There’s been a certain Kabuki Theater quality to arguments over a “public option” in a reformed, competitive system for universal health care, with many progressives insisting on the inherent superiority of public programs not driven by profit-seeking, and many conservatives calling the public option a Trojan Horse for a single-payer system.
Today in The American Prospect, Paul Starr calls attention to key issues about how a public option should be structured that go beyond these reflexive attitudes:

The great danger is that the public plan could end up with a high-cost population in a system that fails to compensate adequately for those risks. Private insurers make money today in large part by avoiding people with high medical costs, and in a reformed system they’d love a public plan where they could dump the sick. Although the proposals before Congress aim to limit insurers’ incentives to skim off the best risks, the measures are unlikely to eliminate those incentives entirely.

The regulatory environment for both public and private options will have an enormous impact on their relative costs, which in turn could determine whether the system as a whole can actually work, explains Starr:

Unconstrained, the public plan could drive private insurers out of business, setting off a political backlash not just from the industry but from much of the public. Over-constrained, the public plan could go into a death spiral itself as it becomes a dumping ground for high-risk enrollees, its rates rise, and it loses its appeal to the public at large. Creating a fair system of public-private competition — giving the public plan just enough power to offset its likely higher risks — wouldn’t be easy even if it were up to neutral experts, which it isn’t.

Those who view a public-private “hybrid” system as a nice compromise between the status quo and a single-payer system need to think more deeply about these questions.

Note: This is a guest post by Chris Bowers, co-founder of OpenLeft, that we feature as part of our continuing discussion on intraparty and intraprogressive debates. It was first published at OpenLeft on Friday, June 19, and was discussed by Ed Kilgore here that same day.
When Democrats were in the minority in the Senate, they argued to progressive activists that, in order to pass the type of legislation we wanted, we needed to take back the majority in the Senate. So, in 2006, progressive activists worked their butts off and helped deliver Democrats a Senate majority.
After Senate Democrats had the majority, they argued to progressive activists that, in order to pass the type of legislation we wanted, they told they needed not just the majority, but also 60 votes in the Senate and control of the White House. So, in 2008, progressive activists worked their butts off and helped deliver not only the White House, but also sixty votes in the Senate (once al Franken is seated, of course).
Now that Democrats have wide majorities in both branches of Congress, not to mention control of the White House, we are still being told that our agenda is not politically possible. However, what is really happening is that a block of conservative Democrats are regularly joining with Republicans to weaken, or block entirely, many of the pillars of the progressive legislative agenda:
1. Stimulus: A group of nearly twenty Senators, most of them Democrats, successfully watered down an already too small stimulus was watered down by $96 billion.
2. Health Care: After the budget passed, and allowed for the 50-vote process on reconciliation, we are now being told by Kent Conrad that there are not enough votes in the Senate to pass a public option. Since that time, bad news for the public option has rained down, including former Democratic Senator Majority Leader and one-time nominee for HHS Secretary Tom Dsachle telling Democrats to drop the public option.
3. Climate Change. The already weakened Waxman-Markey climate change bill is currently being help up and further weakened by a block of 50 House Democrats led by Collin Peterson. The bill already has lower renewable targets than China and most of the 50 states, not to mention removes the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon. However, that isn’t good enough for Peterson, so expect much of the same to happen once this bill finally passes the House and reaches the Senate.
4. Employee Free Choice Act: Six Senators, all of whom are now Democrats, flipped their position on the Employee Free Choice Act. Originally, at the start of Congress, and once Al Franken was seated, there were enough votes to pass EFCA. No more–not even in a 60-vote Senate.
5. Cramdown: Twelve Democratic Senators, and all Republicans, voted against the foreclosure bankruptcy reform known as cramdown. This measure would have allowed bankruptcy judges to reduce the price of mortgages for people in bankruptcy, thus allowing hundreds of thousands to keep their home. It was ostensibly supported by the Obama administration.
Time and time again, conservative Democrats representing between 10% and 25% of their chamber’s Democratic caucus have formed a block, joined with Republicans, and successfully weakened, severely threatened, or entirely blocked key elements of the progressive legislative agenda. They were successful in every case despite the ostensible, public support for that agenda by the Obama administration.
All of this is enough to make one think that it simply wasn’t true that Democrats needed 60-votes in the Senate and control of the White House in order to pass progressive legislation. It turns out that Matt Stoller’s arguments on the 60-vote myth were correct.
Instead of 60 votes in the Senate, what progressives need is Democratic control of both branches of Congress, control of the White House, and a progressive block of at least 13 Senators and 45 House members that will vote against Democratic legislation unless their demands are met. What we need is our own version of the Blue Dogs and Evan Bayh’s “conservodem” Senate group that is large enough, and staunch enough, to be able to block Democratic legislation by joining with Republicans.
We need this group to draw hard lines in the sand for the two biggest legislative priorities of 2009: health care and climate change. The group needs to make it clear that, if their demands are not met, then no climate change or health care legislation of any sort will be passed. Demands like:
1. Health care: A public health insurance option that is immediately available to all Americans.
2. Climate change: Restoring the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon and renewable energy targets that surpass those put in place by China..
The models for the progressive block are the Blue Dogs, the Senate “conservodems,” and also the Afghanistan-IMF supplemental fight. In that fight, a progressive block of 32 House Democrats help up the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership for two weeks, forcing them to whip votes hard and make some concessions. With 13 more votes, there was a good chance they could have succeeded in severely denting the neoliberal “Washington consensus,” and forcing real reform at the IMF. While the fight was not ultimately successful, it forced the White House to deal with the Progressive Caucus more than any other legislative fight in 2009.
Such a progressive block is already in place in the House for health care. In that chamber and on that issue, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has stated there are not enough votes to pass health care reform without a public option. We need to form a corresponding health care block in the Senate, and corresponding blocks in both chambers on climate change legislation.
Once these blocks are in place, the White House and Democratic leadership will be forced to either whip conservative Democrats to fall in line with the demands of the Progressive Block, or to convince an equal number of Republicans to support compromise legislation. Either way, we will put an end to the dynamic of the White House and Democratic leadership offering muted public support for progressive legislation, while conservative Democrats threaten, weaken and block that legislation. They will either have to come out in public for more moderate legislation, or start working hard for progressive legislation.
We need a Progressive Block, not 60 votes in the Senate. For the next few months, progressive legislative efforts should be directed at putting that Block into place.

Note: this is a guest post from Alan Abramowitz, Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University, and a member of the TDS Advisory Board. It’s a follow-up to his May 20 post on public opinion about abortion.
We have more evidence on current public opinion on the issue of abortion from a new CBS/New York Times poll. The survey, which was conducted from June 12-16, asked respondents to choose one of three options–abortion should be generally available to those who want it, abortion should be available but with stricter limts than now, or abortion should not be permitted. 36 percent of respondents wanted abortion to be generally available, 41 percent wanted it available with stricter limits, and 21 percent wanted it prohibited. Three percent of respondents were undecided.
These results were almost identical to those obtained in numerous CBS/NYT polls over the past 16 years. The CBS/NYT poll asked this question 16 times between January of 1993 and September of 2008. In those 16 surveys the average results were 36 percent for the first option, 39 percent for the second option, and 22 percent for the third option.
In addition to this result, the new CBS/NYT poll found that 62 percent of respondents considered the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion “a good thing” for the country while only 32 percent considered the decision “a bad thing” for the country. And 64 percent of respondents said they did not want the decision to be overturned by the Court compared with only 29 percent who did.
Taken together, these results demonstrate that (a) there is no evidence of any substantial shift in public opinion on the issue of abortion and (b) a solid majority of the American public continue to support the Surpreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. Since overturning Roe remains the main goal of the “pro-life” movement, these results clearly indicate that a large majority of Americans do not support the “pro-life” agenda.

As the high-stakes battle over health care reform gets very serious in Washington, we have a well-timed reminder from TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg at TNR today about what happened to the Clinton administration’s health reform plan in 1993 and 1994, when he was Clinton’s top pollster.
Greenberg stresses the exceptional similarity of public opinion on health care then and now:

Then and now, the country proclaimed its readiness for bold reform. In both instances, one-quarter say that the health care system “has so many problems that we need to completely rebuild it”; half the country sees “good things” in the current system but believes “some major changes are needed.” Then and now, about 60 percent of the public feel dissatisfied with the current health insurance system. Yet three-quarters are satisfied with their own health insurance–once again eerily parallel numbers.

And yet again, says Greenberg, cost-containment arguments for universal health coverage will be difficult to make on a macro level, and essential to win on an individual family level, where calculations of the net effect of reform will be made sooner or later.
One ironically positive factor for Obama’s health plan is that the fear of losing insurance coverage due to unemployment is higher than it was 16 years ago. Another is that union members, who are often happy with their own health insurance, are feeling a lot more insecure.
But in the end, Greenberg argues, it’s the President’s advocacy for his plan that most needs to rise to the occasion:

At the moment, the country is tilting toward enacting Obama’s reforms, and it will do so more enthusiastically if Obama learns from the Clinton experience and rises to the educative role that he relishes. He must respect the thoughts, feelings and calculations of ordinary citizens who are not easily spun on important issues. People will take out their calculators when he lays out his plan, and he can’t avoid speaking candidly about its costs and consequences. And he can’t forget that he has a big story to tell about a changed America, one in which health care is but a pile of bricks in the new foundation he is laying.

Editor’s Note: we’re very happy to feature this item, originally published at The Huffington Post, by Mike Lux, founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies, LLC, and author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came To Be. This is an important contribution to our ongoing discussion of intraparty and intraprogressive debates.
There has been some interesting writing lately on the whole Obama and the left thing, a wave of discussion that started when Obama declared his candidacy for president, and won’t end until humans stop writing history books.
The first was kind of a silly article by Josh Gerstein in Politico, which basically described the left as being Rachel Maddow, some civil liberties groups, and some LGBT activists. Not surprisingly given that definition, all “the left” in Gerstein’s article cared about were civil liberties, gay rights, and having a Supreme Court Justice picked.
Now don’t get me wrong, all of those are incredibly important issues and activists, but to describe “the left” in that way seems like pretty bad reporting. Doesn’t mention the labor movement, health care advocates, advocates for low-income people, environmentalists, bloggers, community organizers, progressive think tanks, feminists, progressive activists of color, MoveOn and other online activists, the progressive youth movement, the peace movement, or any other parts of the remarkably diverse and interesting progressive movement. He didn’t mention how progressives had both pushed for the stimulus package to be bigger but also were an essential part of getting it passed in the end; or how progressives have been organizing big coalitions on behalf of helping Obama get health care, immigration reform, climate change reform, and a re-write of banking legislation passed; or how progressives have expressed concern on a range of issues like trade and banking.
There have also been articles in the Washington Post about how Obama’s election and the sausage making of passing legislation had deadened progressive excitement, and the excellent grasp of the obvious file — one about how progressive groups now had more power in lobbying than they had under Bush.
Easily the most thoughtful pieces of all have been two recent pieces by members of the progressive movement themselves (both personal friends, so I’ll admit my bias upfront). The first, by Gara LaMarche of Atlantic Philanthropies, was a thoughtful and nuanced discussion of the challenges of both Obama and progressives, and was fairly hopeful in general, both about Obama and about the relationship between him and the movement. The second, by Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, was a more frustrated discussion of the way progressive leaders aren’t challenging Obama enough, and the distancing of Obama from progressives.
From my experience in the Obama transition as the Obama team’s liaison to the progressive community, and in all my conversations with folks both inside and outside of Obamaland before and since, the tension between being hopeful about the possibilities and upset that better things aren’t being realized will always be there. If managed right by both Obama and progressive leaders, it can be the kind of constructive, creative tension that leads to the kind of big breakthrough progressive changes we saw in this country at key moments in our history- the 1860s, the early 1900s, the 1930s, and the 1960s (the Big Change Moments I write about in my book, The Progressive Revolution). If managed poorly, it can lead to the kind of presidential meltdowns we saw with the LBJ and Jimmy Carter presidencies, and on the Republican side with the first Bush presidency: Presidencies that started with high hopes but ended with destructive conflicts between the base and the presidency, tough primary challenges, and lost re-election hopes.
So far, I’m feeling quite good about Obama’s chances for the former. After some initial stumbles, he pushed through the stimulus package — and the biggest progressive public investment package — in history. His budget was very bold and as strongly progressive as any budget at least since 1965, and it has made its way through the first rounds of the congressional budget process in good shape. He has so far handled the politics around his first big legislative initiatives, health care and climate change, very pretty, giving us a solid chance at success.
Progressive leaders have handled themselves well on balance, too. A lot of us thought the stimulus was too small, but we pushed hard to get it passed once the die was cast. A lot of us prefer a single-payer health care system, but are also pushing hard to see a strong public option kept in this reform package, and are putting big resources into the passage of a good plan. Progressive groups and leaders are working hard and constructively to push Obama and other Democrats to improve the climate change bill that came out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and to move forward on the strong financial regulation and immigration reform legislation. And where Obama has disappointed many of us — on civil liberties, on LGBT issues, on Afghanistan, and on financial regulation — we have pushed back strongly but generally not been destructive in doing so.
Going forward, though, there are certain things history and common sense teach us that both sides need to understand very clearly:
1. We need each other. Progressives need to understand that our fates for several years to come are tied, fundamentally and completely, to Obama’s success as president. If he loses his big legislative fights, we won’t get another chance at winning them for a generation (see health care, 1993-94), and early losses will make the Democrats more cautious, not more bold (see health care, 1993-94). If Obama’s popularity fades, Democrats will lose lots of seats in Congress. If he loses re-election, Republicans and the media will say he was a failed liberal and run against him for many elections to come, even if his actual policies are more centrist (see Jimmy Carter). But Obama’s team needs to understand that they need a strong progressive movement as well, and as Jane alluded to, they haven’t generally acted like they do. Without progressives’ passion, activism, lobbying, and money, Obama can’t win those incredibly challenging legislative battles. Just as Lincoln never would have won the civil war or ended slavery without the passion of the abolitionists, just as FDR never would have won the New Deal reforms without the labor and progressive movement, just as LBJ would never have passed civil rights bills without the civil rights movement, Obama can’t win these big fights alone. And he can’t win re-election either without the passion of his base: see LBJ, Ford, Carter, George H.W. Bush, and many other presidents for more info on that topic.
2. Obama needs a left flank. It is a natural tendency of any White House to be dismissive of criticism, and to play hardball when people disagree with you. The Obama team should not hesitate to defend itself when being pushed from the Left, but I would caution against playing too hard at hardball. The Obama team needs a vibrant and vocal Left flank, because the stronger their Left flank is, the more Obama seems solidly in the middle. The White House would be well-served to fully support and empower progressive groups, media, and bloggers — even when they sometimes disagree with Obama.
3. There needs to be both an inside and an outside strategy for progressives. Progressive leaders who get jobs in the administration are sometimes derided as sell-outs, and progressive groups who are not openly critical of the Administration are sometimes criticized as being too cozy with those inside. At the same time, insiders get very worked up about “irresponsible” bloggers and outside activists who they say don’t understand the system and the challenges they are facing.
Having been both on the inside and the outside, I see the grain of truth in both sides’ perspective, but also respectfully disagree with both sides.
We need progressive people in government, even if the cost of that is that they have to trim their sails on issues where they disagree with administration policy. We need progressive groups in regular in-depth policy meetings with the administration, even if that means they have to soft-pedal their criticisms some of the time to keep that access. And we need outsiders who will push like crazy for doing the right thing now no matter what.
Change and progress never happened in this country without both insiders and outside agitators playing a strong role. The administration needs to respect the role of those outsiders, and those working for progress from the inside and the outside need to respect each other. There is no other way this is all going to work for the good.

As numbers-oriented folk here at TDS, we can’t resist a shout-out for Paul Waldman’s article for The American Prospect today, which examines why the extraordinary availability of good data these days hasn’t translated into a rejection of bad data, at least in the United States.
Waldman blames some of the bogus credibility of bad data on the media, where the quality of data is rarely policed::

How many times in recent years has [the press] treated some bogus figure put out by one side of a political debate as though it might be true, depending on how you look at it? To take just one example, consider the gift that The New York Times offered up to anti-union forces last November, when a now notorious article by Andrew Ross Sorkin claimed that Big Three autoworkers were being paid $70 per hour. It was false — the average worker was actually making $28 an hour. The $70 figure came from disingenuously combining four separate expenses incurred by the automakers, only one of which is actual wages. But that didn’t stop conservative opponents of aid to the automakers from turning factory workers into the villains of the story, a bunch of greedy layabouts sucking the companies dry and driving them to ruin. The truth didn’t much matter — the idea ricocheted around the media for weeks.
The right thing for any reporter to do when confronted with the claim would have been to say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Conservative Think Tank guy, but you and I both know that autoworkers don’t make $70 an hour. Is there anything else you’d like to add — that’s not a lie — that I can use in my story?” But reporters don’t necessarily say that sort of thing. And this is just one case. Journalists’ lack of even the most rudimentary understanding of statistics is evident on the news pages and broadcasts nearly every day.

But Waldman goes on to suggest that cultural factors are at play, including the taste for quackery evidence in popular culture; the poor math and statistical skills of the American population; and a general inability to differentiate between those questions “the numbers” can help answer, and those they can’t.

Last month TDS featured a lot of analysis (here, here, here, here and here) on the whole question of whether new polls from Pew and Gallup showed some sort of major shift in public opinion towards opposition to legalized abortion. The polls got a lot of hype from conservatives in the context of the President’s speech at Notre Dame, and the Sotomayor nomination.
Our last post on the subject was from Emory University’s Alan Abramowitz, who addressed the specific question of whether Democrats could successfully appeal to voters with anti-abortion sentiments (doesn’t much look like it, he concluded).
Now Abramowitz has another post up at pollster.com factoring in a new poll from AP, and summarizing the overwhelming evidence that public opinion is stable on abortion, and continues to lean towards the pro-choice position. Check it out.

People all over the world are watching replays and coverage of President Obama’s big speech in Cairo. Conservatives, of course, are already attacking it, sometimes without bothering to read or listen to it.
TDS Co-Editor William Galston has an interesting take on the speech at TNR today. Comparing the President’s words to those of Ronald Reagan, he suggests that Obama, like Reagan, believes his presidency coincides with a transformative moment in national and world history–you know, sort of like his campaign represented one of those moments in American politics:

Barack Obama is president today because he understood the moment better than anyone else and had the imagination and courage to seize it. He is conducting his presidency on the same basis as he did his campaign, and he may be right again. Whatever happens, it will be one heck of a ride.

For those political folk who aren’t satisfied with off-year elections, or even with midterm elections, yes, there’s already talk going on about the 2012 presidential race, and the emerging field of Republicans. The Daily Beast has not one but two articles up on the subject, one by long-time GOP strategist Mark McKinnon, and one by Benjy Sarlin
McKinnon makes this interesting observation about the current political climate:
I’m surprised by how many people I talk to in the media and politics, including many Republicans, already presume Obama will be a two-term president.
Nonetheless, there’s plenty of Republicans who are at least flirting with the idea of running against him. In his own handicapping, McKinnon ranks Romney and Pawlenty at the top of his list, mentions John Thune prominently, and
suggests that new Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman could “solve an early crisis and come home” to torment Obama.
Sarlin focuses on the evenness of the field, and offers brief profiles of ten potentential candidates–interestingly, not the same ten on McKinnon’s handicapping list!

If you want to understand just how pitbullish conservatives are feeling right now, consider this: Before Sonia Sotomayor makes her first appearance on Capitol Hill, and long before her first confirmation hearing, conservative activists are already pitching a public fit about the possibility that Republicans won’t filibuster her confirmation on the Senate floor months from now.
Politico’s Manu Raju has the story:

In a letter to be delivered to Senate Republicans Tuesday, more than 145 conservatives – including Grover Norquist, Richard Viguerie and Gary Bauer — call for a filibuster of Sotomayor’s nomination if that’s what it takes to force a “great debate” over judicial philosophy.
But in an interview with POLITICO, Manuel Miranda – who orchestrated the letter – went much farther, saying that Mitch McConnell should “consider resigning” as Senate minority leader if he can’t take a harder line on President Barack Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee.

If Miranda’s name rings a bell, it’s because he achieved some notoriety back in 2004 when he got fired from his Senate leadership job after he was caught hacking into the computer files of Democratic staffers and stealing thousands of internal documents. Sounds like Miranda hasn’t exactly mended his hyperpartisan ways.
The letter appears to have been motivated by anger at Senate Republicans who have been critical of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, among others, for over-the-top attacks on Sotomayor.
The not-so-subtle message is: don’t forget who’s the boss here!