Alex Koppleman of Salon.com‘s ‘War Room’ flags an interesting YouTube video (10 mins) showing how Al Franken adroitly handled a group of tea party constituents. Franken respectfully considers their concerns and calmly explains why the Democratic health care reform package is economically-feasible, without getting too wonky. It’s a good training clip for dealing with concerned constituents. What is interesting here is that initially-skeptical constituents appear to be somewhat reassured by Franken’s command of the details.
Another audio-visual resource for messaging on health care is the new film, “Money-Driven Medicine,” which aired on Bill Moyers Journal a week ago. The film is based on Maggie Mahar’s book, “Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much.” Alternet’s report on the book and film features an interview and transcript of a segment.
Month: September 2009
As regular readers have probably noticed, I’m not as freaked out as most Democrats over the President’s approval ratings–generally, or on specific issues like health care. A lot of what’s happened is simply that people are (as Alan Abramowitz pointed out in July) beginning to return to the perceptions of Obama and of Ds and Rs that they had last election day. The process has probably been speeded up by the anxiety surrounding the economy and big policy debates, not to mention the opposition party’s decision to adopt a Total War stance against Obama quite early in his term.
But there’s one factor about Obama’s popularity that was troubling even on the last election day, and is perhaps even more troubling looking forward to 2010: his low standing among seniors. As Tom Schaller explains at fivethirtyeight.com today, drawing on analysis from the Cook Report’s David Wasserman, older voters tend to turn out at much higher relative rates in midterm elections as opposed to presidential elections. For example, voters over 45 comprised 54 percent of the electorate in 2004, but 63 percent of the electorate in 2006. Since Obama’s vote was more or less inversely related to voter age (at least among white voters), a replay of 2008’s results in a midterm could, if normal turnout patterns persist, be a losing proposition for Democrats.
It’s sometimes forgotten that Democrats were actually winning seniors as recently as 2000, and it’s one of the few voter categories where Obama fell noticeably below John Kerry’s percentages from 2004. So obviously, Democratic success in 2010 will depend on either better performances among seniors than in 2008, or better turnout–or even higher Democratic percentages–elsewhere. Another X factor, of course, is that Obama’s popularity isn’t the only factor here: individual candidates from both parties will be competing in actual contests, and disapproval of Obama’s job performance will not automatically translate into votes for every Republican, particularly the type of Republican who spends most of his or her time howling at the moon. And with respect to the emotion being displayed by conservative base voters–old or young–against health care reform of late, it’s worth remembering that you only get to vote once, and “intensity” only matters as it affects turnout, or if it is communicable to others.
Still, Democrats need a 2010 strategy that takes it for granted that disproportionate white senior turnout could be a big problem. Stronger-than-usual turnout among young and minority voters is obviously one way to deal with it, and that will take some serious work.
Given the continuing back-and-forth discussions of how much political risk Democrats are willing to take to enact health care reform, I thought it might be worth a closer look at that hit list the National Republican Congressional Committee put out in August, of 70 House districts they are allegedly targeting in 2010.
Whatever you think of the list, which is certainly ambitious, it does provide some sense of the Democratic Members of the House that have some reason to be politically sensitive to cross-partisan opinion on key votes.
Of the 70 districts in question, 49 went for John McCain in 2008, and 45 are represented by Members from the two Democratic “wave” elections of 2006 and 2008. These are all extraordinarily obvious targets for a midterm election campaign.
In terms of ideological affinity, 25 of the 70 targeted Democrats are members of the Blue Dog Coalition (nearly half the Caucus’ total membership); 30 are members of the moderate-ish New Democrat Coalition; and just three are members of the Progressive Caucus. Since twelve people on the hit list are members of both the Blue Dogs and the NDC, that means 43 of the 70 targeted Dems are self-identified in the House as moderate-to-conservative.
It’s true that many prominent Blue Dogs can’t much plead political peril in taking positions at odds with the congressional Democratic leadership or the White House. But as a group, they’re a lot more vulnerable than their more liberal peers. That’s why it’s helpful to keep reminding them that a failed Obama administration is not going to help any Democrat politically.
As we get down to the lick-log on health care reform, a lot rides on how reform supporters frame the debate. There’s a lot of support among progressives for going after private health insurers in a big way, and for pointing to Medicare to show the relative competence and efficiency of government.
In a post at The New Republic, TDS Co-Editor William Galston agrees the first tactic might work, but warns against the second. Mistrust of government, which naturally increased during the incompetent-government Bush years, has not much revived, which is a real problem for the health reform agenda:
Mistrust of concentrated power is part of America’s cultural DNA. Most Americans regard government as at best a disagreeable necessity. Even this March, at the low point of the recession and confidence in the future, and at a time when a majority of Americans favored more government control of the economy to stave off disaster, only 40 percent opted for a bigger government providing more services, versus 48 percent who preferred a smaller government providing fewer services. In this context, health reform must be spoken of by its defenders not as a positive good, but rather as medicine needed to arrest a disease—namely, the erosion of wages and the employer-based insurance system—that will eventually damage even the healthy parts of the body.
Skepticism of government, says Galston, is an even bigger problem because big majorities of Americans are actually pretty happy with their current health insurance. Adding it all up:
Today, fully 51 percent are more worried about the health reform bill they expect Congress to pass than by the possibility that reform will be delayed beyond this year. On the other hand, only 6 percent believe that the ills currently afflicting the health care system as a whole will get better with no government action, versus 54 percent who say it will get worse.
That’s a prettty big obstacle to the idea that reform needs to happen this year. And that needs to be taken into account when the administration and congressional Democrats plot their strategy for the autumn. Those unhappy with the current health care system should be mobilized; those relatively happy with it should understand how ittle reform effects them now, and how much it benefits them in the future. And the federal government should not be lionized as the indispensable health care provider–just as the indispensable catalyst for making sure the system works for everyone.
Two of the leading strategists of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, Mike Lux and Robert Creamer have posts expressing optimism for the enactment of health care reform. At Open Left, Mike Lux discusses and dismisses rumours that President Obama will cave to his right flank in his September 9 speech, and then Lux says:
I have always believed, and continue to, that at the end of the day, the House will pass a fairly strong bill with a good public option, and the Senate will pass a mushed-up compromise with less coverage and a trigger or co-op or some other unworkable thing. After that, the final question will be determined by who blinks in conference committee and takes a fig leaf compromise, and who stays resolute until the end. One side will walk away with some phony rhetorical nod that will allow them to go to the media and say they forced a compromise, and one side will win the policy fight. I still believe it could be the good guys.
I’m guessing Obama understands the dynamic…I think he will give a strong speech about the need to go forward on health care, while continuing to keep his options and the negotiations process moving ahead. I believe this not because I have blind faith and trust in the President, but because I think it’s the only path open to him that actually makes political sense right now.
Robert Creamer argues at HuffPo that “…The odds are very good that President Obama will succeed in passing landmark health insurance reform legislation this fall – with a robust public health insurance option. The reason is simple: it’s the high political ground.”
Creamer cites four major reasons why Obama and the Dems can claim the high ground, including — Hallelujah somebody finally said it plain — the fact that most Americans “can’t stand the health insurance industry,” and he provides some convincing statistics to back it up (e.g. – CEO’s of the 10 largest insurers had average compensation of $4,100 per hour and Cigna’s CEO retiring with a $73 mill golden parachute this fall). Creamer is also confident that Obama will bring his ‘A’ Game on September 9th, which we have seen is pretty impressive, and Dem centrists will bend, when confronted with the grim reality of being responsible for obstructing reform and owning the consequences. Finally, Creamer believes that the progressive base is energized in a big way:
…Hundreds of thousands of Progressives have been mobilized to counter the Right. They swamped the Right at town meetings at the end of August and are now conducting a week of 2000 “Let’s Get It Done” events in the lead-up to Congress’ return…There is no longer any lack of progressive intensity. The right wing assault awakened progressive passion that has spread like the Los Angeles wildfires…As Members of Congress reconvene on the battleground for this fall’s decisive engagement over health insurance reform, they will look up the political ridge and see that the cavalry has arrived.
Creamer’s and Lux’s optimistic prognosis is a welcome antidote to the toxic speculations of chicken-little pundits of the left and fear-mongers of the right. A proverb favored by MLK comes to mind: “Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. There was no one there.”
We’ve posted before on the phenomenon of peaceful town hall meetings on health care reform, where calm, intelligent and informative dialogue takes place being largely ignored by traditional media, while the few meetings dominated by screaming wingnuts get all the coverage (See here and here). E. J. Dionne, Jr. has a column today, which sheds fresh light on the problem, noting:
…What if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?
There is an overwhelming case that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television’s point of view “boring”) encounters between elected representatives and their constituents.
It’s also clear that the anger that got so much attention largely reflects a fringe right-wing view opposed to all sorts of government programs most Americans support. Much as the far left of the antiwar movement commanded wide coverage during the Vietnam years, so now are extremists on the right hogging the media stage — with the media’s complicity.
In some cases the media distortion is deliberate. In others it’s more about their gullibility, as Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH) suggests, quoted by Dionne:
I think the media coverage has done a disservice by falling for a trick that you’d think experienced media hands wouldn’t fall for: of allowing loud voices to distort the debate
Dionne adds,
The most disturbing account came from Rep. David Price of North Carolina, who spoke with a stringer for one of the television networks at a large town-hall meeting he held in Durham. ..The stringer said he was one of 10 people around the country assigned to watch such encounters. Price said he was told flatly: “Your meeting doesn’t get covered unless it blows up.” As it happens, the Durham audience was broadly sympathetic to reform efforts. No “news” there.
As Dionne concludes, “…The only citizens who commanded widespread media coverage last month were the right-wingers. And I bet you thought the media were “liberal.”
Whatever else happens in the “endgame” of health care reform in Congress (and a lot obviously depends on the President”s big speech next week), the drama over “the public option” within the Democratic Party is going to be a factor. You can argue all day long, as many, many progressives already have, that this shouldn’t be the make-or-break issue for anybody, but the fact remains that it is.
For many Democratic “centrists,” the public option is the symbol of a “government takeover” of health care that plays into conservative attack lines, and a potential threat to the survival of private health insurance. And for many self-conscious Democratic progressives, the public option represents a huge compromise of what they actually consider necessary, a single-payer system.
But this isn’t entirely about substance, either. The more the public option has received attention from both its friends and its enemies, the more its fate in health care reform has become a crucial test of power within the Democratic Party, particularly for progressives who have for years been livid at what they consider the disproportionate influence of “Republican Lite” Blue Dogs.
As Matt Yglesias (quoting a Chris Bowers post) succinctly summed it up today:
[W]hile the movement on behalf of the public option certainly wants a public option and believes the public option is important, the larger goal is to “to try and make the federal government more responsive to progressives in the long-term” by engaging in a form of inside-outside organizing and legislative brinksmanship that’s aimed at enhancing the level of clout small-p progressives in general and the big-p Progressive Caucus in particular enjoy on Capitol Hill.
That requires, arguably, some tactical extremism. If you become known as the guys who are always willing to be reasonable and fold while the Blue Dogs are the guys who are happy to let the world burn unless someone kisses your ring, then in the short-term your reasonableness will let some things get done but over the long-term you’ll get squeezed out. And it also requires you to pick winnable fights, which may mean blowing the specific stakes in the fight a bit out of proportion in the service of the larger goal.
The big question, of course, is whether a my-way-or-the-highway position on the public option is a “winnable fight” in terms of enacting legislation in Congress. And in a direct response to Yglesias’ post, Ezra Klein warns progressives against playing chicken with the Blue Dogs on this subject:
This seems a bit like a firefighter attempting to out-arson an arsonist. The reason the Blue Dogs have a reputation for being happy to let the world burn is that they really, really, really are willing to let the world burn, let health care fail, let cap-and-trade die, let Iraq grind on. The reason liberals have a reputation for not wanting to let the world burn is that all the anti-burn initiatives under discussion are, in fact, items from their agenda. They really, really, really don’t want the world to burn. It’s possible they’ll be able to do it once. But what happens then? The Blue Dogs, now distancing themselves from a party that seems to be plummeting in the polls, will happily abandon cap-and-trade, because that’s their preferred position anyway. Will the liberals? What if we need another stimulus? The Blue Dogs don’t want to support that bill. Attracting them will require all manner of concessions, if it’s possible at all. Will the liberals kill that, too?
Klein goes on to address the frustration of party progressives about the unfairness of this disequalibrium of power within the party, which limits the ability to make “vulnerable Democrats [vote] for initiatives their voters don’t obviously support in districts Barack Obama didn’t win at a time when the president is no longer popular.”
Can you beat the Blue Dogs at their own game of final-stage obstruction? The reason they’ve chosen that game, after all, is because their incentives are well aligned to win it. Liberals need another game. Maybe it’s primary challenges. That strategy has certainly worked against Arlen Specter, Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Grassley. Liberal groups certainly have the money to mount five or six high-profile challenges a season. Maybe it’s procedural changes meant to weaken the power of centrists. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s all of these things. But it’s hard to imagine that liberals will ever beat the Blue Dogs at their own game. The likelier outcome is that everybody loses.
I’d put it in a slightly different way: if, say, the Progressive Caucus in the House wants a final, definitive test of strength against the Blue Dogs, it might make sense to choose one in which the failure to act is entirely acceptable according to their own principles and priorities. At the same time, Blue Dogs need to be frequently reminded that they will be the very first Democrats to suffer electoral disaster if the President’s legislative agenda comes to grief.
This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it appeared on August 31.
It’s becoming more obvious each day that the conservative assault on Barack Obama’s legislative agenda, including his incrementalist efforts towards universal health coverage, isn’t much about the details. It is, instead, a counter-revolutionary campaign to revive 1980s-era middle-class resentments of particular beneficiaries of government social programs. Beneath the hysterical talk about Obama’s “socialism” or the “Democrat Socialist Party,” conservatives are actually revolting against the ancient targets of the New Deal and Great Society, and indeed, against the very idea that “interference” with the distributional implications of free markets is ever morally legitimate.
Consider a long, classic column published at National Review last week by the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, entitled “Obama and Redistributive Change.” It’s an angry screed against the egalitarian underpinnings of progressive politics, past, present and future. It goes over-the-top in suggesting that Obama is determined to wipe out absolutely every distinction in wealth and status among Americans. But the self-righteous fury against any “redistributive” activity by government seems perfectly genuine, representing as it does a rejection of virtually every way of ordering society other than laissez-faire capitalism:
When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.
Hanson is clearly looking beyond our current political debates at much of the history of civilization, and it infuriates him. But if Obama’s health care reform efforts represent a drive to “enforce equality of results,” what existing government program can’t be described the same way?
Social Security is redistributive. Medicare is redistributive. Public education is redistributive. Public investments in highways, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure are most definitely redistributive. The land reforms that accompanied the rise of every society, dating back to feudalism, are inherently and overtly redistributive. Even defense spending is redistributive, insofar as the benefits of national security are rarely captured by current taxpayers.
Beyond government and politics, it’s not only “socialists” who have embraced “redistributive” thinking. The Hebrew lawgivers and prophets; Jesus Christ; Mohammad–all were blatant redistributionists. All denied that wealth or status was invariably the product of productivity and virtue, and rejected the idea that redistribution was theft.
If Hanson and the many conservatives who so often sound like him want to openly take the posture that much of American–not to mention, world–history is a long, disastrous saga of tyranny in the pursuit of “enforced equality,” they are free to do so. But they should at least acknowledge that the rage against Barack Obama is really just displaced rage at democracy; at the mild forms of collective social action embraced by most Americans during the last century; at the longstanding policy positions of both major political parties; and at many of the very people they are calling upon to kill Obama’s agenda–including Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries, people with government-protected mortgages, farm-price-support recipients, military veterans, and public employees tout court. At an absolute minimum, Hanson should rush to publish a column savaging Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele for trying to position the GOP as the Party of Medicare this last week.
The latest right-wing craziness to erupt onto the political scene is truly revealing: hysteria over a planned presidential speech to school children encouraging them to stay in school, work hard, and accept responsibility. The speech, slated for next week, sounds about as anodyne–and if anything, conservative–as any speech Barack Obama has ever given. Participation by schools is voluntary. The President is doing what presidents do when addressing kids: setting an example and encouraging them to be good students and good citizens.
But that’s not how it’s being interepreted in the fever swamps, of course. Led by Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck, conservatives are shrieking about some White House conspiracy to indoctrinate children and enlist them in Obama’s godless hordes of brainwashed totalitarians.
It didn’t take long at all, of course, for this looniness to get picked up by “respectable” Republicans. Here’s what the chairman of the Florida Republican Party had to say in a press release yesterday:
As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology. The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power.
Worse yet, conservative gabbers are actually encouraging parents to keep their kids out of school on September 8. Of course, we are talking about people who often denounce public education entirely as a socialist plot, but it’s still a new low, and a rather ironic way to deal with manufactured allegations that the president is trying to politicize children.
As President Obama prepares to address to a joint session of Congress on health care reform a week from today, a couple of veteran bloggers see cause for optimism. Writing in Mother Jones, Kevin Drum reasons it out thusly in his post, “Optimistic About Health Care“:
…Republicans have been given every chance and have obviously decided to obstruct rather then work on a bipartisan compromise. So the Blue Dogs and centrist Dems feel like they’re covered on that angle. What’s more, the townhalls have shown them what they’re up against: if they don’t pass a bill — if they cave in to the loons and demonstrate that their convictions were weak all along — they’re probably doomed next year. Their only hope is to pass a bill and look like winners who get things done.
When you’re up against a wall, you do what you have to do. Politically, Dems have to succeed, and at this point they’ve all had their noses rubbed in the fact that the only way to succeed is to stick together. What’s more, Barack Obama has a pretty good knack for coming in after everyone else has talked themselves out and cutting through the haze to remind people of what’s fundamentally at stake. If he can do that again, and if he has the entire Democratic caucus supporting him, they can win this battle.
Nearly every Democrat now has a stake in seeing healthcare reform pass. The devil, of course, is in the word “nearly,” but at this point even Ben Nelson probably doesn’t want to be the guy to sink a deal if he’s literally the 60th vote to get something done. It’s usually possible to pass a bill when everyone’s incentives are aligned, and right now they’re about as aligned as they can be. That’s why, on most days, I remain optimistic.
And if the Dems have to skirt the cloture route, the reconciliation process is unlikely to draw prolonged criticism, according to Jonathan Singer’s MyDD post, “GOP for Reconciliation Before it Was Against It.” Singer nails the Republicans for their hypocricy in whining about Democrats using reconciliation, noting that they, lead by Sen Gregg no less, used it to try and open the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling and to pass Bush’s massive tax cuts. Then Singer adds:
This is one of those fake controversies by the Beltway, of the Beltway and for the Beltway… The American people simply do not care as much about these process debates as do those in the establishment media. If healthcare reform gets passed, voters aren’t going to harp on exactly how many votes it took — a 60-vote supermajority or a 51-vote regular majority — they are going to focus on what the new legislation means to them and to their country.
Singer is exactly right. It’s hard to imagine many voters saying “Those dirty Democrats passed reform with a majority vote. That’s outrageous.” The cautious optimism of Singer and Drum seems warranted — especially if the President can cut through the fear and gloom with a bold message based on hope and reason.
