The Obama administration’s first federal budget is officially going out in an hour, but one central feature is already well-known: the basic outlines of his “down payment on universal health care.” $634 billion over ten years has been reserved for this purpose.
But the more important fact about Obama’s health care proposal is its structure. And as Ezra Klein explained yesterday, it is carefully designed to nicely mesh with existing Senate Democratic proposals–principally legislation sponsored by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and a “white paper” issued by Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT)–even at the expense of departing somewhat from what Obama proposed as a candidate for president:

Obama is signaling support for the congressional consensus. The skeletal health plan outlined in tomorrow’s budget has been built to fit the work Congress is already doing on health care reform. As such, it will being with committed allies. It will not lose time defining new concepts to skeptical committee chairs. It will respect and support the existing legislative coalitions It is a strategy aimed at ensuring votes. At passing legislation. At achieving consensus, or as close to it as the Senate can come.

Klein contrasts this approach to that of the Clintons in 1993, who designed a health care reform plan, with a considerable degree of secrecy, that wasn’t really like anything under discussion on Capitol Hill. If for that reason alone, Team Obama begins this health care reform debate with an important leg up on their predecessors.

As Ed Kilgore noted in a post last week, the White House has been dropping hints that the first Obama budget, which will be formally released on Thursday but will be a major topic of the President’s speech to Congress tomorrow, will at least lay the foundation for universal health care.
Jonathan Cohn at TNR has some more advance intelligence on the budget and health care, and is hearing that Obama will specifically identify only a portion of the funds needed in the long run to move towards universal health care:

Obama will restate his commitment to making health care available to everybody, to improving the quality of care, and to bringing its costs under control–in effect, reiterating the promises he’s made since he started running for president. He will also call for putting aside money in the budget for fulfilling that commitment–a sum, I’m told, that will be “significant” and enough to convince skeptics he’s serious about the endeavor.
Some of that money will represent savings from other government health programs. For example, Obama will propose that the government reduce the excessive payments it now gives to private insurers participating in the Medicare program. Another source of funds will be a financial contribution from medium- and large-employers who don’t provide employees with health insurance.
But even when all of this money is put together, it won’t be enough to pay the very high cost of universal coverage. Making coverage available to everybody involves, among other things, expanding programs like Medicaid and subsidizing the purchase of insurance for people who can’t afford it on their own.* And although Obama will aggressively pursue reforms designed to make medical care less expensive over time, it will be many years before those reforms can yield significant savings.
Here’s where things get interesting. Obama will say he’s determined to find that remaining sum, through offsetting revenue increases or spending cuts that will allow him to stay true to his pledge of fiscal responsibility. But Obama won’t be specifying the offsets in this budget overview. Instead, he’ll pledge to work with Congress on identifying them.

So: as Cohn goes on to say, how Obama frames this “down-payment on universal health care” in his speech tomorrow will be very important both politically and fiscally. You can expect Republicans to charge that he’s asking Americans to buy a pig in a poke. But more likely, what he’s trying to avoid is creating a big ripe immediate target for Republicans and industry opponents of his plan, while seeking to convince folks that universal health care is worth the cost, and the effort.

While we are obviously in the midst of a national economic crisis, it’s equally obvious that some places and some categories of citizens are getting hit harder than others. But how will the geographical impact of the recession play out over time?
Well, the controversial but always stimulating urban theorist Richard Florida has some elaborate thoughts on that subject in a long cover article for The Atlantic. Some of his analysis unsurprisingly relies on his longstanding contention that places with high concentrations of “creative class” types will do well over the long run. But he offers some more specific insights that make a great deal of common sense.
Most notably, he points out that you can’t predict a given metropolitan area’s economic trajectory simply by shoehorning it into or out of a “troubled industry” category. Charlotte, for example, is a major banking center, which ought to spell trouble, but the consolidation of that industry through buyouts of near-bankrupt institutions may actually concentrate banking jobs there and get the city through the worst of the crisis. Similarly, the southern states sporting foreign car plants could obtain some relative benefit if U.S. automakers continue to struggle or go belly-up.
There are some cities, though, that have in the recent past fueled hyper-growth through locally determined economic factors that don’t auger well for the future. Florida mentions Phoenix and Las Vegas, whose growth explosions have been heavily dependent on construction, real estate, and retiree savings (Vegas, of course, also depends enormously on tourism, and thus national income and consumption trends) as places that may never quite be the same. To a large extent, their main growth industry was growth itself.
What the reader takes away from this article is that breezy generalizations about the regional impact of the crisis (which in turn helps determine its political impact) are often imprecise. Sure, the manufacturing centers of the Heartland are in deep, deep trouble, but Chicago, suggests Florida, is enough of a national and international center for professional services (and part of a “mega-region” that includes Toronto) that it could emerge even stronger. The most famous financial center of them all, New York, actually has a far more diversified economy than Des Moines, Iowa.
There’s a lot of other material in the article about things like the “metabolism” of various cities that reflects Florida’s earlier work, and is interesting if not self-evidently convincing. But it’s not too early to think about the reshaping of the country, and of the geographic and demographic trends we all began to take for granted over the last several decades, that will likely follow when the current crisis ends.

In an example of how one person’s political crisis represents another person’s opportunity for grassroots democracy: An email from the National Jewish Democratic Council today offers a link to a site wherein you can go through various scenarios for Israeli party coalitions, and Build Your Own Government.
The site itself is in Hebrew, which could limit its usefulness to many American kibitzers. But the party lines are all color-coded.
Next time Barack Obama has to put together a coalition in the Senate to pass key legislation, a tool like this would be helpful.

Over at The New Republic, TDS Co-Editor William Galston has published an article pointing to Ronald Reagan’s negotiation of an economic crisis and his subsequent landslide re-election as instructive for Barack Obama today.
In Galston’s take, Reagan overcame plunging approval ratings and a very difficult midterm election by constantly reminding Americans of the opposing party’s responsibility for the economic calamity, and its apparent failure to learn from it, and by sticking to his basic policy guns despite poor short-term results.
In some ways, Obama should find it easier than Reagan did to hold his predecessor responsible for the terrible economy, since a recession was well under way in Bush’s final year as president, and the financial collapse occurred on his watch. On the other hand, Reagan’s party did not have the sort of control of Washington (the House remained Democratic throughout his tenure) that Obama’s does, and even the Republican-controlled Senate rebelled against him on occasion (most notably in forcing a tax increase in 1982).
Generally, though, the parallels between Reagan’s political situation then and Obama’s now are indeed striking. And certainly Democrats hope to be able to say in 2012 that it’s “morning in America again.”

Yesterday’s elections in Israel can and are being spun in two different directions. On the one hand, Tzipi Livni’s Kadima party, which is committed to the pursuit of a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, narrowly (and somewhat surprisingly) outpolled Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud, theoretically giving her the opportunity to form a government. On the other hand, right-wing parties as a whole gained strength, and the big winner was Avigdor Lieberman’s hyper-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, which eclipsed Labor, the long-time governing party of the country, to become the third largest electoral bloc.
Today, in fact, Livni and Netanyahu are in hot pursuit of Lieberman’s support, since either leader can obtain the chance to put together a government with a majority of Knesset members on board. Lieberman’s party, among other things, favors the disenfranchisement of “disloyal” Israeli Arabs, and is adamantly opposed to any negotiations with Hamas.
At present, there are three possibilities for Israel’s next government: a right-wing coalition led by Netanyahu (the most likely outcome); a Kadima-led coalition that includes Lieberman’s party (which would definitely come with a veto over any possible talks with Palestinians); or some sort of “centrist” coalition (presumably led by Livni) that includes both Kadima and Likud but excludes Yisrael Beiteinu.
Any of these three scenarios would likely paralyze any Israeli movement towards new negotiations with the Palestinians or with Syria, while increasing the odds of unilateral action towards Iran. Livni’s personal victory notwithstanding (and remember that she was until recently a Likudnik herself), the Israeli political center has clearly moved to the right by any meaningful measure. This is obviously not good news for the Obama’s administration and its aspiration to jump-start new land-for-peace negotiations.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

Note: this is a guest post from Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, offering his own take on the debate over President Obama’s handling of the stimulus legislation. We invite and intend to publish different points of view on this subject, as part of our continuing debate on the extent to which Democrats should accomodate, on philosophical, strategic or tactical grounds, “bipartisan” approaches to the administration’s agenda.
The stimulus plan, President Obama’s first serious attempt to change the way Washington works, is hitting a stonewall of partisan rigidity. Republicans are the worst offenders, but Obama is also getting strafed from his left.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman came out blasting yesterday, all but calling the president a postpartisan wimp.
Obama’s stimulus plan, he said, is too small to plug the hole in our economy created by faltering private demand. And he chided the president for allowing a bipartisan group of Senate moderates to strip various provisions out of the House bill. In language that could qualify for a Pulitzer Prize in hyperbole, Krugman claimed that the dastardly centrists would kill hundreds of thousands of jobs and cut vital health care and food programs, while offering new a fat tax break to affluent homeowners.
On food stamps and aid to states, Krugman makes a fair point. But some of the education provisions are more questionable and the housing credit, properly targeted on first-time homebuyers, could help to halt the slide in housing prices. In general, Krugman’s outrage seems out of proportion to the actual differences between the House and Senate bills.
If size matters, as Krugman insists, it’s worth pointing out that the Senate plan is bigger ($827 billion vs. the House’s $819 billion). Many economists believe that the plan’s details matter less than its scale, because they believe what’s essential now is to boost the confidence and “animal spirits” of U.S. consumers, businesses and lenders.
Besides, the House and Senate are very different institutions and are almost always going to serve up different versions of bills. Reconciling them is why we have legislative conferences. What’s more, Obama only has 58 Democratic votes in the Senate, two shy of a filibuster-proof majority. He needs to pick up a handful of GOP votes to get the bill into conference. The real world choice we face is not between $827 billion and whatever larger figure Krugman believes Washington must spend to rescue the economy, but between roughly $800 billion and a smaller package.
What really seems to bug Krugman, though, is Obama’s postpartisan vision. Instead of wasting time reaching out to Republicans, the president ought to reach for a baseball bat. By strenuous campaigning against GOP obstructionism, Obama could remind voters of why they liked him in the first place, and turn up the heat on his conservative opponents. The problem with that theory is that voters responded powerfully to Obama’s promise to end partisan paralysis in Washington rather than pursue a Democratic version of the Rovian strategy of maximum feasible polarization.
It is galling, of course, to hear Hill Republicans assert that they are simply standing on their “small government” principles. This would be more convincing if the party hadn’t colluded in an orgy of earmarking, borrowing and spending during the Bush years – crowned by a new $8 trillion prescription drug entitlement for seniors.
Perhaps, as Krugman complains, Obama waited too long before countering GOP attempts to conflate stimulus with pork.
But in eschewing the strident partisanship that many on the left pine for, Obama is keeping faith with the people who elected him. He’s also maneuvering the Republicans into a position where they appear as dogmatic, lock-step partisans –and politically impotent to boot, since they can’t block a big stimulus bill from passing. And let’s face it: While the president has tried to foster a new spirit of comity and cooperation, the stimulus plans make very few concessions to GOP demands when you look at the big picture.
So let’s all take a deep breath. If progressives want Obama to succeed, they need to avoid ideological purism and reflexive partisanship, and give their new president the tactical leeway he needs to maneuver around Washington’s formidable obstacles to change.

Greg Sargent at The Plum Line reports today that Team Obama has decided to “use his massive campaign email list and communications operations to get around the filter of the big news orgs in order to personally sell his agenda directly to the American people.”
This deployment, according to Sargent, was partially motivated by the obsession of the MSM with the Daschle story, which has “blotted out” Obama’s efforts to sell the stimulus package via network interviews.
An email has gone out to the Obama organization’s 13-million-strong email list with video clips and a plea that recipients convene house parties to view Obama’s case for the stimulus package.
This will be an interesting and important experiment, not just in terms of the effectiveness of the Obama organization, but as an effort to bypass media “filters.” Given the negative MSM coverage of the Daschle and related “stories” about disqualified appointees, and continuing conservative efforts to label the stimulus package as pork-laden, it’s an appropriate and potentially critical step to mobilize generally positive public opinion in favor of the legislation as it struggles through the Senate.

The sudden fall of Tom Daschle has left the Obama administration scrambling, and Democrats and the media speculating, about not one but two replacements. While Daschle is usually described as the designated Secretary of Heath and Human Services, he was also appointed to head up the White House Office of Health Care Reform, the coordinating point for a future Obama universal health care initiative.
Jon Cohn of TNR’s The Treatment, and Ezra Klein of TAP, are as usual the go-to bloggers on health care policy generally and this issue specifically. Cohn seems to think Dashle’s designated deputy in the White House, Jeanne Lambrew, ought to get the nod to head the heath care reform office. Klein lists a number of pols who might be considered–a pretty lofty group for what might be a non-cabinet gig–and agrees the Lambrew is fine if Obama wants to go with a wonk. A pol, of course, might be a dual appointment like Daschle. For these very public figures, expect some hasty but intense vetting, not just of tax records but of associations with lobbyists.
Both these issues–not just the tax problem–were the focus of the New York Times editorial yesterday that reportedly represented the coup de grace for Daschle.

To a remarkable extent, the day-after commentary about the unanimous Republican vote in the House against the economic stimulus package has credited or blamed this development on Rush Limbaugh. Politico is actually devoting its rountable-format “Arena” today to the proposition that Limbaugh has become the de facto leader of the Republican Party. And earlier this week, Georgia Republican congressman Phil Gingrey was forced to make a humiliating retreat and apology after criticizing Rush’s attacks on the GOP leadership for insufficiently robust opposition to Barack Obama.
In a separate development, House Republican conference chairman Mike Pence refused in a media interview to take any issue with a newly notorious Limbaugh comment that Americans have to “bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever” because Obama’s “father was black, because this is the first black president.”
This is all pretty interesting, if depressingly familiar. In the wake of their drubbing last November, the one thing Republicans generally agreed they needed to do differently was getting hep to new media–you know, social networks, twitter, blogs, YouTube, etc. But now here we are in the first big decision-moment of 2009, and the GOPers are still taking their orders from that big mouth on the AM radio dial.