To put this campaign into context, for a moment just imagine the following scenario. Suppose that John McCain had been elected president last November and by this point in time,

1. A minor Democratic presidential candidate had directly accused him of being a member of a secret Nazi organization. A second Democratic presidential candidate said Hitler and Mussolini would approve his policies.
2. A significant liberal journal of opinion had said that McCain was following Hitler’s political strategy and quoted Hitler to prove it.
3. The leading liberal commentators in the New York Times and Washington Post wrote commentaries about McCain’s program using political expressions with absolutely clear and unmistakable connotations of fascism (e.g. “Aryan superiority”, “racial purity”, “national culture” etc.),

“Why would Obama inflict these destructive policies while the economy is collapsing? Simple. Each step strengthens the role of government in people’s lives…That’s exactly what Lenin sought to do. In a cheery volume called State and Revolution, for example, Lenin explains how:

The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy….the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists.

Lenin, too, wished to “spread the wealth around.” And Obama, like Lenin, has been perfectly frank in recommending that we need to go beyond the “merely formal” rights enunciated in the Constitution in order to “bring about redistributive change” in society.

3. The leading conservative commentators in The New York Times and The Washington Post use buzzwords that any political science graduate or well-read person can recognize as directly rooted in classical Marxist and socialist theory.

Charles Krauthammer describes Obama’s “big bang agenda to federalize or socialize” the “commanding heights of the post industrial economy” and calls it the “most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.”
Michael Gerson calls the budget “ideologically ambitious, politically ruthless and radical to its core…This is not merely the rejection of “trickle-down economics,” it is a weakening of the theoretical basis for capitalism — that free individuals are generally more rational and efficient in making investment decisions than are government planners”
David Brooks (who has since stepped back from this approach) says America [is] “skeptical of top-down planning” and “has never been a society riven by class resentment.”Obama’s administration, on the other hand, is: “swept up in its own revolutionary fervor”, “caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it”, is “a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new”, “expands state intervention”, is “predicated on a class divide”

Notice the roundabout way that this process works. On the one hand the columnists can argue with technical accuracy that they are not directly calling Obama a socialist or Marxist-Leninist — and from one point of view they are quite right. The quite evident purpose of their attacks are to not to smear Obama’s personal reputation but rather to demonize the basic ideas of progressive taxation and a robust public sector as policies that should be outside the pale of civilized discourse – ideas that can only be justified by un-American ideologies.
But at the same time, their comments unavoidably and unmistakably tend to imply and reinforce the more extreme accusations. With Rush Limbaugh bellowing that Obama is a “socialist” and Huckabee, Kimball and Keyes calling him a “Leninist” and a “communist”, it is simply impossible not to recognize that politically loaded terms of the kind the leading conservative columnists are using do seem to suggest some degree of sympathy for more extremist claims. The result is that the extremists feel a sense of partial “wink and a nudge” vindication while moderates and middle of the road voters perceive a kind of broad conservative consensus that Obama and his advisors actually are following a secret radical program to which they do not publically admit.
David Brooks realized that his column had contributed to this kind of unacceptable innuendo and, to his very real and substantial credit, the day after his initial column wrote a follow-up piece in which he carefully reformulated his position. As he said:

I had conversations with four senior members of the administration and in the interest of fairness, I thought I’d share their arguments with you today.
In the first place, they do not see themselves as a group of liberal crusaders. They see themselves as pragmatists who inherited a government and an economy that have been thrown out of whack. The budget, they continue, isn’t some grand transformation of America. It raises taxes on energy and offsets them with tax cuts for the middle class. It raises taxes on the rich to a level slightly above where they were in the Clinton years and then uses the money as a down payment on health care reform. That’s what the budget does. It’s not the Russian Revolution.
…I didn’t finish these conversations feeling chastened exactly. ..I’m still convinced the administration is trying to do too much too fast and that the hasty planning and execution of these complex policies will lead to untold problems down the road.
Nonetheless, the White House made a case that was sophisticated and fact-based. These people know how to lead a discussion and set a tone of friendly cooperation. I’m more optimistic that if Senate moderates can get their act together and come up with their own proactive plan, they can help shape a budget that allays their anxieties while meeting the president’s goals.

You should read the whole column. It distinguishes quite well between legitimate conservative disagreements over policy on the one hand and what is simply unjustified innuendo on the other.
Other conservative commentators like Krauthammer and Gerson don’t necessarily have to agree with Brooks’ quite dramatic re-evaluation of his position. But they owe it to their readers to display a basic level of personal intellectual honesty.
Here is the acid test: if they honestly think Barack Obama, along with Larry Summers and Obama’s other advisors are actually using Marxist or socialist doctrine to guide their thinking, they should say so, and provide support for their position. If they don’t really believe that this is true they should stop lending “a wink and a nudge” support to conservative extremists who make those accusations by using politically loaded terms that unavoidably suggest that they believe such accusations might have some element of truth.
That crosses the line from policy disagreement to character assassination and it doesn’t discredit Obama. It discredits them.
And, in addition, it’s bad for America.

There have been some amusing reports lately about earmark-bashing Republicans in Congress themselves securing earmarks. But they represent something more important than just an example of GOP hypocrisy producing a “gotcha” moment for Democrats.
Mark Schmitt gets at the broader issues in a fine TAPPED post today:

Republicans are far more dependent than Democrats on their ability to take some credit for federally funded projects. In the world with earmarks, Lindsay Graham is able to stand against the president on stimulus, on the budget, on Iraq, on health care. And then he’s able to go home, cut a ribbon, get his picture in the paper, and tell everyone that he delivered the money for the new Myrtle Beach Convention Center.
But in a world without earmarks, what does Lindsay Graham bring home? Just words, and great stories about how he fought bravely against health care and economic stimulus.

Schmitt goes on to describe earmarks as an example of what he calls congressional “small ball,” something Members of Congress can do to distinguish themselves in an atmosphere where they have no real influence over big policy decisions, which are, in any event, largely resolved on party-line votes. And as he suggests, Republicans who are in the minority in particular need “small ball” accomplishments to give themselves something positive to talk about in their re-election campaigns, aside from their negative ranting against godless big-government liberals. Indeed, the implicit message a lot of Republican pols send to voters is: “I hate government and government programs just like you do, but by God, until we get rid of them, I’m going to make sure we get our piece of the pie.”
But I think the Republican “small ball” habit goes well beyond earmarks, and when Republicans are actually in power at any level of government, has an impact that is by no means “small.”
One example common at the state level, particularly in the South, is the strong tendency of Republican (and alas, some Democratic) governors to spend a lot of time throwing taxpayer dollars into “megadeals” to secure large industrial investments, most famously foreign auto plants. Such activities sure seem like active governing; they have the same kind of tangible political payoff as earmarks; and moreoever, they can be sold to conservative voters as giving the private sector back the tax payments and control they ought to have anyway. That they also tend to directly and indirectly undermine the kind of “liberal” public investments and policies that are most helpful for long-range economic development strategies is of no concern to most Republican politicians, if they don’t consider it an added bonus. As with those congressional pols who vote against every budget, every program, and every appropriations bill while raking off earmarks, conservative leaders who give away the state revenue base for years to come in order to “deliver jobs” are the position of deploring “pork” while living off the bacon.
Moreover, at an even deeper level, conservative ideology in a competitive political environment almost invariably produces this sort of ostensibly self-contradictory behavior, and with it a great deal of predictable corruption. It’s pretty simple, really: if you don’t believe in the missions of government programs and agencies, but don’t have the guts or the ability to get rid of them altogether, then what do you do with them? Unless you have an unusual degree of integrity, you turn them into patronage and vote-buying systems.
That was a big part of the story of the Bush-DeLay Era of Republican-dominated politics in this decade, and also a source of great confusion in interpreting it. A lot of progressives wasted time arguing about whether it was “ideology” or “incompetence” that caused the disasters of this era. It was both, because the ideology encouraged the incompetence and corruption, from New Orleans to Baghdad and in every corner of Washington. And a lot of conservatives have deluded themselves that Bush and company were “moderates” or “liberals,” when they were really just conservatives who never convinced the public to support massive reductions in government, and then convinced themselves that using government to build a political machine was the next best thing.
To put it another way, when you fundamentally think government spending is a waste of money, then when you are given power over it, it’s not that surprising that you do your best to waste it for your own political benefit, rationalizing the hypocrisy as the shortest path available to that great gettin’ up morning when you have total power and can abolish all those terrible programs once and for all.
Giving conservatives total power would undoubtedly be a horrible disaster for this country. But it’s important to understand that giving them some power, or a lot of power that is limited by the inherent unpopularity of their ultimate goals, is going to help produce precisely the kind of wasteful and corrupt government they claim to deplore. And yes, they’ll protest it all the way to the next earmark announcement or auto plant ground-breaking.

Republican “renewal” strategist Patrick Ruffini of The Next Right published a very revealing post late last night showing that even the most open and innovative of GOP tacticians don’t really favor an open and innovative discussion of the conservative movement’s ideological problems.
Reacting to the flak, some of it from fellow-Republicans, taken by Rush Limbaugh, Michael Steele and Bobby Jindal over the last couple weeks, Ruffini seems to want to designate all three as “made men” whom GOPers are not allowed to criticize. More generally, and dangerously, he wants to make evaluation of the words and deeds of fellow-Republicans strictly contingent on each person’s utility–not, you know, stuff like facts and truth:

Conservatives need to decide who we want to see succeed and who we want to see fail. We then need to calibrate our reactions to the inevitable missteps from either camp accordingly. If someone we want to succeed comes under attack, we hold our fire and close ranks — unless it’s clear they’ve become a long-term liability. If it’s someone we want to see fail — like Jim Bunning — we unload until they get off the stage.

Aside from the coldly instrumental nature of this judgement about wheat and chaff, Ruffini is engaging in some not-very-hidden circular reasoning about who “we want to succeed.” Is Bobby Jindal useful because he’s a smart young GOP politician? Or is he useful because he’s a smart young GOP politician with a strongly ideological background who’s just proven, in his quasi-idiotic response to Barack Obama’s address to Congress, that he’ll subordinate smart politics to the overriding imperative of Being a Real Conservative who will echo the True Faith like a cicada?
Now I know that some folks in the progressive netroots tend to similarly flirt with the feeling that politics is all about Teams and Noise, with not much room for objective reality, and the Team that makes the most Noise wins. Under that rather hammer-headed approach, what you most want to avoid is having anybody on Your Team making discordant Noises. Still, I think the pride in representing what we have often called the Reality-Based Community has kept nearly all progressives from a full surrender of their higher brain functions when it comes to political judgments.
But you will notice something glaring about Ruffini’s hard line against Republican self-criticism: it involves a very blatant double standard. For all the time Rush Limbaugh spends demonizing Barack Obama and Godless Liberals generally, what makes him distinctive is his activity as a commissar policing ideological conformity among fellow-Republicans. So the only rule against GOP self-criticism that Ruffini is really interested in enforcing is one against “moderates” or “centrists” or “reformers” who buck the pre-established party line. To adapt the old Popular Front slogan, there are “pas d’enemi a droite.,” which happens to reinforce the perpetual supremacy of the hard-core ideologues.
I hope progressives reflect on Ruffini’s “thinking” on this subject, and treat it as an object-lesson in the perils of the perennial temptation to idolize or demonize people on “Our Team” not in terms of the Democratic Party’s general principles and strategic needs, but in the pursuit of ideological conformity and “Noise.” Inevitably, this way lies suppression of open discussion and elevates the least thoughtful in our ranks to the status of “made men” who are happy to open up the guns on heretics but cannot be touched themselves.

For an updated profile of President Obama’s top strategist David Axelrod, see Jeff Zeleny’s “President’s Political Protector Is Ever Close at Hand” in the Sunday New York Times.
Also in the Sunday NYT, a good editorial urging President Obama not to cave in to GOP filubuster threats in appointing federal judges nor to defer to Republican Senators’ demands to be able to veto Obama’s nominees from their home state. The Times challenges Obama not to be intimidated from “appointing the kind of highly qualified, progressive-minded judges the nation needs.”
Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake expound on liberal “Blogging in the Obama Era” in Mark Preston’s column at CNNPolitics.com . Video interview here.
Colbert I. King explains in his WaPo column, “Stabbing D.C. in the Back” why the D.C. House Voting Rights Act might not be such a hot deal for Dems, as well as for residents of “Washington D. Colony.”
For a succinct update on Dems chances of getting to 60 in 2010, see Nate Silver’s “Senate Rankings: March 2009 Edition,” plus more than 100 comments.
The Hill‘s Alexander Bolton feeds the buzz that Sen. Arlen Specter is considering a GOP-to-Dem switch, and barring that, Dems’ chances for picking up his seat, while TNR‘s Jason Zengerle wonders in “The Plank” if Specter may pull a “modified Lieberman” and become an Independent.
Bart Jansen reports at CQpolitics.com on the increasing influence of 501(c) 4 and 6 nonprofits in financing political campaigns — tripling in ’08 the amount they spent in ’04.
Again at CQPolitics.com, Adriel Bettleheim’s “For Obama, Popularity Means Don’t Sit Still” discusses the impressive power of Obama’s not-so-secret weapon — his road game.
Chris Bowers ponders Christian demographic shrinkage at OpenLeft.
Has the GOP become the party of deficit concern trolls? Dean Baker gets the meme rolling at The American Prospect.

There’s an important point that has largely been missed (by myself as well) in the debate over Obama’s approach to the budget. Folks like David Brooks (who did a partial recantation today, but not on the issue I am discussing right now), not to mention the entire Republican Party, have been kvetching that Obama is using the economic crisis to sneak all sorts of big-government, socialist ideas into law, instead of just dealing with the economic crisis in a direct and responsible way. My own response to Brooks argued that you can’t divorce the economy from health care and energy costs, or from efforts to restore the progressivility of the tax code to more or less where it was before George W. Bush went on his upper-end tax cut crusade.
But there’s a bigger point to be made: you can’t “do the budget” without making policy choices. If you try to, by simply tinkering with funding levels for this or that, you are making policy choices in favor of the status quo, which in today’s case often means policy choices made by a Republican president and Congress during the period from 2001-2007.
If you want a precedent for policy-based budgeting, look no further than Republican idol Ronald Reagan, whose famous 1981 budget was loaded with all sorts of ideological freight. As Jonathan Chait pointed out yesterday:

Obama is trying to put his imprint on federal policy. I think he’s right to do so. Ronald Reagan governed the country with little worry about its fiscal health. His goal was tilt the structure of the tax code and federal outlays so that conservatives would have an advantage when the bill came due. It worked: when the Democrats recaptured the White House, they mostly played janitor, cleaning up the Republican mess. Not only did Democrats mosty fail to impose their priorities to anything like the degree Republicans had, voters penalized them in 1994 for imposing fiscal pain. And then, when Republicans regained the presidency, they returned to the Reagan strategy.

Jon’s talking about Reagan’s mega-strategy, but highly significant policy decisions were weaved throughout Reagan’s budget. One very good example, which I happened to see up close as a lobbyist for the State of Georgia, was an effort by Reagan to produce Medicaid savings by “capping” the federal share of costs for that federal-state program. In the administration’s one significant budget defeat, the House substituted a provision that produced the same short-term savings by reducing state Medicaid expenditures. The difference was that Reagan and his budget director, David Stockman did not achieve a permanent shift in the share of Medicaid costs to the states, which was part of a broader effort to ultimately devolve both Medicaid and AFDC (a.k.a., “welfare”) to the states.
The point is simply that you can’t divorce the numbers from the policies that produce them. And totally aside from your assessment of various Obama policies, expecting him to fail to pursue them in the context of a comprehensive budget bill makes no sense.

In a useful article for The American Prospect, Matt Yglesias draws attention to a basic disconnect between U.S. and Israeli thinkers and doers that has often been obscured by internal differences in both countries:

Differing coverage of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to Israel on Tuesday captured the divergence of opinion. The Associated Press’ headline kept the focus on Clinton’s somewhat news-making proclamation about Palestine: “US: ‘Inescapable’ movement to Palestinian state.” The story highlighted how Clinton emphasized to Israeli leaders across the spectrum — including Benjamin Netanhayu, almost certainly Israel’s next prime minister and an opponent of a sovereign Palestine — the vital need to continue work toward a two-state solution.
The Jerusalem Post headline, by contrast, was “Netanyahu, Barak urge Clinton for Iran dialogue deadline.” Israeli leaders, from the Labor Party to the Likud Party, think that the most important thing they can be doing right now is urging the United States to get tough on Iran. The March 3 Haaretz had an article about Israeli leaders intending to present Clinton with “red lines” on talks with Iran.
How the client state in this relationship got in the position to start dictating red lines is an issue I’ll leave for others. The larger issue is that this Israeli consensus on priorities is dangerously out of line with reality.

You should go on to read the full article for Yglesias’ arguments about why he thinks the Israeli perspective is “out of line with reality,” mostly having to do with his fear that a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine may soon no longer be an option. But any way you look at it, he’s absolutely right that Americans assume the Palestinian issue is always front-and-center for Israelis, while Israelis increasingly perceive Palestinians as pawns in a bigger geopolitical struggle with Iran. The disconnect here is pervasive, and dangerous.

It has taken several days for the full implications of Obama’s budget and message to sink in among conservatives and Republicans, but now the surprise has passed and the gloves are coming off.
The conservative hope that Obama might actually be the timid, dithering, “split the difference” centrist that some progressives feared he was has now evaporated. On the contrary, the scope of his ambition to be a solidly progressive Roosevelt-style president makes him appear as a genuine threat — not just for committed Republicans, but to a substantial group beyond. For many, this threat is so grave that insuring the defeat of Obama’s political program now takes priority over what might be best for the economy.
The larger group beyond the usual Republican base that finds Obama’s program threatening is essentially comprised of the substantial number of relatively un-ideological Middle Americans – small businesspeople, managers and office park voters among others — who –deep down – simply don’t accept a Keynesian view of economics or understand the need for significant, ongoing government intervention in the economy. On survey questions they will often support certain specific and appealing government programs but then will simultaneously reject “deficit spending”, “big government” and “regulations” as unambiguous evils. If you asked many of these Americans to choose between, on the one hand, a “lost decade of growth” like Japan suffered as well as continuing crises in health care, energy and the environment and, on the other hand, the unknown long-term political consequences of a wildly successful and deeply progressive Democratic Presidency, many will hem and haw for a moment but finally opt for “the devil they know” – recession and stagnation – rather than the uncharted waters of an energetically progressive future.
The result is that Democrats can’t rely on Obama’s tremendous advantage in personal popularity right now to keep the Republicans on the defensive. On the contrary, Democrats must begin preparing to defend themselves against a massive, well-financed and coordinated, three pronged offensive.
Prong Number 1 — The Official Party Line – The most familiar and visible of the three prongs of this offensive is the official Republican Party — represented by the Congressional Republicans and the Republican National Committee. By now virtually every politically involved American has heard the official Republican position. The battle against Obama is a direct clash between socialism and the free market, between liberalism gone completely berserk and the traditional American Way. Buried in the byzantine twists and turns of Rush Limbaugh’s epic , Fidel Castro- length, pronunciamento to the Conservative Political Action Conference last week lie a collection of virtually every one of his “oldies but goodies” and “greatest hits” drawn from his radio show.
By itself, however, this official Republican message will not be sufficient. It needs to be reinforced by two additional forces to successfully challenge Obama’s coalition. It needs (1) “responsible” apologists to give it intellectual cover with more moderate voters and (2) “Black Ops’ boys” to do the political “wet work” – the stuff too ugly to display in public.
Prong Number 2 — The “Responsible” Apologists — David Brooks’ retreat into the boilerplate anti-Obama rhetoric of the Republican National Committee in his recent New York Times column (misleadingly titled “a Moderate Manifesto”) signals the groveling surrender of the “responsible” and “sophisticated” conservatives to the Republican Party base. As Ed Kilgore has noted, for Brooks,’ “moderation is defined as compromise, any kind of compromise, and “moderates” are invariably urged to pursue a course of action that coincides with the immediate political needs of the Republican Party… you will note that [Brooks’] column essentially urges “moderates” to join Rush Limbaugh in derailing Obama’s agenda.”
In fact, the truth is that, without directly using the word “socialism”, Brooks’ entire column is nothing more than a euphemistic restatement of the Republican Party’s central accusation.
Just look at what Brooks actually says:
America:
• [supports] “relatively limited central government”
• “puts competitiveness and growth first, not redistribution first”
• [is] “skeptical of top-down planning”
• “has never been a society riven by class resentment.”
Obama’s administration, on the other hand, is:
• “swept up in its own revolutionary fervor…
• “caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it” …
• “a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new” …
• “expands state intervention”…
• “concentrates enormous power in Washington”…
• “is predicated on a class divide…All the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward”
• [will lead to] “polarizing warfare that is sure to flow from Obama’s über-partisan budget.”
This is not even remotely subtle. It references quite literally every traditional anti-socialist cliché of the previous century except for the use of the actual word “socialism” itself. (Well, OK, the little “uber-partisan” thing hiding in there is a tiny bit subtle — a subliminal hint of Mein Kampf and Nazi jackboots to distract from the near-monotonous recitation of 1950’s anti-“pinko” buzzwords).
In fact, Brooks’ column is for all practical purposes a Frank Luntz-type “words that work” playbook for other editorial and commentary writers. The words above are, in combination, a roundabout, “responsible” way of saying precisely the same things as the Republican National Committee.
Other “responsible” conservatives are also quickly falling in line. In a Wednesday Washington Post commentary Michael Gerson describes Obama’s budget as “ideologically ambitious, politically ruthless and radical to its core… This is not merely the rejection of “trickle-down economics,” it is a weakening of the theoretical basis for capitalism — that free individuals are generally more rational and efficient in making investment decisions than are government planners.” Once again, the basic RNC charge of “socialism” is repeated while carefully avoiding the use of the actual word.
(Note: let’s be clear about this. “Responsible” conservatives actually do know that policies like progressive taxation, government regulation of business and federal protection of the environment are more accurately traced back to Theodore Roosevelt than to Lenin and Mao Tse-tung. They are, however, endowed with a sophistication and nuance of perspective that allows them to see a deeper truth that lies beyond such superficial objections)
As a result, Democrats should look for each and every one of the venerable tropes trotted out by Brooks and Gerson to start showing up in editorial pages, business magazine commentaries and so on all across the country. There are a very large group of moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats who would be embarrassed to turn purple while screaming “socialist” like the red-meat conservatives at a Sarah Palin rally. They will, however, be quite happy to gravely knit their brows and purse their lips in theatrical displays of preoccupation while muttering ominously about their concern over “extreme” and “irresponsible” measures.

Read more…

So exactly how angry are wealthy people becoming about the “socialistic” threat of a return to the tax policies of the bad old days of the 1990s? Listen to one of their more fervent advocates, via the Washington Independent’s David Weigel:

Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), who gives his departing interns copies of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged,” told me today that the response to President Obama’s economic policies reminded him of what happened in the 51-year-old novel.
“People are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’” said Campbell. “The achievers, the people who create all the things that benefit rest of us, are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs, the people who create wealth, who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.”

As anyone who’s read Rand’s mammoth and monomaniacal novel can tell you, the heroes of Atlas Shrugged are the capitalists who literally go on strike, bringing society to its knees by withholding their talents. Campbell seems to be warning us that today’s rich are getting tired of the terrible “punishment” they are enduring from the greedy parasites around them. We may soon be denied the life-giving talents of stock traders, bankers, mortgage brokers, strip-mall developers, and a whole host of other creative people who are yoked to the top tax bracket. They’ve done nothing wrong, but thanks to looting by the poor, the economy’s collapsed, and the best among us are being asked to pay.
I don’t know if John Campbell’s bought the whole Objectivist package from reading Rand, and privately considers all the nice churches in his California district evil temples of life-hating mysticism and theft. But like Rick Santelli, Cambell’s an authentic apostle of the angry overclass that’s sick of being betrayed by “losers” and then expected to help keep the scum alive.
Here’s hoping that Rep. Campbell’s “strike” begins no later than the end of his current term in the House.

A few addenda to my Tuesday post on healthcare strategy: Sam Stein reports at HuffPo that advocates of a single payer system will have representation at today’s White House Summit on health care reform. Rep John Conyers “a known single-payer advocate,” along with an advocacy group, Physicians for a National Health Program will participate in the summit. The group had put out a press release earlier in the week complaining that,

“Groups representing physicians, nurses, and consumers who advocate for a single-payer system of national health insurance have thus far been excluded from the summit,” says the release. “The Clinton task force on health reform made a similar mistake of excluding the voices of those who support a single-payer system… At a time when public support for single-payer is greater than ever – more than 60 percent in recent polls – we urge President Obama not to make the same mistake.”

Obama “has generally shied-away” from outright endorsing a single-payer approach, although he has made favorable comments about the single-payer concept, according to Stein. Conyers and the progressive physicians group undoubtedly will provide a strong voice at the summit, although there will be 150 participants clamoring for attention.
In yesterday’s New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s article “Obama Taps Clinton Ideas but Not Clinton Herself” discusses some possible ways Secretary of State Clinton’s expertise on health care reform could be tapped and notes major differences in the strategy deployed by Presidents Clinton and Obama:

To begin with, the Clinton plan was drafted in secret and delivered to lawmakers as a fait accompli; Mr. Obama is articulating broad principles and leaving the details to Congress…President Bill Clinton waited 11 months after taking office in 1993 to roll out his plan, a delay many Democrats say was deadly. Mr. Obama is forging ahead after six weeks. Mr. Clinton focused heavily on access to care; Mr. Obama is framing the debate in terms of cost. The Clinton plan left Americans worried that they would be forced to switch doctors. Mr. Obama’s message, Mr. Axelrod said, is, “If you are happy with what you have, you can keep it.”
Once the stimulus bill was enacted, Mr. Obama moved quickly to include money for health care changes in his budget, something Mr. Clinton did not do because his economic advisers wanted to focus on deficit reduction first, said Chris Jennings, who was Mr. Clinton’s senior health policy adviser. “That’s really key,” Mr. Jennings said. The delay, he said, “probably was the reason why we were unable to sustain interest and support.”
Mr. Obama, by contrast, made a conscious decision to tackle deficit reduction and health care, for which he set aside $634 billion in his budget, at once. “We’re 16 years later,” Mr. Axelrod said, “and I think the imperative is even greater because of the budget. Health care reform is a fiscal imperative now, not just a moral imperative.”

Thus far, President Obama’s initiatives have received a generally positive response from some sectors of the health care industry, as Ceci Connolly and Dan Eggen report in today’s Washington Post. Eggen and Connolly explain that Obama’s “modest approach” was favorably received by the pharmaceutical industry and “could save the drug companies billions a year compared with price controls,” and,

The lure for the industry is the prospect of tens of millions of new customers: If Obama succeeds in fulfilling his pledge to cover many more Americans, those newly insured people will get checkups, purchase medicine, undergo physical therapy and get surgeries they cannot afford today.

Progressives will be happy to note that Obama’s health plan is not all good with the drug lobby. The authors quote W.J. “Billy” Tauzin, a former congressman who now heads up the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA:”There are things we don’t like about it. But there’s time to discuss all that.” The authors quote other health industry groups that have significant misgivings.
“Obama’s Almost Perfect Strategy” in TNR‘s “The Treatment” blog by Jacob Hacker, co-director of the Center for Health, Economic, and Family Security offers four strategy reccomendations for the Administraton. Hacker, editor of “Health at Risk: America’s Ailing Health System–and How to Heal It,” also advises Obama reform team thusly:

It makes sense to keep the targets for political attacks hidden for as long as possible, but that does not mean that Obama and his advisers should start dropping key priorities-priorities that they have already articulated and defended-before the debate begins. For if there is a final lesson from the Clinton reform debacle, it is that the President’s power is greatest as an agenda setter rather than a legislator. Obama should make sure the agenda is set correctly.
So when the administration presses its agenda to leaders in Congress, it shouldn’t sweat the details. But it should make clear that the big three-employer contributions, an Exchange, and a public health insurance plan aren’t details. They are the essence of Obama’s vision of a transformed system.

Stolberg notes that “Experts say the political climate for passing major health care changes is more favorable than ever, with business leaders, pharmaceutical and hospital executives, insurance officials and advocates for patients all agreeing the need is urgent.” Stolberg’s point about Mrs. Clinton’s influence being felt as the battle lines are drawn is duly-noted. Long before Mrs. Clinton, however, Senator Ted Kennedy lead the charge, and the reforms that pass will bear his imprint and reflect his tireless leadership on the issue.

The ever-vigilant Spencer Ackerman alerts us today in the Washington Independent that the President today issued a memorandum ordering the Office of Management and Budget and executive agencies to “restrict no-bid contracts; to rein in outsourcing of ‘inherently governmental activities’; and to, if necessary, cancel wasteful contracts outright.”
Ackerman notes in particular that Obama focuses on the Defense Department:

[Obama called for] processes for ongoing review of, existing contracts in order to identify contracts that are wasteful, inefficient, or not otherwise likely to meet the agency’s needs, and to formulate appropriate corrective action in a timely manner. Such corrective action may include modifying or canceling such contracts in a manner and to the extent consistent with applicable laws, regulations, and policy.

Cost overruns are, of course, endemic at DoD. Thus, says Ackerman:

If I was a lobbyist for Lockheed or Boeing, I’d be dialing my contacts in the Pentagon and the Hill to figure out what the prospective damage to my company was. And then I’d come up with a strategy to fight this forthcoming Office of Management and Budget review.

The announcement of a new general approach to government contractors raises as many questions as it answers. It’s not always obvious what constitutes “inherently governmental activities,” and contracting sometimes saves a lot of money without corruption. Often the big question isn’t “public versus private,” but how much genuine competition exists among potential providers of services or materials.
But after many years of pro-privatization assumptions in public service delivery at every level of government, it is time to deal with these questions upfront. So Obama’s memo can and should become the beginning of a very big debate.