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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: November 2009

TDS Co-Editor William Galston Calls for National Infrastructure Bank

In his post, “One Way to Rebuild America” at The New Republic, TDS-Co-Editor William Galston makes a persuasive case for “a national infrastructure bank,’ to restore America’s deteriorating network of roads, bridges, sewers, mass transit systems and other essentail public facilities needed for healthy economic growth.
The National Infrastructure Bank, which was proposed by a bipartisan commission and in legislation now before both houses of congress, was supported by President Obama during his campaign for president. Here is the basic outline, according to Galston:

The bank would be established with an initial infusion of federal capital–$60 billion is a frequently cited figure–and an independent board of directors. All projects seeking federal support over a fixed amount ($75 million in the 2007 Dodd/Hagel version) would have to be submitted to the bank for approval. The governors would employ an explicit and rigorous template for evaluating projects’ benefits and fundability. Projects surviving this test would be eligible for a range of financing options.
Beyond reducing the influence of local pork-barrel considerations on infrastructure investments, the bank would offer two other advantages. First, it could mobilize additional capital by reselling the loans it makes in the private market. This would enable the bank to make more loans without additional appropriations, multiplying the bank’s impact on the direction and level of investment. Second, it could help smooth over some short-term political problems. Rather than forcing current taxpayers to bear the entire burden of investments from which the next generation will also benefit, revenue bonds would enable all users over a period of decades to pay a fair and affordable share..

Galston acknowledges that the proposal has some powerful foes, including some “congressional appropriators,” who fear the bank’s independent Board fo Directors might “clip their wings” and there are even rumors of some opponents of the proposal on President Obama’s senior staff. But Galston nonetheless sees a near-perfect match of compelling need and available resources that can be best addressed by the proposal:

We have an urgent need–a growing gap in providing public goods that improve economic efficiency as well as the quality of social life. We have massive unused resources, in the form of idle plants and equipment and sky-high unemployment. Infrastructure investment creates high-quality jobs here at home, and it produces tangible results to which politicians can point with pride…It’s a natural centerpiece for any agenda that emerges from the White House’s December “jobs summit.”

Galston puts the challenge to the white house to provide the needed leadership. “Will the president have the courage of his campaign convictions?…Will we become once again the country that created the interstate highway system? Or are we too divided and dispirited even to try?” Good questions, and America’s economic future may well depend on the answer.


Paranoia on the Upswing

In October, Mother Jones reported on the creation of a popular, massive multiplayer game, in which conservatives launch a revolution in reaction to an attempt by the Obama government to merge the United States with Mexico and Canada to form a North American Union:

In the game’s scenario, 20 million armed American “patriots” begin seizing local and federal government offices. These are the same people whose earlier Tea Party protests had been ignored and dismissed by the mainstream media. Now, they post bounties for government employees. There’s fighting in every state.

The makers call the game, “2011 — Obama’s Coup Fails” but they are careful to describe the project as an act of satire and fiction.
Unfortunately, far too many Republicans believe the coup already happened:

PPP’s newest national survey finds that a 52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately […] Belief in the ACORN conspiracy theory is even higher among GOP partisans than the birther one, which only 42% of Republicans expressed agreement with on our national survey in September.

Writing at TAPPED, Adam Serwer has the perhaps the sanest bit of analysis one can offer about this trend:

The 2008 electorate was the most diverse ever–for some people, that is disenfranchisement by definition, since that means America is being increasingly populated by people who aren’t “real Americans.” Even if ACORN didn’t steal the election, those people did, and so whether ACORN literally stole the election matters about as much as literal “death panels”. It’s “true enough.” Hoffman workers in NY-23 mistook one of their own African-American volunteers for a member of ACORN, which wasn’t even active in the district.
None of this new far right mythology actually has to make sense. As long as the frayed pieces of the puzzle can be assembled in a manner that allows this part of the right to preserve in their minds the idea that they are the authentic representation of what it means to be American, any explanation will do.

The central problem, of course, with this entire line of thinking is that it might motivate some unsettled individual to take matters into his own hands.
Another popular trend among the conservative fringe? The slogan: “Pray for Obama—Psalm 109:8” That particular psalm reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.” Some have launched a small industry selling t-shirts and bumper stickers which display the message. And of course, this comes just six weeks after Facebook had to take down a poll which asked members if they wanted to see President Obama assassinated.
Even if this upswing of anger against the government doesn’t put his life in danger, it runs the risk of calling into question the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency. It bolsters the arguments of those who believe that the liberty of ‘real Americans’ is somehow threatened by his presence in the White House.
That’s an idea we must work to reject. It isn’t just offensive; it’s dangerous.


Reid’s Compromise Bill: The Timetable

A number of political commentators have expressed concern about the timetable for implementing health care reforms, particularly as it relates to Democratic prospects in the upcoming midterm elections. So far, Politico‘s Carrie Budoff Brown has the best summary of the timetable for the proposed Senate compromise health care reform bill. Here’s a much-abbreviated summary of Brown’s rundown on “immediate benefits” of ‘The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,’ which kick in the first year after enactment:

Access to Affordable Coverage for the Uninsured with Pre-existing Conditions…
Closing the Coverage Gap in the Medicare (Part D) Drug Benefit… reduce the size of the “donut hole” by raising the ceiling on the initial coverage period by $500 in 2010…also guarantee 50 percent price discounts on brand-name drugs and biologics purchased by low and middle-income beneficiaries in the coverage gap.
Small Business Tax Credits…Tax credits of up to 50 percent of premiums will be available to firms that choose to offer coverage.
Extension of Dependent Coverage for Young Adults…until age 26.
Free Prevention Benefits…exempt these benefits from deductibles and other cost-sharing requirements in public and private insurance coverage.
No Arbitrary Limits on Coverage…prohibit insurers from imposing lifetime limits on benefits and will restrict the use of annual limits.
Protection from Rescissions of Existing Coverage
Prohibits Discrimination Based on Salary
Health Insurance Consumer Information…provide assistance to States…to assist individuals with the filing of complaints and appeals, enrollment in a health plan…
Clear Summaries, Without the Fine Print

It’s encouraging that the key element of no denying coverage for prior conditions kicks in during the first year. That alone is a significant selling point. The problematic Senators (Lieberman, Nelson, Landrieau and Snowe) will have to think twice about the costs of casting a vote that may kill that important reform for consumers. The other measures are gravy, thin gravy in some cases, but selling points nonetheless.
Now for the tough sell, according to Brown:

The Senate bill pushes back implementation of major parts of the reform to 2014 — a change from 2013 under the Finance Committee bill…This is bad news for lawmakers who will need to explain to constituents why the elements that have attracted the most attention — the public plan, the Medicaid expansion and the insurance exchanges — won’t be available for four years.

Presumably, the timetable for these these delayed reforms is negotiable in myriad combinations with other proposed modifications to come in horse-trading during the weeks ahead. The challenge is to devise face-saving options for Nelson, Lieberman and/or Snowe, and maybe Landrieu — which don’t significantly undermine the substance of Reid’s proposals. Quite a hat trick, that.


Tomasky: Blue Dogs Underestimate Their Latitude

Michael Tomasky’s article, “Who Are the Blue Dogs?” in the December 3rd edition of The New York Review of Books is one of the most revelaing pieces yet written on the topic. Tomasky probes the dimensions of the Blue Dogs’ numerical strength in the House, the demographics of their districts and how the numbers play out in their respective regions. He concludes that,

…The Democratic congressional party has become far more ideologically diverse than the Republican one. In theory, and sometimes in practice, this can be a good thing. But it means that Democrats simply can’t act with the kind of unanimity one sees among Republicans. There is too much disagreement within the caucus…
Certainly, Blue Dogs and other rural Democrats can’t vote like Manhattan’s Jerry Nadler. Everyone understands that. But it’s also not entirely clear that one or two controversial votes would endanger many of these legislators.

A good point. Tomasky also provides some interesting observations about the importance of victory margins:

All but a small number of these Democrats won their own races by a greater margin than McCain’s over Obama in the district. Thirty of them beat their GOP opponents by 10 percentage points more than McCain beat Obama. I calculated these numbers in late July, comparing the Democrats’ victory margins to McCain’s, determining each Democrat’s “margin versus McCain”(MVM).[7] Ross, for example, ran unopposed, scoring an MVM of +67. Melancon also ran unopposed, producing an MVM of +76. Herseth Sandlin’s margin was +28, Shuler’s +21. Only eight of the forty-nine had negative margins. Minnick’s, for example, was –25. He and a handful of others have every right to proceed with caution.
But for the vast majority of members of Congress, once you’ve been elected and reelected once or twice, it takes either a pretty big scandal or a rare historical tidal wave (as in 1994) to produce defeat. Members know this—in fact, they typically know exactly how many percentage points a certain vote might cost them at the polls. One begins to suspect that some Blue Dogs don’t really fear losing as much as they fear facing a semicredible opponent and actually having to campaign hard for a change.

Tomasky offers this insight on the topic of what the Blue Dogs really want:

…It is true that they “campaigned on fiscal responsibility,” as the Pelosi spokesman put it after the stimulus vote. What Blue Dogs typically want out of legislative negotiations, one leadership aide told me, is to be able to go back to their districts and say to their voters that they managed to wrest this or that concession out of the more liberal leadership. This aide spoke of “thousands of hours of meetings” with individual legislators seeking to change health care legislation in large ways and small: “If you can’t go back to your district and say, ‘I’ve changed this bill to reflect you voters,’…you have to be able to point to something that you did that made the bill better.”

An important consideration to keep in mind as congressional leaders craft a final bill that can win the support of a broad cross-section of Democrats.


The CBO Scores the Senate Bill

The moment for which we’ve waited all week has arrived — the CBO has scored the Senate health care reform bill:

On CNN a moment ago, Dana Bash reported that the Congressional Budget Office has given the Senate health care reform bill has an estimated $849 billion price tag.
Bash cited a “senior Democratic source” for this information.
The source also said the bill would reduce the deficit by $127 billion dollars, Bash reported.
The bill also reportedly includes a public health insurance option with an opt-out clause

From a message standpoint, this is particularly good news.
The Senate bill would provide coverage for 94 percent of the population, extending access to another 31 million Americans. The price tag comes in well below President Obama’s $1 trillion ceiling. It does more to reduce the deficit than the bill passed by the House earlier this month, and on that front, the CBO estimates it would cut the deficit by as much as $650 billion in the second decade.
Barring a leak of the bill tonight, we will likely wait until at least tomorrow to get more details about the specific mechanisms included in the Senate legislation. But for now, this is a big step forward.


Three Keys to Dem Success in ’10

TDS contributor Mike Lux’s post “Winning the 2010 Elections” at Open Left offers three challenges he believes Dems will have to meet to do well next November:

…There is a strategy that can turn the 2010 election around. That strategy needs to be built around health care, jobs, and taking on the big banks. None of these things are easy, but I am convinced that they are by far the best hope Democrats have.

First, with respect to health care reform:

On health care, they simply have to pass a strong bill where at least some important and tangible benefits kick in right away. They just have to if there is any hope in the 2010 elections….

Emphasis on ‘right away’ — not a lot of wiggle room here.
To address rising joblessness, Lux has three “don’t”s:

Don’t brag about how the GDP is growing, the recession is over, but jobs are a lagging indicator and the job situation will eventually get better.
Don’t say “well, we know things are bad, but without us it would have been a lot worse”.
Don’t talk about how great it is that the banking sector is healthy again, because soon they will be lending money to businesses, and at some point that will mean some of those businesses will start hiring again.

Making excuses for failure and advocating ‘top-down’ job-creation are “political death” in Lux’s view. On the contrary,

…What Democrats should be doing is …Show that they are moving on this urgent need: get a new jobs bill passed, get a roads/infrastructure bill passed. Show more toughness when the most protectionist country on earth, China, lectures us on being protectionists (they liked us being saps for all those years.) Fight like crazy for new jobs in every venue, every forum, every chance you get- and tell people no matter how many jobs you produce that it is never enough, that you will keep fighting for more…Voters understand the deep hole our economy is in, and that things won’t be solved overnight, but they want to know that their political leaders are as passionate about solving unemployment problems as the people struggling are to find jobs.

Lastly, Lux supports a bill to “break up the big banks,” sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT), adding “about 85% of the American public would agree with Bernie’s statement that if you are too big to fail, you are too big to exist.”
Lux concludes with a warning and a vision for victory:

If Democrats follow the safe conventional wisdom formula in the 2010 elections, they will get their butts handed to them. Voters are not happy with incumbents, base Democratic voters feel like no one is fighting for them, independents feel like nobody cares what they think. But if Democrats shed their caution and become fighters, for jobs and health care and the middle class and against insurers and Wall Street, they can pull off the same kind of surprise in 2010 that we pulled off in 1998.

A formidable challenge indeed, but one which can light the way forward to the best possible outcome in the 2010 elections.


TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira: Health Reform Fear-Mongers Lack Traction

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ post at the Center for American Progress web pages brings bad news for fear-mongers who are trying to squash health care reform — the public isn’t buying it, according to the latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll. While the public “still has many questions and concerns about health care reform,” Teixeira presents encouraging data for reform advocates:

The public was asked whether the president and Congress passing health care reform would make “the country as a whole” worse off or better off. By 53-28, the public thought the country would be better off, rather than worse off.
So much for taking the country down the road to socialism. What about ruining the economy? Over the long term, the public believes, by 49-37, that passing health care reform will actually help the nation’s economy.
And that public option, which conservatives say is the worst of the worst? That still draws 57-39 support from the public, despite the endless talk about how this would mean “a government takeover of the health care system.”

With solid public support for all the key elements of health care reform, the challenge now falls to congress. Says Teixeira, “Let’s hope their elected representatives do the same and complete the historic task before them of finally passing health care reform.”


Don’t Count Out Cost Controls Yet

This morning, NPR introduced a story to outline a supposed shift in the way that Democrats talk about the health care bill which was passed by the House of Representatives earlier this month.
For months, the President has used the phrase “health care reform,” detailing efforts to shift costs dramatically downward. But when he spoke from the Rose Garden ten days ago, he said that the House bill has, “[b]rought us closer than we have ever been to comprehensive health insurance reform in America.”
NPR says that reflects an important change in rhetoric:

“Health insurance reform” is the same label other Democratic leaders are now using — a phenomenon that coincides with the insurance industry having turned against the Democrats’ health care proposals, which force insurers to drop highly unpopular policies, such as denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

Thankfully the House bill only represents one-half the equation. The Senate must still pass a bill, and we have every reason to believe that the final piece of legislation from the upper chamber will much more explicitly embrace the principals of health care reform.
In fact, as Ezra Klein points out, there are three reasons to believe the Senate bill represent one of the most significant efforts at cost control in American history:

The first comes from the excise tax on high-cost health insurance plans. The idea here is simple enough: you’re taxing any growth in health-care premiums that’s faster than the rate of growth in GDP plus one percentage point, which is going to make people a lot less accepting of premium increases and unchecked growth. This is, in the simplest sense of the term, a cost control. In theory, it controls costs by taxing one of the drivers of cost growth into submission. It is, by far, the policy economists are most united on, and the one that works in the most straightforward and blunt way.
The second comes from the newly formed Medicare Commission, which is a lot stronger than people realize. The idea isn’t simply that a panel of experts gets to dream up interesting reforms to try out in Medicare. It’s that they are charged with making sure that Medicare hits certain growth targets, and their package of reforms has to achieve that goal. Those reforms are then sent to Congress, where Senate debate is limited to 30 hours, and amendments must be both budget neutral and “germane.” This report, in other words, is exempt from the filibuster. So far as anything is ever easy to pass, this is easy to pass. If Congress cannot manage action even within this streamlined process, then it simply cannot cut health-care costs at all, and our federal government will go bankrupt.
The third is the delivery-system reforms. The House bill has these too, though they’re a bit weaker. They key alchemy, however, is the interplay of the delivery-system reforms and the MedPAC commission. The Senate builds in a lot of pathways by which an idea that starts in Medicare through the commission and proves successful can be brought to pilot and then brought to scale across the health-care system. Medicare serves as the laboratory, but other institutions created in the bill serve as the factory

We should get a score of the combined Senate bill from the Congressional Budget Office any day this week, and that should give us a very strong indication of the direction that the health reform effort will take going forward. But at this point, it would be a mistake to say that cost controls aren’t a major facet of the legislation.


Democrats – Don’t be misled. The media is going to call Obama’s new Afghan strategy a “betrayal” of the Democratic base – but it’s not. It’s actually a decisive rejection of the Republican/Neo-Conservative strategy of the “Long War”

Print Version
When Obama presents his new strategy for Afghanistan in the next few days it is inevitable that many in the press will describe it as a profound betrayal of the Democratic “base”. Obama will face fierce criticism from many progressive and anti-war Democrats who will consider his decision to significantly increase the number of troops as representing a complete capitulation to the military and Republican neoconservatives.
This reaction is understandable, but it is actually profoundly wrong. At the same time that Obama’s plan will authorize additional troops, his new strategy already represents a powerful repudiation of the fundamental Bush/neoconservative strategy and a historic reassertion of civilian control over the military after 9/11.
For many Democrats – those who do not carefully follow the cloistered and jargon-filled “inside the beltway” debates over counter-terrorism and military strategy — this assertion will seem utterly and patently absurd — how can a decision that significantly increases troop levels in Afghanistan possibly also represent a challenge to a militaristic strategy?
In order to understand why this apparent paradox actually makes sense it is necessary to view the specific issue of Afghanistan in two larger contexts — the overall strategic debate about how to conduct the long-term “war on terror” and the proper relationship between the President and the military. The fundamental conflict that has been going on between, on the one hand, the Obama administration and the Republican/neoconservatives and the military on the other has actually been over these two larger strategic questions and not over the precise number of troops to send to Afghanistan. The size of the proposed troop increase in Afghanistan is only a single sub-issue within a much larger debate over what American military strategy and policy should be for the next ten, twenty and even fifty years.
On one side is the perspective that is variously called the Global War on Terror, World War IV or simply The Long War”. It is widely shared among Republicans and neoconservatives and is supported by a major sector of the military establishment.
This view was codified in the period immediately after 9/11. Its central premise is that military operations aimed at hunting down individual terrorists and dismantling specific terrorist organizations are totally inadequate – indeed almost worthless — in dealing with the threat of global terrorism. It is only by fundamentally transforming the societies of the Muslim world – by introducing U.S. style political institutions and orienting their societies and economies toward the west and the global economy – that the roots of Islamic terrorism can be undermined.


AP Poll: Fund Health Reform by Taxing Rich

Contrary to much recent reportage, the American people are pretty clear about how they would like health care reform to be financed, according to a new Associated Press poll by GfK-Roper Public Affairs and Media, conducted 10/29-11/8. As Erica Werrner explains in her AP report:

When it comes to paying for a health care overhaul, Americans see just one way to go: Tax the rich.
That finding from a new Associated Press poll will be welcome news for House Democrats, who proposed doing just that in their sweeping remake of the U.S. medical system, which passed earlier this month and would extend coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.
The poll found participants sour on other ways of paying for the health overhaul that is being considered in Congress, including taxing insurers on high-value coverage packages derided by President Barack Obama and Democrats as “Cadillac plans.”

Only 29 percent of adults polled supported the tax on Cadillac plans, with 56 percent opposed. Other measures, including new taxes on insurance, drug and medical device manufacturers also failed to win majority support in the AP poll, reports Werner, with 48 percent opposed to new taxes on insurance companies, and 42 percent in support. A slight majority, 51 percent, opposed higher taxes on drug and medical device makers, while 41 percent supported it.
But the poll found 57 percent of respondents favor financing health care refom by raising taxes on those earning $250,000 per year, with 36 percent opposed. The House bill would impose a 5.4 percent surcharge on those earning more than $500,000 per year, as well as households earning more than $1 million per year.