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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Democratic Strategist

A simple suggestion for how to handle the Town Meetings on Health Care:

Let the sick, the weak and the destitute be the first to arrive:
Let America see them enter the meeting hall
Walking on crutches
Rolling wheelchairs
Leaning on canes
Pushing walkers
Holding IV bottles
Carrying tanks of oxygen
Let the sick, the weak and the destitute be the first to arrive:
Let America see them
Holding high in the air medical bills they cannot afford to pay
Holding high insurance claims that were denied
Holding high pictures of family members who died…without insurance, and without decent care
Let the sick, the weak and the destitute be the first to arrive:
Let America see them.
Ask for the right to sit in the front …because the issue is ultimately about them.
Ask for the right to speak….without catcalls, booing or interruption.
Ask to be shown the respect and dignity they deserve ….but have been denied.
Ask if they need to shout to make their voices heard…. or if America is ready to listen.
Let the sick, the weak and the destitute be the first to arrive at the meetings on health care
Let America see them…..and then decide what kind of country America is and what kind of country it wants to be.


So Far, So Good

Editor’s Note: This item by Mike Lux was originally published at OpenLeft on August 2; it represents an important point of view in the intraparty debate over health care reform strategy.
Given the rules and politics of the Senate, we always knew that to get true health care reform passed, we would need for four things to happen:
1. The outside-of-government pro-reform community would have overcome their modest policy differences and bigger power/personality struggles in order to pull together for a strong progressive plan.
2. President Obama would have to lay out an aggressive timeline, and keep nudging it along on Capitol Hill; and also put out some big and progressive policy goals, and then actually fight for them.
3. Speaker Pelosi would have to work the Blue Dogs hard to get enough of their votes without selling out progressives by giving too much away.
4. The progressive wing of the House would have to hang tough and push back hard on attempts to weaken the legislation.
Well, you know what? After all the pushing and shoving, threats and counter-threats, deals and counter-deals, after all the negotiating back and forth: so far, so good. There is no reason to be overly optimistic, because we have a very long way to go, and the mountains to climb before we get there are huge and treacherous. But reform is still alive, because so far all four of those things are happening. Us reformers may yet get out-gunned and beaten. Pelosi and/or Obama, desperate for some kind of win, may yet give up and fold to the insurance companies. Progressives in the House might yet allow themselves to get picked off one by one to vote for a bad deal, and progressives outside of government might run out of money or steam, or start squabbling too much amongst themselves before the deal is done. But so far, give credit where credit is due. Health care reform that actually takes power away from insurance companies and gives them competition, that actually makes coverage affordable for all Americans- it’s still alive. Everyone who needed to step up has stepped up. Praise is due you for what you’ve all done so far.
The last phase of this battle will be brutal, but if all of the above keep doing their job, we’ve got a shot at this thing. Let’s all keep fighting the good fight.


‘Health Care ER’ Campaign Targets House Republicans

With the House of Reps already ajourned for the August recess, The DCCC has hit the ground running with a “Major Advertising and Grassroots Offensive” called “Health Care ER.” DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen has said that the campaign is targeting more than two-dozen Republicans throughout August, explaining:

Time and again, Republicans protect a broken system of skyrocketing costs, insurance companies making health care decisions, and record setting insurance company profits instead of working with President Obama to bring real health insurance reform. President Obama and Democrats are working for health insurance reform that lowers costs and protects patient’s choice of doctors and plans, while Republican are fighting for insurance companies. This August we are going district-by-district to hold Republicans accountable for trying to obstruct health insurance reform through their scare tactics and just-say-no protection of big insurance companies.

Some of the actions being conducted by the DCCC include:

Radio ads in seven (7) Republican Members districts;
Volunteer live calls, automated calls to 25 targeted Republican Members;
Volunteer live calls to talk radio stations in their districts;
Three (3) million e-mails;
Letter writing drive in their districts;
Letters to the editors of newspapers in the targeted districts;
An on-line petition campaign;
Fact check Republicans’ lies about health insurance reform;
Tele-town halls in the districts

You can hear the radio ads at the DCCC Stakeholder Weblog, which also has an ad script and a complete list of the targted Republicans.
Brian Beutler of TPM reports that the targeted Republicans fall into three categories “vulnerable, moderate, and high-profile.” Eight Reps, including Michelle Bachman (R-MN); Joseph Cao (R-LA), Charlie Dent (R-PA), Dan Lungren (R-CA), Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), Erik Paulsen (R-MN), Dave Reichert (R-WA), and Pat Tiberi (R-OH) will be the focus of attack ads in their districts.
Volunteers who want to get involved in the health care reform struggle are encouraged to contact the DCCC here.


Southern Money Race

Most of the talk about 2010 in national political circles is vague and abstract at this point, and involves estimates of trends and waves. But there are actual contests developing, particularly on the financial front, where candidates are struggling to show viability in one of the most difficult fundraising environments in living memory.
Southern Political Report has a useful summary up today of early fundraising numbers for southern gubernatorial races (omitting Alabama, where no public reporting is required until January of next year). The numbers that jump off the page are for the Republican primary grudge match in Texas, where incumbent Rick Perry and challenger Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison have a combined $22 million cash on hand. It’s also notable than in Florida Democrat Alex Sink seems to be currently outraising Republican Bill McCollum. And there are several multi-candidate primary fields (especially Republicans in GA, TN and SC) where dollars may soon separate contenders from pretenders. Two GOP gubernatorial candidates who had grass-roots right-wingers all astir at last weekend’s RedState gathering, Nikki Haley of SC and Karen Handel of GA, aren’t doing very well on the money front. Aside from the fact that they are women in a male-dominated party, they have the dubious distinction of being closely associated with term-limited incumbents.
This serves as a reminder that while national politics will have an effect on state races in 2010, few contests will really represent some sort of referendum on the Obama administration. States have their own very difficult issues, and the Republicans who currently govern FL, GA, SC, AL, and TX have their own problems with accountability for hard times. And as always, the ability to fund and create effective campaigns will matter more than it should.


Kill Health Reform, Save Granny, and Stop the Nazis

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
One of the abiding frustrations attending the campaign for health care reform is that the complexity of the subject enables opponents to, as Sarah Palin might put it, “make things up.” Pro-reform folk have to work overtime to swat down claims that range from the deeply exaggerated to the completely fabricated, only to see their arguments treated as equivalent to conservative howlers in “he said, she said” media coverage. (Harold Pollack tears apart a few particularly egregious provocateurs over at The Treatment today.)
My own personal favorite howler, based on an usually high ratio of drama to fact, is the “kill granny” meme, whereby health reform is alleged to be aimed at saving money by hurrying seniors to the graveyard. And as it happens, Pat Buchanan’s latest syndicated column offers a classicly twisted presentation of this claim, showing that the old demagogue has not lost a step in his ability to defy logic in pursuit of his political aims.
After announcing that “Obamacare” depends on reduction of end-of-life care costs, Buchanan suddenly takes us to the United Kingdom, where a government agency has issued guidelines opposing the routine prescription of steroids for chronic pain. Then we’re back in the USA:

Now, twin this story with the weekend Washington Post story about Obamacare’s “proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical treatment they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills,” and there is little doubt as to what is coming.

Having conflated British and American policies, and identified counseling designed to let seniors control their own care with a government restriction on a particular pain medication, Buchanan suddenly starts talking about an assisted suicide in Switzerland, notes that some people in America support that, too, and then gets to his real argument:

Beneath this controversy lie conflicting concepts about life.
To traditional Christians, God is the author of life and innocent life, be it of the unborn or terminally ill, may not be taken. Heroic means to keep the dying alive are not necessary, but to advance a natural death by assisting a suicide or euthanasia is a violation of the God’s commandment, Thou shalt not kill.
To secularists and atheists who believe life begins and ends here, however, the woman alone decides whether her unborn child lives, and the terminally ill and elderly, and those closest to them, have the final say as to when their lives shall end.

Note that the only “concepts about life” that Buchanan mentions are those of “traditional Christians” and “secularists and atheists.” Thus excluded from the debate are 40 million or so mainline American Protestants, 20 to 30 million “non-traditional” American Catholics (i.e., those who support abortion rights), and of course, Jews, Muslims and all sorts of other people who aren’t remotely “secularists and atheists.” Unbelievers are in turn stereotyped without evidence as holding a casual attitude towards human life, instead of, perhaps, a serious commitment to the rights of human beings who happen to be women or people near death.
But this doesn’t end Buchanan’s vast smear. Next he flies us back in space and time to early-twentieth-century Germany, where a treatise on assisted suicide by two professors in the Weimar era (you know, that decadent “liberal” period) is assumed to have led directly to Nazi Germany’s euthanasia policies. (Pat doesn’t mention that the Nazis were big opponents of abortion, at least for Aryans.)
So in one short column, Buchanan manages to associate “Obamacare” with the intentional infliction of pain on seniors to encourage them to commit suicide, as part of an anti-Christian and proto-Nazi drive to destroy “the sanctity of life.”
I’m not saying that opponents of health care reform generally embrace Buchanan’s ravings, but let’s face it: The man has enormous exposure via his column and his MSNBC appearances. And he merely adds a particular shrill voice to the chorus urging Americans that this complicated idea of health care reform is too risky to undertake. Why open the door to even a small chance of a Fourth Reich in America, via government-sponsored assisted suicide? It’s better to trust the devil we know.


The Democratic Party Is More Diverse Than Leadership Likes To Admit

This item, by TDS Co-Editor William Galston, was first published at The New Republic on July 31.
Over the past three election cycles, congressional Democrats have rebuilt an arithmetic majority. By the end of this year, they will demonstrate whether they constitute a governing majority. Now, as in the early 1990s, the acid test is health insurance reform. And now, as then, the failure to act as a governing majority will jeopardize, and could erase, their arithmetic majority.
Despite the waning of their post-Civil War southern bastion, Democrats remain ideologically diverse–far more so than Republicans. A recent Gallup survey showed that about two-fifths of rank-and-file Democrats regard themselves as liberal, another two-fifths as moderate, and the remaining fifth as conservative. To be sure, the ideological center of gravity among House and Senate Democrats is more liberal than at the grassroots. Still, congressional Democrats include in their ranks many who consider themselves moderate or even conservative, and whose election since 2004 has made a major contribution to the new majority.
As Michael Tomasky pointed out this week in a carefully researched piece, most of the 49 House Democrats hailing from districts John McCain carried are not as vulnerable as that bare fact might suggest. But that’s only part of the story. Twenty-six out of the 35 House Democratic freshmen (not all of whom identify with the Blue Dogs) won seats previously occupied by Republicans and are more vulnerable than established incumbents. For that reason, they demanded and won a delay in the House vote until after the August recess, giving them a chance to consult closely with their constituents. As for the Blue Dogs themselves, they tend to represent districts that are more rural and small town; small business comprise a greater than average share of their economic base. Citizens in these districts also tend to be more skeptical about the efficacy and integrity of government than those from (say) Nancy Pelosi or Charlie Rangel’s districts. Moderate Democrats understand the people in their districts, they represent their interests and values, and more often than not, they agree with the people they represent. The stances they adopt and the votes they cast represent conviction as well as calculation, much like their liberal counterparts.
This is not to say that they’re right and liberals are wrong. It is to say that if health insurance reform is to succeed, it must represent a blend of, and balance among, the diverse points of view within the Democratic coalition. The White House chief of staff seems to understand this, reportedly playing a key role in bringing Henry Waxman and the Blue Dogs back to the table after previous efforts had collapsed in acrimony. But the White House shouldn’t have to do all the heavy lifting; it’s up to the Democratic leadership and chairs of major committees to show some leadership as well. After all, they are supposed to be acting on the behalf of the party as a whole, not just on the basis of their own preferences. Henry Waxman drafted a bill with minimal input from moderate Democrats, in effect daring them to oppose the finished product. But that is not a good way for committee chairs to proceed, as John Dingell, the ex-chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee pointed out this week. And because the Senate bill will probably need 60 votes to pass, a process that includes all the moderate Democrats (and some less ideologically entrenched Republicans as well) is essential.
The stakes are very high, substantively and politically. The past four decades have witnessed a series of missed opportunities to reform our health care system. In the early 1970s, President Nixon proposed a comprehensive, employer-based health insurance plan, complete with employer mandates and subsidies for small business. But not even Senator Kennedy could persuade Democrats to go along with an approach that would have left room for private insurers. Since then, unattainable aspirations have consistently trumped practical possibilities.
Will history repeat itself? We’ll know by December. But one thing is clear: If we are to avoid yet another round of what health care expert Henry Aaron has analogized to Charlie Brown and the football, Democratic leaders in the House and Senate will have to persuade their colleagues not to make the best the enemy of the possible once more. In all probability, the public option (if there is one) in a bill that can pass will not be nearly as robust as liberals would like, subsidies for middle income families will not be as large, more small businesses will be exempt from the employer mandate (if there is one), the wealthy will be taxed less, and insurance plans above a defined threshold will be taxed in some way. Will Democrats hoping for something better torpedo such a bill? If so, we will have missed what may be our best chance in this generation to achieve near-universal coverage while restricting the ability of insurance companies to cherry-pick insurees and deny coverage arbitrarily. Millions of citizens would pay the price. And so would the party that once again failed to act as a governing majority.


Sebelius: A Challenge for August

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has an op-ed, “Lifting A Burden Of Worry” in today’s WaPo, with simple, elegantly-stated message points that health care reform advocates can tap to both challenge reform obstructionists and help win support from those who have concerns. It’s not hard to imagine Sebelius’s op-ed being re-worked into multiple formats — persuasive ad spots for traditional and new media, as well as speeches by and media interviews with reform supporters. As Sebelius defines the central problem in simple terms:

The current health-care system gives insurance companies all the power. They get to pick and choose who gets a policy. They can deny coverage because of a preexisting condition. They can offer coverage only at exorbitant rates — or offer coverage so thin that it’s no coverage at all. Americans are left to worry about whether they’ll get laid off and lose their insurance or wake up from surgery with a $10,000 bill because they didn’t read the fine print on their policy.

That concern is shared by millions of Americans, even those who have some skepticism about the way reform legislation is shaping up. Sebelius also highlights a huge “hidden” expense of the current system:

…Right now, many entrepreneurs are paralyzed by our fractured health insurance system. They know that if they leave their job, they might not be able to get insurance for their families. So they, and their innovations, stay put. Health reform means unleashing America’s entrepreneurs to chase their big ideas.

It’s a hidden cost which cripples American entrepreneurs in competition with their counterparts in nations that have portable health security for all. Sebelius also does a nice, succinct job of calling out the fear-mongers:

…We’ve learned over the past 20 years that “socialized medicine” and “government-run health care” are code words for “don’t change anything.” With some insurers raising premiums by more than 25 percent and 14,000 people losing their health insurance every day, Americans want to hear something more from their leaders than “wait and see” and “more of the same.”

She then provides one of the best short statements that encapsulates what Americans want:

Health insurance is fundamentally about peace of mind. If you have good insurance, you don’t have to worry about an accident or sudden illness. You know that whatever happens, you and your family will be taken care of.

The public option provides a reasonable alternative to unbridled domination of our health care by the insurance industry, explains Sebelius:

By giving Americans choices, health reform will switch the roles. Americans will get peace of mind and insurance companies will start getting nervous. They will know that if they don’t deliver a great value, their customers will flee. So they will start offering better coverage.

And the vision:

…We have a huge, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to improve the lives of all Americans, insured and uninsured alike….We can make investments in prevention, wellness and health information technology that will allow the health-care system to deliver incredible results at prices we can all afford. Imagine a system in which your doctor spends as much time trying to keep you healthy as treating you when you’re sick, in which you and your doctor have all the information you need to choose the treatments that work best for you, in which you never have to fill out the same paperwork twice. Health reform is the first step in that direction.

Secretary Sebelius has done an outstanding job of simplifying the message that can help cut through the obstructionist fog and bring health security to millions. The August recess provides the opportunity for Dems and reform advocates to spread it far and wide.


Dems Dominate Party ID By State

Those Republicans who are already predicting a landslide win in 2010 might want to put down the champagne glasses for a minute and take a look at Gallup’s latest survey on party identification by state. True, the numbers are from interviews over the entire brief course of the Obama presidency, but they’re still interesting.
With leaners duly leaned, Gallup finds Democratic identifiers with a plurality in 44 of the 50 states (plus DC). The six GOP redoubts, in ascending order of Republican strength, are Mississippi, Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah. Democrats have a majority of the electorate in half the states; Republicans in two (Wyoming and Utah).
The numbers are an ever-present reminder that any weaknesses shown by President Obama or congressional Democrats do not automatically translate into Republican gains, short-term or long-term. We’re a long way from November 2010, and Republicans haven’t won back much trust.


A quick lesson: how to misinterpret a poll to prove that Democrats are as nutty as Republicans.

A David Paul Kuhn column over at RealClearPolitics offers the thesis – stated in his title – that not just Republicans, but “Both Parties have their Fanatics.” While recognizing that substantial numbers of Republicans indeed believe against all evidence that Obama was not born in the U.S. , Kuhn argues that Democrats are equally –and in fact even more — delusional than the Republicans because a spring 2007 Rasmussen poll showed that 35% of Dems believed that “George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.”
On this basis Kuhn unleashes a veritable fountain of pejorative adjectives, even dusting off Richard Hofstadter to promote his “Dems are even more nutty and fanatical than Republicans” equivalency thesis.
He says:

“The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” was title of historian Richard Hofstadter’s famous Sixties essay. “I call it the paranoid style,” [Hofstadter] wrote, because “no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”

Kuhn continues:

Most conspiracy theorists’ fidelity is to theory, not truth. They tend to uphold a belief despite the facts. The possible, however improbable, trumps the logical. And it’s futile to attempt to disprove their belief. It’s like debating with those who believe the world is flat.

Having thus set the stage with these hefty portions of hyperbole and Hofstadter, Kuhn then says the following:

The disparate treatment of the two conspiracy theories is unmistakable. More Democrats fell into the “truther” camp than Republicans fall into the “birther” camp. But the mainstream media has covered the “birther” poll far more vigorously. It’s easy to understand, unless one is invested in the opposing camp, why these incongruities irk the political right.

Wow. Take that, you damn Democratic nutcakes. Democrats are not only nuttier than Republicans, but the liberal media, as usual, is giving them a free pass.
This is dramatic, to be sure, but unfortunately there’s a huge and basic fallacy in the argument.


Texas As the Lode Star State

I don’t know what it is about getting a New York Times column, barring deals with the devil to obtain them in the first place. But it seems to be having a corrosive effect on Ross Douthat’s analytical skills, as it earlier did for his colleague David Brooks.
Douthat’s column today touting Texas as an economic “model citizen” for the nation is just plain wrong. Ezra Klein peforms an efficient smackdown on the idea that Texas is booming while “blue states” are wallowing in economic despair, and just as importantly, reminds us that the Lone Star State is famed for its poor treatment of poor people, which helps it keep the state budget balanced.
But I have a more fundamental beef with Douthat’s breezy assumption that state policies have made conservative Texas do well while afflicting “liberal” California. The truth is that state policies have little or no effect on short-term economic trends affecting their populations. Texas and California exist in national and global economies. Unemployment rates in Fresno or El Paso are largely controlled by forces affecting manufacturing exports and imports; prices for housing, oil and gas; and credit availability that have almost nothing to do with the policies of Arnold Schwarzenneger or Rick Perry. Republican-governed Florida is getting hammered, and Democratic-governed Iowa is doing well.
Governors and state legislators do have a big effect on how their constituents are affected by such external forces–on the distribution of wealth, if not its existence–and on that front, regressive Texas has nothing to brag about.
But Ross Douthat’s identification of “low-road” economic development strategies as vindicated by the current recession is deeply flawed and dangerous. If the no-regulation regressive-tax approach really represented the keys to the kingdom, then Mississippi and Alabama would have long since become the economic dynamos and social showcases of America. That hasn’t happened, and isn’t happening, regardless of short-term growth and unemployment rates. With far more resources than its country cousins to the east, Texas has managed to create similar social conditions. Touting the Lone Star State as a lodestar state is a terrible mistake. Ad as a southerner, I’d have to say that it takes a conservative Yankee to celebrate so unreflectively the South’s high ratio of private affluence to public squalor.