As Washington gets buried by consecutive major snow storms, Republicans are reviving one of their oldest and dumbest tricks: using snow to mock the idea of global warming. Just before the first storm hit, the Virginia Republican Party ran a web ad attacking Democratic Reps. Rick Boucher and Tom Periello for supporting climate change legislation, and then said:

Call Boucher and Perriello and tell them how much global warming you get this weekend. Maybe they’ll come help you shovel.

In the same ludicrous spirit, the daughter, son-and-law and grandchildren of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oil) built an igloo on the National Mall and called it “Al Gore’s new home.”
Yuck yuck.
The problem is that more severe winter weather tends to confirm rather than contradict climate change theory. Warmer overall temperatures produce moisture, which in winter tends to produce snow. Climate scientists have long predicted more turbulent winter weather as a result of climate change. And by the way, last month was the world’s warmest January on record.
This won’t keep conservatives from taking cheap shots at anyone who wants to deal with climate change, but it’s worth knowing that this particular attack line is particularly cynical and wrong-minded.

President Obama has now thrown down the gauntlet to Republicans to demonstrate that their alleged willingness to work with him on big national challenges is not just a pose.
On one, very high-profile track, Obama has invited congressional Republicans to participate in a public forum on health care reform. After some talk among GOPers of insisting on preconditions like abandonment of the current House and Senate bills, and of any intention of using reconciliation to enact health reform measures in the Senate, it now looks like Republicans will show up. That’s probably in part because a new ABC-Washington Post poll shows Americans blaming the GOP much more than the president for intransigence.
Despite Democratic fears that Obama is going to screw up the highly fragile prospects for final congressional action on health care reform, all he’s publicly said in the way of concessions to the GOP is that he’s willing to take action on medical malpractice insurance reforms if Republicans are willing to get out of opposition to serious action to cover the uninsured. That’s probably not a deal Republicans will seriously consider.
Meanwhile, on another front, the White House is pushing Republicans to make a deal on jobs legislation.
This is a really tricky proposition for Republicans. They’ve spent months attacking any jobs bill as a “second stimulus” bill, which in their vocabulary is a deadly insult. And they’ve certainly boxed themselves into a proposition that any bill significantly increasing budget deficits is a no-go.
But on the other hand, the administration has made it clear that targeted tax cuts for businesses creating new jobs would be the centerpiece of a jobs bill, and it will be difficult for Republicans to reject that in the current environment. At the same time, though, GOPers have consistently argued that across-the-board, not targeted, tax cuts, is what they demand, even though across-the-board cuts benefit big corporations and/or wealthy individuals, and tend to cost a whole lot.
It’s pretty clear the White House is playing chicken with the GOP: offering bipartisan cooperation, but in a way that either exposes Republican self-contradictions and hypocrisy, or makes them finally cooperate on more-or-less his terms. This may represent a revival and intensification by Obama of his controversial “grassroots bipartisanship” strategy, just when most observers in both parties thought it was dead.
The stakes in this game of chicken are very, very big.

Chris Bowers has an OpenLeft post about the futility of seeking a dependable filibuster-proof Senate supermajority. While Dems may be only one vote away from achieving a filibuster-proof supermajority on health care reform, Bowers crunches some numbers and concludes that overall, Dems would need 72 Senators to have a reliable filibuster-proof majority. His reasoning:

A look at Senate voting habits shows that it takes only 54 Republican Senators to reach 60 votes for conservative legislation, while it takes 72 Democratic Senators to reach 60 votes for progressive legislation. While the last sentence sounds like snark, it isn’t). Democratic Senators vote with Republicans significantly more often than Republican Senators vote with Democrats, making it much easier for Republicans to pass the kind of legislation they want.
According to Progressive Punch, looking only at “crucial votes,” the average Democratic Senator has voted with the progressive position 82.4% of the time over the course of their entire career. By contrast, looking only at crucial votes, the average Republican Senator has voted with the progressive position 3.5% of the time throughout their entire career.
Voting habits like these mean that, in order to reach 60 progressive votes on crucial votes, Democrats actually need 72 Senators ((72 * 0.824) + (28 * 0.035) = 60.3 effective votes). By contrast, Republicans only need 54 Senators to break progressive filibusters of their agenda ((46 * 0.176) + (54 * 0.965) = 60.2 effective votes).

Of course, Bowers’ calculations have to do with averages, rather than specific situations, like health care reform legislation. But his point that a reliable filibuster-proof supermajority for a progressive agenda is not achievable under current rules is a good one. Further, under current rules,

The main choice is thus between:
1. Never having a progressive majority and usually being able to block anti-progressive legislation,
2. Occasionally having a progressive majority and rarely being able to block anti-progressive legislation.

Bowers concludes of the current filibuster rule that “A progressive majority in the Senate simply impossible as long as it exists” — a well-reasoned case for reducing the filibuster threshold or getting rid of it altogether.

One of the things you hear often from conservatives these days is that President Obama is stubbornly pursuing his “liberal” or “socialist” agenda despite the large and growing opposition of the American people.
Nate Silver of 538.com quite naturally wants to know if that’s really true, and he’s conducted an analysis of public opinion on twenty-five issues where the administration has taken a position, usually against a majority of congressional Republicans.
Here’s his conclusion:

Of these 25 issues, Obama’s position appears to be on the right side of public opinion on 14: the bank tax, repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, campaign finance, the credit card bill, D.C. voting rights, fair pay, financial regulation, gays in the military, hate crimes, the jobs bill, mortgage relief, PAYGO, SCHIP, and Sotomayor. It would appear to be on the wrong side of public opinion on five issues: the GM/Chrysler bailout, Guantanamo Bay, health care, the extension of the TARP program, and terrorist trials. On the other six issues, the polling is probably too ambiguous to render a clear verdict.
Republicans, on the other hand, have been overwhelmingly opposed to almost all of these measures with the exception of Ben Bernanke and Afghanistan troops, both of which poll ambiguously, and the credit card bill, which polled well.

Health care, TARP and the auto company bailout have, of course, gotten a lot more publicity than the rest of these issues. But much of politics revolves around focusing attention on things that don’t immediately get publicity. And Democrats would be well advised to continue their recent effort to focus some attention on the GOP’s own agenda, which really does tend to defy public opinion, just as it did prior to the 2006 and 2008 elections.

In his article, “GOP Wary of Pitfalls in Obama’s Health Care Summit,” AP’s Charles Babbington provides insights into the strategic implications of President Obama’s bipartisan health care summit on Feb. 25th. From the lede:

Even as Republicans publicly welcome President Barack Obama’s call for a bipartisan confab on health care, some privately worry that he might be laying a trap to portray their ideas as flimsy. If so, a shaky showing by GOP leaders could possibly embolden congressional Democrats to make a final, aggressive push to overhaul the nation’s health care system, with or without any Republican votes.

“This is a clever tactic by the president to try to put the Republicans on the defensive,” explains John Feehery, a GOP consultant and former congressional aide, who also cites “a vast ideological gulf” between Dems and the GOP on health care.
Babbington reports that GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio and GOP Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia have asked the President to rule out using budget reconciliation to enact any of the Democratic plan’s health care provisions. The white house has responded that the President will not rule it out, but is sincere about hearing Republican ideas for improving the health care bill. Further, the white house is “adamant about passing comprehensive reform similar to the bills passed by the House and the Senate.”
The President adds:

What I want to do is to look at the Republican ideas that are out there. And I want to be very specific. How do you guys want to lower costs? How do you guys intend to reform the insurance markets so people with preexisting conditions, for example, can get health care? How do you want to make sure that the 30 million people who don’t have health insurance can get it?”

Republicans are understandably nervous about the proposed health care summit, partly because of “nonpartisan estimates that the House Republican bill would cover 3 million uninsured people while the Democratic version would cover 36 million.” Republican proposals are very thin on substance and they fear, with good reason, that their policy proposals are a tough sell.
They also fear the summit format, and more particularly the President’s media skills and command of the issues, which were on widely-televised display at the House GOPs’ retreat in Baltimore last week.
Their overal strategy is to deflect public scrutiny of the substance of their policy, and try to keep the media focused on message du jour cliches about “socialism,” “government take-overs” and higher taxes. a message which will be parroted ad nauseum by Fox and other GOP media lapdogs, and one they hope to spread to the more gullible segments of the MSM. They are very good at media manipulation and, if the debate drags on, expect a flood of corporate-funded, anti-reform TV ads in the months ahead.
Stalling is also a key part of the GOP strategy. The public wants the health care reform legislation resolved so congress can move on to jobs. The longer the GOP can prevent Democrats from passing a good reform bill, the better for their prospects to make Democrats look weak in November. As Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) puts it in Babbington’s article, “I think the greatest risk for Democrats is passing nothing.” Others worry that the second-greatest risk is passing something too late to do much political good in 2010.
Some progressive Democrats are skeptical about the Summit idea. As McJoan explains at Daily Kos,

While Obama is stressing that he won’t start over from scratch, he’s leaving room for “scaling back the scope of the legislation in hopes of drawing more support for a health care plan.” A vain hope, if indeed he’s really thinking there’s Republican support out there to be had…The experience of the past year should be enough to convince anyone other than David Broder that Republicans would actually play a part in passing any kind of reform.
Perhaps this nothing more than an elaborate set-up to expose the depth of Republican obstructionism and, as Greg Sargent speculates lay the groundwork for passing the bill through reconciliation by providing them cover. But a more straightforward, and quicker, path would certainly be providing the leadership the Senate seems to be craving and help push the reconciliation fix through.

McJoan notes in a subsequent post,

Republican leadership has spoken. Eric Cantor has now joined Boehner and McConnell to say that they’re not budging. And yet, in an interview with HuffPo’s Sam Stein, HHS Secretary Sebelius says that “President Obama is willing to ‘add various elements’ to health care legislation suggested by Republican lawmakers during an upcoming bipartisan meeting on the topic.” Various Republican elements have already been added to the bill, in the committee processes. Those concessions even included a ridiculous abstinence-only sex ed provision from Hatch. Did Hatch then vote for the Senate bill? No. Making further concessions to the Republicans, now that GOP leadership has issued the marching order, is not going to garner any more GOP votes…That expectation, and any possible concessions to Republicans resulting from that expectation, needs to be taken right off the table.

Still, the Summit may be helpful for setting the stage for deployment of the budget reconciliation strategy for key provisions of the legislation. Feb 25 seems a little late, and McJoan’s points about the dim prospects for any form of bipartisanship make sense. But, read as a stage-setting bipartisan gesture, rather than a project designed to win any Republican votes in congress, the short (half-day) Summit has merit.
Dems are rightly focused on the November elections, which will likely be critical for the Democratic agenda. In terms of longer-range strategy, however, Connolly adds “There are a lot of things the public may not support in a given moment, but later on, when things have quieted down, they may think of highly” — always a consideration for the party of reform.

Much of the nation is looking happily at New Orleans today in celebration of the Saints’ Super Bowl victory, in no small part as a vindication of that battered city’s spirit in the long wake of Hurricane Katrina. But New Orleans experienced another amazing event over the weekend: the landslide victory of Louisiana Lt. Governor Mitch Landrieu in his third bid to become mayor of the Crescent City.
After months of speculation about who, exactly, would face Landrieu in a pre-ordained runoff (Louisiana’s “jungle primary” system requires a rare majority vote in a “first primary” of candidates from all parties to avoid a runoff), Mitch, the son of former mayor Moon Landrieu and the brother of Sen. Mary Landrieu, won with two-thirds of the vote (against five serious challengers) and nearly that high a percentage of the African-American vote in this majority African-American city. That’s remarkable, given the 2006 mayoral election in which Ray Nagin beat Landrieu in a race-saturated campaign.
Landrieu’s huge victory margin and cross-racial voting appeal represent a unity sign for New Orleans that can’t match the universal adulation of the Saints, but is nonetheless pretty impressive. He will need the good will in one of the country’s toughest jobs.

If you didn’t watch Sarah Palin’s speech at the National Tea Party Convention on Saturday night, you should definitely give it a gander. It was in some respects an unprecedented opportunity for her: a prepared text (obviously her best format), but not one scripted by a campaign (unlike her 2008 Republican Convention address), and guaranteed major media attention. As a private citizen, she was in a position to say pretty much whatever she wanted. Yes, the venue was a bit tricky, because of the widespread criticism of the Tea Party Convention itself, but not remotely as perilous as her resignation speech as governor of Alaska.
She used her own Saturday Night Live opportunity to perform four tasks: general cheerleading for the Tea Party Movement (while making it clear the immediate venue and the controversial for-profit organization that sponsored it was a small piece of that Movement); a quick tour d’horizon of global hot spots to begin addressing one of her most glaring weaknesses, a lack of foreign policy chops; an assortment of crowd-pleasing snarky attacks on the Obama adminstration, not very original but pretty well-delivered; and an extremely conventional recitation of time-honored conservative themes, punctuated by ritual invocations of the Holy Name of Ronald Reagan.
Anyone who thinks the Tea Party Movement is vastly at odds with the dominant conservative wing of the Republican Party should observe that this speech could have been delivered at a Lincoln Day dinner pretty much anywhere in the country, and would have received the same rapturous audience reaction.
Indeed, the speech is a good illustration of why Palin creates such dramatically different perceptions among different groups of politically active people. To most progressives, every other line in the speech was something of a howler, thanks to the exceptionally unselfconscious way in which she glides over self-contradictions. She genuflected at the altar of constitutional supremacy even as she mocked the president as a law professor. She called for a radical attack on budget deficits while she demanded more tax cuts, often in the same sentence. She repeatedly assaulted the of lack of transparency in Democratic policy formulation, but failed to offer any policy prescriptions other than minor (and frankly, stupid) conservative pet rocks like interstate health insurance sales or her own well-rehearsed pet rock of expanding fossil-fuel exploration. She redundantly assailed Wall Street bailouts that she endorsed when they were actually happening. And with every breath, she posed as just another citizen-activist fighting against political elites and media persecution, even though she was a professional politician lifted from obscurity by Washington-based Republican political professionals and then made a national celebrity by constant media attention.
But to conservative ideologues, Palin is simply expounding Revealed Truth, in the uncomplicated manner attributed to the sainted Reagan, and her red meat attacks on Democrats, her allusions to persecution by “elites,” and her pose of independence from the GOP establishment, are all projections of their own feelings, cultivated over many years.
And that’s why having watched Palin’s act in Nashville, I disagree more strongly than ever with those who assert she can’t possibly launch a viable campaign for the presidency in 2012. No, I don’t think she will be elected president, but yes, I think it’s possible she could win the Republican nomination.
To assess this question, you have to appreciate the psychology of movement conservatives at this particular moment of political history. Most of them have believed all along that there is a “hidden majority” of conservatives in America that can only be crystallized by the most rigorous conservative candidates and messages. After 1964, at least, conservatives have attributed every single Republican presidential defeat to a combination of RINO machinations, “moderate” policy prescriptions, and an unwillingness to exploit the opposition’s vulnerability by any means necessary–all mistakes imposed by Republican “elites” who contemptuously betray conservative interest groups and causes. These are the kind of people who started showing up at McCain rallies in the autumn of 2008 to upbraid their candidate for failing to talk about Jeremiah Wright and ACORN, and who empathized viscerally with Palin’s public frustration about the campaign’s unwillingness to “take the gloves off” (a frustration she alluded to in her Nashville speech).
I don’t think most progressives fully appreciate how vindicated conservative activists feel right now. Since the 2008 elections, their party has executed the most remarkable turn away from the political center any losing party has probably ever undertaken. RINOs have been intimidated and silenced; Republican Members of Congress have been whipped into highly disciplined submission; policy positions on issues ranging from health care to climate change to foreign policy that were highly respectable in GOP circles just a few years ago are now “socialist” anathema. And in consolidation of earlier conservative victories within the GOP, legalized abortion is now almost universally considered murder; “moral relativism,” including homosexuality, is regarded as an abomination inflicted on a suffering “real American” population by decadent elites in Sodom and Gomorrah enclaves on the coasts; and any suggestion that Islamic jihadism is less than an Cold War-level existential threat is treated as “hate-America” semi-treason.
And lo and behold, even as Republicans finally take hard-core conservative advice, their electoral prospects are blossoming. A Tea Party ally has won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat! Even liberal media villains expect a big Republican victory in 2010! With every day, more American are beginning to blame Obama and the Democrats for the economic crisis, and Republican discipline in the Senate ensures he can’t do much about it. And moreover, the most vibrant popular political movement in the country, the Tea Party Movement, is pushing Republicans (and perhaps the country) even further to the right, aiding materially not only in the savaging of Obama, but in the ongoing purge of RINOs and “moderate” squishes.
This is the context within which any assessment of Sarah Palin’s immediate political future needs to be conducted. It’s a context in which vast and largely sympathetic media coverage is devoted to an amateurish, financially-questionable convention in Nashville where people like Tom Tancredo and Roy Moore really don’t stand out. It’s a context where Sarah Palin is firmly in the mainstream.
So why wouldn’t this sudden mega-celebrity, who believes her career is the object of divine favor, and who is surrounded constantly with adulation made even more intense by any mockery of her misteps, run for president? Why not take a chance on completely eclipsing Mike Huckabee and utterly destroying Tim Pawlenty in the Right-to-Life dominated caucuses in Iowa, a state where a new Des Moines Register poll shows one-third of all voters supporting the Tea Party Movement?
That’s all a long way off, and a lot could change. 2010 may not after all represent the great gittin’ up morning that conservatives expect. At some point, conservative activists may finally get tired of Palin’s maddening lack of specificity, or tumble to the fact that Democratic horror of Palin does not actually represent fear of her general-election appeal. Maybe she really doesn’t want anything other than her current level of fame or her very manageable political work-load. And perhaps her fans will find a new, or old, champion (her Fox colleague Glenn Beck, for example, seems to think Rick Santorum is The Bomb).
But it’s far past time to stop pretending that Palin is just a joke. If her performance in Nashville was taken seriously by the kind of people who tend to dominate the Republican nominating process–and it was–then she’s got a political future that she can only enhance by continuing to pose as the personification of grassroots conservative activism, “you betchas” and all.

Democrats should be encouraged by a new survey conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research in conjunction with McKinnon Media for Common Cause, Change Congress and the Public Campaign Action Fund entitled “Strong Campaign Finance Reform: Good Policy, Good Politics.” According to the Executive Summary, The survey, which was conducted 2/2-4, 2010 found that, among 2010 LV’s:

Voters, particularly independents, strongly embrace the Fair Elections Now Act, a system that allows candidates who eschew contributions over 100 dollars to receive public matching funds for money they raise from individuals in their own state. Voters support the Fair Elections Now Act by a two-to-one margin (62 to 31 percent). Perhaps more important for congressional incumbents, support for the Fair Elections Now Act offers a significant political boost. By a net of 15 points, voters say they are more likely to support the re-election of their Member of Congress (asked by name) if he or she votes in favor of a reform package that includes the Fair Elections Now Act as well as limits on spending by foreign corporations, even after hearing messaging in opposition to the proposal.

As authors Stan Greenberg, Andrew Baumann, Jesse Contario conclude, the study indicates that the likely voters of 2010 are “staunchly opposed to anything that makes it easier for special interests to influence the outcome of elections.” This could be a winning issue for Dems looking toward the November elections. For more detail, read the Memo here and the PDF Questionairre here.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is crossposted from The New Republic.
Our political debates, our public discourse—on current economic and domestic issues—too often bear little or no relation to the actual problems the United States faces.
What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion, but the practical management of a modern economy. What we need is not labels and clichés but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.
The national interest lies in high employment and steady expansion of output, in stable prices and a strong dollar. The declaration of such an objective is easy; their attainment in an intricate and interdependent economy and world is a little more difficult. To attain them, we require not some automatic response but hard thought
–John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11, 1962
We deliberate, not about ends, but about means.
–Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III. iii
Harvey Mansfield, the well-known conservative professor of political philosophy (and—full disclosure—a longtime friend) has penned a serious and civil critique of what he takes to be the animating impulse of the Obama administration. The nub of his argument is that Obama is a “progressive” whose purported non- (or post-) partisanship is designed to put certain issues “beyond political dispute” so that arguments are about means, not ends. And once the argument is about means, the door is opened wide to “rational administration” and the rule of experts.
Take health care. Mansfield interprets Obama’s statement that “I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last” as an effort to take the issue out of politics once and for all—to decide, by side-stepping, the fundamental issue of principle. In his view, that issue is: “Should the government take over health care or should it be left to the private sphere?” The question precedes, and trumps, the myriad technical issues that transform the reform impulse into impenetrable, trust-destroying 2,000-page bills. By pursuing reform without dwelling on that question, he writes, Obama’s worldview “wants to put an end to politics. It considers its measures to be progressive, and progress to be irreversible.” The problem with progress, so understood, is that it is at war with political liberty, rightly understood. One cannot seek to place matters of principle beyond politics without wanting “an imposed political solution.” Some human beings—and by implication, political parties—love progress more than they love liberty; others reverse the hierarchy. Mansfield stands with the party of liberty, the republican principle, against the party of progress, the party of rational administration, which is “more suited to monarchy than to republics.”
Where to begin? Mansfield offers an elaborate argument in defense of the proposition that Obamacare represents a government takeover. I disagree and could offer an equally elaborate rebuttal. I could argue, as well, that Obama’s appeal to transcend the division between red and blue America reflects not a desire to end partisan argument, but rather most Americans’ disgust with the contemporary hyper-partisanship that thwarts effective governance and allows problems to fester indefinitely. These are hardly trivial matters. But because they would divert us from the questions Mansfield raises, I shall pursue them no farther.
As Mansfield knows very well, he does Democrats no favor by framing current disputes as conflicts between progress and liberty. In American politics, the defenders of liberty always occupy the rhetorical high ground. If there really were a contradiction between progress and liberty, progress would surely lose—and so would the party of progress. So there are two questions. First, is there such a contradiction? And second, if there isn’t—if what we really have is a dispute between two competing understandings of liberty—which should we prefer?
I can dispose of the first question quickly: There is no inherent contradiction between progress and liberty. Simply put, removing issues from the political agenda—placing them beyond dispute—often promotes liberty. After political contestation and a bloody war, we decided that slavery was impermissible, and we reordered our laws and institutions accordingly. A century later, we made a parallel decision about racial discrimination, with similar consequences.
I suppose we could view these questions as permanently open to debate. But we don’t, and rightly so. In that sense, there is a “progressive” component to our political history: While some questions remain open, others don’t. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Settling questions neither ends politics nor denies liberty.
Mansfield might reply that, while some disputes raise such fundamental issues, most don’t, and it disserves political liberty to place the latter beyond the bounds of ordinary political contestation. Fair enough. So what is Obama actually saying—about health care, for example?
As I understand the president’s argument, it goes something like this: Our current health care system’s costs are rising at an unsustainable rate, threatening businesses, households, and our public finances. At the same time, nearly 50 million people go without health insurance—some by choice, to be sure, but most out of necessity. The only way to deal with all these problems effectively is to get nearly everyone into the insurance system, with a mix of subsidies and mandates, while creating a more competitive market among insurance plans. He may be right about this, or he may be wrong. But the key point for my purposes is that he is putting forth his plan as the means to an ensemble of ends—universal insurance coverage in a system that reduces the rate of cost increases—that he takes to be both desirable and essential to the long-term common good.
This is a political argument, pure and simple. The president never intended to side-step politics, and he certainly did not succeed in doing so. He hoped that his articulation of the good to be achieved through his plan would outweigh the objections—such as cost and complexity—that he knew would be arrayed against it.
There are several ways to disagree with the president’s proposal. One is to say that while his ends are defensible, his means are defective. This is the line that Representative Paul Ryan takes, as the president has acknowledged. But note that this debate lies squarely within the arena of deliberation as Aristotle defines it. Nothing apolitical or liberty-denying about that–unless deliberation itself suffers from these defects, which would be an odd contention.
Another way of disagreeing with the president is to say that his ends are less important than he thinks—otherwise put, that we can better serve the public interest by giving priority to competing ends. In this vein, many Republicans contend that because even people without insurance get care when they need it, through emergency rooms or charitable organizations, it is unnecessary to use either legal coercion or public funds to universalize insurance coverage. And many fiscal hawks argue that the mechanisms the president uses to fund his proposal—tax increases and Medicare cuts—should be used instead to reduce the long-term federal budget deficit, which is projected to soar unsustainably. Again, a classic political debate, of the sort Aristotle analyzed in the Rhetoric, and the president has done nothing to short-circuit it.
Mansfield gives short shrift to both these sorts of disagreements, focusing instead on a third, which is (to repeat) whether government or the private sphere should take the lead. He describes this as a question of “principle.” Is it? No doubt this question frames a major disagreement between the two political parties, and among Americans. And, as I’ve argued repeatedly, public mistrust of government has done more than anything else to weaken the president’s health reform effort.
The deeper question concerns not public sentiment, but, rather, the basis on which government may legitimately act under the Constitution. In 1933, FDR argued that that only the powers of government could be adequate to the exigencies of the moment. If so, he said, it could not be the case that our Constitution had disabled us from meeting a grave threat to the general welfare, and potentially to constitutional government itself. He won that argument: We live today in the legacy of his victory, and (I say this at the risk of sounding “progressive”), we’re not going back.
The alternative formulation of the dispute–Mansfield’s, I think–is that the issue isn’t the relation of means and ends, but rather the right of government to act in certain ways. If government doesn’t have the right, then considerations of efficacy are irrelevant. Even if government could bring about a good result by acting ultra vires, doing so would be an invasion of liberty, which is the most fundamental good. Rather than invade liberty, we should be prepared to live with the consequences of government forbearance. (I note for the record that if Abraham Lincoln had accepted this view, we’d probably be presenting passports at the Virginia/Maryland border.)
This brings me to the second question: If the issue is liberty, what is the nature of liberty, rightly understood? And does the Obama health care plan invade liberty, so understood?
To begin, experience gives us no reason to conclude that government is the only, or always the gravest, threat to freedom; clerical institutions and concentrations of unchecked economic power have often vied for that dubious honor. The unchecked market, moreover, regularly produces social outcomes at odds with the moral conditions of a free society. Capitalism does not reliably produce, or reward, the good character a free society needs: Perceptive observers from Charles Dickens to Tom Wolfe have given us ample evidence to the contrary. And, while it may be that long-term dependence on government saps the spirit of self-reliance that liberty requires, there are other forms of dependence—economic, social, and even familial—that often damage character in much the same way.
At the heart of the conservative misunderstanding of liberty is the presumption that government and individual freedom are fundamentally at odds. At the heart of any liberal understanding of freedom is the proposition that public power can advance freedom as well as undermine it.

Read more…

If you get bored with pre-Super Bowl hype today or tomorrow, you should check out media reports from the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville. The controversial (but still sold-out) event did not get off to a very smooth start, according to the Washington Post:

The convention’s first day lacked the orchestrated staging of most modern political events. The convention host delivered a meandering welcome speech without notes, saying he misplaced them. Former congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) offered a fiery defense of Judeo-Christian faith and traditional American values, but there was no prayer or Pledge of Allegiance to open the convention — nor was there an American flag in the convention hall. ([Tea Party Nation spokesman] Skoda blamed the oversight on the hotel staff.

With earlier big names Michele Bachman and Marsha Blackburn pulling out of the event, citing congressional ethics concerns over its sponsorship by the for-profit group Tea Party Nation, delegates were instead treated to opening remarks by one of the loonier tunes on the national political scene, former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo, the apostle of twenty-first century nativism. Tancerdo fired up the crowd with a peroration lashing the American people for their ignorance in electing the “committed socialist ideologue…Barack Hussein Obama,” suggesting it wouldn’t have happened if the country had civics and literacy tests for voting. He also blasted John McCain, who is of course a Tancredo bete noir thanks to his one-time support for immigration reform legislation.
Though it’s well-known that anti-immigrant sentiment is very strong in Tea Party circles, it’s still debatable whether the convention did itself any favors by featuring Tancredo, a man whose 2008 presidential campaign disappeared without a trace, and whose political sense was perhaps best illustrated by his attack on Pope Benedict XVI for favoring good treatment of U.S. immigrants in order to boost Catholic church attendence.
The best news is that the Washington Independent‘s Dave Weigel is now on the scene in Nashville, and should have some interesting dispatches over the weekend. And then Saturday night comes the long-awaited televised speech by Sarah Palin, during a dinner where those who paid the pricey registration fee will reportedly dine on that hearty populist fare, steak and lobster.
Speaking of those fees, Tea Party Nation spokesman Mark Skoka had the best line so far in response to perpetual complaints from Tea Party activists about the for-profit nature of the event:

Convention spokesman Mark Skoda acknowledged Wednesday that [Judson] Phillips and his wife, Sherry Phillips, founders of the for-profit Tea Party Nation Inc., will “make a few bucks” on the event. But Skoda questioned why that should be anyone’s concern.
“Have we gone so far in the Obama-socialist view of the nation that ‘profit’ is a bad word — in particular, if we’re using it to advance the conservative cause?” Skoda asked.

Selah.