Given the continuing back-and-forth discussions of how much political risk Democrats are willing to take to enact health care reform, I thought it might be worth a closer look at that hit list the National Republican Congressional Committee put out in August, of 70 House districts they are allegedly targeting in 2010.
Whatever you think of the list, which is certainly ambitious, it does provide some sense of the Democratic Members of the House that have some reason to be politically sensitive to cross-partisan opinion on key votes.
Of the 70 districts in question, 49 went for John McCain in 2008, and 45 are represented by Members from the two Democratic “wave” elections of 2006 and 2008. These are all extraordinarily obvious targets for a midterm election campaign.
In terms of ideological affinity, 25 of the 70 targeted Democrats are members of the Blue Dog Coalition (nearly half the Caucus’ total membership); 30 are members of the moderate-ish New Democrat Coalition; and just three are members of the Progressive Caucus. Since twelve people on the hit list are members of both the Blue Dogs and the NDC, that means 43 of the 70 targeted Dems are self-identified in the House as moderate-to-conservative.
It’s true that many prominent Blue Dogs can’t much plead political peril in taking positions at odds with the congressional Democratic leadership or the White House. But as a group, they’re a lot more vulnerable than their more liberal peers. That’s why it’s helpful to keep reminding them that a failed Obama administration is not going to help any Democrat politically.

Whatever else happens in the “endgame” of health care reform in Congress (and a lot obviously depends on the President”s big speech next week), the drama over “the public option” within the Democratic Party is going to be a factor. You can argue all day long, as many, many progressives already have, that this shouldn’t be the make-or-break issue for anybody, but the fact remains that it is.
For many Democratic “centrists,” the public option is the symbol of a “government takeover” of health care that plays into conservative attack lines, and a potential threat to the survival of private health insurance. And for many self-conscious Democratic progressives, the public option represents a huge compromise of what they actually consider necessary, a single-payer system.
But this isn’t entirely about substance, either. The more the public option has received attention from both its friends and its enemies, the more its fate in health care reform has become a crucial test of power within the Democratic Party, particularly for progressives who have for years been livid at what they consider the disproportionate influence of “Republican Lite” Blue Dogs.
As Matt Yglesias (quoting a Chris Bowers post) succinctly summed it up today:

[W]hile the movement on behalf of the public option certainly wants a public option and believes the public option is important, the larger goal is to “to try and make the federal government more responsive to progressives in the long-term” by engaging in a form of inside-outside organizing and legislative brinksmanship that’s aimed at enhancing the level of clout small-p progressives in general and the big-p Progressive Caucus in particular enjoy on Capitol Hill.
That requires, arguably, some tactical extremism. If you become known as the guys who are always willing to be reasonable and fold while the Blue Dogs are the guys who are happy to let the world burn unless someone kisses your ring, then in the short-term your reasonableness will let some things get done but over the long-term you’ll get squeezed out. And it also requires you to pick winnable fights, which may mean blowing the specific stakes in the fight a bit out of proportion in the service of the larger goal.

The big question, of course, is whether a my-way-or-the-highway position on the public option is a “winnable fight” in terms of enacting legislation in Congress. And in a direct response to Yglesias’ post, Ezra Klein warns progressives against playing chicken with the Blue Dogs on this subject:

This seems a bit like a firefighter attempting to out-arson an arsonist. The reason the Blue Dogs have a reputation for being happy to let the world burn is that they really, really, really are willing to let the world burn, let health care fail, let cap-and-trade die, let Iraq grind on. The reason liberals have a reputation for not wanting to let the world burn is that all the anti-burn initiatives under discussion are, in fact, items from their agenda. They really, really, really don’t want the world to burn. It’s possible they’ll be able to do it once. But what happens then? The Blue Dogs, now distancing themselves from a party that seems to be plummeting in the polls, will happily abandon cap-and-trade, because that’s their preferred position anyway. Will the liberals? What if we need another stimulus? The Blue Dogs don’t want to support that bill. Attracting them will require all manner of concessions, if it’s possible at all. Will the liberals kill that, too?

Klein goes on to address the frustration of party progressives about the unfairness of this disequalibrium of power within the party, which limits the ability to make “vulnerable Democrats [vote] for initiatives their voters don’t obviously support in districts Barack Obama didn’t win at a time when the president is no longer popular.”

Can you beat the Blue Dogs at their own game of final-stage obstruction? The reason they’ve chosen that game, after all, is because their incentives are well aligned to win it. Liberals need another game. Maybe it’s primary challenges. That strategy has certainly worked against Arlen Specter, Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Grassley. Liberal groups certainly have the money to mount five or six high-profile challenges a season. Maybe it’s procedural changes meant to weaken the power of centrists. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s all of these things. But it’s hard to imagine that liberals will ever beat the Blue Dogs at their own game. The likelier outcome is that everybody loses.

I’d put it in a slightly different way: if, say, the Progressive Caucus in the House wants a final, definitive test of strength against the Blue Dogs, it might make sense to choose one in which the failure to act is entirely acceptable according to their own principles and priorities. At the same time, Blue Dogs need to be frequently reminded that they will be the very first Democrats to suffer electoral disaster if the President’s legislative agenda comes to grief.

The latest right-wing craziness to erupt onto the political scene is truly revealing: hysteria over a planned presidential speech to school children encouraging them to stay in school, work hard, and accept responsibility. The speech, slated for next week, sounds about as anodyne–and if anything, conservative–as any speech Barack Obama has ever given. Participation by schools is voluntary. The President is doing what presidents do when addressing kids: setting an example and encouraging them to be good students and good citizens.
But that’s not how it’s being interepreted in the fever swamps, of course. Led by Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck, conservatives are shrieking about some White House conspiracy to indoctrinate children and enlist them in Obama’s godless hordes of brainwashed totalitarians.
It didn’t take long at all, of course, for this looniness to get picked up by “respectable” Republicans. Here’s what the chairman of the Florida Republican Party had to say in a press release yesterday:

As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology. The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power.

Worse yet, conservative gabbers are actually encouraging parents to keep their kids out of school on September 8. Of course, we are talking about people who often denounce public education entirely as a socialist plot, but it’s still a new low, and a rather ironic way to deal with manufactured allegations that the president is trying to politicize children.

Progressives tired of the sense that controversy and misfortune are hounding Democratic politicians exclusively these days should be forgiven for indulging in a bit of schadenfreude at the continuing travails of one-time 2012 presidential aspirant Mark Sanford. Though he’s disappeared from the national political radar over the last few weeks, down in South Cackalacki, he just won’t go away, as detailed in a Wall Street Journal report today by Valerie Bauerline:

To resurrect his image, Mr. Sanford is on a forgiveness tour, criss-crossing the state and imploring civic-club members to join him in pushing for dull but substantial changes to South Carolina’s state constitution. He said he is eager to regain the confidence of his constituents, one fried-chicken luncheon at a time.

But despite his doughty efforts to bore Palmetto State residents into disinterest in his scandals, Sanford can’t help but notice the buzzards circling his path from Rotary luncheon to Kiwanis breakfast. He’s still in deep trouble over allegations of illegal use of state funds for personal and political travel. His former chief political strategist, his wife, has vacated the Governor’s Mansion and split to the coast with his sons. And most recently, in a fine piece of political jiu-jitsu, his Lieutenant Governor (and bitter intra-party enemy), Andre Bauer, greased the skids for his departure by pledging to drop a planned 2010 gubernatorial run if Sanford soon resigns, thus giving his own rivals a tangible incentive to shove the incumbent out the door.
Knowing that the legislature can’t impeach him until January, Sanford’s trying to gut it out, but doesn’t seem to be winning many converts; fully half of the state’s voters now favor a resignation. In a fine kicker, Bauerlein’s account of Sanford’s travails ends with this quote from an audience member at a Kiwanis appearance:

Bill Taylor, the 75-year-old owner of a hotel and apartments, said he listened to Mr. Sanford, whom he had voted for twice. “He kept saying, ‘We’re going to do so-and-so.’ How many ‘we’s does he think he’s got behind him?”

Not enough.

Bob McDonnell, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, has been in full backpedal mode in denying that he still holds the reactionary cultural views he expressed in a 1989 master’s thesis at Regents University. Fair enough, I guess, though there’s a rough justice in anything that raises questions about the long-time Christian Right ally’s current efforts to depict himself as this nice moderate man who’s mainly interested in transportation policy.
But someone needs to ask him if he’s ready to repudiate some far more recent comments from 2003, when he suggested that anyone who had violated the Commonwealth’s sodomy laws—which proscribe any sort of oral sex–probably wasn’t qualified to be a judge. Most interestingly, when asked if he had ever violated said laws himself, McDonnell said: “Not that I can recall.” Poor guy.

A lot of Democrats look at Republican efforts to alienate Medicare beneficiaries from health care reform and think it’s all a matter of misinformation: if seniors really understood that their own health insurance was “government-run,” they’d be less inclined to oppose an offer of similiar insurance to others.
I”m afraid this interepretation misses something fundamental about the conservative assault on health care reform: the idea is to convince seniors that the uninsured don’t deserve similar federal benefits. In essence, they’re bringing back the old “welfare wedge” in a new form, this time aimed at stigmatizing the working poor and at middle-class families trying to stay in the middle class.
I’ve got an article up at Salon that goes into this in some detail, and examines how “welfare” rhetoric began characterizing Republican attacks on Obama’s policies back during the presidential campaign. This is something progressives need to get a grip on, because this divisive strategy is by no means limited to, or likely to end with, health care reform.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It’s becoming more obvious each day that the conservative assault on Barack Obama’s legislative agenda, including his incrementalist efforts towards universal health coverage, isn’t much about the details. It is, instead, a counter-revolutionary campaign to revive 1980s-era middle-class resentments of particular beneficiaries of government social programs. Beneath the hysterical talk about Obama’s “socialism” or the “Democrat Socialist Party,” conservatives are actually revolting against the ancient targets of the New Deal and Great Society, and indeed, against the very idea that “interference” with the distributional implications of free markets is ever morally legitimate.
Consider a long, classic column published at National Review last week by the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, entitled “Obama and Redistributive Change.” It’s an angry screed against the egalitarian underpinnings of progressive politics, past, present and future. It goes over-the-top in suggesting that Obama is determined to wipe out absolutely every distinction in wealth and status among Americans. But the self-righteous fury against any “redistributive” activity by government seems perfectly genuine, representing as it does a rejection of virtually every way of ordering society other than laissez-faire capitalism:

When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.

Hanson is clearly looking beyond our current political debates at much of the history of civilization, and it infuriates him. But if Obama’s health care reform efforts represent a drive to “enforce equality of results,” what existing government program can’t be described the same way?
Social Security is redistributive. Medicare is redistributive. Public education is redistributive. Public investments in highways, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure are most definitely redistributive. The land reforms that accompanied the rise of every society, dating back to feudalism, are inherently and overtly redistributive. Even defense spending is redistributive, insofar as the benefits of national security are rarely captured by current taxpayers.
Beyond government and politics, it’s not only “socialists” who have embraced “redistributive” thinking. The Hebrew lawgivers and prophets; Jesus Christ; Mohammad–all were blatant redistributionists. All denied that wealth or status was invariably the product of productivity and virtue, and rejected the idea that redistribution was theft.
If Hanson and the many conservatives who so often sound like him want to openly take the posture that much of American–not to mention, world–history is a long, disastrous saga of tyranny in the pursuit of “enforced equality,” they are free to do so. But they should at least acknowledge that the rage against Barack Obama is really just displaced rage at democracy; at the mild forms of collective social action embraced by most Americans during the last century; at the longstanding policy positions of both major political parties; and at many of the very people they are calling upon to kill Obama’s agenda–including Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries, people with government-protected mortgages, farm-price-support recipients, military veterans, and public employees tout court. At an absolute minimum, Hanson should rush to publish a column savaging Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele for trying to position the GOP as the Party of Medicare this last week.

I know it’s the last week before Labor Day and all, when the higher-status pundits are by tradition esconced (with the First Family) at Martha’s Vineyard, but it sures seems like the conservative commentariat, so excited by town hall protests and declining presidential approval ratings just last week, is kinda dialing it in right now.
This very morning, you had a George Will column sniffing that Barack Obama and his allies are “unserious;” a Robert Samuelson column lecturing everyone about federal budget deficits and entitlements; a Max Boot column warning that America’s enemies are chortling in derision at America’s newfound delicacy about torture; and even a “historical” Michael Barone column that manages to suggest the the “royal status” of the Kennedy family was spoiled by its growing liberalism.
And just to prime the pump, there was even a snarling Dick Cheney interview on Fox yesterday.
It was all so predictable and by-the-numbers that it could have been, and may have been, filed a week ago, or even a year ago.
Looks like Barack Obama’s not the only one who needs some batteries recharged.