Having just done two adulatory posts about articles in The Washington Monthly, and planning another for tomorrow, I guess it’s a matter of balance to take serious issue with the Monthly’s blog, Political Animal, wherein Kevin Drum just posted a petulant and abusive attack on the Progressive Policy Institute’s proposal for universal health coverage.All you really need to know about Kevin’s point of view is this statement about the PPI proposal:

[I]t’s far too timid about at least acknowledging that our eventual goal should be a full-fledged, single-payer national healthcare system.

Well, hell, Kevin, if that’s the case, I would agree with you that the PPI plan is too complicated, too compromising, too infeasible, etc., etc. Sure, PPI proposes one very simple idea–making the federal employee health plan a national model–but if the only definition of “universal health care” is to abolish private health insurance and cover everyone publicly, then obviously, anything short of that earns all those abusive adjectives. But I somehow missed the moment when single-payer became not only progressive orthodoxy, but the only way to achieve universal coverage. As recently as 2004, John Kerry, John Edwards, Howard Dean, Dick Gephardt, Wesley Clark, and Joe Lieberman offered health care plans that would take the country pretty damn close to UHC without embracing a single-payer system at all. I’m not sure any of those plans could have been described in the seven points you consider so incredibly complex. Were they all compromising wimps? Did they all privately acknowledge that single-payer was the goal, and just cringe from saying it publicly?As I suggested in my first comment on UHC a few days ago, the big debate among progressives isn’t so much about whether to cover 90 percent, or 89 percent, or 100 percent of Americans, but the relative role of public and private insurance in getting there. That’s a debate we have to have, and it’s not advanced by those who deny there’s anything to talk about.

Another fine feature of the new issue of the Washington Monthly is a carefully reasoned and solidly researched article by BeliefNet founder Steve Waldman about the all-but-forgotten history of evangelical Christians’ passionate support for the most radical notions of religious liberty during the founding period of the Republic.What makes Waldman’s account especially valuable is that he directly comes to grips with a whole generation of conservative evangelical revisionist history on this topic, particularly the claim that the First Amendment was only intended to prevent establishment of a particular Church, and should not be understood as prohibiting general public support for Christianity. As Waldman explains, Virginia had a very clear and specific debate on this proposition in the years immediately following the Revolution, when Patrick Henry proposed a system allowing citizens to designate a tax to support the church of their choice, and James Madison, soon to become the “Father of the Constitution,” strongly opposed it. Madison ultimately prevailed in this debate, in no small part because of vocal support from evangelicals, and especially the Baptist forefathers of today’s most avid opponents of the “wall of separation” interpretation of the Establishment Clause.Waldman’s evocation of Madison’s key role in promoting a more radical idea of religious liberty is also useful because another revisionist theory often suggests that the whole idea of church-state separatism was little more than a typically heretical quirk of the notoriously heterodox Thomas Jefferson. If Madison, who once trained for the Anglican priesthood, and remained faithful to that communion throughout his life, shared Jefferson’s Deist tendencies, he left little record of it. And for that matter, even Jefferson himself raised his children as Anglicans, and was a vestryman for an Anglican parish outside Charlottesville until his death (I know this personally, having attended a church in that parish for a while). These were not men determined to fight respect for religion.Yet Jefferson and Madison were jointly responsible for Virginia’s radical religious liberty laws, and clearly sought to implement them nationally in the First Amendment. It’s more than slightly odd that the descendants of their strongest allies in that fight have so decisively changed sides.

For those of you who share my interest in the fate of one Ralph Reed, candidate for Lieutenant Governor in my home state of Georgia, you might want to check out a piece I did for the Washington Monthly, just out today.The bottom line is that Ralph finally appears to be in deep trouble, not just because of his continuing embroilment in the Abramoff scandal, but because, well, a lot of Georgia Republicans just don’t like the guy, and haven’t for years. Some of it has to do with the disastrous campaign he helped run for another candidate for Lieutenant Governor back in 1998, which helped drag down the entire GOP ticket. And some of it has to do with his behavior as Georgia state party chair in 2002, when he took a little too much credit for a big year, and disrespected gubernatorial candidate Sonny Perdue a little too much for his own good. My own conclusion is that Ralph is probably going down, if not in the August primary, then in November, even if he doesn’t get a lethal visit from the process servers in the meantime. We’ll know soon enough, but this is clearly a guy who is having to live with the consequences of his past misdeeds, ethical and political.

I’m still far too cold-remedy-fogged to offer any cogent thoughts on universal health coverage on this Sunday, but did want to point you to a couple of interesting articles about poll numbers from today’s Washington Post.Alan Abramowitz, from my undergraduate alma mater of Emory, probes Bush’s lagging approval ratings and suggests that W.’s systemic lack of credibility is finally and perhaps irreversably infecting the conservative base that has sustained him all these years.More playfully, but no less meaningfully, Richard Morin compares Dick Cheney’s current 18 percent approval rating and compares it to other current and past public figures commonly thought to be loathsome.The bad news for Cheney is he’s:

Less popular than singer Michael Jackson, bedmate of little boys and world-class screwball. One in four Americans — 25 percent — told Gallup polltakers last June they were still Jackson fans after the onetime King of Pop was found not guilty of child molesting.Less popular than former football star O.J. Simpson was after his arrest and trial for murdering his estranged wife and her companion. Three in 10 — 29 percent — of all Americans had a favorable view of Simpson in an October, 1995 Gallup poll.Less popular with Americans than Joseph Stalin is with Russians. In 2003, fully 20 percent said Stalin, blamed for millions of deaths in the former Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s, was a “wise and humane” leader. Thirty-one percent also said they wouldn’t object if Uncle Joe came back to rule again, according to surveys conducted by Russian pollsters.Much less popular than former Vice President Spiro Agnew in his final days in office. Forty-five percent approved of the job that Agnew was doing as President Richard Nixon’s veep in a Gallup Poll conducted in August 1973, little more than a month before Agnew resigned and pleaded no contest to a criminal tax evasion charge arising from a bribery investigation.

The good news for Cheney? Here it is:

Even at 18 percent you’re not the least popular public figure in America. You’re slightly better liked than that fabulously blond and brainless party girl Paris Hilton. She was viewed favorably last June by 15 percent of the public, according to Gallup.

That must be an enormous consolation to the man who used to be thought of as the colorless grownup of the Bush administration, forever lending his great credibility to W.Thus endeth today’s lesson.

A vibrant debate over the political and substantive aspects of a Democratic recommitment to Universal Health Coverage has broken out all over the wonkier avenues of the progressive blogosphere (especially at TAPPED, where Ezra Klein and Garance Franke-Ruta have a bunch of recent posts). I plan to cautiously weigh in on this debate over the weekend, if and when my current vicious cold allows me to emerge from my mental fog. But for the time being, I just wanted to let you know about the Progressive Policy Institute’s plan for UHC, which combines some of the smarter recent ideas about how to deal with the triple problems of cost, coverage and (especially) quality. Today’s New Dem Dispatch briefly lays it all out, and the main DLC web page currently features a nice little box that combines links to PPI’s critique of the atavistic Bush health care agenda and its positive progressive alternative.

The well-known advocate of “intelligent design” theories, George W. Bush, is not a guy you would normally associate with Charles Darwin. But when it comes to social policy, Bush has no particular problem with Social Darwinism.That’s particularly true of his health care agenda, which may seem light and lame-o to casual observers, but actually reflects a systematic effort to unravel the whole system of risk-sharing on which not only public programs but private insurance pools depend, and make access to health care a matter of “survival of the fittest.” Read all about it in today’s New Dem Dispatch.

Having done a brief meditation on mortality in my last post, I should mention the passing of a very good man recently: Eli Segal, who among other things, was the founding father of AmeriCorps. Al From wrote a tribute to Eli’s service to his country and his party that you can read here.My own most vivid memory of Eli was of a phone call I received from him at home late one night in the midst of congressional consideration of the original AmeriCorps legislation. Some veterans group had become concerned that the post-service educational benefits proposed for AmeriCorps participants were too generous in comparison to veterans’ benefits, and Eli was trying to get in touch with my former boss, long-time national service champion Senator Sam Nunn, to help put out the fire. But he greeted me with the words: “Ed Kilgore! History is calling!”At the time I thought the line was very funny, and typically Eli. But as I get older, I think he might well have been correct: tracking down Sam Nunn that night might have been one of my few personal contributions to the national welfare. Eli Segal had to put out many other fires that threatened the Clinton administration’s small but proud national service initiative, particularly after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. He probably felt vindicated when George W. Bush made national service a major theme of his 2003 State of the Union Address, and promised to stop GOP efforts to kill AmeriCorps and related programs. But that’s why it especially outrageous that Bush’s latest budget renewed the Republican assault on national service, proposing to shut down the National Civilian Community Corps, an ancillary program to AmeriCorps whose members have particularly distinguished themselves in post-Katrina recovery efforts. The Office of Management and Budget’s rationale for this proposal is that the per-participant cost of NCCC is marginally higher than that of AmeriCorps. Well, that’s hardly surprising, since the whole point to NCCC is that it is a residential program targeted in no small part to young people from very disadvantaged backgrounds, who need residential support. Guest-blogging at Political Animal, Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris goes after this proposed elimination of NCCC, and offers some alternative cuts if Republicans are actually serious about cutting frivolous federal spending. And like Paul, a whole generation of national service advocates, among whom I am proud to be a charter member going back to the 1980s, is mobilizing to expose the Bush proposal for the hypocritical joke that it actually is.Somewhere, Eli Segal is smiling.

Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return!This is, at least in the traditional Catholic and Anglican versions, what priests say to Christians during the imposition of ashes (created from the previous year’s Palm Sunday fronds) on this first day of Lent. The line comes from God’s injunction to Adam and Eve in Genesis about the consequence of their disobedience, which is mortality.It’s not a bad time for all of us to devote a day to the remembrance of our mortality, individually and as a species. And recent months have represented fine times for the Grim Reaper, in places ranging from Darfur to Iraq to subsarahan Africa to New Orleans. It’s also not a bad time for everyone to take notice of our collective responsibility that could lead to a virtual suicide of the human race, such as our potentially catastrophic tampering with global climate patterns, and our tolerance of a renewed nuclear arms race across the breadth of Asia. As the economist John Maynard Keynes once famously said when arguing with some long-term prediction: “In the long run, we’ll all be dead.” That’s true, and aside from our particular convictions about a life beyond death, it’s why the best possible meditation on Ash Wednesday is on ways we can give hope to those who will succeed us in this life. I know that sounds like some liberal injunction to collectivism and to the idea of investments in the future. But it’s an entirely Biblical train of thought. You could look it up.

Via Amy Sullivan in a Political Animal post, Washington Monthly founder Charlie Peters drifts into the treacherous waters of wondering why people under 35 don’t see to know or care much about political history, viz. the (anecdotal) lack of young-folk interest in his book on Wendell Willkie, Five Days In Philadelphia.Not surprisingly, the comment thread to that post is full of angry responses from people under 35 accusing Peters of old-guy-nostalgia, old-guy-arrogance and old-guy-overgeneralization, along with a few bitter comments about how young-uns are too busy fighting Bush and Rove to care anything about Wendell Willkie.Not having read Peters’ book myself, I won’t comment on his hypothesis that Willkie’s upset nomination in 1940 made internationalism safe for FDR, and hence for America. (My own impression from other sources is that Willkie, or “our fat friend,” as Thomas Dewey liked to call him, may have been a proud internationalist before and especially after 1940, but ran a fairly isolationist general election campaign against Roosevelt.)And I also won’t associate with Peters’ generationalizations (to coin a term) about the historical knowledge of people under 35 today as opposed to their predecessors. Hell, there are a million historical topics I know embarassingly little about, including the history of art and the history of science–two subjects on which my 19-year-old stepson could kick my ass on Jeopardy any old day.But I will say this: I am continuously struck, from personal experience, at how many very highly educated and politically obsessive young Americans don’t know seem to know that much about U.S. or international political history.This is not an observation based on self-inflated Boomer Nostalgia for the Huge Events of my own lifetime, BTW.In the throes of the 2000 presidential psychodrama, I wrote a piece for the DLC that in passing compared Ralph Nader to Henry Wallace. A very smart 30ish colleague, who used to teach American history, admitted to me that he had no clue about the identity of Henry Wallace. After I enlightened him about the vice president and Progressive Party leader, he got a little defensive and said: “You have to remember that was before my time.” “Believe it or not, it was before my time, too!” I replied rather heatedly. “And you know what? Andrew Jackson was before my time. Don’t you read?”Knowing I was only half-serious, my colleague didn’t deck me, but it did make me wonder, not for the first time, if there was something about my generation or his that made interest in political history so variable. The only common theory I’ve heard that makes sense is that today’s politically active young adults have been told, or have experienced, that their world is radically discontinuous from much of the past–post-Cold-War, post-industrial, post-modern, and in a word, post-historical.The topic in political history that seems to have suffered the largest drop-off in interest is Marxism, despite the crypto-Marxist views lingering in academia so often alleged by whiners on the Right. That obviously makes sense after 1989, and I should probably grow up about it and stop making obscure references to Communist figures in blog posts, like the one I did last night calling Katherine Harris the “Pasionaria of the Palms” (an obscure reference to La Pasionaria, a cult figure of the Spanish Civil War).Not surprisingly, interest and perceived relevance go hand in hand in determining which of the vast avenues of political history one decides to explore, beyond the basics. For example, Rick Perlstein’s fine book on the Goldwater Movement, Before the Storm, seems to have stimulated an enormous amount of interest among left-leaning young journalists and bloggers hungry to learn about the roots of their contemporary enemies on the Right. I expect a similar buzz to develop about Michael Kazin’s new biography of William Jennings Bryan, A Godly Hero, among both neo-populists and those interested in a revivial of the Christian Left tradition.And for all I know, interest in the Trotskyist backgrounds of so many contempory neo-conservatives may have led to a subterranean trend towards renewed study of Marxism among young lefties, who as we speak may be reading up on the murderous relationship between the Trots and Stalinists like La Pasionaria in the Spanish Republican coalition.Assuming relevance really is the key, I have an answer to Charlie Peters’ cri du coeur about declining knowledge of political history. Those of us who’d like to see the trend reversed need to make the case that our particular historical hobby-horses are immediately relevant. Peters obviously thinks that’s true about Wendell Willkie, and he should keep making that case instead of fretting about why his audience doesn’t automatically embrace it.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

If you’re feeling restless and vaguely disgruntled at the amount of fun you’ve had this weekend, treat yourself to quick read by Michael Crowley about the majestically doomed U.S. Senate candidacy of Katherine Harris, the Pasionaria of the Palms who played such a key role in shutting down recounts in Florida in 2000.The Harris campaign has been a particular embarassment for Karl Rove and the national Republican Party for reasons that go well beyond her disastrous standing in general election polls against incumbent Democratic Senator Bill Nelson. She wildly popular among hard-core Florida conservatives–and thus unbeatable in a Republican primary–precisely because her fans believe and don’t mind saying they believe she personally and as a matter of partisan loyalty handed the presidency to George W. Bush (with a later assist, of course, from the U.S. Supreme Court). This is, of course, a story line the Bushies would like to bury forever, as Crowley notes:

Indeed, the GOP’s preferred Bush creation myth really begins on September 11, when a great man’s life intersected with world history. It’s a far better story than the one about the butterfly ballot, the “Brooks Brothers riot,” and a presidency claimed by a disputed 537-vote margin.But there will be no escaping all that now.

No, there won’t, but this time, it’s unlikely there will be a happy ending for Katherine Harris.