Progressives tired of the sense that controversy and misfortune are hounding Democratic politicians exclusively these days should be forgiven for indulging in a bit of schadenfreude at the continuing travails of one-time 2012 presidential aspirant Mark Sanford. Though he’s disappeared from the national political radar over the last few weeks, down in South Cackalacki, he just won’t go away, as detailed in a Wall Street Journal report today by Valerie Bauerline:

To resurrect his image, Mr. Sanford is on a forgiveness tour, criss-crossing the state and imploring civic-club members to join him in pushing for dull but substantial changes to South Carolina’s state constitution. He said he is eager to regain the confidence of his constituents, one fried-chicken luncheon at a time.

But despite his doughty efforts to bore Palmetto State residents into disinterest in his scandals, Sanford can’t help but notice the buzzards circling his path from Rotary luncheon to Kiwanis breakfast. He’s still in deep trouble over allegations of illegal use of state funds for personal and political travel. His former chief political strategist, his wife, has vacated the Governor’s Mansion and split to the coast with his sons. And most recently, in a fine piece of political jiu-jitsu, his Lieutenant Governor (and bitter intra-party enemy), Andre Bauer, greased the skids for his departure by pledging to drop a planned 2010 gubernatorial run if Sanford soon resigns, thus giving his own rivals a tangible incentive to shove the incumbent out the door.
Knowing that the legislature can’t impeach him until January, Sanford’s trying to gut it out, but doesn’t seem to be winning many converts; fully half of the state’s voters now favor a resignation. In a fine kicker, Bauerlein’s account of Sanford’s travails ends with this quote from an audience member at a Kiwanis appearance:

Bill Taylor, the 75-year-old owner of a hotel and apartments, said he listened to Mr. Sanford, whom he had voted for twice. “He kept saying, ‘We’re going to do so-and-so.’ How many ‘we’s does he think he’s got behind him?”

Not enough.

Bob McDonnell, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, has been in full backpedal mode in denying that he still holds the reactionary cultural views he expressed in a 1989 master’s thesis at Regents University. Fair enough, I guess, though there’s a rough justice in anything that raises questions about the long-time Christian Right ally’s current efforts to depict himself as this nice moderate man who’s mainly interested in transportation policy.
But someone needs to ask him if he’s ready to repudiate some far more recent comments from 2003, when he suggested that anyone who had violated the Commonwealth’s sodomy laws—which proscribe any sort of oral sex–probably wasn’t qualified to be a judge. Most interestingly, when asked if he had ever violated said laws himself, McDonnell said: “Not that I can recall.” Poor guy.

Thomas Frank has a good opinion piece, “Why Democrats Are Losing on Health Care” in the Wall St. Journal. The first part of Frank’s article is reflected in its subtitle “They Won’t Debate the Proper Role of Government,” in which he argues that Democrats should be making the health care debate in terms of “fundamental principles,” specifically “the size and role of government.” He doesn’t really address the size of government here, nor should Democrats. Ideologues already have strong opinions on the topic, and most Americans are less concerned about size than making government more effective in helping to provide affordable health security.
But the best part of Frank’s article provides a nicely-stated response to the frequently-heard protest, “Why should I have to pay for your health care?” First the set-up”

Consider the assertion, repeated often in different forms, that health insurance is a form of property, a matter of pure personal responsibility. Those who have insurance, the argument goes, have it because they’ve played by the rules. Sure, insurance is expensive, but being prudent people, they recognized that they needed it, and so they worked hard, chose good employers, and got insurance privately, the way you’re supposed to.
Those who don’t have what they need, on the other hand, should have thought of that before they chose a toxic life of fast food and fast morals. Healthiness is, in this sense, how the market tests your compliance with its rules, and the idea of having to bail out those who failed the test—why, the suggestion itself is offensive. We have all heard some version of the concluding line, usually delivered in the key of fury: By what right do you ask me to pay for someone else’s health care?

Then the response:

This image of sturdy loners carving their way through a tough world is an attractive one. But there is no aspect of life where it makes less sense than health care.
To begin with, we already pay for other people’s health care; that’s how insurance works, with customers guarding collectively against risks that none of them can afford to face individually. Our health-care dollars are well mingled already, with some of us paying in more than we consume while others use our money to secure medical services for themselves alone.
The only truly individualistic health-care choice—where you receive care that is unpolluted by anyone else’s funds—is to forgo insurance altogether, paying out-of-pocket for health services as you need them. Of course, such a system would eventually become the opposite of the moral test imagined by our Calvinist friends, with the market slowly weeding its true believers out of the population.

And the clincher:

The righteous individualists among us might also consider that our current health-insurance system, which delivers them the medicine they think they’ve earned, is in fact massively subsidized by government, with Uncle Sam using the tax code to encourage employers to buy health insurance. And were it not for government programs like Medicare and Medicaid taking over the most expensive populations, the political scientist Jacob Hacker pointed out to me recently, the system of private insurance would probably have destroyed itself long ago. That image we cherish of our ruggedly self-reliant selves, in other words, is only possible thanks to Lyndon Johnson and the statist views of our New Dealer ancestors.
One reason government got involved is that our ancestors understood something that escapes those who brag so loudly about their prudence at today’s town-hall meetings: That health care is not an individual commodity to be bought and enjoyed like other products. That the health of each of us depends on the health of the rest of us, as epidemics from the Middle Ages to this year’s flu have demonstrated. Health care is “a public good,” says the Chicago labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan. “You can’t capture health care just for yourself. You have to share it with others in order to protect your own health.”

So next time a conservative ideologue at the local tavern starts bellowing about how he/she shouldn’t have to pay for someone else’s health care, explain in the most dulcet of tones: “You already do, my friend. That’s what insurance is. When you get sick, others pay to help you recover. And when others don’t get health care, it makes your family more vulnerable to epidemics. That’s why real reform should include everyone.” It probably won’t change the ideologue’s mind, such as it is. But maybe, just maybe, a nearby listener will nod and get it.

According to Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic today, the White House is finally prepared to pull the trigger on presidentially branded approach to health care reform, in the form of key markers he will expect any legislation to achieve:

Next week, President Obama is going to give Democrats a health care plan they can begin to sell.
He plans to list specific goals that any health insurance reform plan that arrives at his desk must achieve, according to Democratic strategists familiar with the plan. Some of these “goals” have already been agreed to, including new anti-discrimination restrictions on insurance companies. Others will be new, including the level of subsidies he expects to give the uninsured so they can buy into the system.
Obama will also specify a “pay for” mechanism he prefers, and will specify an income level below which he does not want to see taxed.
He will insist upon a mechanism to cut costs and increase competition among insurance companies — and perhaps will even specify a percentage rate — and he will say that his preferred mechanism remains a government-subsidized public health insurance option, but he will remain agnostic about whether the plan must include a robust public option.

It sounds like “ObamaCare,” which will finally begin to merit that term, will be consistent with what’s expected to pass the House, but flexible enough to accomodate what’s “doable” in the Senate.
One key goal will be to identify his administration and his party with reforms on health insurance practicies, such as exclusions of people with pre-existing conditions, that even Republicans claim to support:

The effect of this sales job, if it works, will be to associate the President with parts of the reform bills that are almost certainly likely to pass — assuming the Senate doesn’t bog down.

So: after months of Democratic anxiety over the President’s strategy of deferring to congressional committees, we’ll at last see if his Fabian strategy of gaining by delay in drawing his own lines in the sand will work.
It’s interesting that one long-time and generally nonpartisan Beltway observer, Norm Ornstein, has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post arguing that Obama has in fact chosen the best available strategy for achieving health care reform this year. We’ll soon now if that’s the case. But in any event, the White House’s planned moves should at least calm down progressives who had feared the President was happy to let his signature initiative rise and fall without ever saying exactly what he was willing to expend political captal to accomplish.

A little less than a year ago, (then) Senator Obama spoke on taxes in Dover, N.H., and pledged,

“And I can make a firm pledge: under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase – not your income taxes, not your payroll taxes, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes. My opponent can’t make that pledge, and here’s why: for the first time in American history, he wants to tax your health benefits Apparently, Senator McCain doesn’t think it’s enough that your health premiums have doubled, he thinks you should have to pay taxes on them too. That’s a $3.6 trillion tax increase on middle class families. That will eventually leave tens of millions of you paying higher taxes. That’s his idea of change.

Now, WaPo‘s Ceci Connolly reports that President Obama is taking “a more nuanced approach” and taxing health benefits is “on the table,” as far as the President is concerned. Les Leopold, author of The Looting of America, weighs in on the topic with a HuffPo post warning that Obama is flirting with disaster. Leopold spotlights a group of workers who won a good health care policy from Verizon in a difficult struggle and notes:

American working people desperately want President Obama to succeed. They certainly do not expect him to break his word on taxing worker health benefits….These workers also provided rock solid support for Obama, including his call for health care reform so that all working people one day could enjoy similar coverage. In fact, for these workers one of the key distinguishing points between Obama and McCain centered on the taxing of health care benefits. They felt enormously threatened by McCain’s health tax proposals, especially since the cost of many of their excellent plans can exceed $20,000 a year per active member and even more for retirees and their families. Counting those benefits as taxable income would amount to an enormous tax increase for these workers, and their union made sure they understood this point during the campaign. In fact, labor unions all over the country distributed millions of pieces of campaign literature and made tens of thousands of phone calls to drive this point home.
Yet, team Obama led by Rahm Emanuel seems incredibly out of touch with this reality. In their desperate effort to find revenues for their national health care proposals, they are “pivoting” as they signal a willingness to consider taxes on the better, more expensive health insurance benefits. If the administration continues down that path, Obama will lose these workers, now and forever. They probably won’t vote for the Republicans in the mid-term elections, but they might sit it out or fail to campaign vigorously for Democrats.

It may not be fair to blame Emanuel, but Leopold makes an important point. If Obama trades away his earlier promise, he will be hammered mercilessly with GOP ads depicting his promise and its breaking. Breaking promises is a bad idea. Breaking such clearly-stated promises is even worse. His approval numbers will tank far deeper than they are now. Leopold tosses out a roundball analogy to frame the gravity of what is at stake:

Like a good basketball player, President Obama knows how to pivot. Like a good politician he also should know when to pivot and in what direction. But if he pivots towards taxes on health care benefits, he’ll find himself alone on the court with a bunch of blue dogs and bankers as teammates, while his working class fans walk away in disgust. Even more importantly, his real team needs to see him take on the big boys… and soon.

There are times when political leaders have to admit a mistake and change a position. This is not one of those times. Obama was right a year ago. As Leopold points out, there are other, less dangerous ways to get the needed revenues. — ways that don’t break such a clearly-stated pledge and that keep faith with working people. Entertaining the notion that it would go unnoticed is asking for trouble. This trial balloon needs to sink. There are plenty of alternatives. He should pick one — or more — and protect his integrity.

A lot of Democrats look at Republican efforts to alienate Medicare beneficiaries from health care reform and think it’s all a matter of misinformation: if seniors really understood that their own health insurance was “government-run,” they’d be less inclined to oppose an offer of similiar insurance to others.
I”m afraid this interepretation misses something fundamental about the conservative assault on health care reform: the idea is to convince seniors that the uninsured don’t deserve similar federal benefits. In essence, they’re bringing back the old “welfare wedge” in a new form, this time aimed at stigmatizing the working poor and at middle-class families trying to stay in the middle class.
I’ve got an article up at Salon that goes into this in some detail, and examines how “welfare” rhetoric began characterizing Republican attacks on Obama’s policies back during the presidential campaign. This is something progressives need to get a grip on, because this divisive strategy is by no means limited to, or likely to end with, health care reform.