This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Suzy Khimm’s post at The Treatment about Howard Dean’s latest remarks on health care reform strategy shows the perils of the obsession with the public option on both sides of the barricades. After a fiery demand that progressives refuse to relent on the public option, the good Doctor allowed as how if we can’t get that, he’d be fine with legislation that just regulated health insurance abuses.
Ironically enough, Dean seems to be embracing the same fallback position as his old adversary Joe Lieberman, who’s said regulate-only legislation is all he’d be willing to support if a public option is included in a comprehensive reform bill. The problem, of course, is that absent an individual mandate to bring healthier people into the risk pool, or significant subsidies to lure them in, imposing a national system of community rating or guaranteed access to insurance on behalf of less robust Americans will likely boost private insurance premiums for everybody–not exactly an ideal outcome.
Now it’s likely that Dean is really just engaged in a tactical effort to keep progressives fired up for the public option in order to keep pressure on Senate Democrats and the White House to insist on some competitive mechanism–perhaps a “triggered” public option, perhaps strong national or regional co-ops–that’s significantly stronger than the weak state co-ops in the Baucus bill. And perhaps the reconciliation route means a “robust” public option can still be passed by the Senate. But at some point, when you keep urging people to say “my way or the highway,” you have to look down that highway to see where it leads. And if the end-point is going to be a regulate-only bill, both Dean and Lieberman need to acknowledge that may actually be no better than the status quo, and could possibly be even worse.
Ed Kilgore
The announcement today that the administration is scrapping a Bush administration program to create a ground-based missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland is eliciting predictable howls from neoconservatives.
You can understand why. A big missile defense system has been a hobby horse for conservatives going all the way back to the Nixon administration, despite constant signs that it would cost far too much, might not work, and would be exceptionally destabilizing if it became a true centerpiece of our national security strategy. But the particular system in question has become an even bigger obsession for conservatives who favor military confrontation with both Russia and Iran.
Here’s National Security Network’s assessment:
[N]ot only do the cancelled missile defense systems have significant technological shortfalls, but they would also fail to protect against Iranian missiles because of both their location and technological advances in Iranian missile technology. Furthermore, from a geopolitical perspective, the European missile defense was a disaster. It worsened relations with Russia without even providing a credible defense against their nuclear arsenal, further undercutting nonproliferation efforts. Because there is no strategic benefit to maintaining the program – either militarily or diplomatically – the Obama administration has wisely has decided to eliminate this program and to develop a more adaptable missile defense system that better protects Europe.
Indeed, much of the negative reaction from the Right isn’t about the actual national security implications of this as opposed to alternative (probably sea-based) missile defense systems, but just psycho-babble about the alleged pleasure the step would give to Russia and/or Iran.
Funny, isn’t it? Neocons who are outraged by any consideration of diplomatic concerns in the development of national security policy nonetheless think we should perpetually let nations like Russia control our actions. If Putin doesn’t like something, we absolutely have to do it, even if it makes no real sense.
If you’re puzzled about why everybody thinks Max Baucus’ new health care blueprint is a big step forward in the debate even though pretty much nobody likes it, it’s important to understand the dialectical nature of the process. For health care reform to happen in the Senate, it needs to get out of the Finance Committee, which even on the Democratic side, is not a terribly progressive group. It also represents the last chance to lure a couple of Republicans across the line, and although none have stepped up yet, the relatively positive reaction of health industry groups (in itself not the most wonderful thing) could make it a lot easier for that to ultimately occur.
Once the Baucus bill is out of committee, the Senate Democratic leadership will design a floor package composed of elements of the Finance and (more progressive) HELP Committee bills. That’s also the point at which Senate Democrats and the White House will make the fateful decision of whether to go for broke on a cloture vote (which requires 60 Senators), or move towards use of reconciliation, at least for the more controversial elements. And all along, Democrats will be acutely aware of the need for a health reform design that can produce a conference committee report able to survive close votes in both House and Senate. And that means, for example, that the Baucus bill’s exceptionally weak state-by-state co-op system will have to be eventually revised or the whole effort could go down thanks to opposition from House Democrats.
So Baucus’ bill represents just one piece of the puzzle. Ezra Kleiin has an excellent summary today of five steps that could make Baucus’ proposal significantly more acceptable to progressives; none really does much violence to the basic scheme.
There’s one wrinkle to the Baucus plan, however, that probably will have “legs”: its back-door attack on the tax deductibility of high-end employer sponsored plans via an “excise tax.” Modifying the deduction for employer-sponsored plans is one of those things that policy wonks from all sides of the ideological spectrum tend to favor, but it’s quite unpopular. Baucus’ approach might be doable because it’s indirect, and is phased in very slowly through a threshold that will be adjusted by a consumer price index, not a health care price index (which means more and more high-end plans will be exposed to it over time). And this last feature, most significantly, means that the overall Baucus plan is not only deficit-neutral, but actually begins reducing the federal budget deficit in the “out-years.” This makes it pretty attractive to the many people who worry that we simply can’t afford health care reform.
At present the main visible opposition to the “excise tax” idea is coming from the labor movement, which has many members who have negotiated very good health plans. But if only because the threshold for future exposure to the excise tax could be changed down the road, union leaders probably won’t make this a litmus test for final support.
In any event, the significance of the Baucus plan can’t really be captured by up-or-down (mostly down) assessments of its content. There are a lot of moving parts on health care reform, and this is just one of them, albeit the final basic piece to fall into place.
On the advice of my physician, I do not watch or listen to Glenn Beck, preferring to follow his exploits via the serial bouts of hysteria he inspires in his fans. So it was news to me to learn that he spends a lot of time hawking the works of the late W. Cleon Skousen, an extremely sketchy right-wing character who lived on the far fringes of the conservative movement and of Mormonism.
In a fascinating piece on the subject in Salon today, Alexander Zaitchick explores Beck’s near-apostolic advocacy of Skousen’s work, which serves as a sort of intellectual framework for the highly paranoid worldview of the Tea Party movement that Beck has done so much to promote. In his very colorful career, which earned him a big fat “dangerous extremist” file with his former employers at the FBI, Skousen gained most notice in the early 60s as a fellow traveler and stout defender of the John Birch Society (after Birch founder Robert Welch had been read out of the conservative movement for contending that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist).
As Sarah Posner alertly reminds us at TAPPED, Beck’s not the only Skousen fan high in the ranks of contemporary conservatism. Mitt Romney has spoken of the old crank fondly as well, which led to a sort of warning from National Review’s Mark Hemingway back in 2007:
Who is Cleon Skousen you might ask? In answering that question, it’s hard to even know where to begin. Skousen was by turns an FBI employee, the police chief of Salt Lake City, a Brigham Young University professor, consigliore to former secretary of agriculture and Mormon president Ezra Taft Benson and, well, all-around nutjob.
Of course he was also a prolific writer and likely brilliant, but Skousen is not an association a presidential candidate should loudly trumpet.
Thanks to Beck, one of Skousen’s books, The 5,000 Year Leap, has become a runaway bestseller, which suggests that a lot of Tea Party folk have read it and given it to friends and family. Next time someone tells you the Tea Party movement is composed of average Americans who are simply worried at the terrible things Barack Obama’s trying to do to their country, keep in mind they are being influenced by the works of someone who thought America was being plunged into socialist tyranny by the Eisenhower administration.
This item by James Vega was originally published on September 13, 2009
In order to judge the significance of the conservative-led demonstration that took place in Washington D.C. this weekend, it is important to begin with a realistic estimate of the number of people who actually participated. This is unusually difficult in this particular case because Matt Kibbe, the President of the organizing group Freedomworks — understandably concerned as he was about the danger of liberal media bias — came up with the innovative solution of simply claiming that ABC news had estimated that1.2 to1.5 million people had participated – something the network itself most emphatically denied ever having done. Several conservative blog posts and tweets later this number had been carefully and judiciously narrowed to an even two million participants, making the demonstration larger not only than Obama’s inauguration – which shut down the entire transportation grid of Washington D.C. — but also the entire population – every man woman and child — of both Delaware and the District of Colombia. Say what you will about chairman Kibbe, whatever he may lack in empirical rigor, he certainly compensates for in audacity.
The only official estimate that was provided – by the Washington D.C. fire department – was that about 60,000-70,000 people participated, a number that was generally in line with standard crowd estimation techniques ( As it happened, because all the marchers were funneled through the narrow rectangle formed by Pennsylvania avenue between the white house and the capitol and time lapse photographs were taken, it was possible to use a number of standard “per square foot” and “flow per minute” crowd estimation formulas to roughly gauge the number of demonstrators. Both methods indicated a crowd size clearly below 100,000).
On the one hand, bringing 60,000-70,000 protestors to Washington is undeniably a substantial achievement, one that firmly establishes the existence of a new kind of conservative political organization – a composite organization that is a fusion of (1) a major TV network that provides popular political commentators and massive free advertising for a demonstration (2) a professionally managed coordinating organization (Freedomworks) that in this case provided $600,000 in direct funds, 14 full-time staff workers for logistics and planning and a robust, technically sophisticated web and social network infrastructure and (3) a set of decentralized social networks that enabled communication among the grass-roots protesters.
Although Freedomworks as an organization is as completely “Astroturf” as any firm in Washington, the large majority of the participants in the demonstration were undeniably “authentic” grass-roots conservatives – they were neither full-time Republican operatives nor members of traditional right-wing organizations. They generally paid their own way to participate in the demonstration and the vast creative and artistic panoply of their hand-made signs – which generally ranged from the histrionic and lurid to the clinically delusional – bespoke a perspective and sensibility that — whatever else it might be — could not seriously be described as regimented and obedient to any organization.
The demonstration apparently left most of the participants feeling optimistic and energized. “We are the real America” they confidently asserted to each other, and “the vast majority of Americans are now waking up” and joining the struggle to “take back our country”
The demonstrators’ sense of having reached an important milestone was not necessarily wrong, but among the organizers and strategists of the protest there was a different perception – that the critical objective of bringing a sufficient mass of protesters to Washington to actually intimidate wavering, “on the fence” members of congress had clearly failed. For this purpose the demonstration would have had to be at least in the 250,000-300,000 range, and preferably around a half a million. The demonstration needed to convince wavering members of congress that the protesters represented more than just the well-known conservative/Republican base and in this critical regard it simply did not succeed.
The consequences for the “Tea Party” (or, as Glen Beck has for some obscure reason renamed it, the “9/12 Movement”) are substantial. Mass demonstrations in Washington D.C that do not achieve their key objectives are subject to a form of diminishing returns. It becomes harder and harder to convince the same number of people to return to Washington for subsequent events. This is particularly the case with a new social movement like the Tea Party protests whose participants can become deeply demoralized when they begin to perceive that their efforts are actually having very little effect on the steady progress of health care reform and other Obama initiatives.
As a consequence, it is likely that by this November or December if not before the Tea Party/9-12 movement will begin to experience a major schism over strategy and tactics.
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on September 10, 2009.
I watched the President’s address on a jumbotron screen at a rally in the MLK National Historic Site in Atlanta. The rally and viewing, which were put together by Organizing for America, featured some of the better local agitators, including the state AFL-CIO president, the pastor of King’s church, a firebrand state senator, a couple of people who had been badly burned by insurance companies and OFA leaders, all of whom stoked the crowd leading up to the President’s address.
About 300-350 people attended, maybe 75-80 percent African Americans, plus a subtantial number of people with disabilities of all races. These were not just Obamaphiles, but people who felt strongly about health reform, and, moving around in the crowd, I heard pieces of quite a few health care horror stories. The event seems to have been designed mostly for the local TV cameras, which is understandible, since the tube still rules in the battle for hearts and minds.
Predictably enough, the crowd cheered the President’s stronger statements, and booed lustiily when the camera panned to Rep. Boehner and other GOP stiffs. I imagine the scene was replicated in cities across the country. I wondered what political moderates viewing the speech thought about the stolid Republicans, who have offered no reform proposals of their own thus far. I especially like how Robert Creamer puts it in his HuffPo post, that the heckling S.C. Rep. Joe Wilson is “the poster child for the new Republican Party.”
As for President Obama’s address (transcript here) , I thought he scored key points with impressive brevity. Never did I feel, “this is too wonky,” which has been an issue with other health care reform advocates. I liked the way he directly addressed the lies and distortions foisted by Republican fear-mongers. His tone was a little sharp. But there is really no way to make nice when debunking some of the nastier allegations they have smeared on his reform proposals. He unsheathed a few good zingers, such as the reference to the monstrous deficit he inherited, but wisely kept them to a minimum. Better to let the glowering Republicans marinate in bitterness on national TV, and they obliged.
President Obama endorsed the public option, but he kept an escape hatch open, saying he would consider alternatives. There was only a vague reference to what has elsewhere been called the “trigger mechanism” that would make the public option available. Even less was said about the possibility of taxing health care benefits. Those who were looking for heightened clarity on these controversial issues in the Presidents’ speech were probably disappointed. He tossed out a bit of an olive branch to the Republicans, in the form of a hint that some kind of tort reform should be part of the enacted legislation, which may be small comfort to them, but it’s more conciliatory than anything they have offered.
I expect that the President’s approval ratings will improve, as they generally do after a televised address. But I do think he needs to do more, perhaps in a warmer format, such as a series of televised “fireside chats,” as has been suggested. The President’s address was a pretty good beginning, especially if he will follow it with more visible, assertive leadership.
Among progressives, the reaction has been more favorable than not. Open Left‘s David Sirota and Mike Lux heard different speeches, with Lux giving Obama’s address a rave review and Sirota a pan. E. J. Dionne, Jr. noted a positive transformation in his WaPo column:
It seemed as if a politician who had been channeling the detached and cerebral Adlai Stevenson had discovered a new role model in the fighting Harry Truman. For the cause of health-care reform, it was about time.
And that’s all to the good.
Back in 1970, my high school held an assembly to listen to pitches on behalf of the various people running for governor of Georgia (the Peach State allowed 18-year-olds to vote well before the enactment of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment). Most of the candidates recruited students from the school to recycle their talking points. But candidate Jimmy Carter was represented by a chubby, funny young man named Jody Powell.
That probably meant that Carter was somewhere close by, because he rarely went anywhere that year, or in his subsequent presidential campaign, without Powell, who started out as the candidate’s driver and soon became his press secretary. The driving gig was actually a step up for Powell, who had not long before been expelled from the Air Force Academy for cheating on an exam. But rarely has a politician enjoyed the services of a more unlikely (Powell liked to smoke and drink) and effective staffer. And Jody Powell soon went on a very wild ride that took Jimmy Carter through the governorship of Georgia to the White House.
It’s part of the institutional history of Washington that the Carter presidency failed because he insisted on bringing all these Georgia rubes to the White House with him, who didn’t know how to deal with the movers-and-shakers of “this town.” (I’d say inheriting an ongoing economic disaster might have been a somewhat larger factor). But Powell never lost a step, and in the most hidebound, boys-club segment of the Capitol, the press corps, this cracker who never went to journalism school or held a reporting job was soon rated one of the best press secretaries in memory. He was one of the few significant members of the Carter administration whose reputation was better going out than coming in, even though he started out pretty well.
On the news of Powell’s sudden death yesterday, ABC’s Jake Tapper made a very sad observation:
Powell and the late Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff, were WH “whiz Kids” on a Rolling Stone cover in 1977. I doubt Carter thought he’d outlive both of them.
Jody Powell was a good ol’ boy who did very well in an unlikely life. May he rest in peace.
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the wake of the display of craziness by Rep. Joe Wilson during the president’s health care speech, and the rather notable reluctance of Republicans to criticize him on substantive (as opposed to protocol) grounds, a perennial question arises: Do these conservative eruptions of extremism actually tilt the national political debate to the Right?
This has long been a concern of progressives. Just last week Michelle Goldberg fretted:
The marginalization of the left has its costs. Political energy tends to concentrate around extremes, and while the Republican Party has been able to draw on the passion of their right flank, there’s a yawning gap between left-wing culture and the Democrats….
Politicians who try to separate themselves from right-wing madness by blaspheming Rush Limbaugh or evangelical leader James Dobson are quickly forced to repent. As a result, the center of the political conversation is pulled steadily rightward. In this sense, legitimatizing more left-wing voices, even those that make liberals uncomfortable, would be a tremendous help to progressivism.
The “energy” argument is a familiar one. But if ideological excess only encourages voters to show up at the polls once, it’s probably irrelevant—except in the closest elections. The discussion about how extremism “tilts the debate” is newer and more interesting.
There are generally two sets of villains in this revisionist take on “extremism.” The first are “centrist” Democratic politicians and pundits who legitimize the other side, however crazy, by their blind support for “bipartisanship” and “compromise.” And the second are the news media, who either (in the case of the openly partisan media like Fox News) create or echo crazy arguments, or (in the case of the mainstream media) adopt a position of presumptive equivalency, blandly reporting crazy talk as one side of a he-said, she-said story. Hence, the debate is “pushed to the Right”—the center-right suddenly seems so much more moderate relative to the loudly broadcast extreme positions.
The solution, this sort of analysis invariably suggests, is to counter right-wing “framing” of arguments with left-wing framing, pulling the debate back to something resembling the actual “center.”
If this approach sounds a bit too cute and cynical, that’s because it assigns roles to various players in politics based on their tactical positioning rather than the validity of what they actually believe. Iif this is a dubious moral proposition, it is also politically risky. Does it really help Barack Obama or the congressional Democratic leadership get anything practical done to perpetually mobilize an army of activists and ideologues who, say, want radical reductions in military spending or a socialist makeover of the economy? Will conservatives stop calling Obama a “socialist” if the genuine article is more visible? I doubt it, but in any event, if I were a Department of Peace enthusiast, I’d soon tire of being asked to shake my fist and howl in order to make regular Democrats look more “centrist” and to “push the debate” towards center-left positions I don’t actually share.
This is not to deny the problem that Goldberg and many others have highlighted. One quickly despairs each time some semi-educated newsreader stares at the camera and talks about “the debate” over “death panels” or the reality of climate change as though these are fully debatable propositions.
But perhaps there’s something to be said after all for truth-telling and reasonableness, not in the pursuit of compromises with the crazy people of the Right, but because a majority of people in this country will ultimately recognize and reject craziness, just as they’ve generally done in the past. Progressives shouldn’t have to cultivate their own cadre of “extremists,” or feign extremism in their own “positioning,” in order to show they are actually trying to solve the country’s many problems. Sometimes it’s best to say what you actually think, with emotional empathy and passion to be sure, but with a little more faith in democracy.
It’s now increasingly clear that big segments of the chattering classes will not rest until President Obama is somehow forced to stop talking about bipartisanship.
That’s been a standard theme for some progressives, going back to the early stages of the 2008 campaign, who have fretted that Obama will needlessly sacrifice progressive principles and constituencies in the vain pursuit of nonexistent Republican support. But now you can add a big MSM source: Politico‘s top honchos Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, who have published sort of a primal scream on the subject.
Even though VandeHei and Allen acknowledge that the destruction of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, and the happiness of conservatives to remain “the party of No” are the most important factors contributing to polarization, they just can’t resist blaming Obama and Democrats at least as much as the opposition:
President Barack Obama is on the warpath over myths and distortions about health care reform, but he’s spreading one of his own: that there’s any chance of genuinely bipartisan health care legislation reaching his desk this fall.
In truth, Democratic offers to reach across the aisle — and Republican demands that they do so — are largely a charade, performed for the benefit of a huge bloc of practical-minded voters who hunger for the two parties to work together and are mystified that it never seems to happen.
And that’s the bulk of their analysis: independent voters want bipartisanship, so both parties, with equal dishonesty, are pretending to pursue it. He said, she said, and he and she are both lying.
Well, whatever. Allen and VandeHei may think that pursuing bipartisanship in the knowledge that it largely won’t materialize is just dishonest pandering by Obama, or an exercise in finger-pointing, but I beg to differ. Republicans have consciously chosen to systematically oppose health care reform–not just Obama’s version, but any version–and it actually is important for Americans to understand that in terms of what they can expect to happen next if Obama’s initiative is defeated. There is no Plan B for the GOP, or for the country. By “reaching out,” Obama is forcing Republicans to ever-more-explicitly make that choice, and as the latest polling shows, the public is beginning to “get it.”
Moreover, the “wedge” Obama is seeking to create between Republicans and independents is reflected in his formulation–generally ignored by Allen and VandeHei–that he’s trying to utilize “the best ideas of both parties” even when he’s not getting cooperation from the other side. His whole health care scheme relies on a competitive private-insurance-based system for universal coverage. Many of his proposals for “bending the curve” on health care spending and for Medicare reforms were once championed by Republicans. Yes, of course, Republicans quickly abandon and even repudiate these themes once Obama picks them up, but after a while, people begin to notice the pattern. And that’s both real and honest.
In reality, the biggest single problem with Obama’s rhetoric of bipartisanship isn’t that Republicans rise to the bait by refusing to cooperate. It is, instead, the media coverage of the issue which blames both sides equally, dismisses Obama’s outreach as cynical pandering, and recommends that the ignorant public forget about changing the culture of Washington, or either party.
Joe Wilson’s little town hall tantrum during the president’s speech the other night has fed an inevitable question: what is it about the conservatives of South Carolina? You got Mark Sanford trying to keep the ctizens of his own state from benefitting from economic stimulus legislation long after it was enacted (but before his own pants-down moment). You got Jim DeMint almost daily embracing every extremist way of looking at government that he can find. And now Wilson’s managing to get himself compared to Preston “Bully” Brooks, the antebellum symbol of southern bellicosity.
Alexander Burns of Poltico examines the question of the Palmetto State’s peculiar taste for conservative extremism, and does come up with this interesting assessment from one of the SC GOP’s First Families:
Carroll Campbell III, the son of the popular late governor and a Republican exploring his own bid for Congress next year, suggested Wilson’s behavior may have resonated with a powerful conservative base frustrated by its minority status.
“I talk to a lot of Republican groups, but most of these individuals are really happy that at least he’s showing some backbone,” said Campbell, whose father served two terms as governor. “Republicans are desperate for, looking for the new face of politics…There’s a sense of satisfaction that at least he can step up and do what he did.”
But there’s clearly a lot more going on than contemporary political feelings. The great southern historian V.O. Key once referrred to South Carolina and Mississippi as “the super-South.” These were the states where slaves represented a very large majority of the population prior to emancipation. SC was famously the state that nearly broke the union during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, and then did break it by firing on Fort Sumter. It was a state where there was virtually no hint of cross-racial class solidarity during the Populist revolt. It was the state where class conflict among white people was best symbolized by the brutal crushing of efforts to unionize the textile mills in the 1930s and 1940s.
South Carolina is the state where the realignment of conservative whites towards the Republican Party was really pioneered, with the defections of Sen. Strom Thurmond and Rep. Albert Watson in 1964 started a long trend throughout the region. And it’s no coincidence that the SC GOP was for many years pretty much the wholly owned subsidiary of the Milliken textile family, among the bitterest economic reactionaries in the country.
So there’s some history there, all right, and enough drama to make the occasional demagogue or South American sexual tourist in the political ranks not terribly conspicuous. It’s a wonderful thing for the embattled ranks of South Cackalacky progressives that the state played an important role in the nomination of Barack Obama as president. But it was indeed a rare occasion.
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