Most people outside New York have probably never heard of Betsy McCaughey, and even New Yorkers would mainly remember her bizarre one-term stint as Lieutenant Governor of the Empire State in the 1990s, characterized by constant friction with her supposed boss and running-mate, Gov. George Pataki.
But in the world of policy wonks, McCaughey is notorious for a studious-sounding 1994 piece published by The New Republic that is frequently blamed for undermining support for the Clinton health plan at a crucial moment, via fundamental mistatements of its impact on people who already had health insurance. Indeed, her role in derailing universal health coverage led directly to her short career in Republican politics.
Current TNR editor Franklin Foer apologized for the magazine’s publication of McCaughey’s piece in his first signed editorial. Now that she is back on the same scene spreading disinformation about the current health reform effort, that apology has undoubtedly been made manifest in Michelle Cottle’s definitive smackdown of McCaughey in an article with the same title–“No Exit”–as the 1994 essay.
After listing a variety of highly negative characterizations of McCaughey’s veracity as a policy thinker by other wonks, including many conservatives, Cottle makes this provocative judgment:

What kind of person drives normally staid wonks, including her own ideological teammates, to such stinging public reproof? Part of it is obviously the nature of her commentary. But beyond that, there is something about McCaughey herself that drives her critics wild–and has throughout much of her career. Friends posit it’s her disconcerting blend of brains, beauty, and confidence. Detractors chalk it up to her rank dishonesty, narcissism, and lack of shame. Whatever the cause, the passion McCaughey inflames is familiar. Looking over the sweep of McCaughey’s life, from her swift political rise (and fall) to her humble roots, from her straight-talking persona, fierce will, and blinding confidence to her gift for self-dramatization, head-turning looks, and embrace of the gender card, one sees precursors of a more recent conservative phenom. Replace the East Coast researcher’s political-outsider, stats-wielding, pointy-head shtick with a political-outsider, gun-toting, populist one, and a striking parallel emerges: Betsy McCaughey is, in essence, the blue-state Sarah Palin.

The comparison to Palin is inevitable, since it was McCaughey’s “research” on current Democratic health reform efforts that inspired Palin’s infamous claim that they would lead to government “death panels” withholding health care from seniors and people with disabilities. The big difference between McCaughey’s destructive role on health reform in 1994 and now is, of course, the rise of hyper-ideological media eager to take her think tank credentials at face value and give her a big and continuous platform for her views.
But as Cottle argues, there’s a more direct parallel between McCaughey and Palin: an uncanny knack for turning any and all criticism into an indictment of the alleged biases of critics, a tactic that perpetually evades basic questions of fact and fiction:

[McCaughey] has proved devastatingly adept at manipulating charts and stats to suit her ideological (and personal) ambitions. It is this proud piety concerning her own straight-shooting integrity combined with her willingness to peddle outrageous fictions–and her complete inability to recognize, much less be shamed by, this behavior–that makes McCaughey so infuriating. In this way, perhaps most of all, she resembles the tell-it-like-it-is good ol’ girl Palin, whose scorching self-regard and ostentatious disdain for politics-as-usual infuse even her most self-serving fabulisms. Palin, of course, hawks homespun wisdom, faith, and common sense, in contrast to McCaughey’s figures and footnotes. But both women have an uncanny ability to shovel their toxic nonsense with nary a blink, tremor, or break in those dazzling smiles. People of goodwill and honest counsel don’t stand a chance.

You have to guess that Michelle Cottle will soon experience McCaughey’s tactics first-hand.

It is often suggested that the struggling economy is a giant millstone around the neck of the Democratic donkey, which can’t do much about it because widespread fears of rising federal budget deficits have taken most remedial options off the table.
But a new survey from Hart Research Associates, asking some well-framed questions, paints a different picture of public opinion on the economy. Americans are still more worried about unemployment than budget deficits, still blame George W. Bush more than Barack Obama for current conditions, and are open to further action by the federal government.
Even self-identified Republicans rate unemplomyent as a bigger concern than deficits by a margin of 51%-42%, and overall, only 27% of Americans consider deficits as among the one or two most important economic problems facing the country. Even so, Americans blame the Bush administration as opposed to the Obama administration for current budget deficits by a 52%-27% margin (45%-27% among self-identified independents).
Meanwhile, 83% of Americans consider unemployment to be either a “very big problem” or a “fairly big problem.” A remarkable 68% of people in rural areas rate unemployment as a “very big problem,” which is a reminder that some parts of the country have been struggling economically for a long while, and don’t necessarily view the recession as having suddenly emerged last year.
Moreover, the recession is a very personal thing to vast numbers of Americans, with 44% claimiing that someone in their own household has either been laid off or has had hours or pay cut in the last year. This number rises to 54% among Hispanics.
Perceptions of this year’s stimulus package are more positive than you might expect, though not very strong; 53% said it had helped the economy a little, and 12% a lot, while only 16% bought the conservative argument that it had hurt the economy. Unsurprisingly, voters oppose the now-common Republican idea of freezing further stimulus spending by a 55%-39% margin. And in a parallel finding, Americans favor the economy strategy of “creating jobs and investing” over one of “shrinking government spending” by a 61%-36% margin.
At a time when sweeping generalizations about public opinion on the economy are far too prevelant, this new research from Hart is well worth reading and pondering.

TDS Co-Editor William Galston earns a quote of the day designation for a quote included in an Eliza Carney piece for National Journal on the possible use of budget reconcilation procedures for health care reform:

Resorting to reconciliation would amount to “bridge burning, not bridge building,” acknowledged William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a policy adviser to President Clinton. “On the other hand, as I look at Congress right now, I don’t see a lot of bridges that haven’t been bombed out already. It’s sort of like Europe in 1944.”

As our staff report below indicates, it’s looking very good for a favorable Senate Finance Committee report of the health care reform legislation this week. The Senate floor vote later on is more of a concern. The central question pre-occupying Senate-watchers and progressive health reform advocates alike is, what kind of public option, if any, is taking shape?
The answer to that question depends on the consensus-building skills of the white house and the willingness of a half-dozen or so key Senators, who have put their concerns out there, loud and clear, and who can not be expected to roll over without some face-saving concessions. They include:

Senator Ron Wyden (OR) wants much broader access to a ‘health exchange’ marketplace;
Senator Blanche Lincoln (AR) wants stronger cost-cutting measures so she can convince her middle-class constituents that they are not going to get saddled with tax hikes.
Republican Senator Olympia Snowe won’t vote for anything that even smells like a ‘public option’ without a ‘trigger’ mechanism of some kind;
Senator Maria Cantwell (WA) and Sen. Tom Carper (DE) want to localize the ‘public option’ by making it a state elective;
Senator Bill Nelson is mostly concerned about seniors, who are a large component of his FL constituency, and who are nervous about changes in the popular ‘Medicare Advantage’ programs.

It’s not hard to imagine a range of deals to make these six adequately happy. They have to be able to go back to their constituents and say in effect, “See, all that fussing I was doing has helped get changes in the reform package that address your concerns.” President Obama and his staff are working overtime to help make this doable.
Cantwell and Carper have already gotten an amendment supporting a public-private hybrid state approach passed in the Senate Finance Committee. Some form of it will have to survive the floor votes and reconciliation stages to keep them on board.
Wyden’s main concern is that access to health exchanges ought not be limited to those who can’t get employer-based coverage. He feels strongly that it is a critical element of cost-cutting, and forcing private providers to be competitve. Sounds about right to me.
As for Snowe, perhaps a ‘hair trigger’ that will enable her to say to her constituents, “This will protect the private insurers from cut-throat government insurance,” will be enough to make her comfortable with the package and still be acceptable to ‘robust’ public option advocates like WV Sen. Jay Rockefeller.
My guess is that Sen. Lincoln is the hardest to please, since she is the only Dem who voted against the Cantwell amendment in the Finance Committee. She has been hanging tough about cost-cutting and opposing tax hikes, and she is not alone, backed by several other moderate Democrats who share her views in varying extent, including Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson, Debby Stabenow, Joseph Lieberman and Claire McCaskill, among others. Convincing moderate-conservative constituents that major government reforms are not going to jack up their taxes has always been a very tough sell. Satisfying Lincoln and like-minded Senators is the white house’s most difficult challenge.
All of these Senators are aware that nation-wide public opinion favors some kind of a public option. In September, The Kaiser Family Foundation’s health care poll found that 57% of Americans want “public health insurance option similar to Medicare.” As Democratic strategist Paul Begala said, quoted in an article in today’s L.A. Times by Noam Levy and Janet Hook, “One of the most consistently popular ideas in the healthcare debate is the public option, more popular than health reform generally…”It’s good politics.”
The Administration’s best hole card, however, is that no one Senator wants to be the spoiler who gets lambasted for killing reform prospects that could save the lives of countless thousands during the next few years. Yet, understandably, none are willing to go back to their constituents empty-handed. In between these two fears there is an array of possible compromises, concessions and deals that everyone can live with. The great hope is that Team Obama can find the balances that can get to 60.

It sometimes seems like the Senate Finance Committee has been deliberating on health care reform legislation for a decade or so. Now that all 500-plus proposed amendments have been disposed of, the Committee appeared to be ready for a vote tomorrow, but the latest buzz is that it’s waiting for a final “score” of the cost of the modified Baucus bill from the Congressional Budget Office, and probably won’t vote until later in the week.
Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic has a thorough analysis of the five shaky votes (four Democrats and one Republican) on final passage, but in the end agrees with this positive assessment from Ezra Klein:

[T]he people I talk to don’t believe there is a single Democrat on the committee who would actually imperil the legislation’s chances. Anyone whose vote is needed will vote for the bill. But if the bill is going to pass comfortably, you might see Snowe withhold her vote to strengthen her negotiating position on the floor of the Senate, or Lincoln hold back because she’s worried about her political standing in Arkansas, or Wyden hold back because he’s genuinely unimpressed with the legislation and infuriated at how he’s been treated. But the bill will pass, and easily. That means health-care reform will have passed all five relevant committees, and is moving toward the floor of the House and the Senate, and after that, the president’s desk.

So even at this late date, there’s a lot of maneuvering on the Finance Committee to position the bill, and senators, for the more important moment when the Finance and HELP versions of heatlh care reform are combined under the direction of Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, and the White House and the combined congressional Democratic leadership decides on a strategy for floor action in both Houses. The real endgame remains several steps ahead, but action in Finance keeps the ball rolling.

Like a lot of folks, I’ve expressed worries about the likelihood that older white voters will represent a disproportionate share of the electorate in the 2010 midterm elections, creating an unearned GOP advantage. In his latest column, Ron Brownstein meditates on that possibility, but also points out that a Republican message tailored to older white voters could come back to haunt the GOP in 2012.

In midterm elections, the electorate tends to be whiter and older than in presidential elections. ABC polling director Gary Langer has calculated that since 1992 seniors have cast 19 percent of the vote in midterm elections, compared with just 15 percent in presidential years. That difference contributed to the 1994 landslide that swept the GOP into control of both the House and Senate. Seniors had cast just 13 percent of the vote in Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, but that figure spiked to nearly 19 percent two years later, with voting by the young people who had bolstered Clinton falling off sharply….
In 2008, Obama won the votes of just 40 percent of whites over age 65 (compared with 54 percent of whites under 30). All surveys show that white seniors remain the most resistant to Obama’s health care agenda and the most skeptical of him overall. In the nonpartisan Pew Research Center’s most recent poll, Obama’s approval rating among elderly whites stood at just 39 percent. Surveying all of these numbers, veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres says that the Republican margin among white seniors could “easily expand to 25 points” in 2010.

Brownstein also notes, however, that the general assumption of low voting in midterms by minorities is based on mixed evidence. Minority voters actually represented a higher share of the electorate in 1994 and 1998 than in the presidential years of 1992 and 1996. These voters did, however, decline slightly as a percentage of the electorate in 2002 and 2006 as compared to 2000 and 2004. Moreover, the bar is higher in 2010 given the strong minority turnout in 2008. A lot will depend on what happens between now and then, and perhaps on the extent to which Republicans are perceived as playing on white racial or cultural fears.
After 2010, though, any Republican focus on older white voters isn’t likely to pay dividends:

In the 2012 presidential election, the young and minority voters central to Obama’s coalition are likely to return in large numbers. The risk to the GOP is that a strong 2010 showing based on a conservative appeal to apprehensive older whites will discourage it from reconsidering whether its message is too narrow to attract those rapidly growing groups.

Even if, says Brownstein, the share of the electorate for minority voters drops from 2008’s twenty-five percent to twenty percent in 2010, it’s like to rise to near thirty percent in 2012. It’s at that point that any Great White Hopes for the GOP could really begin to backfire.

In recent weeks, and particularly since the September 12th protests in Washington, a significant number of national commentators have advanced the notion that behind the stated objections raised against Obama by the Tea Bag/Town Hall/ September 12th protesters (and the much larger group that opinion polls indicate sympathize with them) there actually lies a deep undercurrent of racism.
The main evidence that is offered for this view is the deep underlying “us versus them” cognitive framework in which many of the protesters’ objections are expressed – “I want my country back”, “Obama hates white people”, “We are the real America.” It seems almost self-evident that when a group of white people pose issues in stark “us versus them” terms and when the person they are opposing is Black, then racism must somehow be intimately involved.
At the same time, it is also a very easy task to find examples of just about every imaginable form of anti-Black racial prejudice expressed somewhere or other in the vast number of broadcasts of various conservative talk radio commentators or in the comment threads of conservative discussion sites or in the texts of anonymous viral e-mails.
Combine item A with item B and op-ed commentaries accusing the protesters and their sympathizers of racism seem to literally jump out of the keyboard and write themselves.
But before concluding that anti-Black racism is actually a major source of the Tea Party/Town Hall protesters attitudes toward Obama, there are two additional steps that have to be taken: (1) to try to seriously gauge the extent (and not just the presence or absence) of racist attitudes among the protesters and (2) to consider possible alternative sources of deep “us versus them” polarization that might be behind the protesters’ attitudes.
To do this, it is necessary to look specifically at the stereotypes that exist about different social groups. It is group-specific stereotypes that distinguish one kind of prejudice from another — racial prejudice against African-Americans, for example, from prejudice against Mexicans, Moslems, radicals, homosexuals or drug users. These groups all experience hostility, prejudice and discrimination, but the specific stereotypes that define them are entirely different.
In America, there are two main categories of anti-Black racist stereotyping:
The first is older, segregation- era stereotypes of African Americans as “lazy”, “stupid” and/or violent sexual brutes. These segregation-era stereotypes are still widespread in overtly racist web sites like those of the Christian Identity, White Power and Neo-Nazi movements. They occasionally show up in more mainstream conservative sites and have sometimes appeared in e-mails sent by staff members of conservative political candidates and officials – particularly among staffers of the political dynasties in the South that have deep roots in the segregation era. Interestingly however none of these “old fashioned” racist slurs have gone massively viral and gained widespread popularity among conservatives and Republicans in the way that other attacks on Obama have done.
Overlaying the traditional racist images are four new and distinct post-civil rights era negative stereotypes of Blacks – (1) the angry and anti-white “black militant”, based on 1960’s figures like Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X and Huey Newton (2) the “Welfare Queens” of the 1970’s and 1980’s , Black people supposedly “ too lazy to work” but driving Cadillacs while living off welfare (3) the “racial guilt hustler” (symbolized by African-American leaders like Al Sharpton) and (4) gangbangers and crack cocaine dealers, symbolized by swaggering “gangstas” with 9-millimeter pistols and gold teeth.
These new negative images are more widely disseminated than the segregation-era racist stereotypes. They frequently appear in discussions on the larger conservative web sites and are a staple of commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Mike Savage and others. While it is possible to criticize groups like gangbangers without intending to invoke any racist stereotypes, the context of the remarks usually gives the game away. When former civil rights leader Congressman John Lewis criticizes gangbangers, you know he’s not being racist; when former KKK leader David Duke calls their behavior “typical”, you know that he is.
But when one looks at the roughly 200-300 photos of the hand-made signs attacking Obama at the tea parties and Washington march that have been published on the major news and commentary sites, the striking fact is that attacks on Obama based on these racial stereotypes represent only a minor percentage of the total. Let’s quickly look at the main categories:

Read more…

In the ongoing debate over what’s likely to happen in the 2010 elections, a point that I’ve tried to make repeatedly is that the Republican Party is exceptionally weak, and thus not in a great position to harvest discontent with Congress, the Obama administration, or the condition of the economy. A lot of conservatives seem to think the relative unpopularity of the GOP is a temporary “hangover” from the Bush years that will gradually dissipate.
But if you look at the data on party favorability (which can all be found together at PollingReport.com), what’s striking is that the GOP’s bad reputation isn’t getting any better. Pew, which offers respondents a range of options that appears to boost favorability, had the GOP’s total favorables at 40% in August, 40% in April, 40% in January, 39% in May of 2008, and 41% on the eve of the 2006 midterm elections. That’s as flat a line as you will ever see. GOP total unfavorables for that stretch of time oscillated slightly from the high forties to the low fifties; they were at 50% in August. Meanwhile, Fox has Republican favorability actually declining, from a ratio of 45/49 just before the 2008 elections, to 41/50 in April, to 36/53 in July. The same pattern is found by CBS/New York Times, where Republicans had a favorable/unfavorable ratio of 37/54 in October of 2008, then 31-58 in April of this year, and 28/58 in June.
I won’t go through all the polls in terms of Democrats, but unsurprisingly, they show the Democratic Party losing favorability in recent months, but still maintaining significantly more popularity than Republicans. Pew, for example, had the Democratic Party’s total favorables at 49% (versus 41% unfavorable) in August, down from 62% (versus 32% unfavorable) at the beginning of the year.
So you make the case that the recent abrasive behavior of the Republican Party may have helped damage Democrats, but isn’t helping Republicans much, either. Since Republicans have a much tougher climb to make to reach anything like majority status, they are in danger of committing a political murder-suicide.
The current popularity of the GOP, moreover, is low by historical standards, particularly for a party with visions of a big landslide electoral victory just ahead. Both Ezra Klein and Brendan Nyhan have taken a look this week at the favorability ratings of the two parties in 1994, and there’s absolutely no comparison to today’s low ratings for the GOP. As Nyhan summed up the evidence:

Republicans are currently viewed more negatively than any minority party in the previous four midterms in terms of both net favorables and the difference in net favorables between parties:

It’s possible, and perhaps even probable, that the GOP strategy for 2010 is to create a political environment so toxic and voter-alienating that Republicans can win a very low turnout election by whipping their base into a genuine frenzy. That’s obviously not a very good scenario for the country, and it remains to be seen if it’s even good for the GOP.

The reporting about it in the major rags has been sketchy, to put it charitably. But Ryan Grim has a HuffPo post that outlines the basics of Sen. Maria Cantwell’s “quasi-public option” health reform amendment, just passed by the Senate Finance Committee. Grim says the Cantwell amendment (full text here) “moves the conservative panel as close as it will likely get to a public health insurance option” and he provides this synopsis:

The amendment creates a “federally funded, non-Medicaid, state plan which combines the innovation and quality of private sector competition with the purchasing power of the states,” according to an overview.
It would be available to people with incomes above Medicaid eligibility but below 200 percent of the federal poverty level — a very narrow window. However, Republicans fear — and progressives hope — that once the plan becomes law there will be pressure to expand it…The plan would not be free. It is based on Washington state’s Basic Health plan, which costs roughly 60 dollars a month, with the remainder of the premium subsidized by the state.
Private insurers would be eligible to participate in the plan, as would HMOs or other networks of health care providers…Cantwell says that her measure…would assure coverage of 75 percent of people who are currently uninsured.

Cantwell’s amendment did win the support of four of the five Dems who voted against stronger public option amendments, the exception being Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln. Grim notes that Sen. Snowe voted against it, which could be a problem down the road. The 12-11 margin suggests, for better or worse, that it may be a tweakable approach to a consensus.

Just in case you thought that, gee, maybe the GOP has a point about Rep. Alan Grayson owing them an apology for his remarks (see J.P. Green’s post below) about their bogus health care “plan,” Think Progress has a collection of some of their more intemperate ‘greatest hits’ bashing the Democratic health care reform proposals — none of which they have apologized for. Read the following, and then decide whether you think Rep. Grayson owes the Republicans any kind of apology:

– “Last week Democrats released a health care bill which essentially said to America’s seniors: Drop dead.” [Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL), 7/21/09] (video clip here)
– “They’re going to save money by rationing care, getting you in a long line. Places like Canada, United Kingdom, and Europe. People die when they’re in line.” [Rep. Steve King (R-IA), 7/15/09] – “The Republican plan will] make sure we bring down the cost of health care for all Americans and that ensures affordable access for all Americans and is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.” [Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), 7/28/09] (video clip here)
– “That’s exactly what’s going on in Canada and Great Britain today…and a lot of people are going to die.” [Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA), 7/10/09] – “One in five people have to die because they went to socialized medicine! … I would hate to think that among five women, one of ‘em is gonna die because we go to socialized care.” [Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), 7/15/09]

And hey, we don’t remember Saint Joan of the Tundra apologizing for her drivel about Democratic “death panels,” nor Rep. Michelle Bachman’s apology for calling for renewed witch hunts to ferret out ‘anti-American’ elected officials (video here). If the Republicans want to declare a moritorium on overheated rhetoric, let them set an example. Otherwise Dems should not feel guilty for using every media opportunity to educate the public about the Republicans’ lack of a health plan and the Democrats serious reforms.