The most interesting aspect of American media coverage of Japan’s startling “change election” is that nobody much knows what to make of it. Yes, it’s assumed that the opposition Democratic Party, which dislodged the Liberal Democratic Party by a landslide, will be cooler to the United States, even as its leader, soon-to-be Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama makes it clear nothing much will change on the foreign policy front. Maybe Americans just don’t understand Japanese politics.
But Matt Yglesias is definitely on to something in suggesting that systems in which one party dominates for long periods of time don’t tend to be terribly ideological:

One consequence of this prolonged period of one-party rule is that the LDP is not an especially ideological political party. It’s essentially a “party of government” patronage machine that contains diverse factions and different points of view. The Democratic Party, consequently, is more of a generic umbrella opposition grouping than a clear ideological alternative. Thus the Democrats are riding in on a tide of public discontent, but don’t seem to have articulated much in the way of a policy agenda beyond the obscure issue of bureaucracy reform.

Back in the late 1990s, I participated in a international conference in Taiwan sponsored by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the long-time opposition party to the reigning Kuomintang (KMT). The purpose of the conference was basically to draw on center-left experiences elewhere to help devise an ideological and policy agenda for the DPP, which had long been defined as simply the opposition party, and as the preferred party of ethnic Taiwainese who had long resented the domination of “mainlanders” from China. After a period in government beginning in 2000, the DPP (and for that matter, the KMT) has a somewhat sharper ideological focus these days.
Come to think of it, the same dynamic was evident in the “Solid South” of my childhood in Georgia. The governing Democratic Party was a catchment of all sorts of people from serious progressives to hard-core segregationists, and the Republican Party was a motley assortment of transplanted Yankess, older African-Americans, and people interested in federal patronage during Republican administrations in Washington. Ideology was not a particularly clear or important partisan differentiator until the Civil Rights Act, and even then it took a decade or two for the parties to sort themselves out.
So maybe Japan’s parties will make more “sense” to us foreigners once the LDP has been out of office for a while. Serious competition has a way of clarifying things.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It’s debatable whether the latest incarnation of Mike Huckabee represents a turn to the dark side by the genial and amusing 2008 presidential candidate that a lot of Democrats admired, or a revelation of what the man has always really been.
But ever since he became a radio and TV gabber, the Bad Huck has taken over. Aside from his early charges that Barack Obama’s agenda was aimed at creating a Union of American Socialist Republics, and his more recent arguments for a displacement of Palestinians to a homeland somewhere outside Palestine, Huck really went over the brink today, as reported by HuffPo’s Sam Stein:

The 2008 Republican presidential candidate suggested during his radio show on Friday that, under President Obama’s health care plan, Kennedy would have been told to “go home to take pain pills and die” during his last year of life.
“[I]t was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don’t have as long to live might want to just consider taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them,” said Huckabee. “Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for.”

This despicable rant should disqualify Mike Huckabee from any further liberal sympathy, no matter how much he tries to joke or rock-n-roll his way back into mainstream acceptability.

Over at TNR, Jonathan Cohn asks whether the Obama White House should have promoted a different message on health reform from the beginning, and makes a point that should be pretty obvious by now: administration efforts to respond to demands for cost control measures by deficit hawks earlier this year led to all the rationing talk that reform opponents are now using to scare Americans.

The trouble for Obama is that, in getting serious about cost, he gave critics lots of fat, juicy targets. Obama proposed to tie payments to quality; Betsy McCaughey said he would be giving doctors money for pulling the plug on grandma. Obama proposed to put a board of experts, using clinical evidence, to set Medicare payment rates; Sarah Palin interpreted that as creating a “death panel” that would declare the sick and disabled unworthy of treatment. The great irony is that by trying earnestly to craft a plan that could control costs, as well as expand coverage, Obama has provoked a political backlash that will make cost control harder in the future. He’s tried to tackle health care like a grown-up and, at the moment, he’s suffering for it politically.

The long-range political implications of what’s happened on cost control are, as Cohn suggested, pretty troubling. Right now it appears a lot of Americans can’t distinguish between quality-and-cost based second-guessing of doctors’ decisions, and euthanasia. If for years to come, any suggestions for questioning provider costs or treatments are greeted with shrieks of “Rationing!” Rationing!” we’re going to have a real hard time ever getting a grip on health care costs. It’s ironic that Republicans are the ones who have promoted the backlash against cost control, even as they still wail about deficits and costs.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Politics being politics, there’s already talk about who would run in a special election in Massachusetts to succeed the late Edward Kennedy, assuming the legislature there doesn’t change the system to allow a gubernatorial appointment. And in Republicanland, conservative columnist Peter Roff has created a stir by suggesting that Mitt Romney run for the seat.
I don’t know anything about Roff’s loyalties, but the idea is tailor-made to appeal to the Mittster’s intra-party enemies. For one thing, he’d probably lose. For another, if he won, it would have to be by appealing to policy views popular in Massachusetts, which is precisely what earned him the reputation as a flip-flopper or closet liberal when he ran in 2008. And on top of everything else, the shriveled booby prize for a victory would be a term that only lasted until 2012, which would make him either a non-candidate for president or an exceptionally invisible senator. Yes, Barack Obama successfully ran for president as a freshman Senator, but when you are a former governor who’s already run for president once and has a gazillion dollars in the bank, why bother?
Expect Romney to rule out a Senate run within minutes of any official announcement of a special election.
UPDATE: The latest buzz from Massachusetts is that if Gov. Deval Patrick does get the power to appoint a temporary “caretaker” senator prior to a special election, his choice might well be former governor and 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis. This would be an appropriate valediction for the all-but-forgotten and much-derided Duke, whose political weaknesses in the 1988 election were more attributable to the general weaknesses of the Democratic Party than most people wanted to admit at the time.

I can’t match J.P. Green’s eloquence in his obituary for “the lion,” Ted Kennedy. But I do have a few thoughts in appreciation of this great legislator, crossposted from the Progressive Policy Institute site:
Perhaps the most fitting epitaph for the career of Edward Moore Kennedy, who died last night at the age of 77, is that he managed to both embody and transcend the mythos of his remarkable family. First elected to the Senate as a callow assistant district attorney to fill out the term of his brother, the President of the United States, within six years he endured the assassinations of both JFK and RFK, and without any real choice in the matter, inherited the vast expectations their shortened lives had created. He became the de facto leader of old-fashioned American liberalism before he turned 40, and with only occasional competition, remained so until his death.
Some now remember his one presidential campaign, a failed challenge to Jimmy Carter in 1980, as a low point of his career. But in many respects, it actually liberated him from a “destiny” for which he was less suited than the one he built as one of the great legislators of his or any other era. It’s hard to credit this now, but when Ted Kennedy’s presidential aspirations were dashed, after many years of speculation about when he would make the move towards the White House, he was about the same age as Barack Obama is today. It’s doubtful he could have accomplished more as president in four or eight years than he did before and after that time in the Senate.
Today’s tributes will often note the irony that this man of ideological principle was also a consummate bipartisan legislator. At a time when “bipartisanship” has become a forlorn hope or (to some) a bitter curse, it’s worth remembering Kennedy’s key role in the last great spasm of genuine legislative bipartisanship, the No Child Left Behind legislation, along with his frustrated efforts to secure another bipartisan breakthrough on immigration reform.
But despite his legislative accomplishments in so many areas, from rights for the disabled to national service, there’s no question that universal health coverage was the consuming passion of his entire career. As a freshman senator, he was there to vote for the original Medicare and Medicaid legislation. And in the ensuing 44 years, he played central roles in every painful and frustrating step the country has taken towards universal health coverage.
This legacy will be cited often in the days just ahead, as health care reform advocates tout the enactment of today’s endangered legislation as a fitting tribute to Kennedy, even as others (however disingenuously) cite his bipartisanship and willingness to accept incremental steps towards his goals as grounds for scaling back the drive towards universal coverage. It’s a good bet that he wouldn’t mind the political use of his own memorials if they do in fact contribute to the achievement of universal health coverage, just as he always accepted the unfair burden of the Kennedy family mantle, which aroused so much love and hate in so many people.
In the end, the best tributes to his memory will be written in legislation, the distillation of strong values and bold goals into concrete action for the common good. Few Americans have ever been Ted Kennedy’s peer in the art of making dreams into laws, and he will be missed.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
There are two specters haunting progressives as we near the endgame of this year’s health care reform debate. The first, of course, is the sad precedent of the Clinton effort. But the second is a success story, cited often in invidious comparison to Obama: the ghost of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s epochal legislative blitz of 1964-65, which produced the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid.
It’s something you hear about all the time in casual conversation among Democratic political junkies, particularly those with chronic doubts about the Obama’s legislative strategy and his personal style: Why can’t he be more like LBJ, who exploited big Democratic majorities in Congress to get big things done, and fast? And LBJ is cited not just as a successful activist president, but also as, to cite the title of the last-published volume of Robert Caro’s vast biography of the man, “The Master of the Senate.” Here’s how Tom Schaller put it yesterday in a pitch-perfect essay for Salon reflecting present progressive second-guessing of Obama’s, and congressional Democrats’, approach to health reform, entitled “What Went Wrong?”:

Obama is no LBJ … Given the reflexive Republican biting of Obama’s extended hand, perhaps the president should have dispensed from the start with any serious effort to find accommodation with the GOP. … Instead of wasting energy on trying to persuade Republicans, it could have worked over dissenting Democrats in the Senate, and had a better shot at jamming the public option through.

Schaller thus invokes the myth that LBJ, a famously truculent and manipulative SOB, when given a similar gift of initial public support and a big Democratic congressional majorities (particularly after the 1964 landslide), didn’t screw around with “bipartisanship” or compromises but instead bent Congress, including the inherently change-averse Senate, to his progressive will. Woe onto us that Barack Obama, the professorial amateur with a fatal addiction to bipartisanship and compromise, cannot be more like LBJ!
The problem with this argument is that real LBJ wasn’t really that partisan legislative steamroller who announced what he wanted and got it. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 accomplished, lest we forget, basic citizenship guarantees that took 88 years to enact after the end of Reconstruction. It took a martyred president and a vast array of contemporary and heavily publicized outrages against African-Americans to give these bills the political momentum they needed. And far from being the fruit of aggressive partisanship, the big civil rights laws represented a bipartisan and trans-ideological consensus outside the South to impose national values on that rebellious region.
Yes, LBJ’s leadership (in tandem with congressional leaders like Hubert Humphrey) was essential to the enactment of the civil rights laws over southern Senate filibusters. But according to Caro, LBJ’s true “mastery of the Senate” was best displayed on behalf of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which accomplished virtually nothing for African-Americans other than the establishment of a precedent for future action.
As for Medicare and Medicaid, the idea that LBJ came up with a bold set of proposals and ram-rodded them through Congress is wrong by all sorts of measurements. It’s important to understand that however important these health care entitlements became, they were at the time clearly major compromises from the progressive commitment, first articulated by Harry Truman, to enact national health insurance. Medicare, obviously, was offered only to retirees, not all Americans–a distinction that is cherished as a matter of principle by those Medicare beneficiaries who today oppose universal health coverage. Medicaid was even more of a compromise, eschewing national health coverage for a crazy quilt system in which the states would largely determine eligibility and benefit levels, with coverage generally limited to low-income families with children.
Medicare and Medicaid also did not spring fully formed from LBJ’s head or his White House, and weren’t enacted via royal disdain for Congress and the petty fiefdoms of the committee system. Federal health insurance for retirees was narrowly defeated in the Senate in 1960 and in 1962. It finally passed the Senate in 1964, only to succumb in the House when Democratic Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills refused to support it. It was finally enacted in 1965, but only after Mills shaped the legislation, and also added Medicaid, intended as a sop to Republicans and the AMA, which had long proposed health care subsidies for low-income families as an alternative to national health insurance.
So the myth of LBJ as the driven president demanding and securing progressive legislation against the grain of party, congressional prerogatives, and even public opinion, is an exaggeration, to put it mildly. LBJ showed great courage and resolution on civil rights, but he was riding almost a century of momentum, and he certainly didn’t reject bipartisanship in his effort to get the job done. The landmark health care initiatives of Medicare and Medicaid were “betrayals” of the long-established progressive goal of national health insurance–certainly far more so than, say, the substitution of a health care cooperatives for a “public option” in a system of universal health coverage.
Team Obama faces a crucible this autumn in trying to get health reform enacted, and the president’s legacy will be greatly affected by success or failure. But while Lyndon Johnson may provide inspiration in the small ball of legislative sausage-making or even the big lift of public persuasion, Barack Obama doesn’t really need to look over his shoulder at the big Texan’s shade.

Republican opportunism and irresponsibility is hardly a new development in the political world. But I have to say, RNC chairman Michael Steele’s latest gambit–depicting the GOP as the party determined to protect Medicare from cuts or reforms or really any changes at all–absolutely takes the cake.
The new party line, unveiled by Steele in a Washington Post op-ed yesterday, and now emblazoned on the RNC site as a “Seniors’ Health Care Bill of Rights,” represents one of the most incredible flip-flops in living memory.
The antipathy of the GOP and the conservative movement towards Medicare goes back, of course, to the beginnings of the program, and even to its pre-history. Ronald Reagan, after all, made his political debut attacking proposals to create Medicare as “socialized medicine” back in 1961. Barry Goldwater, of course, opposed Medicare, but so too did future Republican presidential nominees George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole.
Though Medicare quickly became part of the national landscape and something of a sacred cow, Republicans in power could never resist the opportunity to go after it. That happened in 1981 after Ronald Reagan’s election, and even more famously in 1995, with the advent of the so-called Republican Revolution led by Newt Gingrich. Efforts to pare back Medicare spending arguably contributed more than any other factor to the failure and eventual repudiation of said Revolution.
With that experience in relatively fresh memory, it came to pass in George W. Bush’s presidency that Karl Rove decided on a bold move to win over senior voters with an actual expansion of Medicare via a prescription drug benefit. The initiative was clumsily handled and not terribly popular initially. But more importantly, the Medicare expansion almost immediately became exhibit number one in the conservative claim that Republicans had abandoned their principles under Bush, and were subsequently defeated in 2006 and then in 2008 because of (no, not Iraq or Katrina or the recession) “runwaway spending.” Indeed, one of the few things (other than his Iraq policies) conservatives activists liked about 2008 Republican nominee John McCain is that he opposed the Rx drug bill.
After the 2008 elections, the we-lost-because-we-spent-too-much self-diagnosis of Republicans became holy writ. And in early policy blueprints for Republican “recovery,” Medicare was once again in the bullseye, typically through proposals to “voucherize” the program, which would largely eliminate its risk-spreading function and in all likelihood reduce the money available for health insurance for most seniors. Suffice it to say that such an approach is vastly more of a change to Medicare than anything Democrats have proposed this year or in the past.
To be clear, there’s no particular reason conservatives should like Medicare in anything like its current form. It is, after all, a single-payer program similar to the wicked socialist schemes employed in godless foreign countries like Canada. And it’s the most natural thing in the world for conservatives to attack Medicare in the course of attacking Democratic proposals for universal health care. As Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), chairman of the conservative House Republican Study Committee, said in an op-ed just last month:

While the stated goal remains noble, as a physician, I can attest that nothing has had a greater negative effect on the delivery of health care than the federal government’s intrusion into medicine through Medicare.

I haven’t seen Price’s reaction to Steele’s ukase making maximum defense of Medicare the GOP’s badge of honor, but you have to figure he’s not real pleased about it.
So who really speaks for the GOP on Medicare? It’s hard to say right now, but I’m inclined to believe forty-plus years of conservative hostility to Medicare a bit more than Steele’s pandering stunt.

The week’s political news includes indications that Rudy Giuliani is strongly considering a run for the governorship of NY next year. It’s an interesting prospect. Despite the many troubles of Gov. David Paterson, and of the Democratic Party in the legislature, NY remains a strongly Democratic state.
Rudy can presumably have the GOP nomination for the asking, but Empire State Republicans ought to give a bit of thought to his remarkably inept presidential campaign last year. Stealing a page from the unsuccessful Al Gore campaign of 1988, Rudy became the latest presidential candidate to try a back-loaded nomination strategy that conceded Iowa and wound up focusing on Florida. It predictably failed, as did his clumsy efforts to pander to cultural conservatives who would never, ever trust him.
You’d have to guess the pre-2008 Giuliani is the guy who will be running for governor if he decides to take the plunge. But some of the things he said on the presidential campaign trail will definitely come back to haunt him.

I nearly didn’t bother to read Jonathan Martin’s Politico article today about Rep. Allen Boyd’s reflections on the health care reform protesters he’s encountered at town hall meetings in his district during the August recess. Entitled “A Blue Dog’s Lament,” and subtitled “‘People Are Scared,'” it looked like yet another maddening snail’s-eye-view piece suggesting that the protesters represent John Q. Public and portend the righteous doom of health care reform. I also figured Boyd might well be one of those Democrats opposed to health care reform for less than principled reasons, who’s using the protests as an excuse to do what he’s decided to do anyway.
But the piece is actually worth reading. Martin–and for that matter, Boyd–do seem to understand that the protesters represent a minority of voters, even in Boyd’s conservative Florida district, who probably voted against Barack Obama last year and are simply and logically extending their opposition to his agenda into the opportunity to make some noise about it. And it’s interesting that the protesters seem as upset about TARP as they are about their perceptions of health care reform.
As for Boyd, he’s making it clear at these meetings that he’s going to vote against the House version of health reform. But he appears open to what might well come out of a House-Senate conference committee, and is going out of his way to correct misperceptions of the various bills, and also to remind protesters that many of them already depend on government for health insurance.
The irony that comes through in this account is that many of the protesters are being manipulated by reform opponents even as they express fear of manipulation by Big Government:

“They want to take over our life,” insisted Elaine Thompson just minutes before she shoved a stack of signed pink slips and a copy of the Constitution in Boyd’s hands.
Wearing a shirt that read “Concerned American Patriots” on the front and “Wake Up America” on the back, Thompson, of Marianna, said the White House was being run using “Chicago terrorism.”
“Saul Salinsky is their mentor,” she replied when asked to explain what she meant, misstating the name of leftist community organizer Saul Alinsky, who is often cited by talk radio host Rush Limbaugh. “They are controlling what’s happening in this country.”
After his summer recess, Allen Boyd may disagree.