We’ll soon know the fate of health care reform legislation in Congress. But win or lose, the retrospective analysis of the health reform fight, and particularly the Obama administration’s overall strategy, will go on for years. That’s why I think it’s important to refute some questionable interpretations right now, before they are incorporated into the unofficial history of the debate.
Today Peter Beinart posted an article for The Daily Beast that treats the last-minute skirmishing among Democrats over health reform as the final stage in a two-decade-long battle between Clintonians and progressives, which Barack Obama brought to a conclusion by choosing to move ahead despite Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts. This decision, Beinart says, changed Democrats “forever.”
Beinart’s piece is something of a pinata: it can be whacked from any number of directions. Most obviously, he mischaracterizes the current, and actually very limited, conflict among Democrats about what Obama should have done after the Brown victory. Yes, you can find a few self-described Democratic pundits (and he names virtually all of them) who have argued that Obama should have folded his tent or (somehow) pursued a bipartisan, incremental health reform proposal in the wake of Massachusetts. But the idea that the polling pair of Doug Schoen and Mark Penn, or longtime eccentric Pat Caddell, speak for the entire “Clintonian” tendency in the party is completely absurd. More typical and certainly more relevant are TDS Co-Editor William Galston (whom Beinart treats as a major foundational thinker for what he calls the “DLC types” in the party) and Progressive Policy Institute (the DLC’s think tank during all the battles Beinart describes) president Will Marshall, who have avidly backed Obama’s decision on both philosophical and practical grounds (here and here).
If you look at the actual conflict among Democrats in Congress, “no” or possible “no” votes in the House nearly all fall into two categories: nervous Democrats from very tough districts, who do not neatly fit on one side of some intraparty ideologicial spectrum, and more importantly, the “Stupak Democrats” who are focused on abortion policy. By and large, “Stupak Democrats” aren’t “Clintonian” in any meaningful sense of the term; many are very liberal voters on economic issues, and some, in fact, profess to be upset by the absence of a public option in the Senate bill and/or the presence of an insurance premium tax which many unions don’t like. To the extent that they reflect any intra-party conflict of an enduring nature, the “Stupak Democrats” represent the losing side of a debate over abortion that pre-dated the DLC/progressive battles and has little or nothing to do with them.
At least a few actual or potential Democratic defectors on health reform do so strictly from a progressive point-of-view, on grounds that the Senate bill, even if it’s “fixed” via reconciliation, merely ratifies the tainted health care status quo.
And so long as the Clinton brand is going to be thrown around in this discussion, it’s worth noting that the single most crucial modification of Obama’s campaign proposal on health care reform was adoption of an individual mandate, which Hillary Clinton championed. The idea that Mark Penn rather than Obama’s Secretary of State speaks for Clintonism is more than dubious.
Equally implausible is Beinart’s claim that Obama’s decision to move ahead on health reform represented the vindication of the Democratic “left” as opposed to the “center.” Yes, most self-conscious Democratic progressives (like most Democratic “centrists”) are pleased that Obama is pressing ahead on health reform absent any Republican support. That’s because they consider the status quo intolerable from a moral and substantive point of view, and surrender as politically calamitous as well. But as anyone who has been paying attention should know, many, perhaps most, on the Democratic Left are unhappy with Obama for pursuing Republican support as long as he did, and sacrificing important features of health reform in the process.
And this leads me to my most fundamental objection to Beinart’s analysis: his assumption that “partisanship” and “bipartisanship”–or as it puts it elsewhere, a Rovian “base mobilization” strategy as opposed to a Dick-Morris-style “crossover” strategy–are and have always been the essential differentiators between the progressive and Clintonian factions in the party, leading to the conclusion that Obama has now, once and forever, chosen the former over the latter. For anyone seriously engaged in intraparty debates over the years, the picture painted by Beinart is a very crude cartoon that should be offensive to both sides of those debates (as crude, in fact, as his characterization of the seminal Galston-Kamarck essay “The Politics of Evasion” as urging Democrats to “move to the right”).
It should be reasonably obvious after the last year that Obama and congressional Democrats didn’t “choose” partisanship after the Scott Brown victory; they were forced into a purely partisan stance on health reform by Republican instransigence. And it should be equally obvious that Obama’s many gestures towards bipartisanship were motivated not by naivete, but by a conviction that he could best achieve “crossover appeal” in the electorate by exposing the radicalism and intransigence of the GOP. It’s not clear this strategy will work in 2010, but it might well work in 2012 and beyond, thus building a more durable Democratic majority and/or creating incentives for the GOP to correct its current crazy course. In any event, he has not for all time chosen for Democrats a permanent posture of maximum partisanship and “base mobilization,” and his position on the literally hundreds of other policy and political issues that Democrats have internally debated can’t be shoehorned into Beinart’s scheme.
Maybe the decision to go for the gold on health reform will prove to have been momentous. But it wasn’t really a hard choice given the circumstances, and it certainly didn’t resolve every strategic decision Democrats will make “forever.”

As the political world prepares for what appears to be Last Stop Week on health reform, conservatives seem astonished that the president and congressional Democrats are pushing ahead for final enactment of legislation passed by both Houses last year, intead of folding their hands and fleeing in terror. They are particularly incensed that Democrats aren’t being shamed or frightened by the prospect of–gasp!–a poisoned partisan atmosphere in Washington. Here’s how Julie Mason of the conservative Washington Examiner presents the threat:

The White House claims it’s above worrying about the politics of health care — they just want a bill passed this week.
Good thing, because politics in Washington could become a lot more ferocious and partisan, whether their plan flies or not.
“If they pull off this crazy scenario they are putting together, they are going to destroy a lot of the comity in the House,” said Brian Darling, a congressional expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “Even in the current, highly partisan atmosphere, it can get a lot worse.”

Sorry, Brian & Julie, you are wrong. It really can’t get much worse. And for that, conservatives have no one but themselves to blame, if they actually even care.
Just to cite the most obvious example, there were many moments over the last year when the White House and congressional Democrats might well have significantly changed health reform legislation in exchange for just a few Republican votes (in fact, they made unilateral concessions in the Senate again and again simply to keep the possibility open). And after the loss of the 60th Senate vote last month, had Republicans offered any suggestions other than complete repudiation of the bills already enacted by a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate, Democrats would have snapped them up instantly. But in an atmosphere where long-held Republican ideas on health reform like the individual mandate were suddenly being denounced as socialist or even fascist by the Right, no serious offers were forthcoming, unless you think such “ideas” as sweeping away state regulation of health insurers via mandatory interestate sales is “serious.”
So let’s not hear any empty threats about Republican “partisanship.” For better or worse, the GOP made a clear and collective decision last year to take partisanship to the max on every conceivable front, and they have been quite successful with that strategy in a nilhilistic sort of way. But there are no arrows left in that particular quiver.

As you may have heard, Glenn Beck has gotten himself into some serious hot water by suggesting that people (or more specificially, Christians) leave their churches or even their denominations behind if they harbor any talk about “social justice” or “economic justice,” terms he identifies as “code” for communist- and Nazi-sponsored totalitarian designs. As usually interpreted, Beck’s line sounds like a fairly common kulturkampf tactic by conservatives who are engaging in civil war against alleged “modernism” within the Roman Catholic Church, or who have been urging Protestants for years to abandon “liberal” mainline churches for various fundamentalist gatherings.
But if you listen to what Beck actually said yesterday, in another rant on the subject, he’s saying something about Christianity that’s a lot more radical than the usual back-to-the-1950s stuff about religion focusing on personal morality rather than caring for the poor. Calling “social justice” a “perversion of the Gospel,” Rev. Glenn explains it this way:

Nowhere does Jesus say, “Hey, if someone asks for your shirt, give the government a coat, and then have the government give him a pair of slacks.” You want to help out, you help out.

Now you often hear religious conservatives argue that state social welfare programs undermine the charitable instinct or the private organizations that help the poor. But Beck seems to be suggesting that any government efforts–indeed, any collective efforts–to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and so forth, are “perversions of the Gospel.” Beck’s Jesus is a strict libertarian.
Beck’s original remarks were treated by some as a thinly veiled attack on the Catholic Church, since, as the conservative religious journal First Things quickly pointed out, the very term “social justice” was invented by a nineteenth-century Jesuit theologian interpreting St. Thomas Aquinas. “Social justice” isn’t just a trendy contemporary slogan, and it certainly wasn’t pioneered by communists or Nazis: it was the central theme of the great Social Encyclicals of various Popes, most notably Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, is considered especially normative.
More basically, the idea that Christianity is opposed to state action in pursuit of the common welfare is highly alien to both Catholic and Protestant traditions. Most religious observers would contend that “social justice” as practiced by communists and Nazis is a “perversion” of Christianity, and hardly any would confuse government-sponsored health and welfare programs with totalitarianism. Even amongst the hard-core Christian Right, most spokesmen save their Nazi analogies for attacks on legalized abortion.
As it happens, Beck is a Mormon, which isn’t exactly a libertarian creed, either. But he’s really endangering his status on the American Right by claiming that Jesus would today be out there with the Tea Party folk fulminating about the “looting” of taxpayers to help the poor.

One of the fundamental reasons for the kind of strategic analysis that TDS encourages and sponsors is that it’s sometimes easy to conflate strategy and tactics, and more basically, means and ends. Indeed, I’d contend that most of the major disagreements among Democrats are attributable to this problem of arguing past each other because one side or the other is thinking in different terms about where a particular political or policy decision lies on the continuum that extends from day-to-day tactics all the way over to grand strategy. And that has certainly been true in the health care reform debate.
But we should all be able to agree on one thing: the ultimate objective in politics–particularly progressive politics–is to make changes in public policy that have a real, beneficient impact on the real-life experiences of the American people. When that opportunity presents itself on one of the major challenges facing this country, taking advantage of it trumps a lot of otherwise valid considerations.
And so, in all the back-and-forth this week about polling on health reform, and the possible consequences to the Democratic Party this November of enacting or failing to enact legislation, it is important not to forget the big picture here: the responsibility that most Democrats would accept for meeting the challenge of changing the health care system in a positive direction.
Matt Yglesias offers a good analogy to keep in mind in weighing the political risks involved in enacting health care reform this year:

[T]he measure of a political coalition isn’t how long it lasted, but what it achieved. From the tone of a lot of present-day political commentary you’d think that the big mistake Lyndon Johnson made during his tenure in the White House was that by passing the Civil Rights Act he wound up damaging the Democratic Party politically by opening the South up to the GOP. Back on planet normal, that’s the crowning achievement of his presidency.

From that perspective, there are still important short-term political factors for Democrats to keep in mind: the impact of future Republican gains on other important policy goals, and even the possibility that those gains will be so large that the next Congress or the one after that will repeal health reform legislation. Short of that, though, it’s probably a moment for Democrats to keep their eyes on the prize and let the political chips fall where they may. It’s not as though we haven’t faced and overcome political adversity before, when we didn’t necessarily have the chance to make large progress on one of the enduring policy goals of the party going back more than a half-century.

Today’s big whoop in the manic conservative drive to kill health care reform is a Washington Post op-ed by Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen urging Democrats to abandon reform and work with Republicans on “bipartisan” proposals like “purchasing insurance across state lines, malpractice reform, incrementally increasing coverage,” and so on and so forth.
Now normally I don’t like to get into the motives or personality of people making political arguments, but in this case it’s inavoidable. The only reason anyone on earth is paying any attention to the views of Caddell and Schoen on this subject is that, as they note prominently in the WaPo piece, they used to work as pollsters for Democratic presidents (Schoen for Clinton, though it was really his business partner, Mark Penn, who had the White House account, and Cadell way back in the Carter administration). But the impression they give of being good Democrats who have finally spoken out in exasperation at the folly of health care reform is completely false. Schoen has never been much of a loyal Democrat; his latest enthusiasm has been encouraging a third party. And Caddell has a history of cranky eccentricity dating back at least a few decades. As Jon Chait points out, both of them have become fixtures on Fox News recently.
They are entitled to their opinion like anyone else, but Schoen and Caddell should check their worn-out Party Cards at the door before they write a piece repeating Republican talking points on health care reform.

When we last checked in on the Texas textbook wars, the craziest advocate on the state School Board for rewriting American history was a dentist named Don McLeroy, who had become so embarassing that he faced a Republican primary challenge from a more conventional conservative. The good news is that McLeroy lost, albeit very narrowly. The bad news is that he remains on the Board for ten more months, and as James McKinley explains in the New York Times today, McLemore and the conservative bloc he leads on the Board is going for the gold in imposing its revisionist views on the school children of the Lone Star State (and many other states, given Texas’ outsized clout in the textbook market).
Check this out:

Dr. McLeroy still has 10 months to serve and he, along with rest of the religious conservatives on the board, have vowed to put their mark on the guidelines for social studies texts.
For instance, one guideline requires publishers to include a section on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”
There have also been efforts among conservatives on the board to tweak the history of the civil rights movement. One amendment states that the movement created “unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes” among minorities. Another proposed change removes any reference to race, sex or religion in talking about how different groups have contributed to the national identity.

Don’t know if the instruction on the important role of the NRA will include in-class Eddie Eagle appearances, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The revisionism does not, of course, only pertain to relatively current events:

References to Ralph Nader and Ross Perot are proposed to be removed, while Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, is to be listed as a role model for effective leadership, and the ideas in Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address are to be laid side by side with Abraham Lincoln’s speeches.
Early in the hearing on Wednesday, Mr. McLeroy and other conservatives on the board made it clear they would offer still more planks to highlight what they see as the Christian roots of the Constitution and other founding documents.
“To deny the Judeo-Christian values of our founding fathers is just a lie to our kids,” said Ken Mercer, a San Antonio Republican.
The new guidelines, when finally approved, will influence textbooks for elementary, middle school and high school. They will be written next year and will be in effect for 10 years.

It’s long been a common ploy for Christian Right advocates to insist on the “Christian roots of the Constitution” as a way to marginalize the church-state-separatist legacy of Jefferson and Madison, and limit the protection of religious liberty to Christians (and we are talking about people with a rather rigid view of what constitutes a “Christian,” with the President of the United States or pro-choice Catholics often not qualifying). The elevation of Confederate leaders into a position of moral equivalency with Lincoln also has an old and unsavory history, as anyone who grew up in the Jim Crow South (as I did) can tell you. But it’s arguably not surprising to see such travesties gain ground in a state whose current governor has been known to flirt with antebellum theories of nullification and absolute state sovereignty.

Today’s strange quasi-political news is that Tiger Woods has turned to former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer to help manage public relations for his comeback to the professional golf tour. Fleischer last made national news by becoming the spokesman for college football’s Bowl Championship Series, and earlier represented Mark Maguire and (as they were getting rid of quarterback Brett Favre) the Green Bay Packers, powerfully unpopular clients all.
Ari’s rise to become the hottest ticket in toxic waste management ranks right up there with AIG’s bonuses as a talking point for those who argue that the world is ruled is operated by a malevolent demiurge rather than a just God. But perhaps, as he showed in the White House, he does have a unique talent for combining mediocrity with mendacity, and can protect his embattled clients by boring the news media into submission by repeating lies in a manner designed to induce a trance-like stupor.

I was reading Spencer Ackerman’s scathing summary of the foreign policy/national security sections of Mitt Romney’s new book, No Apology, and had to laugh out loud at this brief aside:

Romney himself never served, and his unfamiliarity with military issues is evident in “No Apology.” He proposes adding “at least 100,000 soldiers to the army and the marines” (Marines are not soldiers)….

You don’t have to have served, but need simply to have known a Marine (and they never, by the way, become “ex-Marines”), to be aware that Marines strongly object to being lumped in with Army folk as “soldiers.” How that reference made it past the ghostwriter and various editors, in a book heavily focused on boosting Romney’s national security street cred in anticipation of another presidential run, is beyond me.
Ackerman’s broader indictment of the book is well worth a careful read. He covers Mitt’s weird tyopology of America’s enemies and “rivals;” his indifference to diplomacy, alliances and international institutions; and his shirking of any real analysis of what we should do in Afghanistan. His summation:

[A] glance through the remarkable conflation of conservative shibboleths, paranoid global fantasies and deterministic myopia in “No Apology” makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the perennial GOP candidate might have been better off saying nothing at all.

If, of course, you can’t talk about, say, health care policy without getting into deep trouble, maybe even bad prose on national security is preferable. But Mitt does need to avoid insulting Marines.

One of the oldest and hoariest debates among pollsters and political scientists is the measurement of public opinion according to likelihood to vote in a particular election. Some polls show results for “all adults,” some for “registered voters,” and some for “likely voters.” This last category is especially useful, if perilous, in projecting election results. It’s useful for the obvious reason that the views of people who don’t wind up voting are irrelevant to actual election results. It’s perilous because determining likelihood to vote is not an exact science, and moreover, can produce some serious distortions. Pollsters typically use two different methods for measuring likelihood to vote: some are subjective, mainly involving poll respondents’ own expressed interest in an election, and some are objective, including past voting behavior, and most controversial, post-survey “adjustments” of raw data to reflect the expected composition of the electorate. “Adjustments,” in fact, are one of those factors (others include question language and question order) the biases of pollsters or their clients can become pretty important, but in general, “tight” likely-voter screens have recently produced results more favorable to Republicans.
Aside from measurement factors, there are two important reasons why going into the November elections, “likely voters” are more likely to lean Republican than “registered voters.” The first is that historically, midterm elections attract an older and whiter electorate than presidential elections; given the weakness of Barack Obama among old white voters even in his 2008 victory, that’s significant. The second is that likelihood to vote measures intensity of political engagement, and right now, there’s little question Republicans are more “energized” than Democrats. So I’m certainly in full agreement that Democrats have what Jonathan Chait recently called (after examining the latest Democracy Corps/Third Way data on “drop-off” voters) a “turnout emergency” in 2010
But it’s a very different matter altogether to use public opinion surveys sifted for likelihood to vote in the next election to measure the current “mood” of the American people on this or that issue–in other words, to treat polls as a sort of plebiscite on the wishes of the electorate as a whole. You see this every day when conservatives argue that “the people” or “America” has rejected health reform because likely 2010 voters in a poll tilt heavily against some formulation of health reform legislation. Such polls may well indicate a possibility that voters in November will react poorly to the enactment of health reform, but do not present a fair representation of public opinion on the subject. No one would seriously argue that only those voting-eligible adults who get through a pollster’s LV screen are “people” or “Americans.” So no one should use LV data to construct some sort of plebiscite. LV’s will have their say in November. Let all Americans have their say when they are asked to express it.

In a period of great conflict and confusion over health reform, one of the most promising signs is the general refusal of Senate “centrist” Democrats to fish into a particularly devious Republican gambit: an effort by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) to recreate the bipartisan Gang of 14 that notoriously headed off the “nuclear option” of a permanent elimination of judicial filibusters in 2005.
According to Politico‘s Carrie Budoff Brown and Chris Frates, Graham’s been targeting former Democratic members of the Gang of 14 to suggest they stop the use of reconciliation for helath reform and force a start-over based on a smaller bill.
But so far “centrist” Democrats aren’t buying it, and in fact, are making something of a mockery of Graham’s effort to treat the use of reconciliation for an eleven-page set of “fix” amendments to bills already passed by both Houses to the 2005 GOP threat to kill judicial filibusters forever. Check out this embedded quote from Gang of 14 member Ben Nelson:

The Gang of 14 averted a plan in 2005 by Republican Senate leaders to abolish the filibuster for judicial nominees. The group, which included 10 members still serving in the Senate, agreed that nominees should be filibustered only in “extraordinary circumstances.” Otherwise, they should receive an up-or-down vote.
Nelson said the two situations are not the same.
“It is different to say judges get up-or-down votes except in extraordinary circumstances,” Nelson said. “The Gang of 14 was directed at getting up-or-down votes. This is aimed at stopping an up-or-down vote.”

Bingo.