The public option for health care reform may be a dead issue for pundits and centrists, but CNN reports that group of Democratic Senators is calling for a vote on it under the budget reconciliation rule that requires 51 votes to pass the upper house. Sens. Michael Bennet (CO), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), Jeff Merkley (OR) and Sherrod Brown (OH), along with 119 House of Reps members, signed a letter urging Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to schedule a vote on the proposal under the rule. As the letter explains:

We respectfully ask that you bring for a vote before the full Senate a public health insurance option under budget reconciliation rules…There are four fundamental reasons why we support this approach — its potential for billions of dollars in cost savings; the growing need to increase competition and lower costs for the consumer; the history of using reconciliation for significant pieces of health care legislation; and the continued public support for a public option.

Seems like a reasonable request from four level-headed U.S. Senators, none of whom have ever been associated with political suicide missions, or even unrealistic expectations. And they are on solid political ground, according to polling data. In a Kaiser Family Foundation Kaiser Health Tracking Poll conducted 1/7-12, 2010, 53 percent of respondents said they “would be more likely to support” legislation that creates “a government-administered public health insurance option to compete with private health insurance plans,” with only 31 percent saying they would be less likely to support the public option proposal.
This may be a moment of truth for the beleaguered majority leader, who is starting to look like President Obama’s General McClellan, Lincoln’s union army commander who wouldn’t attack. The comparison may be unfair in this case. If Reid’s head count indicates the votes simply aren’t there, then he would be wrong to schedule the vote. But if the votes are there, Reid should take the initiative, and soon after the Feb 25th health care reform summit. Confidence in Democratic leadership is fast eroding as a result of the perception of excessive hand-wringing and inaction. Further delay could metastasize into unnecessary defeats for Democratic candidates in November. We need a significant win, and soon.
It appears that the political party in power gets about a year to produce reforms that have some credibility, before disapproval takes root. It’s unfair in the sense that this expectation doesn’t take the draconian filibuster threshold into account, but we’re stuck with it — unless we take action via budget reconciliation. Even if the measure is defeated, however, Dems could come back quickly with a modified “plan B” strategy, to give the impression that were are at least trying to pass reforms and moving forward. Otherwise the public perception of do-nothing stagnation will fester on and do deeper damage. What we must convey to voters is the perception that Democrats have the gonads to lead.

Today brings still another bushel-basket of earnest if not angry commentary on the retirement of Sen. Evan Bayh. Sigh. But the best single quote was supplied by Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight, aimed at Bayh’s nostalgia for the good old days:

[T]he notion of a government run based on bi-partisan cooperation among moderates from each party is a fictional fairyland that never existed in the first place, and split-party governance is hardly better. Listening to Bayh wax poetically about the past is like hearing a lecture from your dad (or Bayh’s, since his father was senator, too) about how morally superior America was 50 years ago, and then flipping on an episode of Mad Men to see dad’s generation drunk by lunch and patting their secretaries’ bottoms.

Schaller goes on, however, to offer his own sense of what self-conscious “moderates” can and cannot constructively accomplish, and it’s pretty well-reasoned:

1. They should lay down markers now and again, and occasionally be a holdout when the policy process is insufficiently transparent or the national deliberation insufficiently substantive. Majority-party moderates needn’t rubberstamp every item of their majority’s agenda, nor should minority-party moderates be co-opted tools. However, they shouldn’t expect their ideal policy preference to be the outcome produced by the majority party caucus for which they serve as either an in-party outlier or an out-party critic. This is policy hostage-taking, and it is more dangerous and corrosive to democracy than the ideological, one-party rule moderates so often carp about.
2. Then, after they have negotiated for some concessions or refinements, and precisely because those concessions and refinements were made to accommodate their rhetorical or literal opposition, their role at that point is to wholeheartedly back the compromise. They are fully entitled to clarify their vote for the constituents, saying something like, “Look, this is not the legislation that a chamber full of people like me would produce, but this is a good and good-faith effort by the majority party to solve this national problem.” But what they shouldn’t be allowed to do is hold the process hostage and extract certain policy concessions and still complain about both the process and the outcome. It would be more intellectually honest to just vote against the legislation and criticize it–or even vote for it and criticize it.

My main objection to Tom’s formulation–and for that matter, to how Evan Bayh seems to think–is that being a “moderate” isn’t always must a matter of favoring compromise and bipartisanship, or positioning oneself between wrangling factions or parties. “Moderate” policy positions can reflect matters of principles just as strongly held as those of more conventionally ideological politicians. A good example is the cap-and-trade approach to reducing carbon emissions, which used to be a “moderate” position until Republicans abruptly abandoned it and then began denouncing it as the work of Satan. “Moderates” developed and then supported cap-and-trade not just because it had features attractive to both progressives and conservatives, though it did, but because they thought it would work in the real world.
Personally, I’d say that’s the sort of “moderation”–focused on innovative real-life solutions–that both parties need more than they need old-school wheeler-dealers who are good at forging legislative coalitions based on personal relationships and palm-greasing, which seems to be the object of so much of the misplaced nostalgia surrounding Bayh’s retirement.

The CW these days is that with Americans having real (i.e., economic) problems to worry about, they’re no longer inclined to engage in “culture wars” over abortion, church-state separation, GLBT issues, etc. Aside from the rather insulting premise that struggles over personal freedom, equality, and for some combatants, the structure of the universe and the definition and meaning of human life are less important to people than real growth percentages, it’s not actually true. Cultural issues are less visible in Washington for the simple reason that Democrats control the congressional agenda (if not always the results), and are generally either uniniterested in or divided over cultural issues. (This doesn’t, of course, keep conservatives from claiming that health care reform legislation is actually designed to promote both abortion and euthanasia).
Outside Washington, however, the culture wars often rage on. For a good example, check out a long, fascinating piece by Russell Shorto that appeared in the the latest New York Times Magazine, on the Texas State School Board’s ongoing struggles over public school curriculum and textbook content.
As you may know, Christian Right leaders in the late 1980s, frustrated by the limited ROI from their involvement in national politics, encouraged their followers to run for local office, particularly school boards, in an effort to promote theocratic thinking from the ground up and from early childhood on. The bitter fruit of this strategy is most on display in Texas, where self-consciously Christian conservatives running as Republicans captured the State Board of Education in the late 1990s.
Shorto explains in detail how the Board’s Christian Right bloc pores over textbook content in periodic reviews, usually offering hundreds of amendments to recommendations made by expert panels (which are themselves being skewed towards theocratic views). He also notes that these activities have an impact far beyond Texas, since the state’s gigantic market heavily influences how textbook companies operate nationally. That the Christian Right bloc is interested in religio-political rather than educational goals is best exemplified by the presence on the Board of Cynthia Dunbar, who commutes once a week from Texas to Lynchburg, Virginia, to teach at the late Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University School of Law. Among other things, Dunbar has publicly denounced the very existence of public schools, and said sending one’s children to them (she didn’t, of course) is like “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.” Just the kind of person you want supervising an entire state’s public schools.
Most interestingly, Shorto demonstrates that the ultimate goal of the Christian Right bloc on the Board goes well beyond such headline issues as the teaching of “scientific creationism” or church-state separation hot buttons. They are mainly, as Dunbar puts it, focused on embuing students’ understanding of American history and law with a “biblical worldview.” That means, in practice, emphatically teaching such distinctly non-biblical principles as “American exceptionalism” (which for these folks means America’s divine mission to Christianize the world, by military means if necessary), limited government, and absolute property rights. It’s a very political–one might even say secular–agenda that happens to coincide nicely with the long-range agenda of the secular as well as the religious Right. And it’s an excellent example of how in Conservativeland cultural and economic issues cannot be neatly separated. If God’s a hard money man, an anti-tax activist, and a neocon, then the whole idea of a “Christian Nation” has implications significantly broader than municipal Christmas creches, or even abortion and LGBT equality.
Shorto suggests that the extremism of the Texas State School Board has been controversial even among conservative Republicans, and points to a Republican primary challenge to Board member Don McLeroy (a dentist whose especially heavy hand with science textbooks led to his removal as Board chairman by the state senate) on March 3 as a bellwether:

If Don McLeroy loses, it could signal that the Christian right’s recent power surge has begun to wane. But it probably won’t affect the next generation of schoolbooks. The current board remains in place until next January. By then, decisions on what goes in the Texas curriculum guidelines will be history.

I’d say McLeroy’s defeat, if it happens, is more likely to produce a shift in Christian Right tactics than any real loss of power. But I’ll probably be watching his numbers on March 3 as avidly as I watch the gubernatorial primary battle between Tea Party favorite Rick Perry and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchiston. In good times and bad, the culture wars abide.

At first glance, it’s odd that the decision of a single United States senator not to run for re-election is getting the kind of saturation coverage that Evan Bayh is now receiving. It’s not as though Bayh is Jim Jeffords, whose party switch in 2001 instantly changed partisan control of the Senate. He’s not a member of the Senate leadership, and does not chair a major committee. There was once a time when he was considered presidential timber, but having now been passed over at least twice for the vice presidential nomination, his career seems to have already peaked. And his profile in the Senate as someone who generally votes with his party while constantly complaining about it is not designed to win many friends or admirers. Yes, his retirement denies Democrats a well-heeled and popular incumbent candidate for 2010 in a difficult state, but it now appears Indiana Democrats will be able to hand-pick a successor, and it’s Republicans who will have a potentially ruinous primary.
Bayh, however, is seen as a symbol of different things to different observers in the chattering classes, and so his debankment yesterday has set them to chattering about it. “Centrist” media pundits who are obsessed with fiscal issues and believe Democrats have to move towards Republicans to create “bipartisanship” obviously viewed him as an important congressional ally, and now tend to think of his retirement as a brave Cassandra gesture in protest of a “broken” system. Republicans even more obviously are making Bayh the latest and most important example of congressional Democrats “heading for the exits” in anticipation of a 2010 GOP landslide. And on the Left, where Bayh was beginning to rival Joe Lieberman as the Least Favorite Senator, his retirement is being treated as a characteristic abandonment of party by a gutless no-account DINO, and a welcome step towards a more cohesive Democratic Party.
As always, the vagaries of the news cycle boosted the perceived significance of Bayh’s announcement, coming as it did when Washington snowstorms and then the President’s Day/Olympics recess cut off the mother’s milk of national political news. Some observers really had to reach to find something historic about Bayh’s departure; Peter Beinart’s Daily Beast column on the subject suggested that it “matters” because it dashes a dream of Democratic Hoosier success traceable to Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential primary victory there.
You’d figure that when real news arrives–say, today’s revelation that a joint U.S./Pakistani intelligence operation captured the Taliban’s military commander–the political commentariat can begin to put Bayh’s retirement into better perspective. Let’s hope so.

In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot‘ TDS Co-editor Ruy Teixeira presents compelling statistical evidence that the American public supports President Obama’s call to repeal the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and permit Lesbian and Gay people to serve openly in our armed forces. According to a new Quinnipiac poll, notes Teixeira:

…A strong 57-36 margin, said the federal law prohibiting openly gay men and women from serving in the military should be repealed…Moreover, by more than a 2-to-1 ratio—66 percent to 31 percent—the public agrees that not allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the military is discriminatory.

As for the argument that allowing openly gay men and women in the armed forces would be divisive for the troops and impair their ability to fight, the public is not buying it by a 65-30 margin. “In the court of public opinion, this looks like an open-and-shut case,” concludes Teixeira. “Congress, take note.”

While much of the political world is focused on the health care summit called for February 25 by President Obama, there’s an earlier summit worth watching that will happen tomorrow when RNC chairman Michael Steele meets with about 50 Tea Party leaders from a dozen or so states. Here’s how Kenneth Vogel of Politico describes it:

Steele’s planned Tuesday meeting with tea party leaders from at least a dozen states — a meeting organized by Karin Hoffman, founder of a South Florida tea party group called DC Works For Us — represents something of a breakthrough in the GOP’s courting of the tea party. Though Steele and other GOP leaders have occasionally scored meetings with individual leaders of national groups involved in the tea party movement, Tuesday will mark the first large-scale get-together between the national party and grass-roots activists from a wide array of regional tea party groups.

The meeting will further galvanize disagreements between those Tea Party activists who want to keep their distance from the GOP (many of them Ron Paul disciples and many of them affiliated with the Tea Party Patriots group that was so critical of the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville earlier this month), and those who want to work closely with Republicans to defeat GOP “moderates” in primaries and Democrats in the general election.
What makes the intra-Tea Party arguments on this subject potentially misleading is that many of these “independent” activists really want to take over the GOP in conjunction with hard-core Republican conservatives. The proportion of tea partiers who want to remain permanently independent is probably quite small. The disagreement is largely over terms for a Tea Party/Republican fusion, which makes many activists touchy about how it’s described. It’s clear now, for example, that Sarah Palin made a major mistake in Nashville by urging the Republican Party to “absorb” the Tea Party movement. “Surrender to” would have been a much more popular formulation for the crowd at Opryland.
Underlying the tension over “fusion” is the unhappiness of some Tea Party activists–understandably concentrated among self-conscious libertarians and Ron Paul “revolutionaries”–with the cultural conservatism and foreign policy militarism of “movement conservatives” in the GOP. But again, it’s unclear how many activists actually disagree with such conservative views, and how many simply support a focus on fiscal issues for tactical reasons.
in other words, you may need a decoder ring to understand reactions to tomorrow’s Steele-Tea Party summit.

The problems faced by Democrats in Senate elections this fall just got bigger, as Sen. Evan Bayh shocked the political world by announcing he isn’t running for re-election. He claims to be sick of partisanship in the Senate, though if Republicans win his seat in November, partisanship will simply get worse.
The challenge this poses for Democrats in Indiana and nationally isn’t simply that a popular incumbent in a marginal and traditionally conservative state who was sitting on $13 million in campaign cash is hanging it up. It’s timing: Bayh chose to take this step just four days before qualifying ends for 2010 candidates. (Two Republicans who are former members of Congress are already in the race). Since he appears to have kept his equivocation on running for re-election entirely to himself, there’s no Democratic successor waiting eagerly in the wings.
Early speculation revolves around U.S. Reps. Brad Ellsworth and Baron Hill as potential Democratic candidates. But with so little time to make up their minds, nobody knows if a top-tier Democratic candidate will become available.
Expect Republican hyping of their chances (objectively still limited) of taking over the Senate this year to get amped up to a feral roar.

It’s been obvious for a while that in forcing congressional Republicans to attend a presidential summit on health care reform on February 25, the president is trying to place them on the horns of a dilemma: they must either admit they don’t have their own “plan,” or must advance a “plan” that could be very unpopular (viz. vouchering Medicare). More generally, Obama is trying to create a broader political context in which Americans compare the agendas of the two parties, instead of treating the November elections as an up-or-down referendum on the administration’s policies or, worse yet, on feelings about the political and economic condition of the country. The president is also seeking the deepen the growing sentiment that he’s been a lot more “bipartisan” than the opposition.
But it’s also likely that Obama is using the summit to push congressional Democrats to get their own act together before it’s too late. The formal announcement of the summit indicates that the White House will in advance post on the internet a plan that meets the administration’s criteria for reform. Here’s how Jonathan Cohn analyzes the implications of that statement:

That passage seems to suggest one of the following is true:
1) House and Senate leadership have nearly finished negotiating a new compromise version of their legislation. The text the administration plans to post will reflect that compromise.
2) House and Senate leadership are still struggling to come to an agreement, if not over what to pass then in what sequence to pass it. The administration hopes this promise will force them to wrap things up.

In other words, Obama could be engaging in a two-front offensive: forcing action by Democrats to complete or revive their own health reform negotiations, on pain of looking like fools on February 25, while compelling Republicans to choose the path of open obstruction or of perilous conservative ideology.
With the summit being just ten days away, the White House isn’t affording either party a whole lot of time to make these fateful choices. But one thing seems to be sure: by February 25, there will finally be a plan on the table that merits the much-abused term “ObamaCare.”

Well, OK, it’s not like major traction. But J.P. Green’s post title “G.O.P. = Gridlock, Obstruction & Paralysis” did win a coveted Upper Left Blogspot “Acronym of the Day” designation, which gives us enough of an excuse to re-post the equation. Green’s post title did get some other play, including fleeting mentions in a couple dozen web pages, including WSJ and USAToday search pages. The larger point is “gridlock,” “obstruction” and “paralysis” are three words that are being mentioned with increasing frequency in the same sentence with “G.O.P,” along with phrases like “The Party of No” and “The Party of Obstruction.” Worthy designations all. If anyone has a more apt short description for what the Republican Party of the 21st century stands for, we welcome your suggestions.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is crossposted from The New Republic.
One of the few benefits of being snowed in is the chance to read long documents more carefully than the normal pace of work allows. The 462-page economic report that the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released today is worth the time it takes.
On one level, it paints a clear and cogent picture of the path that economic recovery and growth over the next decade will have to take. The principal drivers of growth in the decade prior to 2007—construction and personal consumption—will both lag between now and 2020. Savings and investment will rise, as will net exports. This is more than national accounting arithmetic: Savings had fallen to unsustainably low levels in response to misleading economic cues (more on this a bit later), and investment sagged below trendline for much of the past decade. For their part, exports tend to decline more rapidly than GDP during recessions and to grow more rapidly during recoveries. So the story makes sense, at least qualitatively.
The CEA report offers an illuminating account of the savings rate. It turns out that three factors—the wealth/income ratio, credit availability, and the unemployment rate—explain most of the variation. Much of the decline in the savings rate since the early 1980s is attributable to the proliferation of credit; the near-collapse of saving during 2005 and 2006 is correlated with what turned out to be illusory increases in household wealth. Looking forward, it seems likely that the wealth/income ratio will stabilize below its peak, that credit will remain tight for quite some time, and that unemployment will decline only slowly.
Indeed, the labor market outlook over the next decade is not especially bright. The CEA is projecting above-trendline growth in GDP over the next eight years. Nonetheless, the unemployment rate will decline only slowly. It is projected to average 10.0 percent this year, 9.2 percent in 2011, 8.2 percent in the year President Obama will run for reelection, and 6.5 percent during the midterm election year of 2014. This is not the formula for a contented electorate.
The underlying math shows why it will take the job market so long to climb out of its hole. Recent estimates revealed that the economy has lost a staggering 8.4 million jobs since the Great Recession started in December 2007. In addition, the economy needs to generate about 100,000 jobs per month just to stay even with the natural growth of the labor force. In short, we are nearly 11 million jobs short of where we need to be. But the CEA estimates job growth for 2010 at 95,000 per month—just about enough to keep the hole from getting even deeper, but not enough to begin digging out. My calculations based on the CEA projections show that we will not recover the missing 8.4 million jobs until the spring of 2013, more than five years after the recession began. And we won’t reach full employment (defined as 5 percent unemployment) until nearly the end of the decade.
Suppose you have only five minutes to spend on this report. What are the five most illuminating pages? Here are my nominees, back to front:

•Figure 8-7, p. 225, which dramatically illustrates how we have lost our leadership in post-secondary education attainment. We still have the greatest research universities in the world, but our workforce is treading water while the rest of the developed world is moving ahead. We won’t be the world’s economic leader in 30 years if we don’t do something to end our stagnation.
•Figure 8-4, p. 219, which charts the unbelievable rise, over the past four decades, in the share of pretax income going to the wealthiest 10 percent of all families. Bottom line: Welcome to the 1920s.
•Figure 7-4, p. 192: From 2000 until 2008, the percentage of non-elderly adults with private insurance coverage fell from 75.5 percent to 69.5 percent. What are the chances that this trend will halt if the Democrats let health reform die.
•Figure 7-2, p. 184: During the past decade, health insurance has consumed all the growth in total compensation … and then some. If we do nothing over the next 30 years, health care will constitute fully half of total compensation, and workers’ income net of health care costs—i.e., the amount remaining for everything else—will barely budge.
•Figure 5-3, p. 141: The previous administration’s refusal to pay for two tax cuts, two wars, and prescription drug coverage has increased the budget deficit by more than 4 percent of GDP. How long will it take the Republicans to acknowledge that they bear some responsibility for the fiscal mess we’re in?

The late lamented Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked to the effect that, while every man is entitled to his own opinions, he’s not entitled to his own facts. How quaint that sounds today. But we can’t have a serious discussion of our problems—especially across party lines—if we don’t jointly acknowledge a common base of evidence. I’m not holding my breath.