I can’t match J.P. Green’s eloquence in his obituary for “the lion,” Ted Kennedy. But I do have a few thoughts in appreciation of this great legislator, crossposted from the Progressive Policy Institute site:
Perhaps the most fitting epitaph for the career of Edward Moore Kennedy, who died last night at the age of 77, is that he managed to both embody and transcend the mythos of his remarkable family. First elected to the Senate as a callow assistant district attorney to fill out the term of his brother, the President of the United States, within six years he endured the assassinations of both JFK and RFK, and without any real choice in the matter, inherited the vast expectations their shortened lives had created. He became the de facto leader of old-fashioned American liberalism before he turned 40, and with only occasional competition, remained so until his death.
Some now remember his one presidential campaign, a failed challenge to Jimmy Carter in 1980, as a low point of his career. But in many respects, it actually liberated him from a “destiny” for which he was less suited than the one he built as one of the great legislators of his or any other era. It’s hard to credit this now, but when Ted Kennedy’s presidential aspirations were dashed, after many years of speculation about when he would make the move towards the White House, he was about the same age as Barack Obama is today. It’s doubtful he could have accomplished more as president in four or eight years than he did before and after that time in the Senate.
Today’s tributes will often note the irony that this man of ideological principle was also a consummate bipartisan legislator. At a time when “bipartisanship” has become a forlorn hope or (to some) a bitter curse, it’s worth remembering Kennedy’s key role in the last great spasm of genuine legislative bipartisanship, the No Child Left Behind legislation, along with his frustrated efforts to secure another bipartisan breakthrough on immigration reform.
But despite his legislative accomplishments in so many areas, from rights for the disabled to national service, there’s no question that universal health coverage was the consuming passion of his entire career. As a freshman senator, he was there to vote for the original Medicare and Medicaid legislation. And in the ensuing 44 years, he played central roles in every painful and frustrating step the country has taken towards universal health coverage.
This legacy will be cited often in the days just ahead, as health care reform advocates tout the enactment of today’s endangered legislation as a fitting tribute to Kennedy, even as others (however disingenuously) cite his bipartisanship and willingness to accept incremental steps towards his goals as grounds for scaling back the drive towards universal coverage. It’s a good bet that he wouldn’t mind the political use of his own memorials if they do in fact contribute to the achievement of universal health coverage, just as he always accepted the unfair burden of the Kennedy family mantle, which aroused so much love and hate in so many people.
In the end, the best tributes to his memory will be written in legislation, the distillation of strong values and bold goals into concrete action for the common good. Few Americans have ever been Ted Kennedy’s peer in the art of making dreams into laws, and he will be missed.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
There are two specters haunting progressives as we near the endgame of this year’s health care reform debate. The first, of course, is the sad precedent of the Clinton effort. But the second is a success story, cited often in invidious comparison to Obama: the ghost of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s epochal legislative blitz of 1964-65, which produced the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid.
It’s something you hear about all the time in casual conversation among Democratic political junkies, particularly those with chronic doubts about the Obama’s legislative strategy and his personal style: Why can’t he be more like LBJ, who exploited big Democratic majorities in Congress to get big things done, and fast? And LBJ is cited not just as a successful activist president, but also as, to cite the title of the last-published volume of Robert Caro’s vast biography of the man, “The Master of the Senate.” Here’s how Tom Schaller put it yesterday in a pitch-perfect essay for Salon reflecting present progressive second-guessing of Obama’s, and congressional Democrats’, approach to health reform, entitled “What Went Wrong?”:

Obama is no LBJ … Given the reflexive Republican biting of Obama’s extended hand, perhaps the president should have dispensed from the start with any serious effort to find accommodation with the GOP. … Instead of wasting energy on trying to persuade Republicans, it could have worked over dissenting Democrats in the Senate, and had a better shot at jamming the public option through.

Schaller thus invokes the myth that LBJ, a famously truculent and manipulative SOB, when given a similar gift of initial public support and a big Democratic congressional majorities (particularly after the 1964 landslide), didn’t screw around with “bipartisanship” or compromises but instead bent Congress, including the inherently change-averse Senate, to his progressive will. Woe onto us that Barack Obama, the professorial amateur with a fatal addiction to bipartisanship and compromise, cannot be more like LBJ!
The problem with this argument is that real LBJ wasn’t really that partisan legislative steamroller who announced what he wanted and got it. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 accomplished, lest we forget, basic citizenship guarantees that took 88 years to enact after the end of Reconstruction. It took a martyred president and a vast array of contemporary and heavily publicized outrages against African-Americans to give these bills the political momentum they needed. And far from being the fruit of aggressive partisanship, the big civil rights laws represented a bipartisan and trans-ideological consensus outside the South to impose national values on that rebellious region.
Yes, LBJ’s leadership (in tandem with congressional leaders like Hubert Humphrey) was essential to the enactment of the civil rights laws over southern Senate filibusters. But according to Caro, LBJ’s true “mastery of the Senate” was best displayed on behalf of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which accomplished virtually nothing for African-Americans other than the establishment of a precedent for future action.
As for Medicare and Medicaid, the idea that LBJ came up with a bold set of proposals and ram-rodded them through Congress is wrong by all sorts of measurements. It’s important to understand that however important these health care entitlements became, they were at the time clearly major compromises from the progressive commitment, first articulated by Harry Truman, to enact national health insurance. Medicare, obviously, was offered only to retirees, not all Americans–a distinction that is cherished as a matter of principle by those Medicare beneficiaries who today oppose universal health coverage. Medicaid was even more of a compromise, eschewing national health coverage for a crazy quilt system in which the states would largely determine eligibility and benefit levels, with coverage generally limited to low-income families with children.
Medicare and Medicaid also did not spring fully formed from LBJ’s head or his White House, and weren’t enacted via royal disdain for Congress and the petty fiefdoms of the committee system. Federal health insurance for retirees was narrowly defeated in the Senate in 1960 and in 1962. It finally passed the Senate in 1964, only to succumb in the House when Democratic Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills refused to support it. It was finally enacted in 1965, but only after Mills shaped the legislation, and also added Medicaid, intended as a sop to Republicans and the AMA, which had long proposed health care subsidies for low-income families as an alternative to national health insurance.
So the myth of LBJ as the driven president demanding and securing progressive legislation against the grain of party, congressional prerogatives, and even public opinion, is an exaggeration, to put it mildly. LBJ showed great courage and resolution on civil rights, but he was riding almost a century of momentum, and he certainly didn’t reject bipartisanship in his effort to get the job done. The landmark health care initiatives of Medicare and Medicaid were “betrayals” of the long-established progressive goal of national health insurance–certainly far more so than, say, the substitution of a health care cooperatives for a “public option” in a system of universal health coverage.
Team Obama faces a crucible this autumn in trying to get health reform enacted, and the president’s legacy will be greatly affected by success or failure. But while Lyndon Johnson may provide inspiration in the small ball of legislative sausage-making or even the big lift of public persuasion, Barack Obama doesn’t really need to look over his shoulder at the big Texan’s shade.

We knew it was coming. Yet the death of Senator Ted Kennedy nonetheless leaves a gaping wound in the Democratic Party, or more precisely in the heart of the Democratic Party. No other Senator, perhaps in all of U.S. history, fought longer or harder in behalf of the disadvantaged and for working people.
When he spoke for the powerless and downtrodden, you could feel the compassion in the tremors of his booming voice. Don’t take my word for it. Give a listen here, here and here. I heard him speak once in MLK’s church in Atlanta. The microphone was unnecessary.
Born to privilege and given to character flaws in the early stages of his life, Ted Kennedy conquered his demons and became one of America’s greatest champions of social justice and an exemplar for redemption. The showhorse became a workhorse who provided his colleagues the emblematic example of a passionate, energetic and hands-on United States Senator. He was also regarded as one of the best negotiators in Congress, a skill which is sorely-needed and much-missed at this hour. (A good DNC video tribute to Senator Kennedy can be viewed here.)
A partial list of legislative reforms passed under his leadership includes: the vote for 18-year olds; abolishing the draft; SCHIP; anti-Apartheid sanctions against South Africa; a ban on arms sales to Chile’s dictatorship; and voting against the authorization of the Iraq war — which he called “the best vote I’ve made in my 44 years in the United States Senate”. He was also the point man for: the MLK holiday, every civil rights bill that came up during his tenure; minimum wage hikes and numerous laws to protect working people from employer abuse. His endorsement of Barack Obama demonstrated vision and courage and probably was instrumental in his nomination.
As Ted Kennedy joins his brothers in eternity, we are left wondering who will carry the torch for health care, in particular, in the Senate. We’ve got some great U.S. Senators. But at this critical moment, there are no Wellstones or leaders of equivalent stature and skill to fill the void. Perhaps one will now come forward and provide the needed leadership. Having a President with powerful oratorical skills helps, and now is the time for him to pour it on, so we can enact a worthy health care bill. There can be no finer tribute to Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

At The New Republic today, TDS Co-Editor William Galston looks at the economic and budget forecasts recently released by the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, and sees tough times ahead:

If the consensus these documents represent is in the ballpark, the country and the Obama administration are in for a rough ride. Consider the following:
After shrinking over 2009, real GDP will grow only anemically in 2010 before that growth accelerates for a few years and then subsides to below 3 percent for the second half of the decade.
Unemployment will remain persistently high, averaging about 10 percent in 2010, when Democrats will be trying to defend their recent congressional gains. It will be close to 9 percent in 2011, but remain well above 7 percent as late as 2012, when President Obama presumably will run for reelection.
After years of economic recovery and growth, budget deficits will remain larger throughout the next decade than most economists (and the administration) consider acceptable, raising debt held by the public to between 67.8 percent (CBO) and 76.5 percent (OMB) of GDP by the end of the decade.

Galston goes on to discuss the implications for budget and tax policies of these sobering forecasts. But what he really reinforces is that progressive governance, as always, will ultimately depend on a revival of economic growth.

Republican opportunism and irresponsibility is hardly a new development in the political world. But I have to say, RNC chairman Michael Steele’s latest gambit–depicting the GOP as the party determined to protect Medicare from cuts or reforms or really any changes at all–absolutely takes the cake.
The new party line, unveiled by Steele in a Washington Post op-ed yesterday, and now emblazoned on the RNC site as a “Seniors’ Health Care Bill of Rights,” represents one of the most incredible flip-flops in living memory.
The antipathy of the GOP and the conservative movement towards Medicare goes back, of course, to the beginnings of the program, and even to its pre-history. Ronald Reagan, after all, made his political debut attacking proposals to create Medicare as “socialized medicine” back in 1961. Barry Goldwater, of course, opposed Medicare, but so too did future Republican presidential nominees George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole.
Though Medicare quickly became part of the national landscape and something of a sacred cow, Republicans in power could never resist the opportunity to go after it. That happened in 1981 after Ronald Reagan’s election, and even more famously in 1995, with the advent of the so-called Republican Revolution led by Newt Gingrich. Efforts to pare back Medicare spending arguably contributed more than any other factor to the failure and eventual repudiation of said Revolution.
With that experience in relatively fresh memory, it came to pass in George W. Bush’s presidency that Karl Rove decided on a bold move to win over senior voters with an actual expansion of Medicare via a prescription drug benefit. The initiative was clumsily handled and not terribly popular initially. But more importantly, the Medicare expansion almost immediately became exhibit number one in the conservative claim that Republicans had abandoned their principles under Bush, and were subsequently defeated in 2006 and then in 2008 because of (no, not Iraq or Katrina or the recession) “runwaway spending.” Indeed, one of the few things (other than his Iraq policies) conservatives activists liked about 2008 Republican nominee John McCain is that he opposed the Rx drug bill.
After the 2008 elections, the we-lost-because-we-spent-too-much self-diagnosis of Republicans became holy writ. And in early policy blueprints for Republican “recovery,” Medicare was once again in the bullseye, typically through proposals to “voucherize” the program, which would largely eliminate its risk-spreading function and in all likelihood reduce the money available for health insurance for most seniors. Suffice it to say that such an approach is vastly more of a change to Medicare than anything Democrats have proposed this year or in the past.
To be clear, there’s no particular reason conservatives should like Medicare in anything like its current form. It is, after all, a single-payer program similar to the wicked socialist schemes employed in godless foreign countries like Canada. And it’s the most natural thing in the world for conservatives to attack Medicare in the course of attacking Democratic proposals for universal health care. As Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), chairman of the conservative House Republican Study Committee, said in an op-ed just last month:

While the stated goal remains noble, as a physician, I can attest that nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government’s intrusion into medicine through Medicare.

I haven’t seen Price’s reaction to Steele’s ukase making maximum defense of Medicare the GOP’s badge of honor, but you have to figure he’s not real pleased about it.
So who really speaks for the GOP on Medicare? It’s hard to say right now, but I’m inclined to believe forty-plus years of conservative hostility to Medicare a bit more than Steele’s pandering stunt.

The week’s political news includes indications that Rudy Giuliani is strongly considering a run for the governorship of NY next year. It’s an interesting prospect. Despite the many troubles of Gov. David Paterson, and of the Democratic Party in the legislature, NY remains a strongly Democratic state.
Rudy can presumably have the GOP nomination for the asking, but Empire State Republicans ought to give a bit of thought to his remarkably inept presidential campaign last year. Stealing a page from the unsuccessful Al Gore campaign of 1988, Rudy became the latest presidential candidate to try a back-loaded nomination strategy that conceded Iowa and wound up focusing on Florida. It predictably failed, as did his clumsy efforts to pander to cultural conservatives who would never, ever trust him.
You’d have to guess the pre-2008 Giuliani is the guy who will be running for governor if he decides to take the plunge. But some of the things he said on the presidential campaign trail will definitely come back to haunt him.

Alan I. Abramowitz’s “The Myth of the Independent Voter Revisited” in Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball makes a strong case for minimizing the importance of Independents in formulating electoral strategy.

Independents are hot. If you’ve been reading the opinion columns in the newspaper or watching the talking heads on television, you probably know that political independents are the largest and fastest growing segment of the American electorate. You also know that independents don’t care about party labels, vote for the person instead of the party, and hew toward the center rather than the poles of the ideological spectrum. And you know that appealing to this growing bloc of independent voters is the major goal of modern political campaigns.
Unfortunately, almost everything that you’ve read or heard about independent voters recently is wrong.

The reason, Abramowitz says:

True independents actually make up a small segment of the American public and an even smaller segment of the electorate; the large majority of those who call themselves independents actually have a party preference…

Abramowitz cites the evidence from the 2008 American National Election Study, and pinpoints the reason for the mistaken belief in the power of Independents as an electoral demographic :

…The 2008 NES appears to show that independents make up the largest segment of the American electorate. About 40 percent of respondents identified themselves as independents, which was considerably more than the 34 percent who identified with the Democratic Party or the 26 percent who identified with the Republican Party. However, when these independent identifiers were asked a follow-up question, nearly three-fourths of them indicated that they usually felt closer to one of the two major parties. Only 11 percent of the respondents were “pure independents” with no party preference. And because these pure independents turned out at a much lower rate than either regular or independent partisans, that number shrank down to 7 percent among those who actually voted.

The study showed that party preferences of many self-described Independents was strongly reflected in their votes, and “these independent partisans think and act almost exactly like regular partisans”:

Not only did the large majority of independent identifiers readily acknowledge having a party preference, but the evidence…shows that independent partisans behaved almost identically to regular partisans when it came to choosing candidates for President, House of Representatives, and Senate: independent Democrats voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates and independent Republicans voted overwhelmingly for Republican candidates.

And the pattern holds for opinions on issues — particularly on health care:

Independent Democrats were generally quite liberal while independent Republicans were generally quite conservative. For example, 76 percent of independent Democrats supported a government-sponsored universal health insurance plan as did 74 percent of regular Democrats. On the other hand, 60 percent of independent Republicans opposed such a plan as did 70 percent of regular Republicans.

And interestingly,

On social issues, independent Democrats were sometimes even more liberal than regular Democrat. For example, 59 percent of independent Democrats supported same-sex marriage compared with 48 percent of regular Democrats, and 63 percent of independent Democrats took the most pro-choice position on the issue of abortion compared with 53 percent of regular Democrats.

The pattern persists for presidential approval polls, notes Abramowitz, who concludes:

…It therefore makes no sense to view independents as a homogenous bloc of floating voters. Independents are sharply divided along party lines just like the rest of the American electorate….The major goal of modern political campaigns is not appealing to a mythical bloc of independent voters, but unifying and mobilizing partisans.

Abramowitz presents a couple of tables that lay out the data nicely, with categories like “weak Democrats” and “pure independents.” The implications of Abramowitz’s analysis for allocating campaign resources should be considerable and his article is a keeper for those interested in electoral campaign strategy.

When I was in college, my friends and I were obsessed with a piece of science fiction. Epic 2014 is an eight minute video describing the fall of the Fourth Estate. The story begins with fact — the invention of the Internet, the introduction of Amazon.com, the rise of Google. Then, as the narrative thread moves into the future, the voice lays out a plausible vision of history where Google and Microsoft become the dominant forces in media. In 2014, after losing a major court case, The New York Times gives up, goes offline, and becomes “a print-only newsletter for the elite and the elderly.”
We’re still five years away from that prediction, but according to Paul Farhi — a writer for The Washington Post — there is already a growing movement for newspapers to retreat from the Web. For Farhi, writing for the American Journalism Review, that decision seems to make a kind of sense. He says:

A massive migration back to print would restore some balance to the industry’s crippled supply and demand equation. If there were truly no other place on the Web for readers to get the valuable information that daily newspapers provide exclusively each day – local news and photos, enterprise reporting, columnists, ads from local businesses, etc. – advertising dollars would have to follow.

This line of thinking both confuses newspapers with journalism and assumes that all news outlets share the same interests.
Newspapers — built around business models that did not anticipate the economics of the Internet — struggle to make money online. But it’s only half-true that, as Farhi writes, “online news sites aren’t exactly cash cows.” Sites like TMZ and Talking Points Memo have found ways to make money and cover breaking news (albeit in radically different ways). All the talk of Huffington Post as nothing more than an aggregator ignores the fact that the site employs a stable of reporters who break important stories regularly.
In the world of EPIC 2014 — which so fascinated me as an undergrad — the Fourth Estate exists only as an afterthought. The business of news and commentary is directed by individuals and organizations outside of traditional media and stitched together for publication by the algorithms of technology companies. While the bulk of the media delivered by today’s aggregators comes from newspapers, every day, more and more content is created by those who aren’t traditional journalists. If every newspaper in the United States were to retreat from the Web, it would only create more incentives for media entrepreneurs to find new ways to use the Internet to fill the void.
Luckily, we will never see that kind of coordinated action from the nation’s newspapers. If some go offline or put their content behind expensive paywalls, others will embrace the opportunity to attract new readers. They’ll be joined by news outlets that don’t need to make a profit (like the BBC and NPR) and those who have found new kinds of business models online. The costs of producing news online are so low that it will always make sense for those who are willing to innovate. (Sidebar: In one bullet point, Farhi notes that, “Eliminating Web offerings would save precious dollars now being spent on a product that does little more than undercut the printed paper.” He complains that newspapers have devoted resources to publishing blogs, Twitter feeds, and online video. Yet all these tools are available for use by any individual — journalist or otherwise — for a grand cost of zero. Perhaps a basic economics lesson is in order)
The hard truth that newspapers need to embrace is that their business model is already broken. Craigslist has already killed the cash cow that was the classified ad. An entire generation of readers has come of age without a newspaper subscription. There is no going back to the time that was. The thought that there is a future for journalism without the Internet is a dangerous fantasy.

Michael Tomasky has a Guardian U.K. article, “Change is Tough. So liberals can’t just leave it to Obama,” which brings some welcome wisdom to the Democratic expectations game. Actually Tomasky’s subtitle, “For euphoria to give way to disillusionment is premature. Instead, supporters should battle for his healthcare bill,” provides a better indication of his theme, unwound in this excerpt:

…The mood is somewhat grim these days among American liberals. Some feel President Obama has already sold them out. Others are angrier at conservatives and their deliberate lies about aspects of healthcare reform. But even many in this latter cohort think the White House hasn’t been pushing back against the lies hard enough. Either way, expectations are diminished – nerves are fraying, temples are greying.
What a change from just six to nine months ago. During that period, from the wake of Barack Obama’s victory through the first 100 days, liberal optimism was higher than it’s been in this country for 40 years….I counselled that liberals should not delude themselves into over-interpreting the election results. They represented, I thought, a rejection of conservatism (for now), but not an embrace of liberalism. That would come only over time, and only if Obama and the congressional Democrats showed better results for people than Republicans had across a range of fronts. But the more common feeling was euphoria. So now, disillusionment has set in.
If Obama serves two terms, we are a mere 8% of the way into his tenure. That strikes me as a little early for people to be throwing in the towel. So the interesting question of the near future will be: can the Obama movement go from the euphoric phase, in which everything seemed possible, into a more realist phase in which people come to terms with the very difficult and far less exhilarating tasks associated with governing, and the often dissatisfying victories that result from the legislative process?

Tomasky goes on to note a stark contrast between liberals’ “deeply romantic view of political movements” to the “mundane and inglorious work” that was needed to actually pass landmark progressive legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — nine years after Rosa Parks and MLK launched the Civil Rights Movement. Now, Tomasky explains, comes the really hard part:

So now, liberals have to fight hard for something they’re not terribly excited about. A health bill will likely have a very weak public option or it won’t have one at all. But liberals will have to battle for that bill as if it’s life and death (which in fact it will be for thousands of Americans), because its defeat would constitute a historic victory for the birthers and the gun-toters and the Hitler analogists.

I’m hoping Tomasky is wrong that a weak public option is likely the best we can do. But I’m certain he is right that Democrats across the spectrum will have to fight for the Democratic health reform bill, regardless of the public option provision. To sit it out would make a mockery of even the concept of progressive unity, green-light the wing-nuts and encourage all-out GOP obstructionism on every progressive legislative proposal going forward.
Tomasky concludes with a sobering call to the long haul:

This is what movements do – they do the hard, slow work of winning political battles and changing public opinion over time. It isn’t fun. It isn’t something Will.i.am is going to make a clever and moving video about, and it offers precious few moments for YouTube. It takes years, which is a bummer, in a political culture that measures success and failure by the hour. The end of euphoria should lead not to disillusionment, but to seriousness of purpose.

As Tomasky reminds us, the greatest achievements of the Democratic Party have always been measured over years, not months. We should fight like hell for the best bill we can pass this year, and after the decisive vote, begin organizing for stronger reforms without missing a beat.

I nearly didn’t bother to read Jonathan Martin’s Politico article today about Rep. Allen Boyd’s reflections on the health care reform protesters he’s encountered at town hall meetings in his district during the August recess. Entitled “A Blue Dog’s Lament,” and subtitled “‘People Are Scared,'” it looked like yet another maddening snail’s-eye-view piece suggesting that the protesters represent John Q. Public and portend the righteous doom of health care reform. I also figured Boyd might well be one of those Democrats opposed to health care reform for less than principled reasons, who’s using the protests as an excuse to do what he’s decided to do anyway.
But the piece is actually worth reading. Martin–and for that matter, Boyd–do seem to understand that the protesters represent a minority of voters, even in Boyd’s conservative Florida district, who probably voted against Barack Obama last year and are simply and logically extending their opposition to his agenda into the opportunity to make some noise about it. And it’s interesting that the protesters seem as upset about TARP as they are about their perceptions of health care reform.
As for Boyd, he’s making it clear at these meetings that he’s going to vote against the House version of health reform. But he appears open to what might well come out of a House-Senate conference committee, and is going out of his way to correct misperceptions of the various bills, and also to remind protesters that many of them already depend on government for health insurance.
The irony that comes through in this account is that many of the protesters are being manipulated by reform opponents even as they express fear of manipulation by Big Government:

“They want to take over our life,” insisted Elaine Thompson just minutes before she shoved a stack of signed pink slips and a copy of the Constitution in Boyd’s hands.
Wearing a shirt that read “Concerned American Patriots” on the front and “Wake Up America” on the back, Thompson, of Marianna, said the White House was being run using “Chicago terrorism.”
“Saul Salinsky is their mentor,” she replied when asked to explain what she meant, misstating the name of leftist community organizer Saul Alinsky, who is often cited by talk radio host Rush Limbaugh. “They are controlling what’s happening in this country.”
After his summer recess, Allen Boyd may disagree.