At the New Republic today, TDS Co-Editor William Galston draws attention to Obama administration projections that unemployment could well remain very high through the mid-term election cycle, and perhaps beyond it:

If OMB’s projections are correct, unemployment will average 9.8 percent during 2010 and will likely stand above 9 percent on the day of the mid-term election. After the health care debate ends, and whatever its outcome may be, the administration and congressional Democrats would be well advised to turn their attention back to the economy and ask themselves whether there is anything more to be done to jumpstart job creation.

Another stimulus package, anyone?

Think about what you’ve seen from Republicans in Congress this year. And then read this paragraph from RedState’s Erick Erickson, asking for contributions to four conservative Senate candidates:

Imagine a world where Marco Rubio, Chuck Devore, Pat Toomey, and Michael Williams work together in the Senate with Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn. Imagine a world where they push the GOP to the right in the Senate and stop the culture of capitulation.

“Cultural of capitulation,” eh? It’s always interesting to look at the world through the eyes of others.

Since RedState.com is one of the two or three most prominent conservative political blogs out there, it’s very interesting to see the reaction of its founder, Erick Erickson, to the incident last night when Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) shrieked “You lie!” at the President for saying (accurately) that his health care proposal did not create coverage for illegal immigrants:

Joe Wilson has been identified as the Republican who yelled out that Barack Obama was a liar.
He gets a drink on me!
CONTRIBUTE TO JOE WILSON HERE. Joe Wilson’s opponent raised $11,000.00 in an hour after Joe Wilson stood up to Barack Obama. We must help Joe Wilson.

But defending Wilson as a “Great American Hero” (in the title of the post) wasn’t enough for Erickson, who is only happy when he’s acting as an ideological commissar rooting out any signs of moderation in the GOP:

Bob Bennett (RINO-UT) was the only Republican who stood up and clapped when Barack Obama bashed Sarah Palin over the death panels. That jackass should be taken out in a primary.

So Sarah Palin completely fabricates an inflammatory “death panel” claim, and other wingnuts fabricate the illegal immigrants claim. Nobody made them do this; both claims were based on crazy conspiracy theories at best, and conscious, end-justifies-the-means lies at worst. The President calls them on it, Wilson goes nuts, and he’s an American Hero, while Bennett is an “unrepentant fool” and a “jackass” for failing to sit on his hands when Obama called the “death panel” crap a lie.
These people are shameless. And they no longer seem to have a firm grip on reality.

As we await the president’s heatlh reform speech tonight, TDS Co-Editor William Galston, writing in The New Republic, succinctly describes the challenge Obama faces in appealing to people who are reasonably happy with their current health care options:

[T]he president now faces a two-front challenge. First, he must persuade skeptical middle-class voters that his plan will in fact allow them to keep what they have. Second, he must paint a compelling picture of what they stand to lose if we do nothing–higher premiums, reduced benefits, more out-of-pocket cost, and steadily diminishing employer coverage in good times as well as bad.

Premiums for a typical family health insurance policy, notes Galston, have more than doubled since 2000, and middle-class folk are losing employer-based coverage in the current recession at an alarming rate.
As Jonathan Cohn, in a separate TNR piece, says about Medicare beneficiaries:

As is so often the case with health care, the choices aren’t exactly as the public perceives them. Seniors don’t have the luxury of picking between the Democrats’ plan and the status quo. Instead, the choice between them is between the Democrats’ plan and a steady deterioration in the program’s finances–all but forcing the sort of radical scaling back that Republicans tried to push through in the early 1990s.

That about sums it all up. On complicated issues, inaction always seems like an acceptable option, particularly if you’ve been convinced to fear change. But on health care, inaction ought to be particularly scary.

So, the longest August in history is over, Labor Day is past, all the bigfoot journalists are back from Martha’s Vineyard, and we can now have something approaching a real debate over health care reform.
At TNR, Jonathan Cohn has a good, if somewhat tenative, assessment of where were are on health reform. He points to the decision to deal with Olympia Snowe, the one Senate Republican who actually seems to be negotiating in good faith, as a good sign (not just in terms of her own vote, but because she can provide cover for shaky Democrats), as is the more serious attention being paid to the reconciliation option for moving a bill through the Senate.
Right now the biggest problem for the White House may be the enormous expectations building up around the President’s speech tomorrow. Today and tomorrow he’ll get a lot of armchair advice for what he ought to say, and how he ought to say it. The one thing everyone will agree on is that he need to be clear, clear, clear on one of the murkiest policy issues imaginable.

As we get down to the lick-log on health care reform, a lot rides on how reform supporters frame the debate. There’s a lot of support among progressives for going after private health insurers in a big way, and for pointing to Medicare to show the relative competence and efficiency of government.
In a post at The New Republic, TDS Co-Editor William Galston agrees the first tactic might work, but warns against the second. Mistrust of government, which naturally increased during the incompetent-government Bush years, has not much revived, which is a real problem for the health reform agenda:

Mistrust of concentrated power is part of America’s cultural DNA. Most Americans regard government as at best a disagreeable necessity. Even this March, at the low point of the recession and confidence in the future, and at a time when a majority of Americans favored more government control of the economy to stave off disaster, only 40 percent opted for a bigger government providing more services, versus 48 percent who preferred a smaller government providing fewer services. In this context, health reform must be spoken of by its defenders not as a positive good, but rather as medicine needed to arrest a disease—namely, the erosion of wages and the employer-based insurance system—that will eventually damage even the healthy parts of the body.

Skepticism of government, says Galston, is an even bigger problem because big majorities of Americans are actually pretty happy with their current health insurance. Adding it all up:

Today, fully 51 percent are more worried about the health reform bill they expect Congress to pass than by the possibility that reform will be delayed beyond this year. On the other hand, only 6 percent believe that the ills currently afflicting the health care system as a whole will get better with no government action, versus 54 percent who say it will get worse.

That’s a prettty big obstacle to the idea that reform needs to happen this year. And that needs to be taken into account when the administration and congressional Democrats plot their strategy for the autumn. Those unhappy with the current health care system should be mobilized; those relatively happy with it should understand how ittle reform effects them now, and how much it benefits them in the future. And the federal government should not be lionized as the indispensable health care provider–just as the indispensable catalyst for making sure the system works for everyone.

According to Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic today, the White House is finally prepared to pull the trigger on presidentially branded approach to health care reform, in the form of key markers he will expect any legislation to achieve:

Next week, President Obama is going to give Democrats a health care plan they can begin to sell.
He plans to list specific goals that any health insurance reform plan that arrives at his desk must achieve, according to Democratic strategists familiar with the plan. Some of these “goals” have already been agreed to, including new anti-discrimination restrictions on insurance companies. Others will be new, including the level of subsidies he expects to give the uninsured so they can buy into the system.
Obama will also specify a “pay for” mechanism he prefers, and will specify an income level below which he does not want to see taxed.
He will insist upon a mechanism to cut costs and increase competition among insurance companies — and perhaps will even specify a percentage rate — and he will say that his preferred mechanism remains a government-subsidized public health insurance option, but he will remain agnostic about whether the plan must include a robust public option.

It sounds like “ObamaCare,” which will finally begin to merit that term, will be consistent with what’s expected to pass the House, but flexible enough to accomodate what’s “doable” in the Senate.
One key goal will be to identify his administration and his party with reforms on health insurance practicies, such as exclusions of people with pre-existing conditions, that even Republicans claim to support:

The effect of this sales job, if it works, will be to associate the President with parts of the reform bills that are almost certainly likely to pass — assuming the Senate doesn’t bog down.

So: after months of Democratic anxiety over the President’s strategy of deferring to congressional committees, we’ll at last see if his Fabian strategy of gaining by delay in drawing his own lines in the sand will work.
It’s interesting that one long-time and generally nonpartisan Beltway observer, Norm Ornstein, has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post arguing that Obama has in fact chosen the best available strategy for achieving health care reform this year. We’ll soon now if that’s the case. But in any event, the White House’s planned moves should at least calm down progressives who had feared the President was happy to let his signature initiative rise and fall without ever saying exactly what he was willing to expend political captal to accomplish.

This is a guest post from Mark Ribbing, Director of Policy Development at the Progressive Policy Institute.
The time is coming to give this decade a name. We are four months from its end, and still we have no handy moniker that captures the spirit of the 2000’s, their odd blend of dislocation, dissolution and hope.
Back at the start of the millennium, commentators offered various spoken shorthands for the 00’s, but none have caught on. The most logical choice, “The Two-Thousands,” is unwieldy. Playing on the multiplicity of zeros, some pundits suggested “The Zeros” or even—in an antiquarian turn—“The Aughts.”
Others chose to see all those circles not as numbers, but as letters, and to pronounce them as such—“The Oh’s.” This, it turns out, was a step on the right track. But let’s consider a different pronunciation, one that captures not only the numerical identity of the 00’s, but also their historical essence: “The Ooze.”
This name’s been suggested before, mainly as a gag entrant in the dub-the-decade sweepstakes. Now it’s time for us to embrace its aptness for our times. Let us ponder ooze.
My desk version of Webster’s dictionary lists its first definition of “ooze” as a verb meaning “[t]o flow or seep out slowly, as through small openings.” The second is “[t]o vanish or ebb slowly,” and offers as an example the following phrase: “felt my confidence ooze away.”
But “ooze” is not just a verb for things that seep through small openings (like an infiltrating terrorist, or a flu virus) or for things that vanish or ebb over time (like Arctic ice, or the U.S. manufacturing-job base).
For “ooze” is also a noun. It is mud, goop, gunk, but its meaning goes a bit, well, deeper than that.
Back to the dictionary. It turns out that ooze is the “[m]udlike sediment covering the floor of oceans and lakes, composed mainly of the remains of microscopic animals.” In other words, it is the inert decayed matter of that which was once alive, and moving, and whole, however fragile it turned out to be.
This was our national condition all too often in the 2000’s—a perceptible wearing-away of living, intact structures that upheld our sense of security, liberty, prosperity, and mutual obligation.
This sense of national loss and unsettlement was a continual theme of the first eight years of the decade. It was an undercurrent running from the September 11 attacks to Hurricane Katrina, from the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the implosion of our financial sector.
Yet before we mire ourselves in pessimism, let us once again consider the floors of oceans and lakes, where microscopic beings settle and separate into the mud. The resulting stew is a vital staging ground for life itself. It is a place where ecosystems filter and regenerate themselves.
In short, ooze need not only signify decay. It can also represent the conditions for lasting growth and renewal—the kind that emerges from the ground up.
Such emergence is often hard to see at first. Ooze does not lend itself to clarity or rapid fruition. But down there, beneath the surface, things are happening that will one day become visible to the wide world.
Somewhere, a laid-off worker is taking her career into her own hands and starting up a new business. An abandoned building is reborn as a charter school. A vacant lot becomes part of the growing nationwide push toward local, sustainable sources of food.
The American instinct for renewal was crucial to Barack Obama’s electoral appeal, and it may yet manifest itself in a national willingness to confront such challenges as our deeply flawed health-care system, our educational dysfunction, and our increasingly costly dependence on fossil fuels. These are big problems, and anyone who expected them to be solved easily or without opposition has forgotten the basic truths of human nature, and of democracy.
What matters is this: Progress toward change is indeed taking place, on all of these fronts and others besides. That progress may seem too slow, and it may send its tendrils down the occasional dead-end channel, but it’s nourished by something quite real—a keen desire to see our nation do better, to reclaim its inventive, expansive soul. The Ooze is where we have been, and our future is forming in its depths, nourished by the broken shells ofwhat had come before.

We’re pleased to cross-post from The Huffington Post this piece by Mike Lux, founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies, LLC, and author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came To Be. It is offered as part of the continuing debate over progressive strategiy and intra-party Democratic relations.
I wanted to weigh in on this whole left flank for Obama issue (the idea that Obama needs a strong progressive movement pushing him from the left to get things done), because I think getting it right is probably the single most important thing in creating transformative change. Let me start by talking for a bit about my personal situation, because I think it has lessons from the broader issue.
I am blessed and cursed by this man-in-the-middle life I’ve created for myself.
One the one hand, I am a DC insider. I have served inside of five Presidential campaigns, two Presidential transition teams (sadly, the only two in my adult lifetime), and the Clinton White House. On the other hand, I have chosen to spend most of my life outside of government and the Democratic Party, working instead on helping to build progressive infrastructure and issue campaigns. This being connected to both the inside and outside has created some interesting dynamics.
Last week was in some ways fairly typical for me. I had one senior White house official tell me I was positioning myself in a fairly helpful way, and another who people told me was referring to me as an “(expletive deleted), (expletive deleted), (particularly gross and disgusting expletive deleted).” My blog posts prompted some of my responders to say that I was way too pro-Obama, and what could you expect from a DC insider like me, while the same posts caused another friend to e-mail me, worried that I was being too tough on Obama and was endangering my relationship with the White House.
I am sort of used to having at least some of my friends pissed off at me almost all of the time (let alone what my actual enemies — there are a few — think of me). In the Clinton White House, I got yelled at almost daily from people on the outside about (a) all the bad things we had done to progressive causes, and (b) other White House officials who said I was just carrying water for all the lefties outside. My job there was described by people as being the person responsible for having all my friends yell at me.
This personal experience has made me reflect a lot on what an effective left flank is for a Democratic President. First, on the definition: my view of what is effective is based on my understanding of history laid out in my book, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be: an effective left flank pushes the more progressive party’s President toward big, transformational changes. The abolitionist movement successfully pushed Abe Lincoln and the radical Republicans toward ending slavery and other big changes; the Populist and Progressive and suffragist movements pushed Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson toward making the big progressive era changes in the early 1900s; the labor movement pushed FDR toward the major achievements of the New Deal; and the civil rights and other movements of the 1960s pushed the Kennedys and LBJ toward the big achievements of that era.
Moving toward transformational change is especially urgent when the nation is in crisis. Lincoln would not have won the civil war without the Emancipation Proclamation, and FDR would not have led us out of the Great Depression without New Deal economic policies. In both cases, the country was too broken, and needed big changes to fix it. And the reason that Buchanan, Hoover, and LBJ ended up as failed Presidents is that they stayed with conventional wisdom and weren’t bold enough on the biggest crises of their times (respectively, the lead-up to the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Vietnam War).
I believe we are at that kind of crisis moment now, and that we can only get ourselves out of it with big, bold, progressive policies. Lincoln, FDR and JFK/LBJ on civil rights all started out in more of a conventional wisdom mindset, but the combination of progressive movement pressure and the crisis itself moved them toward making the major changes needed to solve things.
So how do we create an effective left flank? Given that (per the above stories), I tend to get everybody I know mad at me at some point or another, I’m sure there will be a lot of disagreement on this, but here are some principles I believe we ought to follow in creating that left flank:
1. Understand that whether we like it or not, the progressive movement’s fate, at least for the next few years and probably longer, is inextricably tied to Obama’s. As mad as many of us progressives get at Obama over certain policy or strategic failures, we have to understand that him failing as President hurts the entire progressive cause. In case you didn’t notice, LBJ’s and Jimmy Carter’s failed Presidencies did not usher in eras of progressive reform, they moved the country inexorably to the right. As President from the more left party, most Americans saw them as liberals even though LBJ was decidedly un-liberal on Vietnam, and Carter was the most conservative Democratic President on economics since Grover Cleveland in the 1800s. But progressives were struck with their failures anyway and paid the price. People who think Obama is failing because he’s following a more moderate path, and that eventually helps us move in a more progressive direction, are fooling themselves.
If Obama fails on health care (and, by the way, I consider failure to be either not passing a bill, or passing a bill that doesn’t work for the middle class), we won’t see another attempt at serious health care reform for at least another generation. If he fails at doing something big on climate change, we probably won’t be able to get anything done on it until it is too late to make a difference. And if his economic policies fail, regardless of demographics moving in our favor or Republican extremism, all Democrats will be punished at the polls, and the far-right that has taken over the Republican Party will probably come into power. And this isn’t just about the long term, either: for every percentage point Obama’s approval drops, we probably lose another two or three House seats in 2010.
Progressives’ strategy, then, should not be to attack Obama personally, to undermine voters’ confidence in him, but to shore up the backbone of progressives in Congress — and in his own administration, because I guarantee you, policy debates between more and less progressive staffers are held every day at the White House. If Obama makes a bad policy decision, we shouldn’t hesitate to push back or encourage progressives in Congress to do the same, and if White House staffers are pursuing destructive political strategies (see the “left-of-the-left” quote), we shouldn’t hesitate to bang on them. But our goal should be to do all this while still holding up hope that Obama will move in the right direction, and to praise the hell out of him when he does.
2. We should value the different roles we all play. The “we” in the previous sentence includes insiders and outsiders, different players in the movement, and people who work in that building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We all have (hopefully) constructive and important roles to play, even when we disagree sometimes on tactics and strategies. I think it’s a mistake to assume anything about each other’s motives. These are big important policy debates we are having, and it’s natural that things will get heated. But we have to respect each other’s roles to make this work.
Frederick Douglass excoriated Lincoln for moving so slowly on abolition even while Lincoln was inviting him to the White House for quiet conversations about how to move forward, conversations that were critical in shaping Lincoln’s abolition strategy. Labor leaders loudly announced that no one, FDR included, was going to get them to back down, even as FDR was meeting with them privately and urging them to keep pushing. Alice Paul was chaining herself to the White House fence and going on hunger strikes while other feminist leaders were meeting with Wilson and other congressional leaders, and it took both tactics combined to get the vote. King and other civil rights leaders refused to back down on pleas to stop civil disobedience and the march on Washington, but met constantly with White House officials to keep things moving.
We all have roles to play. Let me throw out some specific examples:
DC coalitions tend, by their very nature, to be clunky, cautious, and a little slow-moving. But they still have incredibly important roles to play in terms of coordinating lobbying, field, and communicating tactics, and keeping a steady dialogue going on important details of legislation with congressional and White House staffers.
Some progressives chose to play an inside role so that they can be at the table on the incredibly important details of the legislative language. That is a really good thing, but to be on the inside, you have to be a team player, and you have to mute your criticisms. That can leave you open to criticism by folks on the outside, but it is an incredibly valuable and important role. Jan Schakowsky (an old friend, so I am biased) is a big example of this kind of person. She is both a strong progressive and is a loyal member of the Obama/Pelosi team. I am thankful every day she is fighting for our cause on the inside, because I guarantee you the important details of the bill would be a lot worse without her.
The bloggers who have been demanding that Congressional Progressive Caucus members stand firm on a public option have annoyed a lot of insiders, but their single-minded focus on the strategy of keeping House progressives united is a big reason why the public option is still alive. If the left didn’t keep pushing, this health care debate would keep shifting more and more to the right.
The kind of silly attitude, that the “left of the left” is the problem, hurts the White House. As I wrote the other day, when progressives are being critical is exactly the time the White House ought to be cultivating them. If people are inside a tent, they generally wee-wee (as the President would put it) outward, and if they are kept out, they generally wee-wee inward. And if you can’t figure that most progressives are trying to be your friends (even if, yes, we are occasionally big pains in the butt), then the White House has a very big problem.
Hopefully this discussion continues, because getting this right is arguably the single most important thing that will determine whether Obama and those of us in the progressive movement are a success. When the stakes are so incredibly high, tempers will flare, sharp elbows will be thrown, and various players will be critical of each other. All that’s understandable, and can be healthy. But we also all need to understand that progressives and the White House need each other to get anything big and important done. Abe Lincoln and Frederick Douglass understood that. So did FDR and John L. Lewis. So did Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s how big change happens in this country.
In the meantime, everybody feel free to keep yelling at me. I’ve gotten kind of used to it.

Steve Benen at Political Animal has a nice summary of conservative complaints yesterday that the memorial services for Edward Kennedy will be “politicized” by Democrats. They constantly invoke the 2002 memorial service for Sen. Paul Wellstone, and seem right on the edge of suggesting that Kennedy’s death will wind up being a net asset for the GOP. All this within hours of the announcement of the senator’s passing, mind you.
Benen’s comment nails the unseemliness of this sort of talk:

There may be a genuine fear on the right that Kennedy’s passing may inspire Democrats to complete his unfinished work, and give the left new resolve. A stirring memorial service with inspirational eulogies may have political consequences, so conservatives have apparently decided to try to crush that spirit now, before anyone starts to feel motivated to honor Kennedy’s legacy.
Indeed, they’re just laying the groundwork. Far-right bloggers and Fox News personalities may feel tempted to condemn Kennedy-related services when they occur, so they’re letting everyone know now, “We’ll be watching closely, waiting for rhetoric we don’t like.”
Hold services for a progressive champion that meets the demands of right-wing activists, or face their wrath.

It’s hard to imagine how you would hold an appropriate memorial service for someone who fought for progressive causes for nearly half a century, without mentioning said causes. This concern over making sure no politics crept into a memorial service or the surrounding commemorations sure didn’t bother conservatives when Ronald Reagan died.