Here’s something to tuck away in your files on both health care reform and 2012 presidential aspirant Mitt Romney, from Tim Noah at Slate (via Jon Chait). Looking at Romney’s new pre-campaign book, Noah observes:

Romney’s discussion of health reform is, from a partisan perspective, comically off-message. (How could he know what today’s GOP message would be? He probably finished writing the book months ago.) Remove a little anti-Obama boilerplate and Romney’s views become indistinguishable from the president’s. They even rely on the same MIT economist! At the Massachusetts bill’s signing ceremony, Romney relates in his book, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., quipped, “When Mitt Romney and Ted Kennedy are celebrating the same piece of legislation, it means only one thing: One of us didn’t read it.”

Noah goes on to mix up some Obama and Romney quotes on health care reform, and challenges the reader to say which is which. Can’t be done.
Back in January, I predicted that Romney’s sponsorship of health care reform in Massachusetts might turn out to be a disabling handicap in a 2012 presidential race, given the shrillnesss of conservative rhetoric about features in Obama’s proposal that are also in Romney’s–most notably, the individual mandate.
Something happened since then, of course, which has been of great value to Romney in protecting his highly vulnerable flank on health reform: Scott Brown, another supporter of RomneyCare in Massachusetts, became the maximum national GOP hero and set off to Washington to try to wreck Obama’s plans. That meant that not one, but two major Republican pols would be promoting ludicrous distinctions between RomneyCare and ObamaCare as though they were actually vast and principled.
But I can’t see this illogical brush-off as working forever. If the Mittster does crank up another presidential campaign, fresh media attention will be devoted to his record and “philosophy” on health care. And more importantly, Romney’s rivals in a presidential race won’t for a moment give him a mulligan on the issue the GOP has defined as all-important. Mitt’s “socialism” in Massachusetts will eventually re-emerge as a big, big problem for him, and arguments that it was just state-level “socialism” won’t quite cut it in a Republican Party that’s moved well to the Right since the last time he ran for president. Before it’s over, they’ll make it sound like he’s the reincarnation of Nelson Rockefeller, money and all.

This item is cross-posted from Progressive Fix.
For all the talk about the Tea Party Movement and its demands that America’s political system be turned upside down, it’s always been a bit hard to get a fix on what, exactly, these conservative activists want Washington to do.
To solve this puzzle, it’s worth taking a look at the Contract From America process — a project of the Tea Party Patriots organization, designed to create a bottoms-up, open-source agenda that activists can embrace when they gather for their next big moment in the national media sun on April 15. The 21-point agenda laid out for Tea Partiers to refine into a 10-point “Contract” is, to put it mildly, a major Blast from the Past, featuring conservative Republican chestnuts dating back decades.
There’s term limits, naturally. There are a couple of “transparency” proposals, such as publication of bill texts well before votes. But more prominent are fiscal “ideas” very long in the tooth. You got a balanced budget constitutional amendment, which ain’t happening and won’t work. You got fair tax/flat tax, the highly regressive concept flogged for many years by a few talk radio wonks, that has never been taken seriously even among congressional Republicans. You’ve got Social Security and Medicare privatization (last tried by George W. Bush in 2005) and education vouchers. You’ve got scrapping all federal regulations, preempting state and local regulations, and maybe abolishing some federal departments (an idea last promoted by congressional Republicans in 1995). You’ve got abolition of the “death tax” (i.e., the tax on very large inheritances). And you’ve got federal spending caps, which won’t actually roll back federal spending because they can’t be applied to entitlements.
My favorite on the list is a proposal that in Congress “each bill…identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does.” This illustrates the obliviousness or hostility of Tea Partiers to the long string of Supreme Court decisions, dating back to the 1930s, that give Congress broad policymaking powers under the 14th Amendment and the Spending and Commerce Clauses. More broadly, it shows the literalism of Tea Party “original intent” views of the Constitution; if wasn’t spelled out explicitly by the Founders it’s unconstitutional.
We are often told that the Tea Party Movement represents some sort of disenfranchised “radical middle” in America that rejects both major parties’ inability to get together and solve problems. As the “Contract From America” shows, that’s totally wrong. At least when it comes to policy proposals, these folks are the hard-right wing of the Republican Party, upset that Barry Goldwater’s agenda from 1964 has never been implemented.

With Republicans beating the drums incessantly for the proposition that “the American people have rejected health care reform,” it’s probably not a bad time to recall the discussion that broke out late last year over evidence that many people saying they oppose specific proposals do so because they want to take reform much farther.
Exhibit A was an Ipsos-McClatchey poll taken in November. Here was Nate Silver’s take on it:

Ipsos/McClatchy put out a health care poll two weeks ago. The topline results were nothing special: 34 percent favored “the health care reform proposals presently being discussed”, versus 46 percent opposed, and 20 percent undecided. The negative-12 net score is roughly in line with the average of other polls, although the Ipsos poll shows a higher number of undecideds than most others.
Ipsos, however, did something that no other pollster has done. They asked the people who opposed the bill why they opposed it: because they are opposed to health care reform and thought the bill went too far? Or because they support health care reform but thought the bill didn’t go far enough?
It turns out that a significant minority of about 25 percent of the people who opposed the plan — or about 12 of the overall sample — did so from the left; they thought the plan didn’t go far enough.

Well, Ipsos-McClatchey is back with another poll, and it’s shows an even stronger percentage of reform “opponents” thinking current bills don’t go far enough: more than a third of the 47% of respondents opposing “the reforms being discussed” say it’s because “they don’t go far enough.” Added to the 41% of respondents who say they support “the reforms being discussed,” that’s a pretty significant majority favoring strong government action to reform the health care system.
If that’s right, then maybe a majority of Americans technically favor a “no” vote on health care reform. But it’s not at all clear that they’ll be any happier with a perpetuation of the status quo, much less the kind of “reforms” Republicans are talking about. It looks like a significant share of the public wants something with a strong public option, or perhaps a full-blown single-payer system. It’s disengenuous to pretend these are people who have linked arms with Rush Limbaugh and congressional Republican leaders to fight against serious reform.
Bill Galston’s correct: Democrats should do what’s right on health reform regardless of the polls. But if they do, it’s worth noting that they really aren’t necessarily sailing into the wind of public opinion.

This week’s big preoccupation in the chattering classes is about White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Is he in danger of being fired? Should he be? Is he engaged in a death struggle with David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs? Is he leaking his side of the story to the press? And on and on it goes.
Without question, internecine strife in the White House is a perpetual favorite of the beltway media. But the important thing for Democrats is to avoid the mistake of feeding this dangerous beast by making administration personalities proxies in fights over ideology, strategy or tactics, or scapegoats for disappointments and frustrations.
Unfortunately, such proxy wars are in great danger of getting out of control. Some progressives, with honest and sincere objections to various policies and rhetoric of the Obama administration, have seized on Emanuel as a Rasputin figure: he’s the key player in a “centrist” Clintonian clique that’s ruining the promise of Obama’s presidency; he’s an unprincipled tactician who sells out progressive policies; he bears responsibility for recruiting “conservatives” to run for office as Democrats when he chaired the DCCC; his friends are a bunch of corporate whores. Some “centrists” return the favor by creating a distorted caricature of Emanuel as the sole heroic realist in the White House fighting a lonely battle against impractical ideologues who’d prefer Republican victory to any accommodation of public opinion on their pet issues. Republicans themselves, of course, are gleefully piling on, agreeing with every available attack on every figure in the administration, while the political gossip columnists of the media exploit the opportunity to keep the daily debate as lurid and superficial as possible.
Democrats can’t stop the gossip columnists or the Republicans, both of whom have their own distasteful ulterior motives for promoting this divisive narrative, but they can firmly and emphatically refuse to participate in this profoundly destructive game – and they better start doing so right now. Barack Obama is the president, and there’s nothing in his background or present behavior to suggest that he’s the passive tool of his own staff or disengaged from the decisions that bear his name. In this White House as in any other, there is a place for strategists and for tacticians, for visionaries and for pragmatists, for people who are protecting the presidential “brand” and for people who don’t think much beyond this November. This White House, like every other, has made, and will continue to make, mistakes—some big, some little, some whose consequences nobody is in a position to calculate. At this exceptionally complicated moment in political history, there’s rarely any blindingly obvious course of action for the administration that only a fool or a knave would fail to undertake. We all have our opinions about what’s gone right or wrong on issues ranging from the minutiae of health care policy to the broad outlines of the Democratic Party’s message, and second-guessing is inherent to human nature. But converting our necessary disagreements over substantive issues into personality-based political soap opera represents an act of foolish self-indulgence that no successful political enterprise can endure for long.
At some point—at this point—it really is time to stop pointing fingers and focus on the political tasks just ahead. Encouraging “internecine war” narratives in the media is never a good idea, and it’s a particularly bad idea when it tends to make the president look weak and manipulated, and make his advisors look petty and divided. The president is the only one in a position to completely understand how his team functions, and how their strengths and weaknesses can best be managed.
So please, fellow Democrats, let’s not join our opponents in trashing Rahm or Ax or Robert or Valerie or any other satellite in the presidential orbit, and stop projecting our worries and hopes onto people who are invariably more complex than the cartoon caricatures that are imposed on them by observers with personal agendas. The late musician George Harrison once called gossip “the devil’s radio.” Democrats ought to avoid joining in political insider gossip of the type we are hearing right now like it’s the devil himself.

The President held a press conference today to announce that yes, indeed, he will press Congress to act on health care reform this month. There’s was nothing immensely new about that development, but it’s interesting that Obama used the occasion to lay out, quite succinctly, the three key points he made in his health care summit with Republicans: why comprehensive reform is essential, why the time for “negotiations” is over, and why there’s nothing that unusual about the use of reconciliation (though he did not use the word, a very unfamiliar term to most people outside Washington) to get the job done. He essentially took another bite at the apple of responding to the most effective Republican lines of attack, and will apparently do so some more in appearances on the road this month.
On the other hand, the presidential press conference may get demoted on the nightly news if a possible scandal involving Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) continues to develop. Massa, a freshman from a highly marginal district, abruptly let it be known he was retiring. Some sources say he’s suffering from a recurrence of cancer, but Politico is reporting that he was about to come under investigation by the Ethics Committee for allegedly sexually harrassing a male staffer. If the latter story has a basis in reality, it will be big news tonight.

Texas governor Rick Perry is not what you’d call a statesman, but as the old saying goes, if you can’t be good, be lucky. Perry’s been a very lucky–and opportunistic–politician. He was first elected to the Texas legislature as a Democrat (hard to believe, given his current behavior), and switched parties just in time to take advantage of the rise of the GOP in Texas. In his first statewide race, in 1990, he squeaked by the famous left-populist Jim Hightower to become Agriculture Commissioner; Hightower had not exactly made life easier for himself in Texas by becoming deeply involved in Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign.
In 1998, Perry hitched a ride to the top of Texas politics as George W. Bush’s running-mate, again very narrowly winning the general election (this time over John Sharp) with a lot of help from Bush associates who were getting ready for W.’s presidential run and didn’t want a Democrat wreaking havoc in Austin when the candidate was out of state. Perry inherited the governorship two years later. His two re-elections haven’t been terribly impressive: in 2002, he beat Rick Sanchez, a political neophyte widely perceived as running a very bad campaign, and in 2006, survived with just 39% of the vote in a crazy four-candidate general election.
Perry’s great stroke of luck this year was to run against Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a formidable politician in the past, in absolutely the worst climate imaginable for a United States Senator. Hutchison also obliged Perry by running an unfocused campaign with virtually no message (she joined Sanchez on the Houston Chronicle’s list of the ten worst campaigns in Texas history). Moreover, a third candidate, Tea Party activist Debra Medina, self-destructed by going on Glenn Beck’s show and sounding like a 9/11 “truther.” Perry manged to win yesterday with few votes to spare, garnering 51% of the vote against Hutchison’s 30% and Medina’s 19%.
We’ll see if Perry’s luck holds one more time in November; his Democratic opponent, former Houston mayor Bill White, is a respected politician who will not roll over and play dead. It’s says a lot about the incumbent’s residual weakness that he’s not a prohibitive favorite in a state like Texas in a year like 2010.
Perry gets mentioned now and then as a potential presidential candidate in 2012. He would definitely be stretching his luck by taking his act the national level, but don’t rule it out for a guy who had the opportunity to watch George W. Bush up close and personal when he turned privilege and perfect timing into an unlikely rise to the presidency.

Yesterday I wrote about the conservative effort to convince the news media and others that crazy people were being kept under control by the Tea Party Movement and the Republican Party. There’s an even less credible media narrative kicking around that was pursued the same day by Janet Hook of the Los Angeles Times: Republican moderates are making a comeback!
If you understandably missed this development, here’s how Hook puts it:

With healthcare legislation mired in partisanship, “tea party” activists on the march and GOP leadership dominated by conservatives, Capitol Hill looks like a parched landscape for the withered moderate wing of the Republican Party.
But green shoots are sprouting in Washington and on the campaign trail. A small band of Republican moderates in the Senate broke a logjam on jobs legislation. They added to their ranks with the arrival of another New England Republican, Scott Brown. And several moderate Republicans are in a good position to win Senate seats in November.

The article is loaded with qualifiers of this dubious proposition, but not enough of them. The jobs bill where “Republican moderates”–including Tea Party favorite Scott Brown–offered a few votes for cloture was a vastly watered-down $15 billion measure that included a payroll tax credit for employers long beloved of Republicans (indeed, that’s why it was in the bill). Once cloture was invoked, 13 GOPers voted for the bill, including such decidedly non-moderate senators as Inhofe, Burr and Hatch. Indeed, the only reason the bill was even controvrsial for Republicans is that it was offered by the Democratic leadership in lieu of a much more expensive and tax-cut laden bill worked out between Sens. Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley that most Democrats intensely disliked. Anyone expecting this development to lead to an outbreak of bipartisanship or a breakdown of Republican obstruction is smoking crack.
Hook’s optimistic spin on “moderate Republican” prospects for election to the Senate is equally off-base. She cites Mark Kirk, Mike Castle, Charlie Crist, Tom Campbell and Rob Simmons as potential additions to the “moderate” ranks. Kirk moved hard right to win his primary, and is running even with his Democratic opponent. Campbell is best known at present as the object of primary opponent Carly Fiorina’s cult favorite “demon sheep” web ad; I’d bet serious money he doesn’t win his primary, and the winner likely won’t beat Democrat Barbara Boxer, either. Simmons is struggling against a well-financed primary opponent, and is trailing Democrat Richard Blumenthal by double digits. Crist is political toast. I’ll grant that Castle is in good shape, and has a quite moderate record (so far). But even if Castle and Kirk win, their election would no more than offset the retirements of George Voinovich and Judd Gregg in the less-than-loudly-conservative ranks. And Hook also doesn’t mention that at least two GOP senators who occasionally cooperate with Democrats, Bob Bennett and John McCain, could get purged in primaries.
As for the forward-looking optimism of Hooks’ “green shoots” metaphor, it should be noted that Castle is 70 years old; Simmons is 67; Campbell is 56; Crist is 53; and Kirk is 50. Even by the geriatric standards of the Senate, this group ain’t exactly the wave of the future. They also don’t look much like America.
Sure, if the Republlican caucus in the Senate expands significantly this November, it is going to include a handful of members who don’t regularly howl at the moon about “socialism.” But any suggestion that the ancient tribe of moderate Republicans is much more than an anthropological curiosity these days is just not credible. It says a lot of the direction of the GOP that the early 2012 presidential favorite of “moderates” appears to be Mitt Romney, who spent the entire 2008 cycle campaigning as the “true conservative” in the race.
If words like “moderate” have any real meaning, it’s not a word that should be applied to any major faction in today’s Republican Party.