Not surprisingly, Republicans are anticipating the President’s health care reform speech before Congress tomorrow with some serious pre-spin. The basic take, expressed by Jonah Goldberg today, is that this arrogant politician thinks he can override overwhelming public opposition to health reform with oratory, but it won’t work.
I’d normally just scoff this all off as predictable partisan hackery, and in many cases that’s what it is, but I would like to take a closer look at one column of negative predictions about the speech, by Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics. I do so because I don’t think Jay’s a hack, but his writing does illustrate some circular reasoning that’s common among many Republicans and even some Democrats. It all goes back to the 2008 campaign:

President Obama is a compelling speaker to a relatively narrow segment of the country – namely, African Americans and white social liberals. He inspired them to support his primary campaign against Hillary Clinton – but other voters (including many in his own party) were harder to win over. His Philadelphia speech on race was no Cooper Union; it merely distracted attention from the main question of why he spent so many years in that church. His numbers still fell, and he struggled through the rest of the primaries, even losing South Dakota on the day he declared victory. He then gave big speeches in Europe and Denver, but it was only thanks to the financial panic of last September that he had a breakthrough.
Still, his speechifying seems to give some people a thrill up the leg – and the idea that he’s not just a good speaker, but a game changing speaker, has become conventional wisdom. I think the White House believes that this is actually true.

As this snippet illustrates, Jay, like a lot of people, is deeply invested in the idea that Obama’s victory last year was sort of a fluke, and certainly didn’t indicate that Americans supported (or even paid attention to) the agenda he campaigned on. He won because people were tired of Bush, or because of the financial meltdown, nothing else. And as a result, he shouldn’t expect to act on his agenda. In the case of health reform, the President should, as Jay has said a couple of times, sort of stamping his foot, “scale his proposal back,” and forget about anything that looks or smells like universal health coverage. After all, this remains a center-right country, right?
This attitude is related to another one that you hear a lot: that Obama has unaccountably “tilted to the left” since taking office, listening to liberals and disrespecting moderates. For many Republican partisans, this spin, consciously or unconsciously, is designed to mask their own rather dramatic shift to the right since 2006, when they first decided (and then decided again after the 2008 election) that Bush’s “big government conservatism” was the reason for their electoral weakness. I don’t think this is Jay Cost’s motive; like David Brooks, he really has convinced himself that there isn’t and hasn’t recently been an electoral majority for mainstream progressivism, so if Obama is trying to implement his campaign agenda, in conjunction with the congressional Democrats who were elected on similar platforms, that counts as a shift to the left from what he thinks Obama ought to do.
The problem with this mindset, other than the fact that it involves treating Barack Obama like a treacherous backstabber for doing exactly what he said he’d do during the campaign, is that it blinds one to the actual politics of the current situation. Obama’s hardly home free on health reform, of course, but at present, it looks very likely that the House will pass a bill, and that Democrats have a better than average chance of coming up with a deal with Olympia Snowe and perhaps one or two more Senate Republicans that will enable them to get 60 votes for cloture. Alternatively, even though Republicans will shriek about it, it’s within the power of Senate Democrats to use reconciliation and avoid the risk of filibuster altogether. Assuming the Senate bill has some sort of public option, even if it’s “triggered,” I think the deal can get through the House, too. Or at any rate, it’s hardly the sort of guaranteed losing proposition that both Goldberg and Cost seem to think it is.
If I’m right, then the political context of the presidential speech becomes different: it’s not some desparate measure to work political magic, but an effort to frame the endgame of the health debate, to deal with the lies that are out there about what he’s trying to do, and to rally the troops he already has, which, after all, clearly include over half the people in Congress. He might be able to produce some positive movement in the polls as well, but even if he doesn’t, he’s likely to get a bump when health reform is enacted and the sky doesn’t fall on people with insurance, while people without it (or in danger of losing it) will be pretty happy.
So the speech doesn’t have to produce miracles, and if someone tells you it must, they probably don’t think health reform is a particularly good idea to begin with.

As the earlier staff post noted, the President is going to get a lot of unsolicitied advice about what to say in his big health reform speech tomorrow. And the problem is that there’s so much ground he might cover he could lose the clarity he needs to actually change minds.
But one way or another, he does need to call out Republicans for their deeply irresponsible posture on health reform, even as he tosses a bouquet to the very, very few GOPers who are actually interested in getting legislation enacted. One immediate practical reason for doing this is that Republicans are already preparing to denounce the use of reconciliation, or even an effort to invoke cloture (one or the other is necessary to get anything through the Senate), as some sort of draconian hyper-partisan “nuclear option” or parliamentary trick, as though an up-or-down majority vote on a bill that’s gone through the regular legislative process is something new or sinister. If nothing else, such a presidential dressing-down should discourage Democrats from saying the same stupid stuff about reconciliation or cloture, while making it clear that even those Democrats who intend to vote against health reform legislation shouldn’t conspire to strangle it via a filibuster.
While he’s at it, the president could also aim a tart sentence or two at Republican “alternatives” to health care reform that would get their sponsors tarred and feathered if anyone took them seriously. Given the GOP’s recent efforts to pose as The Party of Medicare, maybe he could draw attention to the vast, demonstrated enthusiasm of congressional Republicans for voucherizing Medicare.
Better yet, perhaps he could come to the podium prepared to offer a deal from Harry Reid that provides for an up-or-down vote on any Republican health “plan” in exchange for an up-or-down vote on actual health reform.
The bottom line is that Republicans are determined to derail health care reform via a filibuster–actual or threatened–and this simple fact needs to be impressed upon the viewing public.

When I was a child growing up in the textile company town of LaGrange, Georgia, during the 1960s, we began school each year on Labor Day. That was the town fathers’ way of expressing contempt for the labor movement, and their determination to keep LaGrange union-free. The word “union” was rarely uttered other than in whispers, and there were tales of organizers being beaten and locked up during brief efforts to unionize the mills in the 1930s and 1940s.
As I grew older, I came to realize exactly how atavistic this deep hostility to the right of workers to organize really was by national standards. Outside the Deep South, conservatives and business people often privately hated unions, but they had learned to live with them, and it wasn’t unusual for Republican politicians to court union leaders and rank-and-file alike for support. In my own memory, the partriarchal company-town mentality that I grew up with seemed as embarrasingly shameful as its psychological big brother, Jim Crow.
Now, so many years later, even though Jim Crow is long dead, and unions represent a much smaller share of the work force (particularly in the private sector), the old Dixie attitude towards unions has become commonplace among conservatives from coast to coast. The economy “can’t afford” collective bargaining, conservatives often say, as often as they say we “can’t afford” universal health coverage, action on climate change, or much of anything that addresses the inequality and powerlessness that chronically afflict working people. Even as conservatives have regressed from neo-Keynsianism to neo-Hooverism in their thinking about how to deal with a deep recession, they seem to have regressed in the direction of nineteenth century assumptions about unions as inherently illegitimate and anti-competitive.
It’s too bad that Labor Day has largely become a partisan holiday, but for that very reason, Democrats should celebrate it with genuine conviction, particularly at a time when no sane person can blame working people for the economic straits facing our country. Those so richly blessed by our capitalist system have once again blighted the standard of living enjoyed by those struggling to get by. Now more than ever, unions represent a last line of economic self-defense for millions of Americans, and we should honor them as such.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In all the debate over public opinion polls, town hall protests, and “bipartisanship” (or the lack thereof), not to mention the complex details of this or that plan, it is easy to forget that the key obstacle to enactment of health care reform remains the threat of a filibuster in the Senate. Since 60 votes are required to “invoke cloture” and proceed to a vote, the White House strategy on health reform has oscillated between efforts to pull a few Senate Republicans across the line (shoring up “centrist” Democrats as a byproduct) to get to 60, and schemes to use budget reconciliation procedures, which prohibit filibusters.
This latter possibility has aroused dire threats of Armageddon from conservatives, most notably from New York Times columnist David Brooks, who said use of reconciliation for health reform would be “suicidal,” and would “permanently alienate independents.” Brooks cleverly conflated public misgivings about health reform with support for a filibuster, and equated a simple majority vote with an effort to “ram health care through” Congress. There is zero evidence at this point that voters are versed in the intricacies of Senate procedure, or cherish the right of 41 senators to dictate national policy.
There are, however, other problems with the use of reconciliation for health reform. The loophole is vulnerable to an adverse parliamentary ruling, which can stop items that don’t really have anything to do with the budget; this ruling can only be waived by a three-fifths vote, defeating the whole purpose of reconciliation. Also, reconciliation places certain structural limitations on the scope and duration of reforms. Politically, it will be used by Republicans and High Broderist pundits to hammer Obama as a partisan dictator (though the former are somewhat constrained by the use of reconciliation to enact the 2001 Bush tax cuts).
That leaves Democrats searching for a way to reach the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster, which has proven quite difficult for them. Democrats understandably need to allow for some amount of political diversity within their caucus. But the time has come–and in fact, it is long overdue–for them to begin forcefully making the case that being a member in good standing of the party’s Senate caucus means supporting cloture motions on key legislation even if a given senator intends to vote against it.
This case was, in fact, briefly made in July by Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin–but it gained little traction. Durbin’s argument should be revived in and outside the Senate. Right now, progressive groups around the country are in the midst of efforts to agitate for a “public option” as an essential feature of health reform, and eventually will devote enormous efforts to support final passage of health reform, if we ever get to that point. Wavering Democrats have been targeted for ads and other communications, with mixed results. A significant fraction of that pressure should be devoted to a very simple message: Democrats should not conspire with Republicans to obstruct a vote in the Senate on the president’s top domestic priority. Vote your conscience, or your understanding of your constituents’ views, Ben Nelson, but don’t prevent a vote.
There are those who would respond to this suggestion by arguing that a senator voting for cloture but against the bill could be accused of flip-flopping or deviousness. Let them provide the evidence that voters understand or care enough about Senate procedures to internalize that charge. When John Kerry got into so much trouble in 2004 by saying that he “actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it,” he was the one trying to explain arcane Senate procedures. “I voted against ObamaCare, but I didn’t try to keep the Senate from voting” should be a pretty easy sell for any Democrat, particularly since the contrary argument requires an explanation of cloture, not exactly a household word.
The harder question is whether public pressure to support one’s party and president on a cloture vote could be supplemented by more tangible sanctions against senators who won’t at least let health reform or other critical legislation get to the floor–such as withholding choice committee assignments or party committee funds. But until Democrats begin to question the right of certain Democratic senators to maintain their tyranny, possible sanctions are beside the point.
In any event, this is a project that progressives should embrace sooner rather than later, and even if a “bipartisan” 60 votes are rounded up for health reform, or the reconciliation route is pursued. The same problem will bedevil Democrats on other legislation. The constitutional structure of the Senate will always tend to produce a more conservative body than the House, and than the national body politic.
There’s no real “down side” for Democrats to a campaign for party discipline on cloture votes, because Republicans already largely have it on legislation that matters. Democrats need to stop kowtowing to “moderates” who see a vote for cloture as the same thing as voting for the actual bill. These moderates can show their centrist bonafides by voting against the actual bill–and Democrats, free of the 60 votes needed for cloture, can finally pass the bill with the simple majority it deserves.

To their credit, Patrick Ruffini and Jon Henke of NextRight have been on something of a crusade to get their fellow conservatives to disassociate themselves from Birthers, WorldNetDaily, and other objectively crazy people (and also from the cheesiness of the Joe the Plumber type stunts).
Today, though, reflecting on the resistance of conservatives to these attempts to instill some policing of crazy people, Ruffini suggests that it really takes a seriously right-wing intellectual to have the credibility to build opposition to anti-intellectualism on the Right. He cites William F. Buckley’s excommunication of the John Birch Society from respectable conservative company as the model:

Buckley provided an ideal — and set a standard — for conservatives to position themselves as scholarly thought leaders within the broader culture that simply no longer exists today — despite numerous conservative academics toiling facelessly in the vineyards. This gave a Buckley the credibility to cast out the movement’s lesser lights, and impose a layer of discernment between fact and fiction inside the movement. In politics, symbols matter….
The automatic problem that arises when someone who is not a William F. Buckley (and none of us here pretend to be) is that you’re instantly tagged a RINO for calling out something that is objectively and demonstrably false. The space between fact and fiction is confused as a litmus test between right and left.

Unfortunately, Ruffini’s argument sorta kinda sounds like a suggestion that you have to be a little bit crazy to call out the crazy people. The “space between fact and fiction” isn’t clear enough that it can survive an ideological prism.
And that’s a real problem, not just for conservatives, but for all of us who have to grapple with the “news” and the “debates” spawned by crazy people.

As regular readers have probably noticed, I’m not as freaked out as most Democrats over the President’s approval ratings–generally, or on specific issues like health care. A lot of what’s happened is simply that people are (as Alan Abramowitz pointed out in July) beginning to return to the perceptions of Obama and of Ds and Rs that they had last election day. The process has probably been speeded up by the anxiety surrounding the economy and big policy debates, not to mention the opposition party’s decision to adopt a Total War stance against Obama quite early in his term.
But there’s one factor about Obama’s popularity that was troubling even on the last election day, and is perhaps even more troubling looking forward to 2010: his low standing among seniors. As Tom Schaller explains at fivethirtyeight.com today, drawing on analysis from the Cook Report’s David Wasserman, older voters tend to turn out at much higher relative rates in midterm elections as opposed to presidential elections. For example, voters over 45 comprised 54 percent of the electorate in 2004, but 63 percent of the electorate in 2006. Since Obama’s vote was more or less inversely related to voter age (at least among white voters), a replay of 2008’s results in a midterm could, if normal turnout patterns persist, be a losing proposition for Democrats.
It’s sometimes forgotten that Democrats were actually winning seniors as recently as 2000, and it’s one of the few voter categories where Obama fell noticeably below John Kerry’s percentages from 2004. So obviously, Democratic success in 2010 will depend on either better performances among seniors than in 2008, or better turnout–or even higher Democratic percentages–elsewhere. Another X factor, of course, is that Obama’s popularity isn’t the only factor here: individual candidates from both parties will be competing in actual contests, and disapproval of Obama’s job performance will not automatically translate into votes for every Republican, particularly the type of Republican who spends most of his or her time howling at the moon. And with respect to the emotion being displayed by conservative base voters–old or young–against health care reform of late, it’s worth remembering that you only get to vote once, and “intensity” only matters as it affects turnout, or if it is communicable to others.
Still, Democrats need a 2010 strategy that takes it for granted that disproportionate white senior turnout could be a big problem. Stronger-than-usual turnout among young and minority voters is obviously one way to deal with it, and that will take some serious work.

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.