Joe Wilson’s little town hall tantrum during the president’s speech the other night has fed an inevitable question: what is it about the conservatives of South Carolina? You got Mark Sanford trying to keep the ctizens of his own state from benefitting from economic stimulus legislation long after it was enacted (but before his own pants-down moment). You got Jim DeMint almost daily embracing every extremist way of looking at government that he can find. And now Wilson’s managing to get himself compared to Preston “Bully” Brooks, the antebellum symbol of southern bellicosity.
Alexander Burns of Poltico examines the question of the Palmetto State’s peculiar taste for conservative extremism, and does come up with this interesting assessment from one of the SC GOP’s First Families:

Carroll Campbell III, the son of the popular late governor and a Republican exploring his own bid for Congress next year, suggested Wilson’s behavior may have resonated with a powerful conservative base frustrated by its minority status.
“I talk to a lot of Republican groups, but most of these individuals are really happy that at least he’s showing some backbone,” said Campbell, whose father served two terms as governor. “Republicans are desperate for, looking for the new face of politics…There’s a sense of satisfaction that at least he can step up and do what he did.”

But there’s clearly a lot more going on than contemporary political feelings. The great southern historian V.O. Key once referrred to South Carolina and Mississippi as “the super-South.” These were the states where slaves represented a very large majority of the population prior to emancipation. SC was famously the state that nearly broke the union during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, and then did break it by firing on Fort Sumter. It was a state where there was virtually no hint of cross-racial class solidarity during the Populist revolt. It was the state where class conflict among white people was best symbolized by the brutal crushing of efforts to unionize the textile mills in the 1930s and 1940s.
South Carolina is the state where the realignment of conservative whites towards the Republican Party was really pioneered, with the defections of Sen. Strom Thurmond and Rep. Albert Watson in 1964 started a long trend throughout the region. And it’s no coincidence that the SC GOP was for many years pretty much the wholly owned subsidiary of the Milliken textile family, among the bitterest economic reactionaries in the country.
So there’s some history there, all right, and enough drama to make the occasional demagogue or South American sexual tourist in the political ranks not terribly conspicuous. It’s a wonderful thing for the embattled ranks of South Cackalacky progressives that the state played an important role in the nomination of Barack Obama as president. But it was indeed a rare occasion.

Although Reagan and Gingrich have long been out of power, there is a sense in which the Reagan-Gingrich era of government-bashing still rules America. Their accomplishment, begun by Reagan and hammered into place by Gingrich, is quite remarkable. The “government is bad” meme has been floating around in GOP circles for nearly a century. What they suceeded in doing, however, is implanting it as the knee-jerk, default belief, not only among conservative ideologues, but among millions of low-information voters, including Independents and not a few Democrats.
I’m not saying subscribers to the meme are a majority at the moment. They are not. A CBS News/New York Times Poll conducted 7/24-28, for example, found that 53 percent of respondents were “not willing” “for the government to provide fewer services” in key areas to reduce the federal budget deficit, with 31 percent saying they were willing. But 31 percent suggests there is a sizable minority, large enough to obstruct and often prevent the enactment of needed reform legislation.
There is a temptation, maybe it’s the common wisdom, to attribute the phenomenon to Reagan’s charisma and Newt’s shrewd manipulation of the media — both undeniable factors. But I would argue that the single most potent factor that fuels the meme is the acquiescence of Democrats and progressives. Yes, I know, many Dems and progressives scream loud and long in defense of government programs. But usually we are preaching to the choir. What we rarely do is reach out and target persuadable voters with educational campaigns about the virtues of government.
Even when Democrats control the reins of government, like, ahem, now, we fail to trumpet its formidable virtues. Sure, every government agency has brochures and web pages pointing out its accomplishments. But hearts and minds are not won by brochures or even, gasp, web pages. They are won by television.

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Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota has a problem. He wants to be the Republican nominee for president in 2012. But there’s nothing much about him that excites the conservative “base” voters who almost completely control the nominating process. That’s why he was passed over (reportedly at the last minute) by John McCain for the vice presidential nod last year, in favor of the risky proposition of Sarah Palin, whom the Right to Life movement considers its very own St. Joan.
Yes, Pawlenty is himself an anti-abortion absolutist, but that’s a given in GOP circles these days. Yes, he’s a practicing conservative evangelical Christian, but in a 2012 field that will probably include Mike Huckabee, you’d have to personally handle snakes to make a particular impression on that constituency. His record in Minnesota provides little or no red meat. His coinage of the term “Sam’s Club Republicans” is nice, but is getting a little old and meaningless.
But unlike Palin, Pawlenty is, at least until the end of next year, a governor. So he seems to have decided to identify himself with the one crazy right-wing cause that has something vaguely to do with his current gig: the so-called “state sovereignty movement.” As Andy Barr of Politico reports:

Minnesota Republican Tim Pawlenty urged fellow governors on Thursday to more frequently assert state sovereignty over the federal government and suggested that the country may increasingly see states suing the federal government.
Asked by a caller about the option of asserting the Tenth Amendment as a tactic to reject a successful health care overhaul by President Barack Obama during a tele-town hall organized by the Republican Governors Association, Pawlenty said, “that’s a possibility.”
Speaking generally about the tenth amendment, Pawlenty said the country has not had “a proper federalism debate since Ronald Reagan raised the issue in the 1980s.”
“You’re starting to see more governors, me and governor [Rick] Perry from Texas, speaking out on this and asserting our tenth amendment rights,” Pawlenty said on a call listened to by more than 12,000 people.

The “state sovereignty movement” is not, it’s important to understand, just a group of people who think the federal government has too much power. It’s central feature is the crackpot nineteenth century theory, revived most recently to resist civil rights legislation, that states have the inherent right to nullify federal legislation and court rulings that fall outside the enumerated constitutional powers of the federal government. And Pawlenty knows its extremist provenance: that’s why he identified himself with Rick Perry, who’s flirted both with nullification and with secession as part of his high-minded contributions to the “state sovereignty movement.”
Perry, being a Texan and all, knows how to play the game, issuing dog whistles to the people who essentially want to nullify not just every form of federal social or civil rights legislation, but the last presidential election, while making it sound like he’s just offering some observations on constitutional law. I don’t know if Pawlenty, a yankee who didn’t grow up with this particular tradition of double-talk, can pull it off.
But for the time being, this is the car on the crazy train of the contemporary Right that he’s chosen to climb aboard, and it could turn out to be a pretty wild ride. Hope he enjoys the company of his new friends in the “state sovereignty movement,” and can learn to properly whistle “Dixie.”

Since RedState.com is one of the two or three most prominent conservative political blogs out there, it’s very interesting to see the reaction of its founder, Erick Erickson, to the incident last night when Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) shrieked “You lie!” at the President for saying (accurately) that his health care proposal did not create coverage for illegal immigrants:

Joe Wilson has been identified as the Republican who yelled out that Barack Obama was a liar.
He gets a drink on me!
CONTRIBUTE TO JOE WILSON HERE. Joe Wilson’s opponent raised $11,000.00 in an hour after Joe Wilson stood up to Barack Obama. We must help Joe Wilson.

But defending Wilson as a “Great American Hero” (in the title of the post) wasn’t enough for Erickson, who is only happy when he’s acting as an ideological commissar rooting out any signs of moderation in the GOP:

Bob Bennett (RINO-UT) was the only Republican who stood up and clapped when Barack Obama bashed Sarah Palin over the death panels. That jackass should be taken out in a primary.

So Sarah Palin completely fabricates an inflammatory “death panel” claim, and other wingnuts fabricate the illegal immigrants claim. Nobody made them do this; both claims were based on crazy conspiracy theories at best, and conscious, end-justifies-the-means lies at worst. The President calls them on it, Wilson goes nuts, and he’s an American Hero, while Bennett is an “unrepentant fool” and a “jackass” for failing to sit on his hands when Obama called the “death panel” crap a lie.
These people are shameless. And they no longer seem to have a firm grip on reality.

With his speech before Congress and the nation tonight, Barack Obama was effective in cutting through the misinformation and partisan bickering over health care and reaching swing voters, many of whom entered the evening harboring real skepticism about his plan. Obama succeeded in reassuring voters of all political stripes on some of their biggest concerns about reform while also energizing supporters and avoiding the kind of polarization that could drive away independents and Republicans. Moreover, the reaction of Republicans in the audience, including the heckling of the president by Rep. Joe Wilson, generated a strong backlash among focus group participants who expressed deep frustration with Republicans for putting partisan politics ahead of solving the nations’ problems.
Democracy Corps conducted dial testing of the speech with 50 independent and weak partisan voters in Denver, Colorado, followed by focus groups with voters whose support for Obama’s health care plan increased after seeing the speech. The dial group participants were evenly divided among those who initially supported and initially opposed the plan, with an almost equal division between Obama and McCain voters.
These swing voters reacted strongly to Obama’s message. Support for Obama’s plan jumped 20 points, from 46 percent before the speech to 66 percent after. Importantly, Obama also achieved one of his principal goals of boosting the intensity of support. Prior to the speech, just 2 percent of these swing voters supported the plan strongly while 26 percent opposed it strongly; by the end of the evening those numbers were virtually reversed, with 28 percent supporting the plan strongly against just 8 percent strongly opposed. The president was also extremely successful in moving the needle on areas where progressives have struggled over the last few months, making great strides in reassuring voters on issues like the deficits and taxes, seniors and Medicare, choice and control, competition and costs, and government intervention

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
I have been a bit outspoken in arguing that the vast expectations building up around the president’s health care reform speech last night were unreasonable, and unnecessary. Congress is closer to enactment of legislation that it’s been all year, or at any time since 1994, and his job was to “reboot” the debate by rebutting the lies that have been circulating about reform, and restating the basic case for action this year.
The president did that abundantly. But he also did some other important things.
His smackdown of lies about health reform (“That is a lie” was a refreshing high point) was deftly combined with shout outs to individual Republicans who have contributed decent ideas in the past, and with a specific pledge to begin action on the pet rock of conservative health care policy, medical malpractice reform. He also bluntly called out Republicans for their incredible hypocrisy in posing as the saviors of Medicare, even as they embrace proposals to privatize it. This will give Republicans a lot to cope with in the days ahead.
He made the moral case for genuinely universal health care, and explained the whole competitive system more clearly than any politician has done, while refusing to make the “public option” a litmus test, treating it as a “means, not an end,” which is exactly how he needed to frame it.
He got wonky now and then, but not as much as he did in his last effort on this subject, the presidential press conference.
Most importantly, he presented a vision of the big themes of health reform that is consistent with what’s happening in the House, what’s likely to happen in the Senate, and what might ultimately emerge from a conference committee. In other words, it was a keeper.
Many observers will focus on the style rather than the substance of the speech: the president was obviously passionate as well as wonky, and very emotional in his wind-up tribute to the late Senator Kennedy. Even though I didn’t think coming in that he had to move public opinion, he may have actually done that. But if nothing else, he’s set the stage for positive action in Congress, laid down the markers he needed to lay down, and in general, regained some serious momentum for health care reform.

I watched the President’s address on a jumbotron screen at a rally in the MLK National Historic Site in Atlanta. The rally and viewing, which were put together by Organizing for America, featured some of the better local agitators, including the state AFL-CIO president, the pastor of King’s church, a firebrand state senator, a couple of people who had been badly burned by insurance companies and OFA leaders, all of whom stoked the crowd leading up to the President’s address.
About 300-350 people attended, maybe 75-80 percent African Americans, plus a subtantial number of people with disabilities of all races. These were not just Obamaphiles, but people who felt strongly about health reform, and, moving around in the crowd, I heard pieces of quite a few health care horror stories. The event seems to have been designed mostly for the local TV cameras, which is understandible, since the tube still rules in the battle for hearts and minds.
Predictably enough, the crowd cheered the President’s stronger statements, and booed lustiily when the camera panned to Rep. Boehner and other GOP stiffs. I imagine the scene was replicated in cities across the country. I wondered what political moderates viewing the speech thought about the stolid Republicans, who have offered no reform proposals of their own thus far. I especially like how Robert Creamer puts it in his HuffPo post, that the heckling S.C. Rep. Joe Wilson is “the poster child for the new Republican Party.”
As for President Obama’s address (transcript here) , I thought he scored key points with impressive brevity. Never did I feel, “this is too wonky,” which has been an issue with other health care reform advocates. I liked the way he directly addressed the lies and distortions foisted by Republican fear-mongers. His tone was a little sharp. But there is really no way to make nice when debunking some of the nastier allegations they have smeared on his reform proposals. He unsheathed a few good zingers, such as the reference to the monstrous deficit he inherited, but wisely kept them to a minimum. Better to let the glowering Republicans marinate in bitterness on national TV, and they obliged.
President Obama endorsed the public option, but he kept an escape hatch open, saying he would consider alternatives. There was only a vague reference to what has elsewhere been called the “trigger mechanism” that would make the public option available. Even less was said about the possibility of taxing health care benefits. Those who were looking for heightened clarity on these controversial issues in the Presidents’ speech were probably disappointed. He tossed out a bit of an olive branch to the Republicans, in the form of a hint that some kind of tort reform should be part of the enacted legislation, which may be small comfort to them, but it’s more conciliatory than anything they have offered.
I expect that the President’s approval ratings will improve, as they generally do after a televised address. But I do think he needs to do more, perhaps in a warmer format, such as a series of televised “fireside chats,” as has been suggested. The President’s address was a pretty good beginning, especially if he will follow it with more visible, assertive leadership.
Among progressives, the reaction has been more favorable than not. Open Left‘s David Sirota and Mike Lux heard different speeches, with Lux giving Obama’s address a rave review and Sirota a pan. E. J. Dionne, Jr. noted a positive transformation in his WaPo column:

It seemed as if a politician who had been channeling the detached and cerebral Adlai Stevenson had discovered a new role model in the fighting Harry Truman. For the cause of health-care reform, it was about time.

And that’s all to the good.

TDS Co-editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages demonstrates why opponents of health care reform spread lies and distortions about progressive reform proposals. Teixeira says that the lynchpin of their strategy is to insure that “the public can remain confused about what is actually in these plans.” Teixeira explains:

This strategy, as appalling as it is, makes sense from their avowed goal of stopping health care reform. As poll after poll has documented, the public strongly supports the basic reforms that the health care bills would deliver. The latest example of this comes from an end of August CBS News poll. In that poll, 79 percent support “requiring health insurance companies to cover anyone who applies,” 72 percent support “the government setting limits on the amount that health insurance companies can charge people for insurance premiums, co-pays, and out-of-pocket expenses” and 71 percent support “the government providing subsidies to help low-income people buy their own health insurance from private insurance companies.”
These are items that are sure to be in any health care reform bill that Obama signs. But does the public know that? Very doubtful. In the same poll, respondents were asked “Do you think you understand the health care reforms under consideration in Congress, or are they confusing to you?” By an overwhelming 67 percent to 31 percent, the public confessed they are confused by the health care reforms before Congress. This is the confusion the conservatives are so assiduously trying to cultivate.

Teixeira notes further that 60 percent of the public agrees that President Obama “has not clearly explained his plans for health care reform,” nearly double the percentage of those who feel he has done so. If the President meets the challenge of clarity in his speech on health care reform tonight, he could do a lot toward eradicating much of the confusion and lies about the Democratic plan — and lead America toward a new era of health security for all.

The other day J.P. Green published a good summary of initial reactions to Sen. Olympia Snowe’s reported proposal of a “trigger” to resolve the gap between proponents and opponents of a “public option” in a competitive health insurance system. To put it simply, no one much likes it, and there are growing pressures in both parties to rule it out in advance.
But is the “trigger” one of those “centrist” compromises that don’t really make sense, or is something else going on here? In an important post last week, Ezra Klein may have put his finger on the problem:

The concept of a trigger for the public option is actually pretty savvy if the two sides were fighting over the empirical question of “can the health insurance industry control costs and increase competition in a constructive fashion?” If conservatives are right that a restructured market would compel insurers to cut costs and increase competition and generally clean up their behavior, then that’s good enough. But if liberals are proven right that a handful of new regulations isn’t sufficient to create a working insurance market, then the public option would “trigger” into existence and we’d give that solution a try.
The problem is that there’s no real constituency for that compromise: Liberals want a public plan because they want a public plan. Conservatives don’t want a public plan because they don’t want a public plan. Moreover, conservatives don’t just oppose the public plan, but most of them actually oppose passage of a bill. The number of additional votes you can get by making substantive concessions is thus much smaller than the number of additional votes you could get if substantive concessions were actually the sticking point.

Ezra goes on to say that maybe a “constituency of one” is enough to carry the day given Snowe’s pivotal positiion in the Senate (particularly if she can bring along fellow Maine Republican Susan Collins, and provide “cover” to a few Democrats).
But in case the “trigger” does fly, it’s worth noting that the idea is by no means absurd, and could be, if properly designed (a big “if”), entirely consistent with progressive demands for a public option. In the end, the viability of Snowe’s idea will probably come down to a decision among Democrats as to whether they want to cobble together a 60-vote coalition in the Senate and then try to maintain it through a conference committee, or instead go the reconciliation route and hope that Blue Dog defections in the House and a variety of procedural and political obstacles in the Senate don’t doom the legislation. Denunciations of the “trigger” by progressives, mainly in the House, should be understood as an effort to dictate the latter strategy, or perhaps some variation like a full-court press for Senate Democrats who oppose the legislation to vote for cloture and allow a bill to come to the floor. And most Republicans will denounce anything that makes passage of any bill possible.

As we await the president’s heatlh reform speech tonight, TDS Co-Editor William Galston, writing in The New Republic, succinctly describes the challenge Obama faces in appealing to people who are reasonably happy with their current health care options:

[T]he president now faces a two-front challenge. First, he must persuade skeptical middle-class voters that his plan will in fact allow them to keep what they have. Second, he must paint a compelling picture of what they stand to lose if we do nothing–higher premiums, reduced benefits, more out-of-pocket cost, and steadily diminishing employer coverage in good times as well as bad.

Premiums for a typical family health insurance policy, notes Galston, have more than doubled since 2000, and middle-class folk are losing employer-based coverage in the current recession at an alarming rate.
As Jonathan Cohn, in a separate TNR piece, says about Medicare beneficiaries:

As is so often the case with health care, the choices aren’t exactly as the public perceives them. Seniors don’t have the luxury of picking between the Democrats’ plan and the status quo. Instead, the choice between them is between the Democrats’ plan and a steady deterioration in the program’s finances–all but forcing the sort of radical scaling back that Republicans tried to push through in the early 1990s.

That about sums it all up. On complicated issues, inaction always seems like an acceptable option, particularly if you’ve been convinced to fear change. But on health care, inaction ought to be particularly scary.