The course of events in Congress this year have generated a robust debate over the evolution of the Senate filibuster into a routine 60-vote threshold. I’ve been debating this subject over at ProgressiveFix with former TDS Managing Editor Scott Winship.
In the latest back-and-forth, Scott, who earlier argued that partisan polarization is a bigger obstacle to the enactment of legislation than the filibuster, takes on the proposition that polarization is a phenomenon created primarily by Republicans (hence there’s not a lot Democrats can do about it other than beating Republicans like a drum in elections).
My response focuses on a challenge to the perennial liberal-moderate-conservative typology of voter ideology–which invariably places the political “center” farther to the right than it actually is–and also expresses skepticism about Scott’s preferred remedy to polarization of laws that open up party primaries.
It’s a lot of reading, but well worth the time if you are interested in this perennial topic.
Democratic Strategist
This items is a memo to Democratic senators from noted progressive pollster Mark Mellman. It is cross-posted from Politico.
Voters support the content of healthcare reform, while expressing opposition to a “content-less” plan identified with Congress. The individual elements of the legislation are very popular, as is the bill in total, when it is explained. Moreover, the public continues to trust Democrats and the President over Republicans to deal with the issue.
Public Opinion On Healthcare Reform Is Evenly Split
The news media has recently highlighted polls showing double-digit margins in opposition to the current healthcare plan. But these cursory stories often neglect to mention two salient facts.
First, these poll questions fail to give any content, any specific meaning to the reform proposal. Voters are simply asked whether they favor or oppose “healthcare proposals being discussed in Congress.” Focus group research makes clear that voters know little about the substance of the plan—all they know is that some on both the left and the right don’t like it and that it is the subject of intense controversy. In essence then, these questions ask people whether they favor or oppose “a controversial plan that is in constant flux.” Understood that way, it is surprising we find any support.
Second, public poll analyses often ignore the fact that a chunk of opposition to the current plan comes from those who support reform, but would like to see Congress go further. A late-November AP/Ipsos poll found nearly identical numbers in favor of the bill (34%) and opposed (35%), without describing its content. A crucial 12% initially say they oppose the plan, but told pollsters their opposition was based on their belief that it did not go far enough. So what initially appears to be a 12-point margin against reform is actually an even division.
Dick Cheney may have won Human Events‘ “Conservative of the Year” award, but the Right’s more contemporary megastar, Sarah Palin, got her own big end of the year award. She’s the author of PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year,” via her infamous Facebook post on health reform and “death panels.”
This was indeed an instant classic: completely fabricated, aimed at a particularly important constituency, and applying one of the favorite hallucinations of Palin’s buddies in the Right to Life movement (liberals want to extend their “holocaust” from the unborn to old folks) to the domestic policy issue of the day. And best of all, the lie was distributed not through some clunky and news-cycle-sensitive speech, but through Facebook!
TPM has a nice slide show illustrating how the “death panel” meme pre-developed before Palin invented the term and launched it into the national consciousness.
This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
I wrote a piece the other day examining the ideological underpinnings of the left/center split in the Democratic Party over the propriety of a universal health care system based on regulated and subsidized private health insurers. I suggested there was a burgeoning, if questionably workable, tactical alliance between “social-democratic” progressives and some conservatives to derail much of the Obama overall agenda. Then I made this observation:
[O]n a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. They can’t both be right, of course, and these critics would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance. But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.
This statement has drawn considerable comment from people on both the Right and Left, mainly objecting to the argument that Obama’s critics can’t all be right.
Conservative theoretician Reihan Salam, writing for National Review, first argued that there’s not much substantive difference between the “New Democrat” deployment of private-sector entities in public initiatives and that favored by the privatizers of the Right. But then he pirouetted to make common cause with Obama’s critics on the Left:
It is entirely possible for both sets of critics to be correct. The concern from the right isn’t that the Obama approach will literally nationalize for-profit health insurers. Rather, it is that for-profit health insurers will continue evolving into heavily subsidized firms that function as public utilities, and that seek advantage by gaming the political process. Profits, including profits governed by medical loss ratios, can and will then be cycled into political action, which leads to the anxiety concerning a “corporate takeover of the public sector.”
Salam’s friend Ross Douthat of The New York Times added an “amen” to this argument:
The point is that the more intertwined industry and government become, the harder it is to discern who’s “taking over” whom — and the less it matters, because the taxpayer is taking it on the chin either way.
But do conservatives really oppose this intertwining of industry and government? Rhetorically, yes, operationally—not so much. Consider the default-drive Republican approach to health care reform, such as it is. It typically begins with federal preemption of state medical malpractice laws and health insurance regulation, the latter intended to produce a national market for private insurance (while also, not coincidentally, eliminating existing state provisions designed to prevent discriminatory practices). But the centerpiece is invariably large federal tax credits, accompanied by killing off the current tax deduction for employer-provided coverage, all designed to massively subsidize the purchase of private health insurance by individuals (with or without, depending on the proposal, any sort of group purchases for high-risk individuals). Another conservative pet rock is federal support for Health Savings Accounts, which encourage healthy people to pay cash for most medical services, perhaps supplemented by (very profitable) private catastrophic insurance policies. And most conservatives, when they aren’t “Medagoguing” Democratic proposals to rein in Medicare costs, favor “voucherizing” Medicare benefits—another gigantic subsidy for private health insurers.
Now some conservatives will privately tell you that all these subsidy-and-deregulation schemes are just an interim “solution” towards that great gettin’ up morning when tax rates can be massively lowered, all the tax credits, vouchers and other subsidies can be eliminated, and the government gets out of the health insurance business entirely. But don’t expect to see that on any campaign manifestos in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, Republicans generally support huge government subsidies to corporations without any public-spirited regulatory concessions in return.
Do anti-“corporatist” progressives really think they can make common cause with conservatives, beyond deep-sixing Obama’s agenda in the short term? Well, sorta kinda. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who rejected my “incompatibility” argument about left and right critics of “corporatism” as strongly as did Salam, is smart and honest enough to acknowledge there’s no real common ground with conventional conservatives or Republican pols. He instead offers a vision of an “outsider” coalition that includes anti-corporatist progressives and Tea Party types. This is, of course, the age-old “populist” dream (most famously articulated by Tom Frank in What’s the Matter With Kansas?) of a progressive takeover of the Democratic Party that attracts millions of current GOP voters (or nonvoters) who don’t share the economic interests of the Republican Party or the conservative movement but have seen little difference between the two parties.
All I can say is: Good luck with that, Glenn. Short of a complete and immediate revolution within one or both parties, complete with blood purges and electoral chaos, it’s hard to see any vehicle for a left-right “populist” alliance other than a Lou Dobbs presidential run. Barring that unlikely convergence, wrecking Obama’s “corporate” agenda would produce little more on the horizon than a return to the kind of governance we enjoyed during the Bush years, or maybe a bit worse given the current savage trajectory of the GOP.
Part of my intention in the original essay was to suggest that pro-Obama Democrats take seriously the views of intra-party rebels on health care and other issues, instead of insulting them as impractical and childish or obsessed with meaningless totems like the “public option” (which in the anti-corporatist context isn’t meaningless at all). But said rebels really do need to think through where they are going, and where they would take Democrats and the progressive coalition.
Meanwhile, conservatives need to be far less pious about their alleged objections to “corporatism.” Cheap rhetoric aside, their own agenda (when it’s not just preserving the status quo) is largely corporatism with any clear and enforceable public purpose cast aside whenever possible.
The big news coming out of the weekend was that the Senate invoked cloture on health care reform, as President Obama personally brokered an interim deal on climate change in Copenhagen after the negotiations had all but collapsed. Not a bad few days for the White House,
But at Politico, here were the two headlines on these developments this morning: “Health Plans On Collision Course,” and “Copenhagen Fizzle Won’t Help Bill.”
That’s some serious glass-half-empty analysis.
So: at about one o’clock this morning, the United States Senate, or at least the 60 members of its Democratic Caucus, passed the long-awaited cloture vote to proceed to a final consideration of a health care reform bill.
As one who has had an irrational faith that the Senate would get to this point somehow or other, I have to say it was still an improbable accomplishment.
As recently as a few days ago, Joe Lieberman looked all but unreachable for this vote. Then Ben Nelson looked unreachable, even as Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins made it clear they had decided that nearly a year of begging from the White House and Senate Democrats wasn’t enough to overcome the right-wing heat they were experiencing. Then Democrats like Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders came under intense pressure to hold up the bill from progressives determined to derail the latest deal and force a recourse to a 2010 reconciliation strategy.
More fundamentally, a 60-vote Democratic Caucus was an exceptionally improbable achievement. It took (a) a near-sweep by Democrats of winnable seats in 2008; (b) a complex deal to keep arch-apostate Lieberman in the Caucus; (c) a favorable resolution of the near-tie vote in Minnesota after months of GOP legal obstruction; and (d) swift action by the Massachusetts legislature to provide for an interim Senator to replace the late Ted Kennedy.
It all came down to a one a.m. vote after a rare Washington snow storm, with Republicans openly praying that someone (i.e., the infirm Robert Byrd of West Virginia) wouldn’t be physically present.
The current conservative caterwauling about a “rushed” vote is pretty hilarious, given the endless delays undertaken by Senate Democrats all summer and early fall in an effort to engage Republicans, the open and notorious GOP strategy of running out the clock (reminiscent of the Bush strategy for securing the presidency nine years ago), and the front-page status of every detail of the legislation since last spring. Does anyone doubt for a moment that if Democrats had gone along and delayed final Senate action until after the holidays, the same people whining about their spoiled Christmas would be demanding the legislation be put off until after the 2010 elections? Indeed, that’s what we will in fact be hearing in January when a House-Senate conference committee completes its work.
That conference committee, and the House and Senate votes necessary to ratify its report, is far from a slam dunk, given House Democratic resentment of Senate deal-making, and substantive disputes on issues ranging from the public option to abortion. But the struggle to get to 60 votes in the Senate makes the endgame of health care reform look manageable by contrast.
Democrats have railed, with good reason, for a long time about the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party. But the current political realities, especially the new health care reform deal, indicate that Republicans have also set a new standard of intellectual bankruptcy and strategic disaster, according to a pair of interesting articles by Jonathan Chait in The New Republic.
Chait’s 12/19 post at TNR‘s ‘The Plank’ explains the GOPs strategic blundering it this way:
At the outset of this debate, moderate Democrats were desperate for a bipartisan bill. They were willing to do almost anything to get it, including negotiate fruitlessly for months on end. We can’t know for sure, but Democrats appeared willing to make enormous substantive concessions to win the assent of even a few Republicans. A few GOP defectors could have lured a chunk of Democrats to sign something far more limited than what President Obama is going to sign. And remember, it would have taken only one Democrat to agree to partial reform in order to kill comprehensive reform. I can easily imagine a scenario where Ben Nelson refused to vote for anything larger than, say, a $400 billion bill that Chuck Grassley and a couple other Republicans were offering.
But Republicans wouldn’t make that deal. The GOP leadership put immense pressure on all its members to withhold consent from any health care bill. The strategy had some logic to it: If all 40 Republicans voted no, then Democrats would need 60 votes to succeed, a monumentally difficult task. And if they did succeed, the bill would be seen as partisan and therefore too liberal, too big government. The spasm of anti-government activism over the summer helped lock the GOP into this strategy — no Republican could afford to risk the wrath of Tea Partiers convinced that any reform signed by Obama equaled socialism and death panels.
Chait then describes Republican Senator Olympia Snowe’s role as a sort of GOP shill, feigning a willingness to compromise as a delaying tactic, attempting to “run out the clock” so Dems wouldn’t have time to put health care reform behind them and get focused on jobs in time to get in optimum position for the mid-terms. Thus the Republicans forced the Dems into a 60-40 partisan strategy, motivating even “relentlessly centrist” Democratic senators, like Evan Bayh to give up on the possibility of a bipartisan deal. As a result, Chait concludes:
The Republicans eschewed a halfway compromise and put all their chips on an all or nothing campaign to defeat health care and Obama’s presidency. It was an audacious gamble. They lost. In the end, they’ll walk away with nothing. The Republicans may gain some more seats in 2010 by their total obstruction, but the substantive policy defeat they’ve been dealt will last for decades.
In Chait’s longer 12/21 article, “The Rise of Republican Nihilism,” he explores the equally-unimpressive Republican bankruptcy of ideas behind the strategic blundering. As Chait notes in a couple of nut graphs,
In the days following the 2008 election, some Republicans predicted that the party would retool itself in response to reality–not just political reality but the actuality of policy challenges. “Republicans,” wrote conservative Ramesh Ponnuru in Time, “will have to devise an agenda that speaks to a country where more people feel the bite of payroll taxes than income taxes, where health-care costs eat up raises even in good times, where the length of the daily commute is a bigger irritant than are earmarks.” Nothing like that rethinking has happened or will happen.
…The administration has selected three main issues as the focus of its domestic agenda: the economic crisis, climate change, and health care reform…In all three areas, the Republican Party has adopted a stance of total opposition, not merely because it disagrees with aspects of Obama’s solutions, but because it cannot come to grips with the very nature of the problems of modern American politics.
Chait goes on to describe the GOP ‘alternatives’ to Democratic approaches in the three areas, which boil down to: tax cuts for the rich; denial of global warming and “fantastical geoengineering schemes”; and “plans that mostly reflect the right’s embrace of the failed market system that created the health care disaster.” More specifically, on health care reform, Chait explains:
The Republicans’ favorite reform is to let people buy insurance from any state they want. Currently, states require insurance plans to offer certain basic services–psychiatric benefits, maternity care, and so on. That creates another subsidy from the healthy to the sick–healthy people have to buy insurance that pays for all kinds of care they probably won’t need, keeping down the cost for people who do need it. If you let people buy out-of-state insurance, states will lure insurance companies by offering lax requirements, and the healthy will follow. That would allow all the healthy, inexpensive customers to have cheap plans with other inexpensive, healthy people, while sick, expensive customers would get stuck in expensive insurance plans with other sick, expensive customers.
Almost nobody takes these plans seriously as legislative proposals. They are a response to the cross-pressures of the general public’s demand that the party appear to have a positive vision on health care and the base’s demand of fealty to the ideals of the free market. So the House Republican plan would require states to establish plans to cover people with preexisting conditions, but it makes no suggestion for where the funding for such plans would come from. Likewise, the “Health Care Freedom Act,” sponsored by DeMint, is funded by repealing the financial bailout and demanding a prompt repayment. If you’re wondering what the consequences of immediately repealing the bailout might be, or where this plan would find its financing after the bailout funds ran out, you’re missing the point of the exercise. The main role of these plans is to serve as a prop for the disingenuous party talking point that Congress should defeat Obama’s plan and “start over” with “real reform.”
Chait attributes the shallowness of Republican alternatives to “the deepening hold on the GOP of anti-government ideology.” He links to an amusing but revealing TNR collection of quotes by Republican leaders during the last century, predicting certain doom following the enactment of reforms like Social Security, regulation of child labor, the minimum wage, womens’ suffrage and Medicare. Particularly noteworthy is this dilly from conservative icon Ronald Reagan, now hailed as his party’s great visionary, arguing against Medicare in 1961:
The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.
Ridiculous as it reads, this Reagan quote is emblematic of the sort of fear-mongering that remains the core of the GOP’s strategy, absent any credible alternatives to Democratic health care reform proposals. Chait is exactly right in terming Republican strategy as nihilism, eloquently depicted in this YouTube clip featuring one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. One key — make that critical — challenge for Democrats in 2010 is to inculcate the nihilism of the GOP as a meme among swing voters.
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TDS staff
In his latest article at The New Republic, TDS Co-Editor William Galston surveys the chaotic political realities of the moment, warns of serious hazards ahead and charts a path for Dems looking toward the 2010 elections. Here’s Galston on the daunting challenges of this political moment:
When the history of the Obama administration is written, this week may well be regarded as the moment when Democrats’ anxieties crystallized into genuine alarm. Factional fights within the party exploded into public view. Howard Dean—regarded by many progressives as a leader on health reform—denounced the Senate bill, declaring that it “would do more harm than good to the future of America.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi made it clear that the Obama administration would be left on its own to make the case for its Afghanistan policy; odds are that a large number of House Democrats—perhaps even a majority—will oppose funding it. Thirty-eight House Democrats, many facing tough races, joined forces with the Republicans to turn the vote on a new jobs bill into a cliff-hanger that forced the Speaker to spend an hour on the House floor personally lobbying wavering members. Even E. J. Dionne Jr., an ardent liberal and congenital optimist, worried publicly that while “[a]n increasingly bitter and negative Republican Party may not be able to win the midterm elections … Democrats definitely can lose them.” The reason: Democrats’ “turmoil and backstabbing are making what is a rather good [health care] plan look like a failure while persuading political independents that they are a feuding gang rather than a governing party.”
Galston goes on to cite discouraging poll figures regarding the country’s direction, confidence in President Obama’s goals and policies, ratings of congress and feelings about the Democratic Party, among other concerns. He notes parenthetically, however that the “Democrat’s only consolation is that Republican leaders receive even lower ratings.”
Galston then offers some specific strategy suggestions, including:
Get health care done as quickly as possible. The House should recognize that any Senate bill that can garner 60 votes is likely the only bill that can do so. Logic suggests that the best course would simply be for the House to pass the Senate bill, avoiding a useless and time wasting conference.
Pivot hard toward the economy and jobs, and keep the focus there throughout 2010. That means keeping divisive issues—such as immigration and cap-and-trade—off next year’s legislative agenda. It also means more action—such as expanding the flow of credit to small business—to promote job creation in the private sector.
Acknowledge that public concern about spending, deficits, and debt is high and rising. That doesn’t mean turning toward fiscal restraint next year, while the economy remains fragile. It does mean endorsing the creation of a bipartisan fiscal commission—along the lines of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission—with the power to make recommendations after the mid-term elections to which Congress would be required to respond early in 2011.
“Beyond these specifics, ” Galston adds, “Democrats will have to shift their mindset and recalibrate the balance between stability and change. He adds that what Americans wanted most in ’08 was “getting rid of the Bush-Cheney administration. (The NBC/WSJ poll shows that they remain the two least respected public officials of the past decade.)” Now, however, “They want their government to be a rock of security in uncertain times…They want reassurance, jobs, and temporary assistance until they can find them, not a new New Deal. They will accept sensible change in measured increments, but not pell-mell and all at once.”
Tough advice from an experienced Democratic warrior — and it merits serious consideration from Party strategists.
Former DNC head Howard Dean may have ample support for his opposition to the latest Senate version of health care reform, but there are plenty of progressive bloggers and columnists who see it differently. Some examples:
At The New York Times, Paul Krugman’s “Pass the Bill” makes a tightly-crafted case for progressives supporting the latest compromise:
But let’s all take a deep breath, and consider just how much good this bill would do, if passed — and how much better it would be than anything that seemed possible just a few years ago. With all its flaws, the Senate health bill would be the biggest expansion of the social safety net since Medicare, greatly improving the lives of millions. Getting this bill would be much, much better than watching health care reform fail.
At its core, the bill would do two things. First, it would prohibit discrimination by insurance companies on the basis of medical condition or history: Americans could no longer be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, or have their insurance canceled when they get sick. Second, the bill would provide substantial financial aid to those who don’t get insurance through their employers, as well as tax breaks for small employers that do provide insurance.
Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic also believes the bill is a significant improvement, “…light years better than what we have now.” In his MyDD post on former President Clinton’s support of the bill, Jonathan Singer explains “This bill isn’t perfect, but it may be the best chance at reforming the system that there will be for a long, long time. .” WaPo columnist
WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. agrees, noting,
…There is one thing that must be done fast: Democrats need to agree on a health bill and sell it with enthusiasm and conviction. Their own turmoil and back-stabbing are making what is a rather good plan look like a failure while convincing political independents that they are a feuding gang rather than a governing party.
At TPM Cafe Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, supports voting for the current version as the second step in a 3-part effort :
Here’s my position. In these final days of the health care fight, progressives should work hard to improve the health reform bill in the Senate and in the conference with the (better) House bill. But we should support the passage of the best bill we can get – and then keep fighting for more and better reform.
Ezra Klein sees it this way at his WaPo blog:
But now we’re talking about killing the Senate health-care bill — with its $900 billion in subsidies and its delivery system reforms and its Medicare Commission and its Medicaid expansion and its exchanges and its regulations on insurers — unless we make the exchanges slightly stronger prudent purchasers, when they’re already strong enough to “thrill” the original sponsor of the prudent purchaser amendment?
I guess this is the logical outcome of a system in which the greatest gains accrue to those making the most credible and severe threats. But it’s not healthy.
At FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver’s “Health Care:The Elevator Pitch” takes a more persuasive tone than his previous post on the topic, “Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill .” Says Silver:
…The bill is not “real reform” in the sense of something that fundamentally alters the structure of the current, predominately private, predominately employer-based insurance system. The only solutions that I’m aware of that might do that are single payer and Wyden-Bennett, either of which I’d prefer to what’s on the table now — but neither of which are liable to be politically viable any time soon. By the way, I don’t think a bill with a public option would constitute fundamental reform either — it would be better, but it’s still tinkering around the edges of a flawed system.
…Fundamental reform like single-payer or Wyden-Bennett was never really on the table. The bill comes very close, indeed, to establishing what might be thought of as a right to access to health care: once it’s been determined that people with pre-existing conditions cannot be denied health care coverage, and that working class people ought to receive assistance so that they can afford health care coverage, it will be very hard to remove those benefits. It’s the sort of opportunity that comes around rarely — and one that liberals will greatly regret if they turn down.
In his article, “Deal or Die on Health Care: Why progressives should support a Democratic compromise,” at The American Prospect, Paul Starr argues:
Liberals in Congress should also recognize that with either a 2013 or 2014 date for implementation, there will be time enough to revise the program before it goes into effect (indeed, time enough for the opponents to roll it back). Many of the specifics, such as the level of subsidies, almost certainly will be changed in the intervening years. And many of those specifics can be changed through budget reconciliation, which requires only 51 votes to pass the Senate.
Sen. Lieberman’s influence is at its maximum in passing health-care legislation now, and some of those provisions will be hard to change. But if Democrats succeed in getting a bill through Congress in the next several weeks, they can return to some of the issues in the reconciliation process next year. And at that point they won’t necessarily need to have Lieberman on board…If progressives in Congress can see that far ahead, they’ll see their way to vote for a compromise.
Whether to support or oppose the current Senate version of health care reform bill is a tough call for many progressive Democrats, and all of the aforementioned commentators have expressed their concerns about some measures of the Senate bill. But clearly many are ready to sign on and get something they feel is substantial passed soon — and carry the fight for amendments advancing comprehensive, universal coverage with some form of public option to another day.
