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Democrats: all of a sudden a new breed of non-Democratic “moderates” and “centrists” are popping up like mushrooms. Here’s an ironclad way to smoke out the phony crypto-Republican shills and double-talking sanctimonious hypocrites hiding among them.

by , December 5th, 2011 12:47 PM EST

It’s impossible to open a magazine or newspaper these days without running across a fawning, completely credulous article that breathlessly describes a new breed of non-Democratic “moderates” and “centrists” who are said to be sprouting like mushrooms across the country.
These new moderates and centrists are profoundly different from the moderate and centrist political strategists of the Clinton era who sought to prod the Democratic Party toward the “center” in order to win the votes of political independents. Progressives strongly disagreed with these “New Democrats” on many issues but the vast majority of the Clinton era moderates and centrists (with the utterly dishonorable exception of the reptilian Dick Morris and a handful of other political chameleons) were at the time and have subsequently remained firmly and unequivocally committed to working within the Democratic Party.
The new breed of moderates and centrists, in very dramatic contrast, are described as being completely disillusioned with the Democratic Party as well as the GOP and currently wandering about in the political wilderness in search of a new third party or some innovative new technological platform that will allow them to create a political formation far beyond the snares of both Republican and Democratic orthodoxy.
In principle, it is possible to imagine a set of voters who might be attracted to such an alternative. There certainly are many moderate Republicans who feel deeply estranged from the current Republican Party and who yearn for “old fashioned” Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller, George Herbert Walker Bush or Bob Dole but who, at the same time, simply cannot imagine actually voting for a Democrat. On the Democratic side, even though Obama is in many ways the most centrist Dem in recent memory, he is still sufficiently liberal to make some of the more conservative Democratic voters vainly wish for an alternative that is less liberal and more “traditional values” oriented than the modern Democratic Party.
But there’s a massive, unavoidable problem with the idea that the current self-appointed leaders of this potential voting bloc genuinely reflect the views of most “middle of the road/neither Democrat nor Republican” voters. A central pillar of any honest moderate or centrist perspective today must necessarily be the recognition that — while a moderate voter may feel deeply estranged from both political parties – it is also simply impossible for him or her to ignore the fact that the Republicans are vastly more intransigent, rigid and uncompromising in their positions than are the Democrats.
A genuine moderate or centrist is, by the very definition of the two terms, someone who wants to see sincere efforts at compromise coming from both sides of the partisan divide rather than the total capitulation of one side or the other. Yet only a person who is completely – and I mean completely — immersed in the conservative and Republican world-view can seriously believe and assert that the Republicans have actually been just as flexible and willing to compromise as have the Dems.
E.J. Dionne says it well:

Some of my middle-of-the-road columnist friends keep ascribing our difficulties to structural problems in our politics. A few call for a centrist third party. But the problem we face isn’t about structures or the party system. It’s about ideology — specifically a right-wing ideology that has temporarily taken over the Republican Party and needs to be defeated before we can have a reasonable debate between moderate conservatives and moderate progressives about our country’s future.

He continues:

If moderates really want to move the conversation to the center, they should devote their energies to confronting those who are blocking the way. And at this moment, the obstruction is coming from a radicalized right.

In fact, opinion polls show that there are indeed many sincere moderates and centrists who do accept this basic reality. Progressive Democrats may disagree with this group on many subjects, but can nonetheless still grant that they are essentially honest and sincere.
On the other hand, however, a good number of the self-proclaimed leaders and theoreticians of this new centrist “movement” belong to three quite different and substantially less admirable groups. A quick rundown includes three distinct subcategories:

• “Tokyo Rose” Dems who gleefully bash all things Democratic on Fox News
• Faux-sanctimonious “both sides are equally to blame” hypocrites
• Double-talking “have it both ways” verbal gymnasts

Let’s look at them in turn.

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Democrats: the major reason why it’s so hard to get support for job creation is because business and mainstream economists – who both backed Keynesian policies in the 50’s and 60’s – now oppose them. No serious Democratic strategy can ignore this reality.

by , September 23rd, 2011 2:45 PM EST

In a New Republic column last week, Jonathan Cohn pointed to the 500 pound gorilla in the room that nobody has been talking about in the discussion about jobs:

Obama is doing his part to focus the debate on jobs, to pass legislation that can boost the economy, and to frame a clear political choice for the voters. In short, he’s leading. But even the best leaders need help from some followers…

Cohn notes that the grass roots needs to step up, but then he says:

The other source of pressure should be the establishment – in particular, the media and business establishments. The broad, although hardly universal, consensus in both worlds is that this country needs a short burst of stimulus spending, to boost growth, followed by a lengthy dose of steady deficit reduction, in order to bring the budget into balance. It’s the approach both Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, and Doug Elmendorf, head of the Congressional Budget Office, have implicitly endorsed in the last few weeks.
But where are the coalitions of business leaders, whose livelihoods depend on growth, clamoring for this? And where are all the fiscal scolds, whom Obama has tried so hard to please by demanding (unlike the previous administration) that Congress pay for new initiatives and that long-term deficit reduction remain a goal? By refusing to engage more forcefully, and more pointedly, they empower and reward the Republicans who brazenly risked the nation’s credit rating — and who refuse to contemplate tax increases, making deficit reduction impossible as a practical matter.

The reality can be stated simply: the business community and mainstream economists – both of whom supported Keynesian policies for “full employment” in the 50’s and 60’s – now oppose them. This is the central roadblock to job creation today.
Just imagine how radically different the debate over unemployment would be if the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable were testifying in Congress in favor of policies to reduce unemployment and the leading economists in the American Economic Association were taking out full-page ads in the New York Times calling for forceful action to reduce joblessness to below 6%. Yet, in fact, in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s actions like these would have been likely to occur had the unemployment rate reached 9% and threatened to remain there.
Democrats need to understand why and how business and the economics profession have switched from support for Keynesian “full employment” policies to firm opposition. It is the vital starting point for any long-term Democratic strategy.
The support of the economics profession for Keynesian policies in the 50’s and 60’s – even as they continued to condemn trade unions as essentially destructive institutions — was based on the fact that avoiding mass unemployment was seen as a classic “win-win” As explained in the economic textbooks of the era, increasing “aggregate demand” (i.e. consumer, business and government purchasing power) during periods of high unemployment would mobilize idle resources and workers and lead to increased sales and profits, benefiting business as well as labor. In the textbooks the victory of Keynes perspective was therefore not described as the result of a bitter political struggle between progressives and conservatives or between business and labor as the struggle for union rights had been but was rather the tale of wise “new” economists bringing scientific rigor and objectivity to economics and driving away the economic witchcraft and superstitions of the past.
By 1964, when Keynes was voted Time magazine’s “man of the year,” the MIT school of American Keynesians proudly and widely proclaimed that a grand “permanent national consensus” had been reached on the clear benefits for everyone of maintaining near full employment. Unburdened by any excess of false modesty these “new” Keynesian economists cheerfully compared their “revolution” in economics to the scientific triumphs of Isaac Newton in physics and Galileo in astronomy.
It is a charming fable, beloved in the textbooks of the era, but one that has little relation to reality.
Until the great depression, general view among both businessmen and economists was that the business cycle was natural and periodic mass unemployment should simply be accepted. Even in the worst economic depressions in America, in the 1870’s, the 1880’s, the 1890’s and the 1930’s, the general business view, reinforced by the dominant “neo-classical” economic theories, was that depressions were a “natural adjustment” of the market mechanism and that any attempts to reduce unemployment by government action would necessarily make things worse rather than better.
Neither business nor conservatives really had any significant change of heart after World War II. Behind the closed doors of their country clubs and executive dining rooms they still agreed with conservative economists like Milton Friedman who argued that Keynes had not actually proved that any basic flaw existed in the turn of the century “neo-classical” model.
Business did offer very clear public statements of support for “full employment” in the 1950’s and 1960’s however, but it was based on an entirely different calculation. With Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev running around the world in the 50’s proclaiming that capitalism was doomed and socialism superior, top business leaders indignantly harrumphed to each other over their 20 year old scotches that they “were god-damned if they were going to have the evening news show U.S. unemployment creeping back up to 10 or 15% percent and give the god-damned Ruskies a huge propaganda coup all across Europe and the third world.” Occasionally they added “even though that’s exactly what that god-damned son-of a bitch Walter Reuther (president of the UAW) needs to cut him down to size.”
Grumpiness aside, there was indeed a very solid big business consensus in the 1950’s and 1960’s that as long as the U.S. was in a life or death global competition with the “Ruskies,” unemployment needed to be kept at around 4-4.5 percent. The argument that capitalism had now solved the problem of mass unemployment was a critical part of America’s ideological defense against the threat of communism and there was an entirely genuine concern in the business “establishment” that a return of high unemployment in the United States would produce a huge, worldwide propaganda windfall for the Russians and possibly contribute to parliamentary or extra-parliamentary socialist victories in a number of European and third world countries.
Avoiding this scenario was so profoundly important that it even made it worthwhile for big business to put up with the withering, oh-so-British condescension of (as they put it) a “god-damn tea-parlor socialist fop” like Keynes or the self-congratulatory antics of the American Keynesians who did everything short of putting on white lab coats and carrying around microscopes in order to convince everyone of how similar they were to real “hard” scientists in fields like physics and biology.
It was, however, also recognized that keeping unemployment at 4-4.5% would not deal with the “structural” unemployment that was a growing problem in the U.S. economy, one that was obscured by conventional unemployment statistics. European countries that were actually successfully insuring “full employment” — stable, non-inflationary unemployment rates of around 3% that provided jobs for virtually every willing worker — required a quite extensive set of social democratic policies and institutions to achieve this result. In Sweden, where such policies were most systematically employed, these polices included comprehensive manpower and labor market programs to aid the jobless with retraining, relocation and temporary public jobs, a central wage bargain (also called a “social contract”) to keep overall wage levels in line with productivity and tax policies that strongly encouraged business and economic growth but also funded generous social programs with high tax rates on the incomes of the affluent.
A few prominent Americans like John Kenneth Galbraith and Michael Harrington argued the case for full employment policies like these in the early 1960’s but most American economists replied that the US could muddle through adequately with very minor fiscal and monetary “fine tuning” – allowing unemployment to increase slightly whenever supply bottlenecks, increasing labor costs or other inflationary pressures began to appear.
The inevitable end of the long boom of the 1960’s, however, coincided with four factors that sent inflation skyrocketing even as employment simultaneously stagnated and unemployment dramatically rose – (1) the huge fiscal and monetary stimulus engineered by Nixon in 1972 to insure his reelection (2) the “external shock” of the 1973 Arab oil boycott (3) the reemergence of Europe and Japan as major industrial competitors after two decades of post-world war II rebuilding and (4) the first of many waves of “job export” – the migration of American factories to third world countries. The result of this economic “perfect storm” was increased unemployment at the same time as a devastating inflation that made every trip to the supermarket a genuine outrage for most average Americans and destroyed the value of the savings accounts they had painstakingly built up over decades.
As a result, when Milton Friedman argued in the late 70’s that the “great post-war consensus” supporting high employment should be abandoned in favor of allowing unemployment to reach whatever “natural rate” was necessary to calm inflation he was pushing on an open door. Ronald Reagan gained popularity and won re-election when he and Fed Chairman Paul Volker engineered a recession to tame the inflationary spiral of the 1970’s and since then, there has never – never– been any serious business or mainstream economist support for the policies needed to restore the low unemployment rates of the 1950’s and 1960’s.
This is not really surprising. The Soviet Union is no longer a threat and the lost national economic output is an entirely abstract loss for any particular business while the weakening of labor’s bargaining position and the increased deference and availability of willing workers is deliciously concrete. Mainstream economists also no longer see 8 or 9 percent unemployment as a social crisis requiring immediate solution. It is the “new normal.”
Thus, in 2008, when leading progressive economists like Paul Krugman, Joseph Steiglitz, Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich correctly argued that a much larger stimulus was necessary to bring unemployment down significantly, not a single major corporate president, not a single large or small business group not a single leading business publication and not a single major formal or informal group of mainstream economists supported them. There was indeed still a “grand consensus” within American business and the economic profession about unemployment – but it was now a consensus for letting unemployment remain high, not for taking steps to solve the problem.
The political implications of this new reality are clear. Democrats now need to base their strategic planning on the fact that job creation is no longer in any sense whatsoever a shared national goal or priority. As far as the most powerful economic institutions in American society are concerned, large-scale job creation is just as deeply partisan and ideological an objective as strengthening trade unions or expanding the social safety net. These institutions will passively resist and when necessary actively combat pressure for Keynesian job creation with the same intensity and the same vast supply of resources that they mobilize to oppose other progressive goals. Had they been supportive of more aggressive job creation measures in early 2009, the situation today would be profoundly different.
Democrats should therefore cease making the central issue a debate over how much responsibility Obama, his advisors or various Democratic candidates and officeholders should be assigned for the lack of popular support for job creation because there is a much more important factor involved. Job creation measures today are a distinctly progressive goal, not a consensus one, and it should therefore come as no surprise that the dominant social and economic institutions in America do not count themselves among the most enthusiastic supporters.
It is their opposition, far more than any Democratic sins of omission or commission, that presents the most powerful roadblock to serious measures to create more jobs. This is the unavoidable starting point from which any new Democratic strategy must begin.

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Democrats: the major reason why it’s so hard to get support for job creation is because business and mainstream economists – who both backed Keynesian policies in the 50’s and 60’s – now oppose them. No serious Democratic strategy can ignore this reality.

by , September 21st, 2011 3:20 PM EST

In a New Republic column last week, Jonathan Cohn pointed to the 500 pound gorilla in the room that nobody has been talking about in the discussion about jobs:

Obama is doing his part to focus the debate on jobs, to pass legislation that can boost the economy, and to frame a clear political choice for the voters. In short, he’s leading. But even the best leaders need help from some followers…

Cohn notes that the grass roots needs to step up, but then he says:

The other source of pressure should be the establishment – in particular, the media and business establishments. The broad, although hardly universal, consensus in both worlds is that this country needs a short burst of stimulus spending, to boost growth, followed by a lengthy dose of steady deficit reduction, in order to bring the budget into balance. It’s the approach both Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, and Doug Elmendorf, head of the Congressional Budget Office, have implicitly endorsed in the last few weeks.
But where are the coalitions of business leaders, whose livelihoods depend on growth, clamoring for this? And where are all the fiscal scolds, whom Obama has tried so hard to please by demanding (unlike the previous administration) that Congress pay for new initiatives and that long-term deficit reduction remain a goal? By refusing to engage more forcefully, and more pointedly, they empower and reward the Republicans who brazenly risked the nation’s credit rating — and who refuse to contemplate tax increases, making deficit reduction impossible as a practical matter.

The reality can be stated simply: the business community and mainstream economists – both of whom supported Keynesian policies for “full employment” in the 50’s and 60’s – now oppose them. This is the central roadblock to job creation today.
Just imagine how radically different the debate over unemployment would be if the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable were testifying in Congress in favor of policies to reduce unemployment and the leading economists in the American Economic Association were taking out full-page ads in the New York Times calling for forceful action to reduce joblessness to below 6%. Yet, in fact, in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s actions like these would have been likely to occur had the unemployment rate reached 9% and threatened to remain there.
Democrats need to understand why and how business and the economics profession have switched from support for Keynesian “full employment” policies to firm opposition. It is the vital starting point for any long-term Democratic strategy.

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The Bully Pulpit – a Rejoinder by James Vega

by , August 11th, 2011 7:17 PM EST

Let me begin with a confession. When I wrote the piece under discussion I knew that people would tend to interpret it entirely in relation to Obama and that they would fiercely argue that he has done an absolutely miserable job of exploiting such actual opportunities as the “bully pulpit” does indeed provide – thinking that they were thereby refuting my argument.
But that’s simply and very emphatically not what my argument was really about. In fact, I completely agree with the generally critical view of Obama’s communications strategy. Since the spring and fall of 2009, Obama’s messaging and rhetoric has repeatedly (and unnecessarily) demoralized the Democratic base while failing to win the support of the moderate voters he hoped to bring to his side.
There is, in fact, an absolutely extraordinary consensus within the Democratic community today – one that stretches from “inside the beltway” tacticians like Jon Chait and Greg Sargent and opinion poll experts like Stan Greenberg to grass-roots leaders like Bob Borosage and progressive stalwarts like Paul Krugman, Robert Reich and a host of others. Virtually every major sector of the Democratic coalition has now come to the conclusion that Obama’s attempts to communicate with the American people and win their support since spring 2009 have been profoundly inadequate and ineffective.
There are probably a hundred different specific criticisms one can make, the large majority of them quite plausible. Here are several entirely sensible ones noted in the reply to my post by Tom Phillips:

“…The GOP mentioned jobs and the economy, too, and I couldn’t tell them (D’s and R’s) apart.”
“… [Obama’s] jobs proposals got completely drowned out in the debt/government-spending debacle”.
… [Obama’s] 19 trips to 22 projects [were] mostly in daytime, mostly in the Midwest, mostly in businesses…
… [Obama’s advocacy of clean energy jobs were] “boring and removed from our day-to-day concerns”

The truth is that it is not hard to dissect every single specific aspect of Obama’s communications and find a multitude of things that were done wrong.
But Obama’s particular use (or non-use) of the bully pulpit was emphatically not the issue I was raising in my strategy memo. The examples I noted involving Obama were all designed for the sole purpose of illustrating the defensive, after-the-fact rationalization style of argument that pro-Bully Pulpit advocates use when challenged, not that Obama’s strategy itself was sound or correct.
Quite the contrary, precisely because of the near-universal agreement among Democrats (including myself) that Obama’s use of the “bully pulpit” has been essentially a failure, a very sloppy and superficial alternative notion has increasingly gained very widespread currency – the notion that “if Obama (or any other future president) would just use the bully pulpit he could transform the national debate.” It’s an incredibly appealing argument because it dramatically expresses the frustration Democrats are now feeling about Obama and one that seems to offer a clear and coherent alternative.
But this “the bully pulpit can transform the national debate” idea is one that I think is both fundamentally wrong and profoundly dangerous.

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Progressives, let’s face the fact: the “bully pulpit” is not a magic wand. It’s time to stop reciting those two words as if they were a magical incantation that can transform public opinion.

by , August 11th, 2011 9:35 AM EST

As progressive frustration with Obama has mounted, the plaintive assertion that “If Obama had just used the “bully pulpit” of the presidency he could have transformed the national debate” has become one of the most widely repeated criticisms of his administration. In hundreds of op-ed pieces, articles, blog posts, comment threads and e-mail letters to the editor his failure to use the bully pulpit to dominate the airwaves with a full-throated progressive position on issue after issue is cited as the major and indeed single most important reason for the increased influence of Republican views.
The issue goes far beyond Obama or 2010 or 2012. If the bully pulpit view is correct, an uncompromising progressive should be able to dramatically shift the national debate once he or she is elected. If it is not, he or she will find that the bully pulpit is a relatively limited tool that cannot dramatically shift public attitudes. The issue is whether the bully pulpit actually “works” as described or if it doesn’t. This is just as critical a question for a future president Krugman or Olbermann as it is for the present occupant of the oval office.
What is particularly striking about the “the bully pulpit can transform the national debate” notion is the way it is stated as if it were an entirely self-evident truth, one whose validity is so obvious that it does not need any empirical support or confirmation. In virtually every case, it is presented as a proposition whose certainty is simply beyond any serious question.
In fact, however, there is actually very little evidence in either the historical record or public opinion research to support this view. Even such famous examples of presidential rhetoric as Lyndon Johnson’s “We shall overcome” speech supporting the Civil Rights Bill or Ronald Reagan’s often quoted speech asserting that “government is the problem not the solution” did not produce any major epiphany-like transformations of attitudes that opinion polls could detect. Observation suggests that the bully pulpit has a real and to some degree quantifiable but very clearly limited influence on public opinion. It cannot, by itself, produce major attitude change.
The tremendous appeal of the “bully pulpit” notion is rooted in the fact that it provides an all-purpose, entirely irrefutable argument against Obama’s (or any politician’s) political strategy and tactics without requiring any evidence.
To be sure, presidential rhetoric does indeed have a specific, identifiable degree of influence on public opinion. In recent months there have been two relatively clear examples of this – Obama’s speech criticizing Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposal and his call last week for public pressure on Congress in support of a compromise on the debt ceiling. In the first case Obama’s remarks clearly served as a focal point that helped crystallized public opposition to the Ryan plan and his call for pressure on congress last week produced a wave of phone calls that overloaded the congressional switchboard.
But these same two examples also suggest the very clear limitations that exist on the influence of presidential rhetoric. Such rhetoric can help to focus and rally public opinion around a position that already commands strong and widespread popular support or it can mobilize action among dedicated partisans. But there are no solid examples – either recently or in the last several decades — of presidential speeches ever actually producing major transformations of deeply held public attitudes.
When this is suggested to proponents of the “If only Obama had used the bully pulpit he could have transformed the national debate” view, however, they will emphatically deny that it is true. On the contrary, proponents generally launch into what a skeptical listener cannot help but perceive as a series of ex-post-facto rationalizations designed to protect the notion that any Democratic president who genuinely wants to can indeed use the bully pulpit to dominate and control the national debate on any issue.

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Bowers: concentrate progressive resources on strategic elections

by , July 12th, 2011 9:41 AM EST

Chris Bowers one of the most consistently insightful progressive electoral strategists. In a June 19th Kos post he put forward a provocative thesis – that progressives should concentrate their resources on elections where a win is clearly recognized as a victory for progressive ideas.
You should read the whole piece but here is the gist of his argument:

We have to start winning elections in ways so that the majority of political observers believe the defeated candidate lost because s/he opposed one or more progressive legislative priorities. Just defeating someone who opposes progressive legislation with someone who supports it is not enough. A wide array of pundits, candidates and political professionals must believe that opposition to progressive policies was the primary reason an elected official was removed from office. That is the only way we are going to start convincing people that opposing progressive legislation is truly bad idea for someone’s political career. As such, it’s also the only way we’re going to start getting progressive legislation passed on a regular basis.
If political observers think we won an election because our opponent had corruption issues, it won’t build progressive power. If political observers think we won because the other side had crazy candidates, it won’t change legislative outcomes. If people think we won because we were well-organized or because we used clever new tactics, then they will come to our seminars about how to run a campaign-but they will not pass our desired public policy into law. Hell, even if we win because the country is in the dumps and we get a wave election, that will give us a brief shot at power but nothing over the long-term (see 1977-1980, 1993-1994, and 2009-2010).
Right now, there are at least two fights that fit this mold:
• The first is the recall campaign in Wisconsin. The vast majority of political observers know and admit that this campaign is about Republicans stripping collective bargaining rights. As such, winning the recalls has real potential to strike a blow against the idea that pissing off the left has no electoral consequences. We can show that stripping collective bargaining rights can and will result in the people supporting it being removed from office. This will have a major impact on other states.
• The second campaign that currently fits this model is the battle over Medicare. This is because it isn’t really that hard to get candidates, pundits and political professionals to believe campaigns can be lost for favoring cuts to Medicare and/or Social Security. …the NY-26 special election, even though it featured a semi-major third party candidate, was an important step in cementing that belief. Imagine how deeply ingrained that belief will become if we retake in the House in 2012 while defeating Paul Ryan!
If tactics are how you fight a battle, but strategy is the rationale behind what battles you choose to fight, then the strategy to building lasting progressive power is to choose to fight battles like Lamont vs. Lieberman, the Wisconsin recall elections, and going explicitly after Republicans–or anyone–on Medicare and Social Security. We can’t just win elections, and we can’t just win elections with Better Democrats. We have to win elections in which people believe the outcome was determined by popular support for progressive policies, and a backlash against those who opposed them. That’s the only way politicians will believe they have to support progressive policies in order to stay in office, and thus the only way progressives are going to stop being thwarted and disappointed even when Democrats are the party in power

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A Sad Irony on the Fourth of July

by , July 4th, 2011 12:04 PM EST

In the post above Ed points to Victor Hanson Davis’ identification of “the American way” with the right to make money without restriction.
At another point in the same article, Hanson says the following:

“Race, tribe or religion often defines a nation’s character, either through loose confederations of ethnic or religious blocs … or by equating a citizenry with a shared appearance as reflected in the German word “volk” or the Spanish “raza.” And while the United States was originally crafted largely by white males who improved upon Anglo-Saxon customs and the European Enlightenment, the Founders set in place an “all men are created equal” system that quite logically evolved into the racially blind society of today.
This year a minority of babies born in the United States will resemble the look of the Founding Fathers. Yet America will continue as it was envisioned, as long as those of various races and colors are committed to the country’s original ideals.”

At the same time, a New York Times editorial today notes the following:

“The [new immigration laws] laws vary in their details but share a common strategy: to make it impossible for people without papers to live without fear.
They give new powers to local police untrained in immigration law. They force businesses to purge work forces and schools to check students’ immigration status. And they greatly increase the danger of unreasonable searches, false arrests, racial profiling and other abuses, not just against immigrants, but anyone who may look like some officer’s idea of an illegal immigrant.
The laws empower local police officers to demand the documents of people they meet, and to detain those they suspect are here illegally. That means they can make warrantless arrests for assumed civil immigration violations, a stunning abuse of power.”

Concern is certainly justified about our nation’s continuing “committment to the country’s original ideals, but the committment of people of “various races and colors” (other than white males) is not necessarily the place to begin.

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Republican “Vouchercare” versus Democratic “Medicare” – Paul Krugman’s devastatingly accurate distinction that every Democrat should use and repeat at every possible opportunity

by , June 6th, 2011 8:26 AM EST

In his New York Times column today Paul Krugman presents a strikingly clear explanation of the difference between the Democratic and Republican approaches to health care – a distinction between Republican “Vouchercare” and Democratic “Medicare”
Here’s how Krugman explains it:

Medicare is a government-run insurance system that directly pays health-care providers. Vouchercare would cut checks to insurance companies instead. Specifically, the program would pay a fixed amount toward private health insurance — higher for the poor, lower for the rich, but not varying at all with the actual level of premiums. If you couldn’t afford a policy adequate for your needs, even with the voucher, that would be your problem.

And most seniors wouldn’t be able to afford adequate coverage. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that to get coverage equivalent to what they have now, older Americans would have to pay vastly more out of pocket under the Paul Ryan plan than they would if Medicare as we know it was preserved.

Republicans have desperately tried to deny that the Ryan plan would transform Medicare into a radically different voucher system. They say instead that it would create a “new, sustainable version of Medicare”
Krugman replies:

I’ll just quote the blogger Duncan Black, who summarizes this as saying that “when we replace the Marines with a pizza, we’ll call the pizza the Marines.” The point is that you can name the new program Medicare, but it’s an entirely different program.

The mainstream media, with their characteristic tendency to define editorial “balance” as a point exactly midway between fact and bullshit, dutifully report the Republican spin that if they call their program “new improved Medicare” then the press has an obligation to describe it that way. The Republicans even went so far as to try to block an advertisement that attacked them for planning to “end Medicare” on the grounds that it was unfair to let anyone criticize the program using anything other than their preferred words.
The attempt to block the advertisement indicates how threatened the Republicans feel by the popular reaction to their proposal. There is no doubt they will pour tens of millions of dollars into ads pushing the “new, improved Medicare” spin and hope that that, along with their admirable message discipline, can simply smother the chorus of criticism their plan has unleashed.
Krugman’s devastatingly simple and accurate distinction between “Vouchercare” and “Medicare” provides Democrats with an extraordinarily powerful way to cut through the spin and keep the debate clearly focused on the basic issue.
Dems should use the terms “Republican Vouchercare” and “Democratic Medicare” at every possible opportunity and in every single discussion. This is a case where the most relentless message discipline will not only be extremely effective but fundamentally truthful as well.
“Republican Vouchercare” vs. “Democratic Medicare” – clear, powerful, accurate and compelling. Repeat it until the Republicans start pulling out their hair.

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