Steve Benen at Political Animal has a nice summary of conservative complaints yesterday that the memorial services for Edward Kennedy will be “politicized” by Democrats. They constantly invoke the 2002 memorial service for Sen. Paul Wellstone, and seem right on the edge of suggesting that Kennedy’s death will wind up being a net asset for the GOP. All this within hours of the announcement of the senator’s passing, mind you.
Benen’s comment nails the unseemliness of this sort of talk:

There may be a genuine fear on the right that Kennedy’s passing may inspire Democrats to complete his unfinished work, and give the left new resolve. A stirring memorial service with inspirational eulogies may have political consequences, so conservatives have apparently decided to try to crush that spirit now, before anyone starts to feel motivated to honor Kennedy’s legacy.
Indeed, they’re just laying the groundwork. Far-right bloggers and Fox News personalities may feel tempted to condemn Kennedy-related services when they occur, so they’re letting everyone know now, “We’ll be watching closely, waiting for rhetoric we don’t like.”
Hold services for a progressive champion that meets the demands of right-wing activists, or face their wrath.

It’s hard to imagine how you would hold an appropriate memorial service for someone who fought for progressive causes for nearly half a century, without mentioning said causes. This concern over making sure no politics crept into a memorial service or the surrounding commemorations sure didn’t bother conservatives when Ronald Reagan died.

Connoisseurs of political incoherence and hypocrisy really need to check out the interview of RNC chairman Michael Steele on NPR’s Morning Edition today about his latest “Don’t Touch Medicare!” position. In what must have seemed a very long seven minutes for Steele, the Republican chieftain tried to argue that he wants to save Medicare because it’s such a bad program that we can’t afford to “raid” it, though he does support “cuts” and “efficiencies.” “Medicare is what it is,” he said a couple times, despite a certain clack of clarity about “what it is” exactly. Later in the interview, Steele gets belligerant about the suggestion that he has a “nuanced” attitude towards “government-run health care.”
Republicans would be well-advised to just shut up about Medicare. Their efforts to pose as the last-ditch defenders of an entitlement they obviously hate are even less credible than George W. Bush’s claim back in 2005 that he wanted to “protect” Social Security.
UPDATE: ThinkProgress has posted a transcript of Steele’s NPR interview. Enjoy.

To get a full sense of the void Senator Kennedy leaves in his party and Congress, consider the likely successors to replace him at the top of the powerful Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP), which plays a vital role in protecting living standards across the nation. In order of seniority, they are: Chris Dodd; Tom Harkin and Barbara Mikulski — fine Senators all, but none with the clout and skill of Kennedy. As Paul Kane explains in WaPo:

Kennedy ruled as the top Democrat on the committee for more than two decades, using the perch to serve as the Senate’s lead agitator for increasing the minimum wage, expanding civil rights to cover the handicapped and gay Americans, and for promoting what he long called “the cause of my life” — universal health care.

Atop The HELP committee is clearly a great place to be for aspiring national leaders, addressing core concerns of the Democratic Party. Yet, to run HELP, Dodd would have to give up the chairmanship of the Senate Banking Committee and Harkin would surrender the the helm of the Agriculture Committee, important committees, particularly in their respective states. The new chair won’t be selected until after the recess.
The stature of Democratic senators shrinks considerably in Kennedy’s fading shadow. As the media turns to other congressional Democrats to articulate their Party’s agenda, the ranks will likely appear even thinner. Kennedy was a mediagenic star of unrivaled magnitude in Congress, as well as a highly-skilled legislator. There is no other U.S. Senator with anything close to the progressive gravitas and leverage Kennedy commanded.
All of which is likely to strengthen President Obama’s hand as the leader of his Party. But it will almost certainly increase the demands on him to speak out more forcefully. Absent Ted Kennedy, there is no one other than Obama who can credibly be called “the real leader of the Democrats.” Obama will have to abandon much of his low-key approach to legislative reform and step up. It might be a good idea for him to hire a couple of Kennedy’s top staffers to help navigate health care reform and other key bills through Congress.
Obama has another burden, to lift the spirits of a nation coming to grips with the end of the Kennedy era. I know it may not mean so much to the younger generation. But I and a millions of other Americans can still remember what America felt like under JFK’s administration, the can-do spirit and sense of hope that was shattered in Dallas. We remember how RFK grew a heart in Marks, Mississippi, and how he went on to inspire a renewed faith in America’s potential as a nation where opportunity and brotherhood could flourish, his journey also clipped by assasination, just two months after MLK was killed. And then EMK, who did much to translate their dreams into legislative reality (see Ed Kilgore’s post yesterday), his life ending on the eve of fulfilling his greatest dream — health security for all Americans.
It’s a huge burden the President is called to bear. Fortunately, he has the smarts and inspirational skills to lead the struggle ahead. But he will need all the help he can get, including the expertise of Senator Kennedy’s best and brightest, and especially the support of America’s progressive community. For the President, and for all who hold fast to the dream, answering this call is the great challenge of our time.

We all know that public opinion polls have shown declining levels of support for health care reform. But as Jeremy
Rosner, of the public opinion firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, explains today at HuffPo, polls only explain things in a limited way.
Rosner offers five reasons you should doubt polls showing health reform is in deep trouble:
1. Polls under-emphasize the heavy-weights in policy fights. Many health care interest groups are actually on the side of reform this time around.
2. Polls don’t reflect what happens in safe districts. Most Members of Congress are immune to Town Hall pressures.
3. Polls miss the dynamics of anticipation. Public opinion may well change if health reform is enacted and none of the fabricated concerns about it actually occur.
4. Polls don’t factor in the political balance. Obama got a lot more votes than Clinton did, and has a stronger and more ideologically committed Democratic majority in Congress.
5. Polls miss the role of representatives’ judgment. Members of Congress do come to the vote with a variety of personal feelings and judgments on the substance of health care reform, and that often matters more to them that day-to-day polling.
In other words, says the expert pollster, polls do miss a lot on issues like health care reform. And that’s worth considering when staring at polls while trying to understand what might actually happen in Congress this autumn.

I can’t match J.P. Green’s eloquence in his obituary for “the lion,” Ted Kennedy. But I do have a few thoughts in appreciation of this great legislator, crossposted from the Progressive Policy Institute site:
Perhaps the most fitting epitaph for the career of Edward Moore Kennedy, who died last night at the age of 77, is that he managed to both embody and transcend the mythos of his remarkable family. First elected to the Senate as a callow assistant district attorney to fill out the term of his brother, the President of the United States, within six years he endured the assassinations of both JFK and RFK, and without any real choice in the matter, inherited the vast expectations their shortened lives had created. He became the de facto leader of old-fashioned American liberalism before he turned 40, and with only occasional competition, remained so until his death.
Some now remember his one presidential campaign, a failed challenge to Jimmy Carter in 1980, as a low point of his career. But in many respects, it actually liberated him from a “destiny” for which he was less suited than the one he built as one of the great legislators of his or any other era. It’s hard to credit this now, but when Ted Kennedy’s presidential aspirations were dashed, after many years of speculation about when he would make the move towards the White House, he was about the same age as Barack Obama is today. It’s doubtful he could have accomplished more as president in four or eight years than he did before and after that time in the Senate.
Today’s tributes will often note the irony that this man of ideological principle was also a consummate bipartisan legislator. At a time when “bipartisanship” has become a forlorn hope or (to some) a bitter curse, it’s worth remembering Kennedy’s key role in the last great spasm of genuine legislative bipartisanship, the No Child Left Behind legislation, along with his frustrated efforts to secure another bipartisan breakthrough on immigration reform.
But despite his legislative accomplishments in so many areas, from rights for the disabled to national service, there’s no question that universal health coverage was the consuming passion of his entire career. As a freshman senator, he was there to vote for the original Medicare and Medicaid legislation. And in the ensuing 44 years, he played central roles in every painful and frustrating step the country has taken towards universal health coverage.
This legacy will be cited often in the days just ahead, as health care reform advocates tout the enactment of today’s endangered legislation as a fitting tribute to Kennedy, even as others (however disingenuously) cite his bipartisanship and willingness to accept incremental steps towards his goals as grounds for scaling back the drive towards universal coverage. It’s a good bet that he wouldn’t mind the political use of his own memorials if they do in fact contribute to the achievement of universal health coverage, just as he always accepted the unfair burden of the Kennedy family mantle, which aroused so much love and hate in so many people.
In the end, the best tributes to his memory will be written in legislation, the distillation of strong values and bold goals into concrete action for the common good. Few Americans have ever been Ted Kennedy’s peer in the art of making dreams into laws, and he will be missed.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
There are two specters haunting progressives as we near the endgame of this year’s health care reform debate. The first, of course, is the sad precedent of the Clinton effort. But the second is a success story, cited often in invidious comparison to Obama: the ghost of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s epochal legislative blitz of 1964-65, which produced the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid.
It’s something you hear about all the time in casual conversation among Democratic political junkies, particularly those with chronic doubts about the Obama’s legislative strategy and his personal style: Why can’t he be more like LBJ, who exploited big Democratic majorities in Congress to get big things done, and fast? And LBJ is cited not just as a successful activist president, but also as, to cite the title of the last-published volume of Robert Caro’s vast biography of the man, “The Master of the Senate.” Here’s how Tom Schaller put it yesterday in a pitch-perfect essay for Salon reflecting present progressive second-guessing of Obama’s, and congressional Democrats’, approach to health reform, entitled “What Went Wrong?”:

Obama is no LBJ … Given the reflexive Republican biting of Obama’s extended hand, perhaps the president should have dispensed from the start with any serious effort to find accommodation with the GOP. … Instead of wasting energy on trying to persuade Republicans, it could have worked over dissenting Democrats in the Senate, and had a better shot at jamming the public option through.

Schaller thus invokes the myth that LBJ, a famously truculent and manipulative SOB, when given a similar gift of initial public support and a big Democratic congressional majorities (particularly after the 1964 landslide), didn’t screw around with “bipartisanship” or compromises but instead bent Congress, including the inherently change-averse Senate, to his progressive will. Woe onto us that Barack Obama, the professorial amateur with a fatal addiction to bipartisanship and compromise, cannot be more like LBJ!
The problem with this argument is that real LBJ wasn’t really that partisan legislative steamroller who announced what he wanted and got it. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 accomplished, lest we forget, basic citizenship guarantees that took 88 years to enact after the end of Reconstruction. It took a martyred president and a vast array of contemporary and heavily publicized outrages against African-Americans to give these bills the political momentum they needed. And far from being the fruit of aggressive partisanship, the big civil rights laws represented a bipartisan and trans-ideological consensus outside the South to impose national values on that rebellious region.
Yes, LBJ’s leadership (in tandem with congressional leaders like Hubert Humphrey) was essential to the enactment of the civil rights laws over southern Senate filibusters. But according to Caro, LBJ’s true “mastery of the Senate” was best displayed on behalf of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which accomplished virtually nothing for African-Americans other than the establishment of a precedent for future action.
As for Medicare and Medicaid, the idea that LBJ came up with a bold set of proposals and ram-rodded them through Congress is wrong by all sorts of measurements. It’s important to understand that however important these health care entitlements became, they were at the time clearly major compromises from the progressive commitment, first articulated by Harry Truman, to enact national health insurance. Medicare, obviously, was offered only to retirees, not all Americans–a distinction that is cherished as a matter of principle by those Medicare beneficiaries who today oppose universal health coverage. Medicaid was even more of a compromise, eschewing national health coverage for a crazy quilt system in which the states would largely determine eligibility and benefit levels, with coverage generally limited to low-income families with children.
Medicare and Medicaid also did not spring fully formed from LBJ’s head or his White House, and weren’t enacted via royal disdain for Congress and the petty fiefdoms of the committee system. Federal health insurance for retirees was narrowly defeated in the Senate in 1960 and in 1962. It finally passed the Senate in 1964, only to succumb in the House when Democratic Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills refused to support it. It was finally enacted in 1965, but only after Mills shaped the legislation, and also added Medicaid, intended as a sop to Republicans and the AMA, which had long proposed health care subsidies for low-income families as an alternative to national health insurance.
So the myth of LBJ as the driven president demanding and securing progressive legislation against the grain of party, congressional prerogatives, and even public opinion, is an exaggeration, to put it mildly. LBJ showed great courage and resolution on civil rights, but he was riding almost a century of momentum, and he certainly didn’t reject bipartisanship in his effort to get the job done. The landmark health care initiatives of Medicare and Medicaid were “betrayals” of the long-established progressive goal of national health insurance–certainly far more so than, say, the substitution of a health care cooperatives for a “public option” in a system of universal health coverage.
Team Obama faces a crucible this autumn in trying to get health reform enacted, and the president’s legacy will be greatly affected by success or failure. But while Lyndon Johnson may provide inspiration in the small ball of legislative sausage-making or even the big lift of public persuasion, Barack Obama doesn’t really need to look over his shoulder at the big Texan’s shade.

We knew it was coming. Yet the death of Senator Ted Kennedy nonetheless leaves a gaping wound in the Democratic Party, or more precisely in the heart of the Democratic Party. No other Senator, perhaps in all of U.S. history, fought longer or harder in behalf of the disadvantaged and for working people.
When he spoke for the powerless and downtrodden, you could feel the compassion in the tremors of his booming voice. Don’t take my word for it. Give a listen here, here and here. I heard him speak once in MLK’s church in Atlanta. The microphone was unnecessary.
Born to privilege and given to character flaws in the early stages of his life, Ted Kennedy conquered his demons and became one of America’s greatest champions of social justice and an exemplar for redemption. The showhorse became a workhorse who provided his colleagues the emblematic example of a passionate, energetic and hands-on United States Senator. He was also regarded as one of the best negotiators in Congress, a skill which is sorely-needed and much-missed at this hour. (A good DNC video tribute to Senator Kennedy can be viewed here.)
A partial list of legislative reforms passed under his leadership includes: the vote for 18-year olds; abolishing the draft; SCHIP; anti-Apartheid sanctions against South Africa; a ban on arms sales to Chile’s dictatorship; and voting against the authorization of the Iraq war — which he called “the best vote I’ve made in my 44 years in the United States Senate”. He was also the point man for: the MLK holiday, every civil rights bill that came up during his tenure; minimum wage hikes and numerous laws to protect working people from employer abuse. His endorsement of Barack Obama demonstrated vision and courage and probably was instrumental in his nomination.
As Ted Kennedy joins his brothers in eternity, we are left wondering who will carry the torch for health care, in particular, in the Senate. We’ve got some great U.S. Senators. But at this critical moment, there are no Wellstones or leaders of equivalent stature and skill to fill the void. Perhaps one will now come forward and provide the needed leadership. Having a President with powerful oratorical skills helps, and now is the time for him to pour it on, so we can enact a worthy health care bill. There can be no finer tribute to Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

At The New Republic today, TDS Co-Editor William Galston looks at the economic and budget forecasts recently released by the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, and sees tough times ahead:

If the consensus these documents represent is in the ballpark, the country and the Obama administration are in for a rough ride. Consider the following:
After shrinking over 2009, real GDP will grow only anemically in 2010 before that growth accelerates for a few years and then subsides to below 3 percent for the second half of the decade.
Unemployment will remain persistently high, averaging about 10 percent in 2010, when Democrats will be trying to defend their recent congressional gains. It will be close to 9 percent in 2011, but remain well above 7 percent as late as 2012, when President Obama presumably will run for reelection.
After years of economic recovery and growth, budget deficits will remain larger throughout the next decade than most economists (and the administration) consider acceptable, raising debt held by the public to between 67.8 percent (CBO) and 76.5 percent (OMB) of GDP by the end of the decade.

Galston goes on to discuss the implications for budget and tax policies of these sobering forecasts. But what he really reinforces is that progressive governance, as always, will ultimately depend on a revival of economic growth.

Republican opportunism and irresponsibility is hardly a new development in the political world. But I have to say, RNC chairman Michael Steele’s latest gambit–depicting the GOP as the party determined to protect Medicare from cuts or reforms or really any changes at all–absolutely takes the cake.
The new party line, unveiled by Steele in a Washington Post op-ed yesterday, and now emblazoned on the RNC site as a “Seniors’ Health Care Bill of Rights,” represents one of the most incredible flip-flops in living memory.
The antipathy of the GOP and the conservative movement towards Medicare goes back, of course, to the beginnings of the program, and even to its pre-history. Ronald Reagan, after all, made his political debut attacking proposals to create Medicare as “socialized medicine” back in 1961. Barry Goldwater, of course, opposed Medicare, but so too did future Republican presidential nominees George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole.
Though Medicare quickly became part of the national landscape and something of a sacred cow, Republicans in power could never resist the opportunity to go after it. That happened in 1981 after Ronald Reagan’s election, and even more famously in 1995, with the advent of the so-called Republican Revolution led by Newt Gingrich. Efforts to pare back Medicare spending arguably contributed more than any other factor to the failure and eventual repudiation of said Revolution.
With that experience in relatively fresh memory, it came to pass in George W. Bush’s presidency that Karl Rove decided on a bold move to win over senior voters with an actual expansion of Medicare via a prescription drug benefit. The initiative was clumsily handled and not terribly popular initially. But more importantly, the Medicare expansion almost immediately became exhibit number one in the conservative claim that Republicans had abandoned their principles under Bush, and were subsequently defeated in 2006 and then in 2008 because of (no, not Iraq or Katrina or the recession) “runwaway spending.” Indeed, one of the few things (other than his Iraq policies) conservatives activists liked about 2008 Republican nominee John McCain is that he opposed the Rx drug bill.
After the 2008 elections, the we-lost-because-we-spent-too-much self-diagnosis of Republicans became holy writ. And in early policy blueprints for Republican “recovery,” Medicare was once again in the bullseye, typically through proposals to “voucherize” the program, which would largely eliminate its risk-spreading function and in all likelihood reduce the money available for health insurance for most seniors. Suffice it to say that such an approach is vastly more of a change to Medicare than anything Democrats have proposed this year or in the past.
To be clear, there’s no particular reason conservatives should like Medicare in anything like its current form. It is, after all, a single-payer program similar to the wicked socialist schemes employed in godless foreign countries like Canada. And it’s the most natural thing in the world for conservatives to attack Medicare in the course of attacking Democratic proposals for universal health care. As Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), chairman of the conservative House Republican Study Committee, said in an op-ed just last month:

While the stated goal remains noble, as a physician, I can attest that nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government’s intrusion into medicine through Medicare.

I haven’t seen Price’s reaction to Steele’s ukase making maximum defense of Medicare the GOP’s badge of honor, but you have to figure he’s not real pleased about it.
So who really speaks for the GOP on Medicare? It’s hard to say right now, but I’m inclined to believe forty-plus years of conservative hostility to Medicare a bit more than Steele’s pandering stunt.

The week’s political news includes indications that Rudy Giuliani is strongly considering a run for the governorship of NY next year. It’s an interesting prospect. Despite the many troubles of Gov. David Paterson, and of the Democratic Party in the legislature, NY remains a strongly Democratic state.
Rudy can presumably have the GOP nomination for the asking, but Empire State Republicans ought to give a bit of thought to his remarkably inept presidential campaign last year. Stealing a page from the unsuccessful Al Gore campaign of 1988, Rudy became the latest presidential candidate to try a back-loaded nomination strategy that conceded Iowa and wound up focusing on Florida. It predictably failed, as did his clumsy efforts to pander to cultural conservatives who would never, ever trust him.
You’d have to guess the pre-2008 Giuliani is the guy who will be running for governor if he decides to take the plunge. But some of the things he said on the presidential campaign trail will definitely come back to haunt him.