direct corollary of conservative attacks on Obama’s tax policies; they sense that many upscale voters are ready to vote Republican, and perhaps even join the Tea Party “movement,” in reaction to Obama’s outrageous advocacy of top marginal rates on high-earners that resemble those of the bad old 1990s.
But there are some interesting generational arguments as well. Michael Barone suggests, mainly from inferences rather than hard data, that younger WWC voters are pretty much checking out and can’t be relied upon in the future to support the GOP in the numbers represented by their parents. (In fact, there is tantalizing evidence that Obama may have done surprisingly well among under-30 WWC voters in 2008, which Andrew Levison wrote about in a TDS White Paper in December).
Barone cites and at least tentatively endorses another theory, one advanced by David Frum in reaction to the news that single mom Bristol Palin ain’t getting hitched any time soon. Frum contends that young WWC voters don’t exhibit the sturdy folk virtues of their parents, and thus won’t be attracted to the cultural conservatism of the GOP:
Many conservatives carry in their heads a mental image of American society that’s a generation out of date. They imagine the existence of a huge class of socially conservative downscale voters, ready to vote Republican because of abortion and gay marriage.
The story of Bristol Palin should help puncture this illusion.
Take a look at Table A17 in this report by the Educational Testing Service. Of children born to white women with a college degree, only 8% were born out of wedlock. But of children born to white women who did not finish college, 28% were born outside of marriage. Of children born to white women who stopped their education after high school, 42.1% were out of wedlock. And of births to white women like Bristol Palin, who have not completed high school, almost 61% were out of wedlock.
Thus, as Barone puts it in his gloss on Frum’s argument, young WWC Americans are embracing “chaotic and undisciplined” lifestyles that aren’t conducive to GOP voting behavior.
This”forget about the white trash” dismissal of future WWC voters has pretty significant strategic implications for those GOPers who adopt it. And it exposes a dilemma in conservative message development that became obvious during the 2008 campaign, and is becoming even clearer today. In retrospect, as some of us pointed out at the time, the whole Joe the Plumber phenomenon in the McCain-Palin campaign was an effort to put a WWC face on an argument over tax policy that really affected only high-income voters.
The same conflict is even more evident in the current disagreement among conservatives about whether to go after Obama for his “socialist” and “redistributist” economic policies that threaten to destroy the “productive” upper class, or instead to go populist with an attack on bailouts of Wall Street firms, while stressing Obama’s alleged cultural radicalism. And even those who attack bailouts on laissez-faire grounds, like Joe the Plumber’s replacement, CNBC “reporter” Rick Santelli, don’t much like “demagoguery” about the AIG bonuses (which, after all, benefit the very people he has defended as victims of lower-class perfidy).
This conflict is complicated, of course, by the fact that upper-income voters do not proportionately embrace the cultural conservatism that’s been a big factor in WWC Republican voting, and that Frum and Barone suspect the WWC is beginning to abandon, as evidenced in the marital data and symbolized by the devolution of the Palin family.
It’s all pretty fascinating as a sign of fault lines in the GOP and the conservative movement that will probably become more apparent in days to come. And these fault lines have obvious implications for the putative front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Bristol Palin’s mother.
We Democrats, of course, would like nothing better than a GOP abandonment of non-college-educated voters as a target. Whatever well-heeled conservatives think of their “chaotic and undisciplined” lifestyles, we’ll take ’em.
Note: this item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on March 15, 2009
One of the odder phenomena of contemporary public life is the enthusiasm of conservative gabbers and even elected officials for the idea of “Going Galt:” the suggestion that the oppressed wealthy of America withdraw their vast contributions to the commonweal in protest against the supposedly confiscatory taxes and redistribution of income to the morally depraved underway at the behest of the Obama administration. The allusion is to John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, that massive tome that represented the Summa of her rigorously capitalist, atheist, and anti-altruist philosophy of “Objectivism,” which has captured a vast number of adolescents and an impressive number of adults over the last several decades.
I’ve written about this in the context of U.S. Rep. John Campbell’s (R-CA) claim that “we’re living through the scenario” laid out in Atlas Shrugged, wherein the industrial leaders of the West, sick of subsidizing “parasites” and “looters,” drop out, take to the Rockies, and finally, through Galt’s voice–a radio address that took up 90 solid pages in the novel–chastise an economically helpless nation.
But Campbell was just surfing the right-wing zeitgeist, where excited talk about “going Galt” has spread like kudzu. It’s merged, in fact, with the Rick-Santelli-spawned Tea Party “movement” of “productive” people fed up with the poor-and-minority scum who cause the financial collapse by living beyond their means, and who now refuse to shuffle off into the ranks of the homeless and instead are instituting a socialist tyranny.
I don’t need to summarize the “going Galt” literature; that’s already been done quite well by David Weigel of the Washington Independent and Roy Edroso of the Village Voice (the more Galt-sympathetic Stephen Gordon of The Liberty Papers also has a long list of relevant links from various points of view). I also don’t need to analyze the absurdity of well-heeled, not-going-anywhere conservative bloggers and pundits like Michelle Malkin or Helen Smith to encourage others to “go Galt,” or of the self-congratulatory people who think it’s a license to cheat on their taxes, lay off a few underlings, or stop tipping (no, seriously!). Hilzoy has succinctly demolished the clownish and entirely un-Randian nature of these latter-day Galtists.
What I’d like to do as a public service is simply to remind folks tempted to “go Gault” or to gush ignorantly about the subject in blogs or on Fox that they are flirting with a philosophy that is profoundly and expressly hostile to anything that could remotely be described as “conservative.” And before anyone even thinks of offering the “you-don’t-have-to-be-a-fascist-to-love-Ezra-Pound’s-poetry” defense, it’s important to understand that John Galt, Atlas Shrugged, and their creator Ayn Rand represent a remorselessly unified and logical world-view that can’t be sliced and diced into bite-sized portions you can take or leave. Galt’s speech, in particular, which is the supposed inspiration for all this excited Tea Party chatter, was a painstakingly wrought distillation of Rand’s all-encompassing philosophy of Objectivism, which few “conservatives” could stomach, much less endorse. And Rand, if she were alive, would be the first to object to promiscuous use of her words and character, especially by political “conservatives,” whom she largely despised as life-hating slaves to an imaginary God, or as unprincipled demagogues little better in practice than all the other “collectivists.”
The following are a sprinkling of quotes from Rand’s work that ought to make any self-conscious conservative think twice about scribbing “Who is John Galt?” on the nearest whiteboard.
Note: this item by James Vega was originally published on March 10, 2009
To put this campaign into context, for a moment just imagine the following scenario. Suppose that John McCain had been elected president last November and by this point in time,
1. A minor Democratic presidential candidate had directly accused him of being a member of a secret Nazi organization. A second Democratic presidential candidate said Hitler and Mussolini would approve his policies.
2. A significant liberal journal of opinion had said that McCain was following Hitler’s political strategy and quoted Hitler to prove it.
3. The leading liberal commentators in the New York Times and Washington Post wrote commentaries about McCain’s program using political expressions with absolutely clear and unmistakable connotations of fascism (e.g. “Aryan superiority”, “racial purity”, “national culture” etc.),
If this had actually happened, not only would Fox News and company would go absolutely ballistic (justifiably, for a change), but many moderate voices would express sincere outrage and many Democrats themselves would be deeply – and vocally – disturbed.
But, guess what? This is what conservatives are doing to Barack Obama right now – and hardly anybody is raising a stink.
President Obama’s quick apology for his gaffe likening his bowling skills to the “Special Olympics or something” on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show was well-timed and well-directed. Shortly after his appearance on the program, the President called Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver, who described the President’s apology as “sincere and heartfelt.”
In his response, Shriver offered a challenge:
This is a teachable moment for our country. We are asking young people, parents and leaders from all walks of life to engage in conversation and help dispel negative caricatures about people with intellectual disabilities. We believe that it’s only through open conversation and dialogue about how stereotypes can cause pain that we can begin to work together to create communities of acceptance and inclusion for all
Shriver also urged the white house to hire a Special Olympics athlete and he called on “policy leaders at all levels to commit to improving the support and resources for people with intellectual disabilities in areas such as healthcare, education, housing and recreation.” This may be why Republican leaders have thus far not made too much of the President’s remark, since they have rarely supported adequate funding to help people with intellectual and physical disabilities. President Obama, on the other hand, has a robust agenda to expand assistance to people with disabilities.
People with disabilities, together with their families, are one of the largest constituencies in the electorate. It is estimated that approximately 20 million Americans with disabilities voted in the November election. Factoring in their families, a rough guestimate of 50 million voters significantly affected by disability policies would not be far out of line.
The ‘teachable moment’ for Obama offers a good lesson — the need for heightened sensitivity to the struggles of people with disabilities and their families. Also, be careful on the late night talk shows, where the format encourages loose jabber, as well as an opportunity to humanize or ‘warm up’ political leaders.
Over at RealClearPolitics, you can find a valuable exchange between RCP’s Jay Cost and TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira over the latter’s “New Progressive Majority” study published recently by the Center for American Progress.
A few days ago, Cost questioned Texeira’s confidence that the demographic trends he documented in the study represented a reliable indicator of future presidential election cycles, suggesting that short-term factors including campaign dynamics are often crucial variables. Texeira’s response notes that he’s dealing in trends and probabilities, not predictions or certainties, and makes this point about perennial “short-term factors” dismissals of electoral results:
Of course, there are some–Cost appears to be one–who argue that all elections are not much more than short-term forces and that’s all you need to look at. By that logic, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was all about short-term discontent with Carter and the economy and the shifting patterns of support compared to twenty years previously were not of much significance. But that wasn’t true then and I suspect the argument that Obama’s victory was all short-term forces will also turn out to be incorrect.
In a wrap-up post, Cost partially concedes some of Teixeira’s arguments, but notes the strong belief of Republicans as recently as four years ago that trends were moving permanently in their direction.
The whole exchange is worth reading. But while Jay Cost raised some good questions about the implications that some Democrats might draw from Teixeira’s study, he didn’t lay a glove on Ruy when it came to the data.
