Just wanted to let readers know that I will only be posting sporadically for the next month, when I will be travelling. But other TDS regulars–J.P. Green, James Vega and Matt Compton–along with guests, will be filling in. And I”ll be back on a regular schedule before you know it.

In all the swirl of developments and speculation surrounding the treatment of the public option in the House and Senate (Jon Cohn has a good current summary here), one bit of commentary today stands out. The originator of the public option, Yale professor Jacob Hacker, has a New Republic piece on the ¨trigger¨approach that pretty much condemns the whole idea.
Hacker offers a fairly long and complex critique of trigger proposals that merits a full reading, but he basically makes three key points: (1) “affordability” provisions in all the trigger proposals vastly undershoot the actual affordability of total health care costs, and fail to take future medical inflation into account; (2) any “triggered” public option that doesn´t rely on the Medicare infrastructure probably won´t work, particularly if it´s phased in slowly; and (3) “triggers” are, in the Senate at least, typically linked to regulatory structures that give states too much leeway in letting private insurers off the hook for offering affordable universal coverage.
His conclusion is pretty categorical:

Added to the Senate bills, a trigger would represent a backdoor way of killing the public health insurance option that a majority of Americans (and U.S. Senators) support. It is way past time to trigger real competition for private plans that have failed to ensure affordability or cost restraint for decades.

The practical effect of Hacker´s likely-to-be-influential critique is two-fold: it could stiffen the resolve of public option advocates in the House to insist on a “robust” public option with no trigger and national rules, and could also make the “state opt-out” approach the only acceptable compromise for these advocates, on the theory that creation of a strong national public option is the key objective, even if fighting to keep it in place in the states over time proves to be a struggle (as I personally think it would be).

This item was cross-posted at The New Republic.
It´s too early to write off the gubernatorial aspirations of Creigh Deeds in Virginia, but if he doesn´t overcome a consistent lead by Republican Bob McDonnell in the next twelve days, you can be sure many pundits will attribute his defeat to Barack Obama.
There´s only one problem with this hypothesis: despite his extraordinary unpopularity in other parts of the South, the President remains relatively popular in the Old Dominion. According to pollster.com, Obama´s average approval/disapproval ratio in recent Virginia polls is 51/46. Even Rasmussen has him in positive territory at 53/47, and the latest Washington Post poll had him at 53/46. This is precisely the same margin by which Obama carried the Commonwealth last November.
Nor does general disdain for the Democratic Party appear to be the culprit. The current governor of Virginia, Tim Kaine, is chairman of the Democratic National Committee. His average approval ratio at pollster.com currently stands at 53/39.
It´s always tempting to interpret state electoral contests as bellwethers for national political trends, particular in odd years like this one. But it´s usually wrong.

Anyone familiar with sentiment in the region is aware that Barack Obama isn´t very popular among white voters in the Deep South. The Obama-Biden ticket did worse than Kerry-Edwards `04 among white voters in much of that area, despite the Democratic breakthroughs in nearby North Carolina and Virginia.
But the scope of the continuing unpopularity of Obama and Democrats in the South is graphically demonstrated in recent analysis from DKos-R2K. Obama´s overall national favorable/unfavorable ratio in its October poll was 55/37. In the South, it was 27/68. The Republican Party´s rating nationally was 21/67. In the South, it was 48/37. The Democratic Party´s national rating was 41/51. In the South, it was 21/72. And on the congressional ¨generic ballot,“ Democrats led nationally 35/29; GOPers led in the South 47/21.
These are regional averages which almost certainly overstate Democrats´ problems in Florida, NC, and Virginia, but may also understate the problem in the Deep South.
Such numbers will undoubtedly reinforce already strong tendencies by non-southern Democrats to “write off“ the region as intractably reactionary if not incurably racist. That would be a major mistake. Most of the congressional districts held by southern Democrats are far friendlier to Obama than the regional averages indicate, and we need to hold as many of them as possible (the same is true of many statewide offices, and in the state legislative contests that will determine control of redistricting). And as the 2008 results in FL, NC and VA showed, there are demographic trends in the region that give Democrats considerable future hope wherever sufficient concentrations of minority voters, upscale professionals, and academic/research centers co-exist.
What the current numbers probably reflect more than anything is the exceptional unhappiness of southerners with the economy, which has reversed decades of sunbelt growth. If high southern unemployment rates begin to turn around by 2010 or 2012, the South´s outlier status may moderate as well.

I´ve been something of a skeptic, perhaps even an alarmist, about the idea of dumping decisions on how to design the health care system on the states via some sort of state opt-in or opt-out of the public option, in part because of the likely impact on the 2010 campaign in states across the country, and the impact of the campaign on health care decisions.
Turns out we may be getting a preview of the latter dynamic:

At the final debate of the race last night, Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Creigh Deeds said he “shared the broad goals” of health care reform, but would “certainly consider opting out” of a public option “if that were available to Virginia.”
“I’m not afraid of going against my fellow Democrats when they’re wrong,” Deeds said. “A public option isn’t required in my view.”

This could become a pretty common line in 2010 if states are indeed asked to figure out the public option and the many related decisions about health care.

As the economy continues to struggle, it´s increasingly obvious that some sort of federal job tax credit may be the only ´´second stimulus package´´ that could gain traction in Congress.
The idea has long attracted conservative support, but lately progressives, including former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and the Economic Policy Institute, have been out in front. It´s popular among some Democrats and economists in part because its costs are dependent on its success (unlike across-the-board tax cuts), and in part because it´s viewed as a way to counteract offshoring of jobs.
EPI has a new job tax credit proposal out, and it´s very focused on designing a credit that is large enough to have an immediate impact, temporary enough to keep its cost relatively low, and efficient enough to avoid corporate freeloading.
If there´s another idea that can serve as the centerpiece of a follow-up to the stimulus legislation, I don´t know what it would be. Waiting for a cyclical economic recovery seems irresponsible, and certainly dangerous to the party controlling the White House and Congress.

One of the most important current conservative political memes is to make George W. Bush a very distant memory, even though he was still Commander in Chief just ten months ago. There are two reasons for this, of course: conservatives want to blame Barack Obama for the policies and conditions he inherited, and they also want to pretend the 43d president’s ideology and policies had nothing to do with what his successors on the Right are promoting today.
Since it it rather difficult to argue on any rational basis that the domestic and international state of the nation was shaped far more by the man who was in the White House for the last eight years than the man who’s barely unpacked, a twist on the “blame card” meme is to suggest that Obama and Democrats are, well, being impolite and cowardly by failiing to suck it up and take responsibility for what they walked into on January 20. A good example is a new column by National Review’s Rich Lowry:

When Obama first burst on the scene, he seemed to respect the other side. That refreshing Obama is long gone. Now, he impugns his immediate predecessor with classless regularity, and attributes the worst of motives – pure partisanship and unrestrained greed – to those who oppose him. Their assigned role is to get the hell out of his way.
The acid test of the White House inevitably exposes a president’s character flaws: Nixon’s corrosive paranoia, Clinton’s self-destructive indiscipline, Bush’s stubborn defensiveness. Obama in the crucible is exhibiting an oddly self-pitying arrogance. It’s unbecoming in anyone, let alone the most powerful man on the planet.

So forget about facts; forget about actual responsibility; forget about justifying a different policy course at home and abroad by explaining why the Bush approach failed so dismally. Obama isn’t a mensch unless he shoulders Bush’s blame, and he must “respect” his opponents by absolving them of responsibility for their own deeds and for the policies of the man they so recently lionized as a world-historical colossus.
There’s little doubt that history will judge the Bush administration as a batch of gambles–from the invasion of Iraq, to the abandonment of ailliances, to the demonization of “enemies” overseas and domestic, to giant regressive tax cuts, to an effort to gut the New Deal legacy, and to a systematic attempt to govern in the most partisan manner possible–that failed. It’s simply wrong to forget all that, even for a moment.

A couple weeks ago I expressed skepticism about a Pew survey suggesting that a majority of Americans were feeling pretty bullish about military action towards Iran to stop its nuclear program, in no small part because the poll didn’t distinguish between different types of military action.
Now there’s a Washington Post/ABC poll finding that’s a bit more nuanced. 42% of respondents favor an air attack on Iranian facilities to prevent acquisition of nuclear weapons, while 54% oppose that step; and 33% favor an invasion of Iran to topple the government, while 62% are opposed.
The Post write-up on the poll notes that partisan differences on these questions aren’t as large as you might expect, though ideological splits are more noticeable (liberals oppose bombing Iran 74/24, while conservatives favor it 56/38, and moderates are positioned exactly half-way between the two). Even Republicans (57/40) and conservatives (51/44) oppose a ground invasion aimed at regime change, perhaps remembering how that went in Iraq.
This poll doesn’t make support for military action contingent on the failure of other options; Americans support direct talks with Iran by 82/18, and international economic sanctions by 78/18.