In a post yesterday, I argued that some intra-progressive fights reflect ideological differences, particularly over the role of private-sector entities in pursuing progressive policy goals, that need to be taken more seriously, in part because failing to acknowledge them often makes such fights nasty exercises in name-calling and character attacks.
There’s another broad area where differences of opinion often originate, and that must be understood as well: differing political strategies.
Two Examples of Strategic Disconnect
Consider two examples: Democratic political operatives and progressive “issue” advocates.
Many full-time political operatives undoubtedly have a personal ideology, or more generally, a reason for being a Democrat. Some have the opportunity to reflect those views in primary campaigns, or in where and on whose behalf they practice their craft. But by and large, when a general election comes along, it’s all about Ds and Rs and Us and Them, and this orientation tends to color how they feel between elections. Anything that promotes the election of a maximum number of Democrats–any kind of Democrat–to public office is more or less the Prime Objective. There are obviously major differences of opinion about how to achieve this result, short-term or long-term, and ideology play a role there as well. But the bottom line is probably best expressed by an old ditty from the presidential campaign of 1892, when Grover Cleveland’s comeback election marked the end of a period of fierce partisan competition and very little ideological differentiation between the parties:
Grover! Grover!
Four more years of Grover!
Out they go, in we go,
Then we’ll be in clover!
Not much deep thinking there, eh?
At the other end of the spectrum, there are “issue” advocates who are involved in politics not out of some broad commitment to a progressive coalition but out of concern for a particular cause, often arising from or rising to the level of personal identity. The relationship of issue advocates to a political party is by definition conditional and instrumental: I support you if you advance my cause, or at least smite the enemies of my cause. Such relationships were much, much weaker in the many decades prior to the Great Ideological Sorting-Out of the two major parties that culminated in the 1990s. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, supporters and opponents of civil rights for African-Americans, women’s rights, antiwar movements, environmentalism, and to some extent even labor rights, were found abundantly in both parties. So progressive issue advocates might be Democrats, Republicans, or independents, but were often functionally independent in their basic relationship to political parties.
Nowadays, when a politician’s position on, say, Union Card Check is a generally reliable predictor of his or her position on abortion or climate change, progressive issue advocates are obviously constrained, and must focus on maximizing influence within the Democratic Party alone. That can be done in noncontroversial ways, such as grassroots organizing, petitions, the cultivation of favored candidates and elected officials, and of course efforts to promote or modify legislation or executive actions. But in the end, issue advocates are largely prisoners of a polarized political system, and must rely in the extreme on threats to sit out elections or even defect from the coalition. That’s where some LGBT activists, some civil libertarians, and some antiwar activists, seem to be right now.
To those whose commitment to the Democratic Party is less conditional, such threats often look selfish, destructive, or even childish. But they are perfectly rational, if sometimes short-sighted: if you are engaged in politics for a cause, that cause’s prospects have to be paramount, and absent the occasional threat to defect, your cause and its advocates can be taken for granted, which is the death-knell of political influence.
But what if a variety of “cause” advocates reach this point of frustration simultanously? Then you can have a genuine “revolt,” which some Democrats fear or hope is in the process of happening out of progressive unhappiness with Barack Obama and the congressional Democratic Party on issues ranging from civil liberties and health care to LGBT rights, Afghanistan, and the financial system.

Read more…

If you want a very detailed examination of the intra-progressive battle over the endgame of health care reform, brew yourself a pot of coffee and sit down for a while with Nate Silver’s post today wherein he poses twenty sharply worded questions to “bill-killer” advocates Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos and John Walker of FireDogLake. It becomes immediately apparent that these particular “bill-killers” aren’t just reacting to the loss of the public option as a progressive totem, but have a baleful view of the entire bill as it stands in the Senate. And a particularly large bone of contention appears to be their conviction that an individual mandate will engorge both the profit-margins and the power of private health insurers (a conviction that Nate Silver does not share).
The other important thing to note from this lengthy exchange is that these “bill-killers” are not in fact arguing for the extinction of the current drive for health care reform legislation on grounds that the product is worse than the status quo. They claim, at least, that an effort to reboot the process by killing the Senate bill and then forcing an immediate House-based drive to enact a bill via the budget reconciliation process is a feasible strategy. We’ll never know, of course, if that’s true (the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership certainly don’t think so) unless a progressive revolt against the Senate bill strikes pay-dirt.
But please read the whole thing; if nothing else, it shows that both sides of this argument (and Nate definitely argues back) are more nuanced than you might think.

The latest intra-progressive dustup over health care reform displays a couple of pretty important potential fault lines within the American center-left. One has to do with political strategy, and the role of the Democratic Party and the presidency in promoting progressive policy goals and social movements. I’ll be writing about that subject extensively in the coming days.
But the other potential fault line is ideological, and is sometimes hard to discern because it extends across a variety of issues. To put it simply, and perhaps over-simply, on a variety of fronts (most notably financial restructuring and health care reform, but arguably on climate change as well), the Obama administration has chosen the strategy of deploying regulated and subsidized private sector entities to achieve progressive policy results. This approach was a hallmark of the so-called Clintonian, “New Democrat” movement, and the broader international movement sometimes referred to as “the Third Way,” which often defended the use of private means for public ends. (It’s also arguably central to the American liberal tradition going back to Woodrow Wilson, and is even evident in parts of the New Deal and Great Society initiatives alongside elements of the “social democratic” tradition, which is characterized by support for publicly operated programs in key areas).
To be clear, this is not the same as the conservative “privatization” strategy, which simply devolves public responsibilities to private entities without much in the way of regulation. In education policy, to cite one example, New Democrats (and the Obama administration) have championed charter public schools, which are highly regulated but privately operated schools that receive public funds in exchange for successful performance of publicly-defined tasks. Conservatives have typically called for private-school vouchers, which simply shift public funds to private schools more or less unconditionally, on the theory that they know best how to educate children.
Now clear as this distinction seems to “New Democrats,” there are a considerable number of progressives who think it’s largely a distinction without a difference, in education policy and elsewhere. And we are seeing that fundamental divergence on opinion on other, more prominent issues right now. On the financial front, the Obama administration reflexively pursued a strategy of regulation and subsidies for the financial sector, without modifying the fundamental nature of financial institutions, even as critics on the left argued for nationalization (at least temporarily) of key financial functions. At the more popular level, critics of TARP from the left joined critics of TARP from the right in deploring “bailouts” of failed financial institutions, even though the two groups of critics held vastly different views of the right alternative course of action.
Similarly in the health care reform debate, the Obama administration pursued legislation that utilized regulated and subsidized private for-profit health insurers to achieve universal health coverage. This approach was inherently flawed to “single-payer” advocates on the left, who strongly believe that private for-profit health insurers are the main problem in the U.S. health care system. The difference was for a long time papered over by the cleverly devised “public option,” which was acceptable to many New Democrat types as a way of ensuring robust competition among private insurers, and which became crucial to single-payer advocates who viewed it as a way to gradually introduce a superior, publicly-operated form of health insurance to those not covered by existing public programs like Medicare and Medicaid. (That’s why the effort to substitute a Medicare buy-in for the public option, which Joe Lieberman killed this week, received such a strong positive response from many progressives whose ultimate goal is an expansion of Medicare-style coverage to all Americans).
Now that the public option compromise is apparently no longer on the table, and there’s no Medicare buy-in to offer single-payer advocates an alternative path to the kind of system they favor, it’s hardly surprising that some progressives have gone into open opposition, and are using the kind of outraged and categorical language deployed by Marcy Wheeler yesterday. As with the financial issue, there’s now a tactical alliance between conservative critics of “ObamaCare,” who view the regulation and subsidization of private health insurers as “socialism,” and progressive critics of the legislation who view the same features as representing “neo-feudalism.”
To put it more bluntly, on a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. They can’t both be right, of course, and these critics would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance. But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.
For those of us whose primary interest is progressive unity and political success for the Democratic Party, it’s very tempting to downplay or even ignore this potential fault-line and the left-right convergence it makes possible. It’s also easy to dismiss critics-from-the-left of Obama as people primarily interested in long-range movement-building rather than short-term political success; that’s true for some of them. But sorting out these differences in ideology and perspective is, in my opinion, essential to the progressive political project. And with a rejuvenated and increasingly radical Right’s hounds baying and sniffing at the doors of the Capitol, we don’t have the time or energy to spare in dialogues of the deaf wherein we call each other names while getting ready for the elections of 2010 and 2012.
UPDATE: In discussing this post with several friends, I recognize I should be very clear about my motives here. I am not trying to promote an ideological fight within the Democratic Party or the progressive coalition, and don’t want to exaggerate ideological differences, either. But ideology, however muddled, is part of what makes most politically active people tick. And if we don’t talk about it–and about differences in strategic thinking as well, which will be the subject of future discussions here–then all we are left with to explain our differences on this issue or that is questions of character. And anyone paying attention must recognize there’s far too much of that going on. “Progressive pragmatists”–the camp with which I most often personally identify, as it happens–often treat “the Left” condescendingly as immature and impractical people who don’t understand how things get done. Meanwhile, people on “the Left” often treat “pragmatists” as either politically gutless or personally corrupt. This is what happens when you don’t take seriously other people’s ideological and strategic underpinnings; whatever you gain in ignoring or minimizing differences in perspective or point of view is lost in mutual respect. Sure, the character attacks on both sides are sometimes accurate, but nobody should assume that in any particular case without further examination of each others’ ideological and strategic views. That examination is what we are trying to promote here.

It’s been an insanely busy and confusing week already on the health care reform front, but after a meeting between President Obama and the Senate Democratic Caucus, this much is clear:
(1) Joe Lieberman, for the moment at least, has prevailed, and the bill that will be submitted for an actual Senate vote (tentatively scheduled for December 23) will not include a Medicare buy-in or a federally created national non-profit plan for health insurance. Lieberman sounds like he will now support this bill. Ben Nelson, however, still seems to be holding out for some accomodation of his demands for additional restrictions on coverage of abortion services in plans offered through the health care exchanges.
(2) Most, perhaps all, key Senate liberals are going along with this pared-back bill, most conspicuously public option stalwarts Sherrod Brown and Jay Rockefeller. Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders, however, are not officially on board.
(3) The House Democratic leadership is sounding confident about its ability to get a conference committee passed even if it strongly resembles the Lieberman-approved Senate bill. But the 77-member Progressive Caucus in the House still has to say or do something about its past threat to vote against any bill that doesn’t have a public option.
Meanwhile, in Progressive OpinionLand, a very fractious debate is erupting between those who view this bill, or virtually any bill, as significantly better than the status quo (and/or as politically necessary), and those who would prefer to kill it as insufficiently progressive or even as worse than the status quo.
The ballgame here is obviously whether or not “kill the bill” advocates can convince one Democratic senator or a significant bloc of Democratic House members to throw sand in the gears of the wheezing legislative engine that’s finally approaching the station.
The most notable figure in the “kill the bill” faction is Howard Dean, who is arguing that reform advocates in the House restart the process with a reconciliation bill that could then theoretically be moved through the Senate requiring only 50 votes.
In the blogosphere, Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos and Marcy Wheeler of FireDogLake appear to be leading the opposition to acceptance of the Senate bill.
Both Markos and Wheeler emphasize a point that a lot of their critics may be missing. It’s not the absence of a public option per se that leads them to the kill-the-bill position; it’s the absence of a public option in combination with an individual mandate to purchase private health insurance. From their point of view, the mandate represents a massive public subsidy for for-profit health insurance, which they, like most single-payer advocates, view as inherently invidious in the first place. Wheeler’s rhetoric pretty clearly expresses the sentiment which is driving the kill-the-bill movement:

I believe that if the Senate health care bill passes as Joe Lieberman has demanded it–with no Medicare buy-in or public option–it will be a significant step further on our road to neo-feudalism. As such, I find it far too dangerous to our democracy to pass–even if it gives millions (perhaps unaffordable) subsidies for health care….
It’s one thing to require a citizen to pay taxes–to pay into the commons. It’s another thing to require taxpayers to pay a private corporation, and to have up to 25% of that go to paying for luxuries like private jets and gyms for the company CEOs.
It’s the same kind of deal peasants made under feudalism: some proportion of their labor in exchange for protection (in this case, from bankruptcy from health problems, though the bill doesn’t actually require the private corporations to deliver that much protection).In this case, the federal government becomes an appendage to do collections for the corporations.

It would follow that elimination of the individual mandate–also a major bugaboo to conservatives–is the goal here as much as resurrection of a public option.
It’s fair to say that the majority of progressive health care wonks and political “pragmatists” don’t share this point of view; Steve Benen has a good round-up of their initial reaction to the kill-the-bill campaign. Matt Yglesias has the most direct response to Wheeler’s “neo-feudalism” claim, in a way that points out its similarity to conservative attacks on Obama:

I’ve seen Marcy Wheeler characterize the plan as an “industry bailout.” And, indeed, if I were a small government conservative one political tactic I would employ would be to start characterizing all initiatives involving government spending as a “bailout.” You could say that ARRA’s provisions funding K-12 education are a “bailout for teacher’s unions.” You could call ACES a “bailout for windmill makers.” And you can call the health care bill an “insurance company bailout.” But the mechanism by which insurers can get extra money under reform is that . . . more people get health insurance at a price they can afford. The bill will also expand Medicaid eligibility to include many currently uncovered poor and near-poor people.

The thing to watch for over the next few days (aside from what Ben Nelson decides to do) is whether the kill-the-bill argument finds a Democratic champion in Congress, beyond the ranks of those, like Dennis Kucinich, who haven’t been on board with previous legislation. But beyond that, the intra-progressive argument over the endgame of health reform legislation reflects a broader set of disagreements about the ideological character and political impact of Barack Obama’s leadership, which extends to issues ranging from Afghanistan to financial reform. I’ll have more to say about that subject directly.

This item by TDS contributor Robert Creamer is crossposted from the Huffington Post. Creamer is a political organizer and strategist, and author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win
Last Friday, the House passed critical regulatory reform legislation aimed at preventing the recurrence of the kind of financial meltdown that devastated our economy at the end of the Bush administration.
The lobbyists from Wall Street worked hand-in-glove with the Republicans, and a few Democrats, to try to kill the bill. Astoundingly, the Republicans argued that Wall Street should continue to be free to engage in the same reckless speculation that led directly to 10 percent unemployment and required the taxpayers to inject hundreds of billions into the markets so that the geniuses of private finance would not plunge us all into the abyss of another Great Depression.
With no regard for history — and here I mean the events of only 12 months ago — the Republicans and Big Banks have the audacity to contend that the creation of jobs and a growing economy requires the lowest levels of regulation and government involvement possible.
Here’s a news flash: we tried it your way for eight years. The results: the lowest level of job creation of any eight-year period since World War II; all of the country’s economic growth was siphoned off by the top 2 percent of the population and the financial sector; and the economy imploded. Sure — let’s try that again.
The Republicans even had the brazenness to convene a convocation of 100 Wall Street lobbyists last Wednesday to plot how they could completely kill financial regulatory reform. They failed, largely due to the great work of Americans for Regulatory Reform, House Speaker Pelosi, Finance Chair Barney Frank and intensive lobbying from the Obama administration.
They did manage to water down the House bill — but it still represents the most important move to re-regulate the out-of-control financial sector since the Great Depression.
Soon, Chris Dodd’s Senate Banking Committee will report out the Senate’s version of this measure and hopefully a bill will be on the president’s desk early next year.
Financial reform is terrific politics for Democrats.
Americans United for Change released a new poll conducted by Anzalone Liszt Research that found broad support for regulatory reform aimed at reining in Wall Street. Among the key findings:
Overall, 70 percent of voters believe that the country’s financial system needs either major reforms or a total overhaul.

When voters learn about President Obama’s plan, support for specific changes increases dramatically. Once voters hear a description of the president’s financial reform plan that focuses on increasing oversight over big banks, protecting consumers, and cracking down on corporate abuses, support rises by 25 points to 60 percent.
Independents are particularly receptive to the plan. Among independents, the increase in support for the plan following the description was particularly large (31 points), leading them to support the plan by a 19-point margin (56 percent to 37 percent).
But financial regulatory reform, while necessary, is not sufficient to end the domination of the outsized financial sector on the American economy. The next step requires breaking up the giant Wall Street Banks that dominate our economy. Nothing less will do in order to create an even modestly competitive financial market place.

Read more…

For the first time since Harry Reid put together 60 votes for a motion to proceed to consideration of health care reform, the long struggle to enact this legislation has hit a wall in the Senate. And in what must seem like the ultimate nightmare to many progressives, the wall is the heresiarch Joe Lieberman, who hastened to the Sunday shows last weekend to make it clear he would not vote for cloture on any bill that included the proposed Medicare buy-in for selected near-seniors, or the kind of quasi-public option that offered consumers a choice of private health plans sponsored directly by the federal government.
Anyone cruising the news or blog sites yesterday was treated to an orgy of recriminations aimed at Lieberman, at his flip-flopping on the Medicare buy-in issue, and at the poor logic of his overall position, accompanied by considerable psychotherapeutic speculation on the motives for his destructive behavior.
But the fact remains that there are only 58 reasonably assured votes for cloture on the recently negotiated Team of Ten “deal” for health care reform. Assuming Ben Nelson can be brought aboard without highly divisive concessions on the abortion issue, that still leaves one vote to be secured from a universe of just three senators: Lieberman, Snowe and Collins. So what are the options left to the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership?
(1) Forget about Lieberman and go after Snowe and/or Collins. It would obviously be satisfying to most Democrats to deny Joe Lieberman the opportunity to be King of the Senate and Arbiter of Health Reform, or more to the point, the chance to screw up or kill the legislation down the road. But on the Medicare buy-in and quasi-public-option issues, there’s not much evidence that either of the Mainers is any more amenable to compromise than Lieberman. (There are also Democrats who dislike Snowe’s version of a “triggered public option” a lot more than what the Senate is now discussing). Both are also under intense pressure from their Republican allies to maintain a united front; the idea that they could be trusted to hold the line through a House-Senate conference and a conference report vote is questionable at best
(2) Give Lieberman what he wants and then fix the legislation later. The key argument here is that the very items Lieberman is objecting to–an option for some younger Americans to buy into Medicare, and any sort of public option–are budget savers which could without question be added later (say, next year) via the budget reconciliation route, which only requires 50 votes. Additional subsidies are also clearly budget-relevant, and could be added by reconciliation as well. The downsides of this strategy are pretty obvious: caving to Lieberman could create a huge backlash among Democratic activists, and/or backfire entirely by reducing Democratic support for the bill in both Houses (most notably Sen. Bernie Sanders, and any number of House Progressive Caucus members who feel they’ve already compromised more than they should have). “Manana” promises on future reconciliation bills will be difficult to sell, and –if Democrats lose a significant number of seats in either House in 2010–might be even more difficult to redeem beyond next year.
(3) Threaten Lieberman with loss of his seniority unless he votes for cloture. Without question, it was a major mistake for the Democratic Caucus to allow Lieberman to maintain his seniority after the 2008 elections without an ironclad pledge that he would support the Caucus on all procedural votes, including cloture votes. He had just campaigned for the other party’s presidential candidate. His vote was no longer needed for Democratic control of the Senate, and his contribution to a 60-vote Senate was largely irrelevant without a pledge to support the party on cloture votes. Now it’s not clear he is amenable to any sort of threats or inducements that don’t involve substantive concessions on health care reform. Moreover, at present he is a key player for the administration and congressional Democrats on climate change legislation, which the Senate is due to take up as soon as health reform is resolved. An ultimate score-settling with Lieberman is now a major psychological necessity for a lot of Democrats, but it’s unlikely it would do any good on health care reform, and there could be unpleasant repercussions on climate change and perhaps other issues.
(4) Reframe the bill to use reconciliation. This is the strategy many progressives have been urging all along, for the obvious reason that it gets rid of the need for more than 50 Senate votes and also would make it vastly easier to craft a Senate bill that’s close enough to the House bill to avoid friction in a House-Senate conference. The downsides are also pretty clear, and help explain why the strategy wasn’t pursued earlier: (a) a real if hard-to-nail-down number of Senate Democrats would strongly oppose use of reconciliation on principle (most visibly Sens. Robert Byrd and Russ Feingold); (b) big chunks of health reform, including essentials like private insurance regulation, would be highly vulnerable to an adverse parliamentary ruling in the Senate that they are non-germane to the budget–a ruling that would require 60 votes to overturn; (c) there are all sorts of problems associated with the normal five-year “window” of provisions that can be enacted through reconciliation, which could make the bill a budget-buster while also requiring a lot of future action in Congresses where Democratic majorities are by now means assured. Aside from those factors, shifting to a reconciliation strategy would take considerable time, and it’s already mid-December.
(5) Go back to the drawing board. Before resorting to any of the above unsavory options, health reform supporters will undoubtedly make some effort to devise yet another compromise that can obtain that 60th vote without losing existing supporters. After all, the Medicare buy-in was a freshly unveiled rabbit-out-of-a-hat just a week or so ago. But if Lieberman, Snowe and Collins really are dead-set against any feasible alternatives to private health insurance for the uninsured, there may be no more rabbits in the hat. And that’s aside from the strong possibility that all three senators are demanding not compromise but unconditional surrender as the price for their votes.
Maybe I’m missing something, but these seem to be the options at present, and none of them are particularly good. We may be once again at a crucial juncture where progressives–and most of all, the President–simply have to decide what percentage of a loaf is acceptable.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
If you’ve been following the Copenhagen process this week, you may have noticed that the “debate” over climate change and what to do about it has regressed. Whereas, just a few years ago, George W. Bush acknowledged the human role in global warming and John McCain was a leading proponent of climate-change legislation, know-nothingism is now resurgent. The GOP pins its electoral hopes on slogans like “drill, baby drill” and “cap-and-tax”; McCain has soured on cap-and-trade; and on the nation’s airwaves and op-ed pages, climate-change deniers (and their more circumspect brethren, the “skeptics”) crow triumphantly at every snowstorm and every controversy, real or imagined, that puts climate scientists on the defensive.
Worse yet, many years of painstaking efforts to explain climate change to the American people and get them concerned about it seem to be gradually unraveling. As Chris Mooney notes in a piece on the ‘disastrous’ turn in the narrative, an October 2009 Pew report shows that, since April 2008, the number of Americans who believe there is “solid evidence the earth is warming” has dropped from 71 percent to 57 percent. During that same period, the proportion who accept the existence of climate change and attribute it to human activity has dropped from 47 percent to 36 percent–not exactly a robust constituency for immediate action. (There is a brand new poll from the World Bank that suggests more robust support among Americans for carbon emissions limits; I hope–but don’t believe, in the absence of more details–that it’s accurate.)
What is causing this apparent unraveling? There are three competing theories as to its source:
(1) The first and most obvious is that support for allegedly expensive or growth-threatening environmental action always declines during economic downturns. Gallup periodically asks Americans which they value more: environmental protection or economic growth. Interestingly, from 1984–2008, a plurality (and usually a strong majority) of Americans always prioritized the environment over growth (even when their voting behavior indicated otherwise). But this tendency to prioritize environmental action does flag during recessions, as was evidenced by a steep slide in the “top priority environment” / “top priority growth” ratio from 70 percent / 23 percent in 2000 to 47 percent / 42 percent in 2003. After an uptick in support for the environment as a priority over the economy from 2004–2007, the ratio nose-dived during the most recent economic crisis, to the point where an actual majority said the economy is more important in March 2009 (51 percent / 42 percent), the first time that has happened in Gallup’s polling.
(2) A second possibility is that the change in public opinion is largely a byproduct of the radicalization of the Republican Party. There’s certainly some support for that proposition in the Pew surveys. As recently as 2007, 62 percent of self-identified Republicans told Pew they believed there was solid evidence for global warming. That percentage dropped to 49 percent in 2008 and then to 35 percent this year. (There’s also been a similarly large drop in belief about global warming among self-identified independents—a group that includes a lot of people who are objectively Republicans. The drop among Democrats has been less than half as large.) It’s probably no accident that this change of opinion occurred during the 2008 campaign, when Republicans suddenly made offshore drilling their top energy-policy priority, and this year, when virtually anything embraced by the Obama administration has drawn the collective wrath of the GOP.
(3) Then, there’s the third factor that might explain the changes in public opinion: a determined effort by the hard-core anti-environmental right to dominate the discussion and change its terms. This is the main subject of Mooney’s essay, which focuses on the “statistical liars” like columnist George Will who have distorted climate data to raise doubts about the scientific consensus, and on the continuing brouhaha in the conservative media about “Climategate.” Matt Yglesias has gone further, arguing that climate-change deniers have scored a coup by convincing the mainstream media (most notably the Washington Post, which regularly publishes Will’s columns, and recently published a predictably shrill op-ed by Sarah Palin on the subject) to treat the existence of climate change as scientifically debatable.
I have no compelling evidence to demonstrate which of these factors has contributed most to the gradual ungreening of America, but there are ways to mitigate the negative impacts from all three. Fears that environmental protection is “unaffordable” in a poor economy are obviously cyclical, so unless we are in a recession that will endure for many years, this problem should at some point recede. What’s more, there’s some evidence that suggests efforts to sell action on climate change as “pro-growth” via investments in green technologies can help cushion the public’s skepticism.
Meanwhile, the second and third causes—GOP radicalization and the revival of a powerful denialist media presence—are clearly interrelated. Self-identified Republicans who spend a lot of time watching Fox News are obviously influenced by the torrent of “information” about the “hoax” of global climate change; while both conservative opinion leaders and GOP politicians are invested in promoting polarization on a historic scale. But this toxic environment would be largely self-contained if misinformation weren’t bleeding over into the broader discourse that includes Americans who don’t think Obama is a committed socialist or that environmentalists want to take the country back to the Stone Age.
And that’s why Yglesias is right: This is one area of public policy where “respect for contrary views” and “editorial balance” are misplaced. Sure, there are many aspects of the climate-change challenge that ought to be debated, and not just between those at the ideological and partisan extremes. But we shouldn’t be “debating” whether or not the scientific consensus on climate change actually represents a vast conspiracy to destroy capitalism and enslave the human race, any more than we should be debating whether “death panels” are a key element of health care reform.

One of the most confusing (but important) details in the health reform debate is the impact of reform on health costs. Last week a lot of reform opponents crowed when the independent administrator (who title is “Actuary”) of the Medicare program released a report suggesting that total national health care costs would be roughly the same in ten years under the pending Senate bill as under status quo policies. It thus wouldn’t, said critics, “bend the curve” of rising health care costs.
As Jonathan Cohn of TNR explains today, one obvious problem with that diagnosis was the arbitary cutoff date of 2019; costs under the reform scenario would actually go down for a couple of years, then go up sharply when the uninsured are covered in 2014, then trend more modestly downward after that. Moreover, the report doesn’t reflect the intended cost savings in the bill that CBO refuses to “score” based on their “speculative” nature, which happen to reflect what serious cost-hounds have been recommending most urgently.
But beyond that, even if you accept that the “curve” doesn’t “bend,” there’s this little matter that over 30 million additiional Americans will have health insurance under the reform scenario as scored by CBO. In other words, even if the costs are the same, the benefits are higher. That ought to count for something in this debate.

The big political story of the weekend has to be the election of City Controller Annise Parker as the first lesbian mayor of Houston. Yes, that’s right Houston, big-oil stronghold, Bush-rearing, 4th-largest-city-in-America Houston.
Although Democrat Parker is not the first openly-gay candidate to win an election for mayor of a major American city — Providence, RI and Portland, OR have had gay mayors — she will be the first openly-gay mayor of a megalopolis. She won with 52.8 percent of the vote in a run-off against another Democrat, highly-respected African American civil rights attorney, Gene Locke, who received 47.2 percent of the tally. Locke was supported by much of Houston’s business establishment.
Parker’s election is being heralded as, not only a major milestone for gay rights, but also a harbinger of new urban politics. But there are many traditional aspects of her election — low turnout (16.5 percent of eligible voters); her status as a born-and-raised, Rice-educated, life-long (except for 2 years) Houstonian; her fiscal conservatism creds, enhanced by a strong background in urban financial management; and her employment in the oil and gas industry for 20 years.
Although Parker and her partner for 19 years have adopted three children, Texas still has a state law that bans same-sex marriage. And Houston’s city council had earlier voted down benefits for same-sex partners.
According to The Houston Chronicle wrap up by Bradley Olson.

Her victory capped an unorthodox election season that lacked a strong conservative mayoral contender and saw her coalition of inside-the-Loop Democrats and moderate conservatives, backed by an army of ardent volunteers, win the day over Locke, a former civil rights activist who attempted to unite African-American voters and Republicans.
…In many ways, the race was framed by the financial anxieties voters have experienced over the past 18 months. At the polls, voter after voter cited Parker’s experience watching over the city’s $4 billion budget as a primary consideration in their choice…Instead of being turned off by a politician reluctant to promise the world, voters responded to Parker’s straight talk about all that might not be possible in the coming years. Dozens of Houstonians interviewed by the Houston Chronicle said they appreciated her often blunt answers that made Locke’s proposals seem vague.

In Rick Casey’s incisive analysis, also in The Chronicle, he adds:

His [Locke’s] backers had nothing against Parker but did not believe she could overcome the lesbian label. They believed Locke could win by combining the black vote with a substantial portion of Republicans who would vote against Parker because of her sexual orientation…That turned out to be wrong. For one thing, as the low turnout indicates, neither candidate had the star power to boost voter participation.
More important for Locke, his appeals to Republicans, particularly as a law-and-order candidate, didn’t stick, and the anti-lesbian vote turned out to be smaller than expected.
…Greg Wythe, a bright political analyst and blogger (www.gregsopinion.com) who has joined Mayor Bill White’s gubernatorial campaign, did a precinct-by-precinct analysis of the first-round of votes. It showed Parker coming in first or second in such Republican areas as the West Side, Kingwood and Friendswood. Locke came in a poor fourth in those areas.
I believe it was Locke’s performance in those areas that led his finance team members to take the desperate step of aligning the campaign with gay-bashing Steve Hotze — thereby pushing undecided white liberals and moderates into Parker’s well-run campaign without turning out enough anti-gay votes to win.

Despite the gay-bashing in the late weeks of the mayoral campaign, her sexual orientation was clearly a non-factor for most voters. The two most salient lessons of Parker’s election for Democratic candidates might be that gay-bashing doesn’t work in city-wide elections and impressive financial management creds are a formidable asset in urban politics.