Michelle Cottle has a nice holiday diversion post over at The New Republic suggesting that President Obama is embracing the wrong hobby in spending time golfing.
I have to admit I was surprised by the statistics she cited about the decline of interest in golf among Americans over the last decade. With (at least up until the latest bout of local government fiscal crises) public courses now fairly common, and with anecdotal evidence that a significant number of professional women are taking up the game for networking purposes, it’s not clear why the numbers are going down sharply. And while golf remains largely a white folks’ past-time, it’s hardly the preserve of the upper classes anymore (as the pursuit of the game by many of my non-college-educated relatives attests).
As it happens, I personally share Cottle’s old-school populist aversion to golf culture and fashion. I once told an upper-crust acquaintance who asked about my own golf and tennis habits: “I don’t play any of those Republican sports; I bowl.” But then again, I grew up at a time and place where country club membership was largely a prerequisite for hitting golf or tennis balls.
The incongruous thing about this sudden interest in the President’s golf addiction is that it’s happening right in the middle of, well, you know, a certain scandal involving a certain golfer. Maybe America really needs a new half-African-American golfer they can believe in, even if he’s just a duffer.

The last person we needed to hear from concerning the terrorist incident over Detroit was Conservative of the Year Dick Cheney. But naturally, he’s out now with the most obnoxious statement imaginable about the president’s own reaction:

As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.
He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.

Forget for a moment the stupid little slur at the end about “social transformation,” an obligatory nod to the conservative movement’s bizarre suggestion that Barack Obama is in the process of creating a Soviet America of some sort. What’s amazing about Cheney’s statement is his extraordinary assertion, in the absence of any real evidence on the subject at present, that the attempted bombing was some sort of major act of war like 9/11 warranting a major reaction by the nation and its chief executive.
Has it crossed Cheney’s mind, even once, over the last nine years that routine overreaction by U.S. leaders is one of the most cherished goals of al Qaeda and its alllies? Does Cheney understand that conceding the ability of a scattered band of terrorists to completely control the foreign policy of the world’s great superpower, to dominate its news, to panic it into abandoning its own values and legal system, “emboldens” terrorists more than anything else we could do?
Just wondering.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
In response to Ezra Klein’s high-profile campaign to encourage an assault on the filibuster, and the invidious development of a de facto 60-vote requirement for passage of legislation in the Senate, the estimable conservative reporter Byron York comes up with a clever but wrong-headed rationalization for past GOP efforts to kill Democratic filibusters against the Bush administration’s judicial nominees. Republicans were not, claims York, endorsing a general end to the right of a minority to obstruct legislation via filibusters:

The argument was that the judicial filibuster undermined the Senate’s constitutional responsibility to give advice and consent on the president’s judicial nominations. When legislation is filibustered, it’s possible for a bill’s sponsors to make changes that will satisfy opponents. But what happens when a nominee is filibustered? No advice and consent. The Constitution does not require the Senate to pass a national health care bill, but it does require it to confirm or deny the president’s appointees.

This is sophistry. For one thing, Democrats blocking judicial nominations were indeed looking for a “deal” that would have changed procedures for selection, appointment and confirmation of federal judges, not just seeking to block action on particular nominees. For another, it’s hardly evident that today’s GOP wielders of the filibuster weapon are looking for “changes that will satisfy opponents;” simple obstruction is the explicit goal of most conservatives fighting health care reform. And beyond that, Republicans are certainly not eschewing procedural roadblocks to Obama’s presidential appointments.
But the biggest problem with York’s analysis of the “judicial filibuster” issue is that he’s forgets we are talking about lifetime appointments to the higher regions of the federal bench. Legislation can be repealed, as Republicans so avidly say they intend to do with health care reform (if it is enacted) at the earliest opportunity. Barring the exceptionally rare resort to impeachment, federal judges are there as long as they wish.
Personally, I dislike judicial filibusters as much as any others, and would happily abolish the filibuster entirely. And there’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around when it comes to the “right” of a Senate minority to destroy the ability of the majority to govern. But if anything, the case for the GOP’s social-conservative-driven (and unsuccessful) assault on the judicial filibuster was weaker than the case for killing legislative filibusters today.

If you’re interested in the broad outlines of what House and Senate conferees will be grappling with in reconciling their health care reform bills, take a look at Paul Waldman’s American Prospect piece on the top ten conference issues.
What’s most interesting about the less-visible but important issues at stake is that several have big implications for the future shape of health care in this country. One is pretty much settled: the bill if enacted will almost definitely put a final stake in the heart of Medicaid’s vast inequalities between states in eligibility (unless, of course, some sort of general state opt-out is authorized). Another is the collateral attack on the employer-based system of private health insurance via the Senate’s excise tax on high-cost plans, and its small opening to Sen. Ron Wyden’s proposal to let some employees covered by particularly bad employer plans to join the new health insurance exchanges. And still another is the principle, all but gutted in the Senate bill but still maintained by the House, that the health care system, beginning with Medicare, should finally begin separating the sheep from the goats in terms of effective and ineffective treatments.
It’s very likely that media coverage and public controversy over the conference will continue to focus on total public costs, new taxes, subsidy levels, the individual mandate, and the ghost of the public option. But in the long run, other deals may represent the real deal on health care reform.

Even before Congress negotiates the still-difficult straits of final action on health care reform, a debate is heating up, not least among Democrats, about whether or not to move on to climate change legislation.
Said legislation has already very narrowly passed the House, albeit in a form that disappointed many progressives to the point of near-disgust. But it’s important to note that there are two very different perspectives among those Democrats urging the administration and the congressional leadership to defer Senate action on climate change to later in 2010, or beyondf.
The first perspective is indeed ideological, but doesn’t neatly follow the moderate/progressive battlelines of the health care debate, despite Politico‘s claim today that “Senate moderates’ are the ones objecting to immediate action on climate change. As is always the case with energy and environmental issues, this is one matter where regional and home-state politics can still trump general ideology or partisanship. It’s no accident that “moderate” Mary Landrieu from the energy-producing state of Louisiana is in the front ranks of those calling for a delay in climate change legislation, or that “moderate” Joe Lieberman from the energy-consuming state of Connecticut, and no friend of the Obama administration or the Democratic Party, is heavily involved in efforts to move a bill. On the positive side of the ledger, this is the rare issue where some Republican votes are potentially gettable, which has been the focus of Sen. John Kerry’s efforts to work with Sen. Lindsey Graham of SC on a nukes-for-climate-change deal.
So a good understanding of each senator’s energy-industry links, or the lack thereof, is as important as ideological lables in predicting his or her behavior on climate change.
But the second go-slow or no-go perspective on climate change has little to do with ideology, and everything to do with political calculations. Like TDS Co-Editor William Galston, some Democrats think it is absolutely essential that the administration be seen in 2010 as obsessively focused on jobs. Yes, it’s possible to sell climate change legislation as a “green jobs” initiative that’s actually essential to long-term economic growth, but so long as we are dealing with double-digit unemployment rates, anything that can be caricatured as elevating the “green” over the “jobs” could be politically very hazardous.
One of the most commonly heard counter-arguments to the political case for putting climate change legislation on the back burner is the observation that this is the sort of initiative that progressives are elected to office to promote, and if they can’t get it done with a Democratic White House and 60 Democratic senators, when will it ever happen?
But in any event, it’s helpful to sort out the various substantive and political arguments on this subject, instead of imposing a cookie cutter based on the fault lines of the health care reform debate.

If you will pardon a personal note, we’re celebrating my father’s 80th birthday today. Ed Kilgore, Sr., instilled in me a powerful interest in politics from an early age, during the turbulent civil rights era of the Deep South, when he (and my mother) were atypically liberal. For years, we had a Sunday ritual of eating breakfast, reading what was then a big, fat newspaper, and talking politics for as long as it took.
My father also had an extraordinary knack for seeing all points of view. He often talked conservative, but then voted progressive, being the best critic of his own arguments. He and I were among the very few voters in Tucker, Georgia (where he still lives) who cast a ballot for George McGovern in 1972, and he was a proud Obama voter (along with his wife, my stepmother Patricia) last year.
Aside from the love, support and patience he unfailingly provided over the decades, I also owe him my sense of humor (he more or less became Richard Pryor for a while there), and whatever perspective I bring to world events in my writing.
Happy birthday, Chief. I look forward to many more talks and laughs with you, no matter what happens in the wider world.

For southern Democrats, the news that freshman Rep. Parker Griffith of Alabama was switching parties brought back bad memories from the 1990s, when a goodly number of elected officials from the region who had been Democrats for no particular reason other than political convenience became Republicans for no particular reason other than political convenience.
But the exodus of party-switchers back then was both natural and healthy, painful as it was. Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics seems to think, or hope, that Griffith’s flip-flop could touch off another wave of party-switching. I have two reactions to that: (a) if, as appears entirely possible, Griffith loses his seat anyway, then I doubt he’s going to be a major role model for others; and (b) Griffith is from the rare southern district that is conservative but has never elected a Republican congressman. In other words, it’s like the venues of the party-switchers of the 1990s, when the realignment of the parties was reaching its peak. Most moderate-to-conservative Democrats in the South are from areas where genuine Democrats-In-Name-Only left the party years ago. The remainders are a pretty hardy bunch, even if more progressive Democrats don’t like their voting records.
But whether or not Parker Griffith is the wave of the future or the north end of a south-bound brontosaurus, one thing ought to be clear: his protestations that he had to change parties because of some shocking new ideological development in the Democratic Party is total, absolute, conscious b.s. Griffith’s not some crusty old long-time incumbent whose party changed without him; he was first elected in 2008, when Barack Obama was running on a platform promising climate change and health care reform legislation, and going along with George W. Bush’s decision to rescue the financial industry. Nancy Pelosi, whom Griffith is now attacking, wasn’t any less liberal then that she is today. Sure, he needs to play catch-up with his new party-mates in shrieking about socialism and the destruction of the U.S. Constitution, but nobody should be under any illusion that anything has changed since 2008 other than Parker Griffith’s calculation of his re-election prospects.
So however you assess the meaning of this development, nobody in either party should have any particular respect for Griffith–not because he’s a “turncoat,” but because he’s trying to disguise his opportunism as an act of principle, which it is not.

One of those topics that sharply divides observers is the immediate impact on public opinion of enactment of health care reform legislation. Some reform supporters believe that when the public realizes a lot of the wild, made-up claims about the legislation were, well, made up, approval ratings for the President and congressional Democrats will rise. Some reform opponents think that since few Americans will see any tangible benefit from the legislation (in no small part because of the long phase-in period), buyer’s remorse could set in for those who have supported the bill.
Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com trains his jeweler’s eye on this controversy, and finds there is no obvious answer to the question of “what happens now?” to public opinion. Those who are hoping for a major “bump” in presidential approval ratings will probably be disappointed, says Blumenthal, since those are rare barring “rally ’round the flag” moments of national crisis. Another complicating factor is that Americans don’t really understand many key provisions of the legislation. Will time correct misperceptions, or will the long phase-in period freeze perceptions as they are?
The one definite task for progressives, Blumenthal suggests, is to promote a balanced understanding of the legislation to offset not just conservative mendacity but the heavy focus of the debate on the left on issues like the public option. The provisions that will take effect most immediately, and that are most popular–such as bans on insurance company abuses like exclusions for pre-existing conditions–haven’t gotten nearly the attention they deserve.
All I’d add is that whatever the immediate effect on presidential approval ratings, most progressives are convinced that an outright failure to enact health care reform would be a complete political disaster for Democrats, as a similar failure arguably was for Democrats going into the 1994 fiasco. Assuming the bill is enacted, we’ll never know what would have happened otherwise. And the inability to “prove a negative” is a problem with many aspects of health care reform. Insurance premiums, for example, were due to go up sharply over the next few years in the absence of reform legislation. They will still go up sharply under this legislation (most cost savings will occur down the road), since it costs money to cover 30 or 40 million additional people, but will Americans blame reform itself for this development, which would have happened anyway? Certainly Republicans will make every effort to promote this misperception.
This reflects a broader problem facing the president and congressional Democrats (or anyone assuming power when a previous administration has so thoroughly botched its job): will they get credit for keeping bad times from growing worse, or will they be blamed for the bad times themselves? To cite one obvious example, the best defense for the deeply unpopular TARP initiative is that it was necessary to avoid a complete collapse in the nation’s, and perhaps the world’s, financial system. That is clearly what Barack Obama thought at the time; he certainly did not relish massive subsidies for the least popular people and institutions on the planet. But it’s hard to prove what would have happened in any other scenario. The best solution to this dilemma is to make conditions in the country actually improve. Given the mess Obama inherited, that may be tough to do by next November, or even by 2012. And that’s why progressives need to spend as much time as possible promoting genuine public understanding of the nation’s complex problems, with reminders of our downward trajectory under the previous administration.

The course of events in Congress this year have generated a robust debate over the evolution of the Senate filibuster into a routine 60-vote threshold. I’ve been debating this subject over at ProgressiveFix with former TDS Managing Editor Scott Winship.
In the latest back-and-forth, Scott, who earlier argued that partisan polarization is a bigger obstacle to the enactment of legislation than the filibuster, takes on the proposition that polarization is a phenomenon created primarily by Republicans (hence there’s not a lot Democrats can do about it other than beating Republicans like a drum in elections).
My response focuses on a challenge to the perennial liberal-moderate-conservative typology of voter ideology–which invariably places the political “center” farther to the right than it actually is–and also expresses skepticism about Scott’s preferred remedy to polarization of laws that open up party primaries.
It’s a lot of reading, but well worth the time if you are interested in this perennial topic.

Dick Cheney may have won Human Events‘ “Conservative of the Year” award, but the Right’s more contemporary megastar, Sarah Palin, got her own big end of the year award. She’s the author of PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year,” via her infamous Facebook post on health reform and “death panels.”
This was indeed an instant classic: completely fabricated, aimed at a particularly important constituency, and applying one of the favorite hallucinations of Palin’s buddies in the Right to Life movement (liberals want to extend their “holocaust” from the unborn to old folks) to the domestic policy issue of the day. And best of all, the lie was distributed not through some clunky and news-cycle-sensitive speech, but through Facebook!
TPM has a nice slide show illustrating how the “death panel” meme pre-developed before Palin invented the term and launched it into the national consciousness.