Robert Dallek has put a must-read post for political strategy junkies up on the New York Times Opinion section, “Can Obama Be a Majority of One?” Dallek, author of acclamed books about Democratic presidencies, discusses which of LBJ’s impressively successful legislative reform tactics might work for President Obama. On Johnson’s sober expectations:

Despite his majorities, Johnson took nothing for granted. He predicted “a hard fight every inch of the way.” He told one adviser: “I’ve watched the Congress from either the inside or the outside … for more than 40 years, and I’ve never seen a Congress that didn’t eventually take the measure of the president it was dealing with.”

LBJ had a toughness of spirit in dealing with congress, but it was tempered with matchless parliamentary know-how and lengthy mental dossiers on hundreds of members of congress that informed his deployment of carrots and sticks:

…He directed aides to treat every member of Congress as if he or she was the center of the political universe. They were instructed to return a representative’s or senator’s call in “10 minutes or else.” Johnson himself devoted countless hours talking to them on the telephone.
Conservative Democrats and Republicans were not neglected. When Representative Silvio Conte, a Republican from Massachusetts, cast a vote for a Johnson initiative, the president called to thank him “on behalf of the nation for your vote.” “It’s the only time since I have been in Congress that a president called me,” Conte said. “I will never forget it”
Every bill Johnson sent to the Hill was presented as a collaboration and was identified with a particular representative or senator. And no cooperative legislator would go un-rewarded…Uncooperative legislators paid a price for their independence. When Senator Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, justified a vote against a Johnson bill by saying that columnist Walter Lippmann shared his view, Johnson scolded him: “Frank, next time you want a dam in Idaho, you call Walter Lippmann and let him put it through.”

On President Obama’s more limited options:

Three months into his presidency, it’s apparent that Mr. Obama is not likely to match the 207 significant pieces of Johnson legislation; but not because he’s unmindful of L.B.J.’s methods. Like Johnson, the current president has been showering considerable attention on members of Congress, courting them by traveling to the Hill and asking their input into his big ticket items — the budget, health insurance, educational, and environmental reforms…
But Mr. Obama faces a more difficult challenge than Johnson’s. Unlike L.B.J., he lacks long-time ties to Congressional leaders, which may be one reason his stimulus plan barely made it out of the Senate and many Democrats, including Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, are balking at the president’s proposed budget. In addition, the sort of mutual back-scratching Johnson relied on is out of vogue. Trading pork-barrel grants for Congressional votes is no longer seen as acceptable politics but as unsavory opportunism. Also, Mr. Obama has far thinner majorities than Johnson had and fewer moderate Republicans to woo. Finally, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and deficits running as far into the future as the eye can see are problems that did not burden Johnson’s reach for a Great Society.

On a more positive note, however:

Yet all is not lost. President Obama has a degree of popular support that rivals the approval F.D.R., Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan enjoyed. And the public’s continuing eagerness for change gives him an advantage over Congress that may yet translate into major economic and social reforms.

Add to this Obama’s email rollodex, the progressive blogosphere support and the edge provided by a highly competent staff, and Obama’s political assets for winning legialtive reforms are formidable.
It would be hard to match LBJ’s mastery of political hardball and softball, and Obama may face a test sooner than later, if congressional Democratic leaders decide to go with the controversial “fast track” budget reconciliation process to pass President Obama’s health care reform and global warming legislation. Resorting to the filibuster-preventing tactic makes some Democrats who still hold fast to fading hopes for a more bipartisan approach a little queasy. But it has been used 19 times in recent years in which both houses of Congress were controlled by one party, according to Majority Leader Harry Reid, who says ” I don’t know why everyone is up in arms about it.”
Indeed. When was the last time an incoming GOP President sincerely reached out to embrace Democrats in genuine bipartisan goodwill? And it’s equally hard to cite an example of Republicans reaching out to help President Obama achieve bipartisan reform. It is early in Obama’s term for protracted trench warfare, but if that’s what it takes to get decent health care coverage for Americans and a sane environmental policy, then we need to bring it on.

President Obama’s new strategy regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan is getting cautiously favorable reviews from a broad range of foreign policy experts, most of whom give him credit for narrowing the U.S. mission to defeating Al Queda and their supporters in the Taliban.
The New York Times has an editorial, “The Remembered War,” which does a good job of putting Obama’s new policy in perspective, noting:

…It was greatly encouraging simply to see the president actually focusing on this war and placing it in the broader regional framework that has been missing from American policy. That is a good first step toward fixing the dangerous situation that former President George W. Bush created when he abandoned the necessary war in Afghanistan for the ill-conceived war of choice in Iraq.
Mr. Obama has come back to first principles. Instead of Mr. Bush’s vague talk of representative democracy in Afghanistan, he defined a more specific mission. “We are not in Afghanistan to control that country or dictate its future,” Mr. Obama said, but “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Foreign Policy magazine’s ‘Flashpoints‘ leads the discussion on the pros and cons of Obama’s Af-Pak strategy paper with a package of 7 separate articles from different authors, including “Will the Real Obama Middle East Strategy Please Stand Up?” by Brian Katulis, who credits Obama with,

a much-needed step in the right direction on the Pakistan piece of its policy. Increasing support for the democratically-elected civilian government and massively increasing development assistance to the country are steps that many think tanks have been calling for

Robert Templer, Asia program director at the International Crisis Group adds this in his Flashpoints contribution, “Call in the police (but please help them first)“.

Policing is one of the most effective — and also the most ill-used — tools available to tackle extremism. Yet compared with military and other assistance, international support for policing is miniscule, and much of it is delivered in an uncoordinated and ineffectual manner. Since 2002, the United States has given the Pakistani military more than $10 billion, only the thinnest slice of which has gone to policing…Giving police forces a greater role in counterinsurgency shouldn’t mean sending them heedlessly into harm’s way. What is needed are police to keep everyday peace on the streets. Reducing general criminality and providing security to the public provides the most widely shared and distributed public good. It is much more effective in winning hearts and minds than digging wells or building schools — and indeed encourages and protects such development activities.

In addition to the Flashpoints collection, FP is featuring “The Idiot’s Guide to Pakistan” by Nicholas Schmidle, a fellow at the New America Foundation who lived in Pakistan in 2006 and 7. Schmidle witholds judgment about the prospects of our Pakistan policy, but he provides a sobering read for gung-ho interventionists.
The New York Times also has a ‘Topic A’ roundtable addressing the President’s Af-Pak strategy with 10 short articles, one of which by Andrew Bacevich, author of “The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism,” asks an interesting big-picture question:

Ask yourself: When it comes to American prosperity and security, which matters more — Afghanistan or Mexico? The question answers itself. So if the United States has billions of dollars lying idle that it wishes to invest in development and security assistance, why prioritize Afghanistan?

Bacevich adds

More important than Afghanistan is neighboring Pakistan — bigger, at least as dysfunctional and armed with nuclear weapons. Yet the Obama plan treats Pakistan as an afterthought, promising trivial levels of assistance given the challenges facing that country. Even assuming that America can “fix” Afghanistan, does it possess the wherewithal, wisdom and will to do likewise in Pakistan?

In the NYT roundtable, former deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan Meghan O’Sullivan takes a more positive view:

President Obama’s new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan deserves high marks on several fronts: The president made a compelling case connecting these countries with U.S. interests; he committed substantially more military and civilian resources to the effort; and he placed equal weight on Afghanistan and Pakistan — the latter being the true epicenter of this conflict. It is reasonable to wonder whether the new strategy is informed by the most important lesson from Iraq: Nothing is more important than winning the support of the population by providing security. Obama announced a “shift [in] the emphasis of our mission to training and increasing the size of the Afghan security forces.”

Then there is the thorny question about how welcome we are in Muslim countries. Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute, notes at his Informed Comment blog:

In a recent poll, Muslim publics, including that in Pakistan, overwhelmingly rejected US military presence in Muslim countries. A year ago, an opinion poll of Pakistanis found that “most Pakistanis do not believe that Pakistan-U.S. security cooperation has benefited Pakistan, and a majority (84 percent) sees the U.S. military presence in Asia as a greater threat to Pakistan than Al Qaeda and the Taliban (60 percent). Two-thirds of the Pakistanis polled do not trust the United States to “act responsibly in the world,” and a vast majority thinks the United States aims to “weaken and divide the Islamic world.” A recent poll of residents of the tribal belt themselves found majority support for the US Predator strikes, but polls show that Pakistanis in general view the US as a destabilizing factor for their country.

Cole told Rachel Maddow “I didn’t think we were at war with Pakistan so much as with some Pushtun tribes on either side of the Hindu Kush. And I didn’t think it was likely that they would be brought under “control.”
Meanwhile I’m hoping President Obama and Secretary Clinton read an interesting article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “How Development Leads to Democracy” by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, co-authors of Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy. A couple of nut graphs:

…The bad news is that it is unrealistic to assume that democratic institutions can be set up easily, almost anywhere, at any time. Although the outlook is never hopeless, democracy is most likely to emerge and survive when certain social and cultural conditions are in place. The Bush administration ignored this reality when it attempted to implant democracy in Iraq without first establishing internal security and overlooked cultural conditions that endangered the effort.
The good news, however, is that the conditions conducive to democracy can and do emerge — and the process of “modernization,” according to abundant empirical evidence, advances them. Modernization is a syndrome of social changes linked to industrialization. Once set in motion, it tends to penetrate all aspects of life, bringing occupational specialization, urbanization, rising educational levels, rising life expectancy, and rapid economic growth. These create a self-reinforcing process that transforms social life and political institutions, bringing rising mass participation in politics and — in the long run — making the establishment of democratic political institutions increasingly likely…

It’s a good point to keep in mind as the Obama Administration refines its long range strategy in the mid and near east and we invest billions of dollars to fight terrorism and promote democracy.

Sen. Arlen Specter’s decision to betray Pennsylvania workers who helped elect him last cycle and opppose EFCA may go down as the day the bipartisan music died. Specter’s potentially decisive vote to pass EFCA would have likely been the most emblematically bipartisan vote cast in this session of congress and have made him the poster boy for bipartisan kumbaya. As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney put it, Specter’s defection is “a disappointment and a rebuke to working people, to his own constituents in Pennsylvania and working families around the country.”
It’s not hard to figure Specter’s motivation. As the gang at MSNBC‘s ‘First Read’ explain:

…he likely has a tough GOP primary on his hands next year. And, according to a new Quinnipiac poll, that primary might be even tougher than we imagined. The poll shows conservative Pat Toomey topping the more moderate Specter by a whopping 14 points in a hypothetical Pennsylvania GOP primary, 41%-27%. Overall, Specter gets relatively high marks from Pennsylvania voters. His fav/unfav is 45%-31%, but among Republicans, it’s just 29%-47%; among Democrats, it’s 60%-16% (who would have thought that?). Per the poll, the reason why Republicans are upset with Specter: his support for Obama’s stimulus. Specter, of course, narrowly beat Toomey in a GOP primary in 2004.

Ironically, Specter’s defection may not save his bacon with his fellow Republicans. As Greg Sargent notes in his blog at The Plum Line:

Doug Stafford of the anti-EFCA National Right to Work Committee added in a statement that Specter’s move should be “viewed with some skepticism,” adding that other labor-oriented proposals championed by Specter remain “totally unacceptable” and will enable “Big Labor to corral more workers into forced unionism.”
Specter’s potential primary challenger, Club for Growth president Pat Toomey, has kept up the attacks, blasting Specter’s vote for the “big government stimulus bill” and dismissing Specter’s opposition to EFCA as merely the result of “a threat in the Republican primary.”

Specter, who co-sponsored the EFCA legislation last session and even voted for cloture to pass it, made unconvincing noises about this not being a good time to pass EFCA, cuz, you know, the recession and all. As Christopher Hayes put it in his article “Specter Stabs Unions in the Back” in The Nation, “what really happened is he got metaphorically waterboarded by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce.” And don’t be too shocked if he gets some lucrative board seats and corporate speaking engagements down the road.
Sure, we would have liked to have Specter’s vote. After giving him due credit for supporting the stimulus legislation, one welcome aspect of his decision is that it adds clarity to the Democratic Party’s priorities in 2010. No more molly-coddling centrist Republicans who cave in on the big worker rights issues. And electing a Democrat to replace Specter in ’10 is our new Job One. This we should do, not only to get to 60, but also to show potential GOP allies that there is a price to be paid for switching sides.

Peter Nicholas and Peter Wallsten are on to something in their L.A.Times article “On Economic Matters, Obama Lacks a Secretary of Selling It.”:

Aside from President Obama, the administration has yet to find a commanding figure who can carry economic policy messages and inspire confidence in White House prescriptions…In assembling his economic team, the President gave first priority to technical skill and intellectual achievement. So far, none of his senior advisors has shown the extra ability to inspire as well — both on Wall Street and Main Street…Because the programs are complex, costly and politically unpopular, the dearth of administration officials who can dominate the stage is becoming a serious handicap.

Economists can be eloquent fellows talking to each other and to other policy wonks. However,

“The ability to communicate with average people was not what these people were chosen for,” said Alice M. Rivlin, budget director under President Clinton. “They were chosen for their understanding of the problem and their ability to think creatively about it and to work out solutions to what is admittedly a very complex issue.”…Selling the president’s economic plans “clearly has not been their forte,” she said

Certainly no one has identified any nascent media stars on Obama’s economic team. But has there ever been a really impressive economic policy salesman or woman, as far as the average voter is concerned ? There’s a reason they call Economics “the dismal science.” If you want to clear out a party quickly, just start talking loudly about the Laffer curve or the velocity of M1.
It could be argued that President Reagan and Newt Gingrich were effective economic policy pitchmen. But what they were really selling was simple: deregulation and tax and federal budget cuts — less economic policy. Their pitch was well-timed, if ill-considered and simplistic. Never mind that they ended up tripling the federal deficit.
Like Obama, FDR was his own economic pitchman and by all accounts, he worked the press quite effectively. But it was a simpler time then, and radio, a media industry now dominated by right-wing gasbags, was the make or break p.r. tool. Pitching economic policy to voters is now more about television than any other media, with the influence of the internet rising just as print media begins to fade into history. Moreover, FDR was really selling himself. He was able to convey a bold persona and a sense that he knew what he was doing.
It is unclear whether Obama, his extraordinary speechmaking skills notwithstanding, can sell himself as effectively over time in our more cynical era. Communications tools are more complex, and that can be a good thing for a media-savvy president (see our staff post below). He has gotten high marks from economists for his media advocacy of economic policy reforms, according to Wallsten and Nicholas. But there is a fear among his staff of over-exposure, and worse, burnout. Tonight he will face the media in his second news conference, and hopefully will do as well as in his first press conference. Generally, however, he should play to his strength — speechifying.
Bottom line is a great many people are still bewildered or bored by economic policy discussions, despite the loud arguments about economic policy taking place in living rooms, bars and at water coolers across the country. It doesn’t matter if you have the greatest salesman/woman in the world fronting your agenda. Bailouts for failed banks and auto companies, along with subsidies for imprudent homeowners are a tough sell, no matter how well-justified by the cold hard facts. Ditto for tax hikes and reassuring voters that their retirement assets will one day return from the market’s Bermuda Triangle.
President Obama’s hole card is that voters well-understand that he has inherited a horrible mess not of his making, and most get it that there is no quick fix. He has to be careful, though, not to parrot this meme so much that it starts to sound like whining. Leave that thankless task to his economic team.

Sheryl Jean of the Dallas-Morning News ‘Economy Watch Blog’ reports that the National Small Business Association has launched a new website, “Health Reform Today.”
In his Alternet article, “Health Care Reform in Critical Condition,” Roy Ulrich discusses whether it is still true, as former HEW Secretary Joseph Califano said that “real health care reform in this country could not become a reality until we accomplished the goal of enacting campaign finance reform at the national level.”
Former Senator Tom Daschle has a WaPo op-ed urging Americans not to get distracted by conservative fear-mongering about the ‘who’ of health care reform, and instead keep focused on the ‘what’ and the imperative of making reform a reality.
Also at WaPo, Karen Pallarito takes a look at the Obama Administration evolving health care reform proposals in light of a recent national opinion survey by Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health (toplines here).
Salon.com columnist Joe Conason’s “The questions our health care debate ignores” puts America’s health care system in global perspective in terms of universal coverage and cost.
Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, takes an interesting look at current reform options facing Obama and the Democrats in “An Election, a Budget, and Two Summits = A Bold Obama Strategy for Health Care Change.”
On March 3rd, I suggested that the failures of health care system are as much if not more of a real threat to national security in terms of protecting the lives of Americans than terrorism. Imagine, for example, the outrage if the death toll for our troops was 60 per day in Iraq or Afghanistan, because 60 per day or about 22 thousand Americans per year die from “the lack of health insurance,” according to the Institute of Medicine.
The Atlantic‘s Marc Armbinder reports that The Obama Administration will pursue health care reform through the 2010 budget resolutions, if they can’t forge a bipartisan consensus. Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com riffs on Armbinder’s article, noting the additional leverage Dems get in the struggle for health care reform as recession deepens and arguing that “it’s a fight where the White House ought to be favored.” Ezra Klein also has a post up today at The American Prospect on the legislative strategy of health reform via the budget process.
Ezra Klein also has an In These Times interview of Steffie Woolhandler, co-director of Physicians for a National Health Program, and Richard Kirsch, the national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now (HCAN) on the topic, “Which Way to Universal Healthcare?.”
A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted 3/12-15 found that nearly three out of four adults are “happy with their overall health care coverage,”but more than three out of four respondents are “dissatisfied with the total cost of health care in this country” and only 29 percent say they are “very confident” they could pay their bills in the event of a major medical emergency.
Single-payer advocates will find americanheathcarerreform.org a bountiful source of links to insightful articles on the topic.

President Obama’s quick apology for his gaffe likening his bowling skills to the “Special Olympics or something” on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show was well-timed and well-directed. Shortly after his appearance on the program, the President called Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver, who described the President’s apology as “sincere and heartfelt.”
In his response, Shriver offered a challenge:

This is a teachable moment for our country. We are asking young people, parents and leaders from all walks of life to engage in conversation and help dispel negative caricatures about people with intellectual disabilities. We believe that it’s only through open conversation and dialogue about how stereotypes can cause pain that we can begin to work together to create communities of acceptance and inclusion for all

Shriver also urged the white house to hire a Special Olympics athlete and he called on “policy leaders at all levels to commit to improving the support and resources for people with intellectual disabilities in areas such as healthcare, education, housing and recreation.” This may be why Republican leaders have thus far not made too much of the President’s remark, since they have rarely supported adequate funding to help people with intellectual and physical disabilities. President Obama, on the other hand, has a robust agenda to expand assistance to people with disabilities.
People with disabilities, together with their families, are one of the largest constituencies in the electorate. It is estimated that approximately 20 million Americans with disabilities voted in the November election. Factoring in their families, a rough guestimate of 50 million voters significantly affected by disability policies would not be far out of line.
The ‘teachable moment’ for Obama offers a good lesson — the need for heightened sensitivity to the struggles of people with disabilities and their families. Also, be careful on the late night talk shows, where the format encourages loose jabber, as well as an opportunity to humanize or ‘warm up’ political leaders.

John F. Wasik’s commentary, “No Reason to Demonize U.S. Single-Payer Health” in today’s edition of Bloomberg.com offers a convincing argument that the most promising form of health care reform has been wrongly taken off the table by both the Obama administration and the mainstream media. On Obama’s strategy:

If President Barack Obama wants real change in American health care, he will have to get over the fear of even mentioning single-payer concepts. At his health-care summit last week, only the threat of a demonstration garnered late invitations for Oliver Fein and Congressman John Conyers, two leading proponents of the single-payer plan.
…Obama has said he would keep an open mind on health-care solutions. Yet when asked on March 5 about why he was against single-payer medicine, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs replied: “The president doesn’t believe that’s the best way to achieve the goal of cutting costs and increasing access.”

Wasik supports Rep. John Conyers’ National Health Insurance Act, which has 93 co-sponsors in the House of Reps, and he makes a strong case for the economics behind the plan.
Obama may see single-payer health care reform as a longer-range goal to be achieved in stages. Polls indicate that despite widespread discontent about the current health care system and strong support for single-payer reform, millions of Americans want to keep their current insurance coverage. In a Gallup Poll conducted 11/13-16, for example, 26 percent of respondents said their current coverage was “excellent” and another 41 percent said it was “good.” Obama’s reform team may have concluded that angering them at this stage may imperil reforms that could improve coverage for millions more.
Wasik is dead right however, about the mainstream media’s “sheepish” failure to give single-payer reform a fair hearing. From the Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting study he cites:

Single-payer–a model in which healthcare delivery would remain largely private, but would be paid for by a single federal health insurance fund (much like Medicare provides for seniors, and comparable to Canada’s current system)–polls well with the public, who preferred it two-to-one over a privatized system in a recent survey (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09). But a media consumer in the week leading up to the summit was more likely to read about single-payer from the hostile perspective of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer than see an op-ed by a single-payer advocate in a major U.S. newspaper.
Over the past week, hundreds of stories in major newspapers and on NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer mentioned healthcare reform, according to a search of the Nexis database (2/25/09-3/4/09). Yet all but 18 of these stories made no mention of “single-payer” (or synonyms commonly used by its proponents, such as “Medicare for all,” or the proposed single-payer bill, H.R. 676), and only five included the views of advocates of single-payer–none of which appeared on television.
Of a total of 10 newspaper columns FAIR found that mentioned single-payer, Krauthammer’s syndicated column critical of the concept, published in the Washington Post (2/27/09) and reprinted in four other daily newspapers, accounted for five instances. Only three columns in the study period advocated for a single-payer system (San Diego Union-Tribune, 2/26/09; Boston Globe, 3/1/09; St. Petersburg Times, 3/3/09).
The FAIR study turned up only three mentions of single-payer on the TV outlets surveyed, and two of those references were by TV guests who expressed strong disapproval of it: conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks (NewsHour, 2/27/09) and Republican congressman Darrell Issa (MSNBC’s Hardball, 2/26/09).

And that may be the biggest problem for single-payer advocates — opening up the discussion. The campaign to stigmatize single payer reform as “creeping socialism” is well-underway, and the fear-mongers are ascendant. For now, it’s up to the progressive blogosphere to push the idea on to the front pages and nightly news programs.
Single-payer advocates argue that presidential leadership ought to be about forging consensus, not searching for it and Obama’s best shot at comprehensive health care reform has to be taken sooner, rather than later, while his approval ratings are still high. Yet, Obama’s strategy choices and timing have been pretty good so far. Still, opening up the discussion to include single-payer reform might help make his current proposals more acceptable to moderates. It’s hard to see much of an upside to taking single-payer totally off the table.

A few addenda to my Tuesday post on healthcare strategy: Sam Stein reports at HuffPo that advocates of a single payer system will have representation at today’s White House Summit on health care reform. Rep John Conyers “a known single-payer advocate,” along with an advocacy group, Physicians for a National Health Program will participate in the summit. The group had put out a press release earlier in the week complaining that,

“Groups representing physicians, nurses, and consumers who advocate for a single-payer system of national health insurance have thus far been excluded from the summit,” says the release. “The Clinton task force on health reform made a similar mistake of excluding the voices of those who support a single-payer system… At a time when public support for single-payer is greater than ever – more than 60 percent in recent polls – we urge President Obama not to make the same mistake.”

Obama “has generally shied-away” from outright endorsing a single-payer approach, although he has made favorable comments about the single-payer concept, according to Stein. Conyers and the progressive physicians group undoubtedly will provide a strong voice at the summit, although there will be 150 participants clamoring for attention.
In yesterday’s New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s article “Obama Taps Clinton Ideas but Not Clinton Herself” discusses some possible ways Secretary of State Clinton’s expertise on health care reform could be tapped and notes major differences in the strategy deployed by Presidents Clinton and Obama:

To begin with, the Clinton plan was drafted in secret and delivered to lawmakers as a fait accompli; Mr. Obama is articulating broad principles and leaving the details to Congress…President Bill Clinton waited 11 months after taking office in 1993 to roll out his plan, a delay many Democrats say was deadly. Mr. Obama is forging ahead after six weeks. Mr. Clinton focused heavily on access to care; Mr. Obama is framing the debate in terms of cost. The Clinton plan left Americans worried that they would be forced to switch doctors. Mr. Obama’s message, Mr. Axelrod said, is, “If you are happy with what you have, you can keep it.”
Once the stimulus bill was enacted, Mr. Obama moved quickly to include money for health care changes in his budget, something Mr. Clinton did not do because his economic advisers wanted to focus on deficit reduction first, said Chris Jennings, who was Mr. Clinton’s senior health policy adviser. “That’s really key,” Mr. Jennings said. The delay, he said, “probably was the reason why we were unable to sustain interest and support.”
Mr. Obama, by contrast, made a conscious decision to tackle deficit reduction and health care, for which he set aside $634 billion in his budget, at once. “We’re 16 years later,” Mr. Axelrod said, “and I think the imperative is even greater because of the budget. Health care reform is a fiscal imperative now, not just a moral imperative.”

Thus far, President Obama’s initiatives have received a generally positive response from some sectors of the health care industry, as Ceci Connolly and Dan Eggen report in today’s Washington Post. Eggen and Connolly explain that Obama’s “modest approach” was favorably received by the pharmaceutical industry and “could save the drug companies billions a year compared with price controls,” and,

The lure for the industry is the prospect of tens of millions of new customers: If Obama succeeds in fulfilling his pledge to cover many more Americans, those newly insured people will get checkups, purchase medicine, undergo physical therapy and get surgeries they cannot afford today.

Progressives will be happy to note that Obama’s health plan is not all good with the drug lobby. The authors quote W.J. “Billy” Tauzin, a former congressman who now heads up the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA:”There are things we don’t like about it. But there’s time to discuss all that.” The authors quote other health industry groups that have significant misgivings.
“Obama’s Almost Perfect Strategy” in TNR‘s “The Treatment” blog by Jacob Hacker, co-director of the Center for Health, Economic, and Family Security offers four strategy reccomendations for the Administraton. Hacker, editor of “Health at Risk: America’s Ailing Health System–and How to Heal It,” also advises Obama reform team thusly:

It makes sense to keep the targets for political attacks hidden for as long as possible, but that does not mean that Obama and his advisers should start dropping key priorities-priorities that they have already articulated and defended-before the debate begins. For if there is a final lesson from the Clinton reform debacle, it is that the President’s power is greatest as an agenda setter rather than a legislator. Obama should make sure the agenda is set correctly.
So when the administration presses its agenda to leaders in Congress, it shouldn’t sweat the details. But it should make clear that the big three-employer contributions, an Exchange, and a public health insurance plan aren’t details. They are the essence of Obama’s vision of a transformed system.

Stolberg notes that “Experts say the political climate for passing major health care changes is more favorable than ever, with business leaders, pharmaceutical and hospital executives, insurance officials and advocates for patients all agreeing the need is urgent.” Stolberg’s point about Mrs. Clinton’s influence being felt as the battle lines are drawn is duly-noted. Long before Mrs. Clinton, however, Senator Ted Kennedy lead the charge, and the reforms that pass will bear his imprint and reflect his tireless leadership on the issue.

Bob Rosenblatt’s L.A. Times article “A National Healthcare Reform Primer” is a good place to start getting up to speed on the major issues of the current debate on health care refom strategy. In the Q&A section of his article, Rosenblatt does a good job of explaining how health care reform would be financed:

How can the country pay for a reworking of its health insurance system?
Obama has proposed a down payment of $630 billion. Most of the money would come from an increase in federal income taxes by limiting deductions for people making more than $250,000 a year…He also wants to cut payments to Medicare HMOs, saving about $175 billion over 10 years, according to the budget plan issued Thursday. This program, known as Medicare Advantage, requires enrollees to get their hospital and doctor care within a network of providers. In return, they get extra benefits, such as dental care, which are not included in the regular Medicare program. Under regular Medicare, called fee-for-service, the beneficiary can see any doctor or hospital where Medicare payments are accepted.

Rosenblatt also discusses other funding mechanisms under consideration, including: capping the federal income tax deduction for health insurance; creating a special tax dedicated for healthcare; and finding ways to make the system more efficient.
For an interesting look at the key health care strategy players, read “On Health, President Takes Team Approach” by Robert Pear and Jeff Zeleny of The New York Times. The authors focus on the following members of Obama’s health care reform team: Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, the President’s nominee for Secretary of HHS; Nancy-Ann DeParle, counselor to the president and director of the White House Office for Health Reform, is not subject to Senate confirmation; Peter R. Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, “a dominant voice on health policy within the administration” ; Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel, an oncologist and medical ethicist and “kibitzer-in-chief on health policy”; Melody C. Barnes, director of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House, and Lawrence H. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council
In her Wall St. Journal article, “Tough Questions Dog Health-Care Overhaul,” Laura Meckler focuses on Obama’s proposed “system in which people could buy insurance through a government-organized marketplace, where private plans and a new government-run plan would compete.” and notes:

If the government were to require businesses to offer insurance, it would have to set a standard for what counts as insurance. Would a bare-bones plan with limited coverage qualify? Businesses and others would likely wince at the idea of government setting standards for the benefits they must offer….During his campaign, Mr. Obama proposed that large businesses be required to offer coverage or pay into a fund, while small businesses that offer coverage would get a tax credit…Many Democrats insist that there be a public option. Some say it would provide a test for whether Americans prefer a government-run system similar to what exists in Canada. But opponents say it would skew the playing field because government will always be able to undercut private insurers’ prices.

What I crave most as a health insurance consumer is simplicity. I don’t want to be what the insurance companies call “an educated consumer,” who has to spend a lot of time reading their brochures and making cafeteria-style decisions about my “benefit options” based on their constantly changing coverage and too often dishonored promises. I want everything covered — a little card that guarantees that any illness or health issue that befalls me or my family will not entail ruinous medical expenses, and requires nothing more than a modest co-payment from me for anything. It doesn’t seem like a lot to ask for in the most prosperous nation in world history.
Right now, I have to believe goverment is likely to be the more credible provider of such a promise, since private insurers have only cut benefits and raised prices in recent years. Theoretically, at least, it should be possible for insurance companies to compete on the basis of who can provide the most affordable insurance that truly covers every illness, without the expensive “optional” add-ons like “cancer insurance” private providers offer today. If one of the big companies had the guts to offer such a truly comprehensive package, I suspect they would bury the competition.
Health security for millions of Americans has always been discussed as something separate from “national security,” and I sometimes wonder if that’s a key reason why comprehensive health insurance that covers everyone and every illness has been such a tough sell. When it comes to saving the lives of Americans, the failures of our health care delivery system have probably done more real damage to our citizens than all of the terrorists threatening America put together. Yet it’s politically easier to dump $5 billion a week into the Iraq quagmire than it is to spend about the same amount– $250 billion a year — to provide coverage for all of the uninsured (American Enterprise Institute maximum estimate, quoted in Rosenblatt’s article).
The same is true to some extent for the relationship of health care reform to the success of the economic reform package. As Governor Jennifer Granholm noted on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Sunday, Ontario produced more cars than Michigan last year — for the first time ever. Conservatives can’t blame it on their traditional boogeymen, taxes and regulation, since Canada has more of both. As Granholm explained about the auto companies, “They were going there because of health care.” Ontario’s edge for auto companies is due to Canada’s more efficient health care system, which makes cars produced there less expensive than in the U.S., where health insurance adds $1200-1500 to the price of every car, according to Granholm. Regardless of the specific policies at issue, clearly health care reform should be pitched more assetively as a critical component of both economic and national security.

It’s hard to see a downside to having the most charismatic Democratic Party leader since JFK. But there is one, and it’s well-stated in Daniel J. Galvin’s article in The Forum, “Changing Course: Reversing the Organizational Trajectory of the Democratic Party from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama,” written during the ’08 campaign. As Galvin’s opening graphs explain:

In a 2005 New York Times op-ed now considered a “classic essay,” former senator Bill Bradley observed a peculiar trade-off in party politics between charisma and structure. Over the previous 40-plus years, he wrote, each party dealt with this tradeoff differently and met with different degrees of success. Republicans, he argued, gained a competitive advantage over the Democrats by emphasizing structure over charisma. They “consciously, carefully, and single-mindedly” built a “stable pyramid” of money, ideas, organization, and action,where “all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.” Because the structure was stable, the personality of the party’s titular leader was of secondary importance. Charisma was a decidedly second-order concern.
Democrats, meanwhile, were “hypnotized by Jack Kennedy, and the promise of a charismatic leader who can change America by the strength and style of his personality.” While searching for the next JFK, Democrats neglected the less glamorous but ultimately more important work of organization-building. The problem was that “a party based on charisma has no long-term impact,” Bradley wrote. Bill Clinton’s charisma, for example, “didn’t translate into structure,” and while “the president did well,” he wrote, “the party did not.” Now, Democrats found themselves with “no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on” and with a grim outlook for the future

Most of Galvin’s article is optimistic about Obama’s commitment to party-building and the accomplishments of Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy during his tenure at the helm of the DNC (For another positive assessment of Dean’s tenure at the DNC, see Alexander Zaitchick’s recent Alternet post).
However, Democratic gains in November, ’08 can be as credibly attributed to a host of other factors, like Obama’c coattails, the economic meltdown, an edge in internet fund-raising or voters’ general weariness of the GOP, to name a few. Geographic saturation is an important aspect of party-building, but the discussion should be broadened to include concerns like structural reform, the role of a strengthened labor movement (a hallmark of strong progressive political parties in Europe), candidate recruitment and training and how to get rank and file Democratic voters organized into lobbying groups. There is also room for an expanded discussion about party discipline, including the role of pro-Democratic reform initiatives like the Accountability Now PAC.
Galvin’s article was written before Governor Tim Kaine was appointed as Dean’s successor, and it’s too early to evaluate Kaine’s track record thus far. Kaine’s plan for building the Democratic Party will be rolled out in April, according to Zaitchick. Democrats face a different kind of party-building challenge now, with the enormous advantage of the President’s bully pulpit. Much depends on the eventual success of the stimulus and other Obama reforms.
Most of the recent debate about the pros and cons of bipartisanship has centered around it’s effect on the quality of legislation. But there is also a legitimate concern about how it impacts the growth and development of the Democratic Party, as noted in this comment, from a poster named Steve at The Last Chance Democracy Cafe:

I know it isn’t politically correct to say it right now, but the truth is that helping to build a strong Democratic Party — one that can win consistently — is the single biggest contribution Barack Obama can make to achieving positive progressive change in this nation. A single gifted president, even serving for the full eight years, can only do so much to improve this nation. A strong progressively rooted Democratic Party, able to effectively fight the good fight for a generation or more, on the other hand, can change the world.
I think Obama knows this: but, to be honest, he’s starting to scare me a little. He played the GOP masterfully during the stimulus bill debate. But there’s a danger in his incessant talk of bipartisanship. It has the effect of putting the GOP — and its response to Obama’s proposals — into the very center of the story, while at the same time marginalizing other Democrats. Why should anyone care what congressional Democrats have to say about the economy, when the whole storyline has become how the GOP will respond to Obama’s proposals?
…I understand the siren song of bipartisanship sounds loudly in the spirit of our new president. And making a public show of reaching out to the GOP is probably good politics — at least for Obama himself. But building a strong Democratic Party is better politics. And it is also an essential element to building a better and more just America over the long haul.
So two words, Barack: party building. Press them to your chest and put them under your pillow at night. Never forget them and never neglect them. Because when all is said and done, they may just represent the single most important inheritance you can give this nation.

Not that sparingly applied bipartisanship, and party-building are necessarily antithetical. But Steve’s concern about media ‘storyline’ is well-taken as is his challenge to Obama to keep focused on strengthening his party. Same goes for Sen. Bradley’s point about the focus on charisma, which is media-driven.
While there is not much the Democratic Party can do about lazy or shallow msm reporting, the growth of the pro-Democratic blogosphere and the telecommunications revolution hold out the hope that we can make better use of our own media. The explosion of streaming video, for example, means that there is no longer much of an excuse for Democrats not having their own 24-7 television station. As this technology becomes more seamlessly interwoven with television, the possibilities for educating voters will multiply dramatically. Ditto for a Democratic Party 24-7 internet radio station, long overdue.
A lot of interesting questions could be addressed, including: How do we make the party platform more of a unifying force? What is the future role for party-related interest groups, such as Dean’s Democracy for America or perhaps some future green Democrats caucus? What sort of ad campaign would attract young voters to become active in local Democratic groups?
It’s a lot to think about. But a broader, ongoing and inclusive discussion of future directions in party-building would help lay a solid foundation for a new era of progressive reform.