The moral case for the public option in health care reform has been well-made by numerous Democratic leaders, activists and writers, and some have also made a persuasive case that it’s good political strategy. Robert Parry’s Consortium News post, via Alternet, takes the argument a step further; that the public option is not only politically-wise; it should be implemented on a faster track — or the Democrats could be risking “electoral disaster.” As Parry explains:

Indeed, if the Democrats abandon the public option for the sake of passing a bill like the one that came out of the Senate Finance Committee, they may be courting electoral disaster once voters grasp that they will have to wait years for the law to be implemented and then that it could lead to higher costs for much the same unpopular private insurance plans.
…As the legislation stands now, many of the key features that hold some promise of helping consumers – such as the “exchange” where individuals and small business would shop for the best product – won’t even take effect until 2013. That means that Americans now facing the crisis of no health insurance won’t get much help for another four years, if then.
…By contrast to the four-year phase-in for these relatively modest reforms, the Medicare single-payer program for senior citizens was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 30, 1965, and was up and running less than a year later.
..The implementing delays mean that in both 2010 and 2012, Republicans will be free to make the truthful case that the Democrats – despite their promises – had accomplished little to help the American people on health care. Already, Republican senators are using the talking point that the four-year delay is part of a budgetary trick to make the bill appear cheaper over 10 years than it would be if its key features took effect quickly.

Parry believes the implementation delays of both the insurance exchanges and public option ‘trigger’ could work against each other to an even more deleterious effect:

…But the insurance exchanges won’t open until 2013, so it may take years before any trigger would be pulled. At minimum, the industry would have earned a lengthy reprieve.
And by the time, the exchanges have a chance to be tested, Congress and the White House could be in Republican hands. If that’s the case, the Republicans might well undo even the triggered public option. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans would surely not worry about ramming their preferred policy through the Congress.

Conversely, Parry sees a huge upside to a bolder implementation strategy:

On the other hand, if Congress enacts a public option now, it presumably could be implemented at least as fast as Medicare, especially if it were piggybacked onto the existing Medicare bureaucracy. That would enable Democrats to show they had accomplished something beneficial for the public before voters go to the polls in November 2010.
By 2012, if the CBO predictions of substantial savings prove true, Obama could campaign for reelection on the basis that he had improved the welfare of the American people — and the budget outlooks for government and business.

It would be bitterly ironic if Democrats enacted a strong health care reform bill, with a solid public option, but then suffered political damage because it was implemented too late to do us some good. Parry makes a compelling case that putting implementation of both a public option and health exchanges on a faster track is wise strategy.

Just a hearty Amen and an addendum to Ed Kilgore’s post below, which provides one of the most crucial insights of the entire health care reform debate going on among Democrats: Every Democratic senator must be put on record — and soon — as supporting the party on cloture, no matter which health reform bill he or she advocates.
This has to be the first flashpoint at which Democratic leaders invoke party discipline, particularly when the stakes are the most important legislative reform in many decades. This is our line in the sand, where the emphasis should now be for all Democrats who care about health care reform and their party’s integrity.
And let all rank and file Democrats agree on one thing, if nothing else — that any Democratic senator who betrays the Party on a critical cloture procedural vote will get exceptionally well-funded primary opposition, regardless of his or her approval numbers. And may all progressive bloggers, journalists and activists pledge their hearts, souls and firstborn to the cause of denouncing cloture turncoats as shameless sell-outs for the rest of their miserable days.

Now that every committee of jurisdiction in both Houses of Congress has reported health care reform legislation, it’s time for reform advocates to focus obsessively on one formidable “choke point” that could kill legislation: a Republican Senate filibuster supported by Democrats. This is true not only for progressives generally, but specifically for hard-core supporters of a “robust” public option. The odds of getting 60 senators to pre-commit to that kind of bill are roughly zero. The odds of getting 60 senators to allow a vote in which 50 senators support that kind of bill are much, much better.
That’s why I applaud blogger Mike Stark’s fairly successful effort to corner Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas on the very specific question of Pryor’s willingness to support a filibuster. Pryor allowed as how it would take a “crazy” development on the substance of the legislation to convince him to vote against cloture. That’s not an unconditional commitment, but it’s still pretty important. Other reform advocates should emulate Stark, and focus their questions and please to Democratic senators on the sole question of helping Republicans block a vote on the party’s and the Obama administration’s top domestic prioriity. How they vote on the bill itself is strictly secondary at this point, and completely irrelevant if cloture fails.
This issue is becoming even more critical and time-sensitive given Joe Lieberman’s broad hints that there is not any template for health care reform that he can support. You can get upset about that, or you can say you don’t give a damn how Lieberman votes on final passage of a health reform bill so long as he votes for cloture to allow it to come to the floor. When Lieberman was allowed to keep his committee chairmanship after campaigning for the Republican presidential candidate for president in 2008, it was with the implicit understanding that he’d vote with the caucus on procedural votes. Despite many recent efforts to create a 60-vote threshold for passage of legislation by making cloture votes synonymous with final passage votes, cloture is inherently and exclusively a procedural matter. There should be no excuse for “no” votes on cloture for something this important.
I unuderstand that many progressives remain focused on the public option, and fearful that the final congressional product will be unacceptable from their point of view. But that’s an entirely academic issue until such time as 60 votes are secured for cloture. Get that done, and then we can fight over which version of the public option can secure 218 votes in the House and 50 votes in the Senate, and can initiate meaningful and successful health care reform.

In recent weeks President Obama has absorbed a volley of hits from progressives who are disssatisfied with his caution on a wide array of policies, including Afghanistan, the public option and bail-outs, to list a few (as reported for example, in Ed Hornick’s CNN.com post, “Candidate vs. boss: Obama’s ship not so tight these days, some say“). But the progressive cause may be better-served by taking a step back and considering his accomplishments in a broader historical context. Peter Beinart, senior fellow at the New America Foundation. and a former New Republic editor, does just that in his latest Daily Beast post, “Liberals Lay off Obama.” As Beinart explains,

…Our do-nothing president did something that Democratic presidents have been trying to do for most of the last century: He celebrated a universal health care bill’s passage through Senate Committee. For good measure, the Dow topped 10,000 for the first time since last fall’s meltdown. Obama’s polling has even ticked up: According to Gallup, he’s more popular than he’s been since summer…Even this summer, when the press was announcing a dip in Obama’s fortunes, the health care bills were moving steadily through Congress, the stimulus was gradually slowing the nation’s economic descent, and Obama’s approval ratings never fell below 50 percent…Get ready for the “Obama comeback” stories, in which the same publications that recently declared that “he’s failing miserably” (Politico) and “suddenly looking unsure of himself” (The Economist) discover that he’s thriving again. But the boring truth is that he was pretty much thriving all along.

Beinart attributes Obama’s sagging image, despite his accomplishments, to the media’s penchant for exagerating trends in roller-coaster fashion to heighten a story’s drama. But he believes Obama will ultimately be judged “against a low bar” — the disaster created by his predecessor. Even if Dems get “clobbered” in the mid-terms, Beinart believes, Obama should be looking pretty solid by 2012, when the stimulus will be showing positive results. Beinart continues:

So liberals should stop complaining that Obama hasn’t done anything. Sure, he hadn’t yet done much to bring world peace, but the stimulus bill — which includes vast sums for college tuition, renewable energy and mass transit — is one of the most important pieces of progressive domestic legislation in decades. And if Obama twins that with health care reform, he’ll have done more to rebuild the American welfare state in one year than his two Democratic predecessors, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, did in a combined twelve.

For drama-seeking journalists, Beinart concludes, “The dreary truth is that politically, Obama is both lucky and good, and he’s well on his way to a successful first term.” Beinart’s big-picture analysis sounds plausible enough, and if he is right, the grumbling Dems of today will likely become Obama’s champions of tomorrow.

For much of this year, one of the surest bets in political circles has been that embattled New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine would go down to defeat at the hands of Republican former U.S. attorney Chris Christie. Aside from Christie’s (now tarnished) goo-goo rep as a corruption fighter, the thinking was that Corzine had a “ceiling” of somewhere in the low forties, thanks to persistently low approval ratings and the likelihood that most NJ voters had fixed opinions of the incumbents. Thus, for the first time in decades, a GOP candidate would get the late breaks in a NJ campaign, and end the party’s long losing streak in the Garden State.
Now the polls are all showing Corzine and Christie running neck-and-neck, with the big wild card being the double-digit support being attracted by independent candidate Chris Daggett.
At Politico today, Jonathan Martin looks at the race from Christie’s perspective, and focuses on the strategic dilemma faced by the GOP candidate in dealing with Daggett:

Christie, who had been running a traditional anti-incumbent campaign against Corzine, must now reckon with a perennial question faced by candidates who are imperiled by a lesser-known, third-party contender: To attack Daggett is to elevate him, effectively acknowledging that he’s a serious candidate and offering him free publicity. But ignoring him could amount to disregarding the most serious threat to Christie’s campaign, leaving Daggett to siphon away a significant amount of voters who are intent on registering their opposition to Corzine.

But Christie really doesn’t control that decision, since his major funding source, the Republican Governors’ Association, has already started going after Daggett with sledge hammers. It appears their theory is that attacks on Daggett as a “tax-and-spend liberal” will either flip Daggett voters to Christie, or perhaps even drive liberal voters who would otherwise support Corzine to the third-party candidate (who already has significant support from environmentalists). Again, the operative assumption is that Corzine’s vote has hit its “ceiling,” so there’s relatively little risk in drawing further attention to Daggett.
But you have to wonder: does Christie’s vote (now that he’s increasingly campaigning like a conventional conservative Republican) also have a “ceiling,” based on the Republican Party’s legendary handicaps in NJ?
This question shows why the outcome in NJ may have national significance, beyond the silly efforts of pundits to make every state race a referendum on Barack Obama, and the undoubtedly positive impact a Corzine win would have on Democrats who had written off the incumbent many months ago. If the Republican party “brand” is enough to sink a challenger against one of the most vulnerable opponents you’ll ever see, then Democrats aren’t the only party with a lot to worry about going into next year’s 2010 midterms.

With the entire U.S. political world engaged in handicapping the likely outcome of the health care reform debate, while others focus on the Obama administration’s impending decision on strategy and troop levels for Afghanistan, there hasn’t been much attention paid outside advocacy groups to prospects for action on climate change legislation (passed, as you might recall, by the House during the summer).
The general prognosis has been pretty negative, in part because of the extreme difficulty encountered in getting the revised Waxman-Markey legislation through the House (requiring compromises that left a lot of advocates cold or lukewarm), and in part because the Senate was so absorbed with health reform.
But last weekend the leading Senate climate change legislation advocate, John Kerry, threw a change-up that will at the very least require a recalibration of expectations, by signing onto a New York Times op-ed with Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham offering a new “deal”: combining a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions with provisions liberalizing offshore oil drilling and relaxing regulations on nuclear power development.
The op-ed is worth reading in its entirety, but aside from offering conservatives the carrot of more U.S. oil and nuclear power, it also bluntly threatens the stick of unileratal action on climate change by the Obama administration:

Failure to act comes with another cost. If Congress does not pass legislation dealing with climate change, the administration will use the Environmental Protection Agency to impose new regulations. Imposed regulations are likely to be tougher and they certainly will not include the job protections and investment incentives we are proposing.
The message to those who have stalled for years is clear: killing a Senate bill is not success; indeed, given the threat of agency regulation, those who have been content to make the legislative process grind to a halt would later come running to Congress in a panic to secure the kinds of incentives and investments we can pass today. Industry needs the certainty that comes with Congressional action.

This threat may actually be welcomed by hard-core Republican pols who would lick their chops at the idea of “bureaucrats” end-running Congress to set up a cap-and-trade system, but not by those industries that would actually be affected, particularly since the business community is already divided on the issue.
The op-ed also discusses the national security case for action on climate change, and as Brad Plumer at The Vine notes, this argument polls well, has some appeal to conservatives, and also explains why Foreign Relations Committee chairman Kerry has for the moment displaced Barbara Boxer of CA as the “face” of the climate change initiative in the Senate.
Meanwhile, Nate Silver goes through the Senate membership and tries to assess which specific senators might be moved by a new bipartisan “deal” on climate change:

So what does this get the Democrats? It gets them Linsday Graham’s vote, and possibly Lisa Murkowski’s. It takes Mark Begich from a leaner to a likely yes. It might encourage Mary Landrieu, and possibly George LeMieux of Florida, to look more sympathetically at the bill. Then there are a whole host of more remote possibilities: Isakson of Georgia, and perhaps Cochran and Wicker of Mississippi or Burr of North Carolina; none of those votes are likely, but they become more plausible with offshore drilling in place. Overall, it seems to be worth something like 2-4 votes at the margin.
That would give the Kerry-Graham bill a fighting chance, especially if an additional vote or two — possibly John McCain’s — can also be picked up as a result of the nuclear energy compromise. Of course, that’s assuming that no liberals would rebel against the new provisions, but the opposition to both offshore drilling and nuclear energy seems to be fairly soft in the liberal caucus

On this last point, it’s worth noting that Dave Roberts of Grist, a highly credible warrior for action on climate change, adjudges the concessions on oil and nuclear energy “an affordable price [to pay] for the benefits of passing a bill.”
If nothing else, Kerry’s gambit has shuffled the deck, complicated Republican claims that Democrats are uninterested in genuine bipartisanship, and offered a sign of potential progress in advance of international climate change negotiations in December. All in all, it’s a good example of strategic audacity on an extraordinarily wonky issue, and well worth watching.

There was an interesting blogospheric exchange yesterday between Matt Yglesias and Nate Silver about the differences between the two parties’ Senate Caucuses on disciplinary issues. Matt expressed a very common progressive envy for the willingness of Republicans to threaten serious sanctions for heterodoxy on key issues:

The Senate Republican caucus is organized, like the House caucuses of both parties, like a partisan political organization whose objective is to advance the shared policy objectives of the party. The Senate Democratic caucus, by contrast, is organized like a fun country club trying to recruit members. Join Team Democrat and Vote However You Want Without Consequence!

Nate, however, wonders how effective Republican Senate hardball tactics have been over the years in building a strong and loyal Caucus. Taking the 10 GOP senators deemed (by one credible measurement) most “liberal” in 2001, here’s Nate’s count of what’s happened to them:

[Of the ten, there have been] two defections (Jeffords and Specter), two losses (Chafee and Smith), two retirements (Warner and Fitzgerald), two Senators that the party can pretty much no longer rely upon (Snowe and Collins), and finally, two who have indeed become more conservative and remained loyal to their party (McCain and Cochran). That’s a .200 batting average, which isn’t good in baseball and isn’t any better in the Senate.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the size of the Senate Republican Caucus has also shrunk by 20% since 2001, but Nate makes the excellent point that enforced unity has its limits as a party-building exercise. Probably the best response to that kind of argument is simply that one joins a political party in the first place (particularly if you are a progressive) to get things done in the real world. If the “big tent” keeps thwarting that objective in fundamental ways, then its size is pretty much irrelevant.

Mike Thomas of the Orlando Sentinel has a funny — and interesting — column. “Who’s taking on Grayson? Anyone? Hello?” on how Rep. Alan Grayson’s recent broadsides against the Republicans’ opposition to health care reform are playing out in his district vis a vis his potential challengers. Here’s a bite:

…The path to a long political career in Central Florida is win that first election, stay out of trouble and win the rest by default.
And now comes U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, who dynamited that model, calling Republicans knuckle-dragging obstructionists who want the sick to “die quickly.”
If this fits the definition of unstable and unhinged, it certainly seems to have served a very lucid purpose.
The Republicans are cowering in knock-kneed terror.
Potential challengers are dropping out with comical regularity.
The last credible challenger standing is former state Sen. Dan Webster, who is so conflicted he can’t say yes and he can’t say no.
So he ponders away while the Republicans cross their fingers for a savior.
“I don’t have to be in elective office,” Webster says. “I am happy coasting right now. It’s great.”
You don’t enter a race against someone like Alan Grayson with this mindset. You go into this race needing to be in Congress more than you need to breathe.
…The Republicans look like a bunch of Chihuahuas yapping at the Rottweiler behind the fence. But this Rottweiler not only is snarling and frothing at the mouth, it also went to Harvard.

More?

…Consider state Rep. Steve Precourt.
Last week he boldly announced that Grayson was an “egomaniacal, socialist, loose cannon.”
Then he announced someone else would have to do something about it because he wasn’t running.
Yap. Yap. Yap.
Orange Mayor Rich Crotty once was considered the Republicans’ best hope. In June, Grayson released a seven-page letter explaining in detail how he would gut Crotty over Crotty’s leadership of the expressway authority.
In early July, Crotty said he had made a decision and would announce it shortly.
Days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months — until finally, the mayor gave us his verdict.
He could beat Grayson “handily.” But he wasn’t going to run.
Pretty slick. He declared victory and bowed out of the race.

Thomas goes on, mining this vein for chuckles. If Thomas proves to be right, Democrats may have found a new template for winning in centrist districts.

This is the second part of a two-part analysis. A print (PDF) version of the memo is available here
The two basic weaknesses of counterinsurgency theory – the doctrines’ wildly ambitious social objectives and its myopically narrow conception of “victory” — are directly reflected in General Stanley McChrystal’s August “Commander’s Assessment” of the situation in Afghanistan.
A. McChrystal’s strategic approach will ultimately require huge numbers of soldiers and resources – far more than are now being discussed.
The Commander’s Assessment defines dramatically ambitious goals for a counterinsurgency campaign: The campaign must:

“…earn the support of the Afghan people and provide them with a secure environment.”
…focus on operations that bring stability while shielding [the the civilian population] from insurgent violence corruption and coercion.
…protecting the people means shielding them from all threats….
…protecting the population is more than preventing insurgent violence and intimidation. It also means that [coalition forces] can no longer ignore or tacitly accept abuse of power, corruption or marginalization.

This is a completely different objective than the goal of neutralizing Al Qaeda and will demand resources far beyond anything that has been publically proposed. John Nagl — one of the three authors of FM-3-24 — has repeatedly warned that actually doing the “armed social work” envisioned in FM-3-24 will require far more troops than anyone is currently discussing. This is how Michael Crowley summarized Nagl’s view in the January, 2009 New Republic:

Nagl’s rule of thumb, the one found in the counterinsurgency manual, calls for at least a 1-to-50 ratio of security forces to civilians in contested areas. Applied to Afghanistan, which has both a bigger population (32 million) and a larger land mass (647,500 square miles) than Iraq, that gets you to some large numbers fast. Right now, the United States and its allies have some 65,000 troops in Afghanistan, as compared to about 140,000 in Iraq. By Nagl’s ratio, Afghanistan’s population calls for more than 600,000 security forces. Even adjusting for the relative stability of large swaths of the country, the ideal number could still total around 300,000–more than a quadrupling of current troop levels.

Moreover, from a purely military point of view, if we are eventually going to end up sending 300,000 troops, it is vastly preferable to “bite the bullet” sending the bulk rapidly to dramatically alter the tactical situation rather than in small driblets over a period of several years.
Nagl also notes that in the longer term, maintaining such large numbers of soldiers in Afghanistan will create nearly irresistible pressure to reinstate the draft and will require a massive increase in the military budget – one that will eventually necessitate new taxes.
For Nagl and many other conservatives, these are sacrifices that all Americans should be gladly willing to make. They point to the example of the stalwart working class and middle class British families who sent generation after generation of their sons to fight in India, Asia, Africa and the Middle East during the era of the British Empire. Most ordinary British citizens at that time fully accepted the need for large garrisons of British troops doing “armed social work” in British colonies around the globe on an essentially permanent basis. By the 1920’s many British families had proudly sent three or four successive generations of their young men to fight “For the Empire” as their noble patriotic duty.
It is dubious, however, that a majority of Americans share this perspective and are willing to make the same kind of commitment today. The current arguments over sending 40,000 or 50,000 more troops are therefore really just preliminary skirmishes in a much larger battle to convince the American people to support a full-scale, 300,000 soldier counterinsurgency campaign that may last for decades.

Read more…

Despite unfounded conservative attacks on President Obama’s stimulus measures, the public “remains supportive of specific spending measures to create jobs, improve the economy, and make investments” in key areas of concern, according to TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira. In his ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, Teixeira explains:

…in a new Economic Policy Institute-Hart Research poll, the public, by 61-36, said “The focus for improving the economy should be on creating good jobs, and investing in education and energy independence,” rather than…“shrinking government spending in order to reduce the federal budget deficit.”

Teixeira adds that impressive majorities now favor a range of federal spending measures to increase employment and economic recovery, including:

Pass a major new job creation tax credit for businesses that create jobs in the United States in the next two years (87 percent support)
Extend unemployment insurance benefits for those who have lost their jobs during the recession and are unable to find new jobs (81 percent support)
Put unemployed people back to work at government-funded public service jobs that help meet important community needs as Roosevelt did when he created the Civilian Conservation Corps (74 percent support)
Put unemployed people back to work at government-funded public service jobs that help meet important community needs (71 percent support)
Give a new round of tax rebates to lower- and middle-income Americans (63 percent support)
Provide increased federal assistance to state and local governments to prevent additional layoffs of government employees because government layoffs add to unemployment and harm vital services (52 percent support)

Teixeira concludes that “there may be a reservoir of public support” for more federal investment in economic recovery measures, “provided they are clear, specific, and not labeled as part of a new stimulus package.”