This item by James Vega is the second part of a three-part TDS Strategy Memo originally published during the week of September 14, 2009. A PDF version of the entire memo is available here)
Democrats must face the unpleasant reality that that from now on any significant local or national political meeting anywhere in America is going to be attended by conservative activists who are mobilized and directed there through a pyramid of online social networks. At the apex of this pyramid is Freedomworks and directly below it is a second tier of a dozen other lobbying organizations.
Immediately after the April 15th Tea Parties it appeared that the local activists who had been mobilized might attempt to form permanent “bottom-up” grass-roots committees in communities across the country. Instead, the rather different framework that has emerged is a kind of permanent “on-call” cadre of activists across the country – individuals who are willing to download talking points and slogans from the online social networks and be directed to local meetings in their area or to national protests in Washington D.C.
The simple but unpleasant fact is that in every one of these local political town halls or other community meetings that is not contested, the conservative point of view will dominate. Therefore Democrats have no choice but to build their own version of this kind of online social organization — a “Democratic Activist Corps” or corps of “Democratic Minutemen” – dedicated activists with a similar “on-call” capability.
At first glance this would appear to be the responsibility of Organizing for America, but in fact, for two reasons, that organization is actually not well suited to manage this task.

First, Organizing for America cannot avoid following a very broad, “big tent” approach because of the huge, extremely heterogeneous group of people in its database. In order to avoid schisms and conflict among its members, it must stick to the most elementary and widely shared views. This is reflected in the rather bland slogans it recommends e.g. “Health Insurance Reform Now: Let’s Get It Done!”, “Stand up for Reform”, “Standing Together for Health Insurance Reform”
Second, because it is directly connected to the DNC and the Obama administration, OFA has to conduct itself in a way that does not reflect negatively on Obama. This makes it necessarily very cautious and highly averse to direct conflict and confrontation. This is reflected it its preference for organizing what are essentially non-confrontational “pep rallies” of its supporters rather than directing them to directly engage and challenge opponents of reform.

Given the huge, ten million member e-mail base of OFA, these choices are not necessarily wrong. OFA is metaphorically speaking a political oil tanker, only able to move and turn only very gradually and cautiously. But as a result of these two characteristics it is impractical to expect an organization like OFA to be able to successfully direct a Democratic counterpart to a fierce and combative organization like Freedomworks that has complete freedom of action. It is therefore preferable to organize a “Democratic Activist” or “Democratic Minutemen” network outside the formal structure of government or the DNC, just as Freedomworks and the other conservative online activist groups have done.
Although the issue agenda of such an organization will be the same as the official Democratic organizations, to be effective its ethos must more closely resemble that of a passionate social movement and its staff must be composed of people with the background and perspective of union or civil rights organizers – men and women with both the passion and the experience to tackle a bitter, well-financed and determined adversary.
Freedomworks has a 14 person Washington staff, six full-time field coordinators or state directors and an annual budget of 8 million dollars. Its economic model is based on obtaining contributions from the industries that derive benefits from its grass-roots organizing activities. To effectively compete with this, Democratic organizations like unions, environmental and other social issue groups, professional associations and similar pro-democratic forces will need to contribute substantial in-kind resources — of staff time, office space, supplies and technical support — to a Democratic Activist Corps of this kind. Even with significant in-kind support, however, a core of paid, full-time employees and a significant operating budget will still be needed.
The key demographic target for an “on call” activist network of this kind will be mid-sized, second and third tier cities and towns. The major American cities and urban areas already have more than sufficient pro-democratic organizations and social networks to mobilize activists when necessary for meetings, marches, demonstrations and so on. At the other end of the spectrum, modern conservatism is disproportionately concentrated in small towns, urban fringes and rural areas – so much so that in many cases any effective competition is simply impractical. It is in the mid-sized cities and towns across America where significant numbers of Democrats live but where there are relatively weak pro-Democratic organizations and institutions that an online social network of committed Democratic activists could make a substantial difference.
The April 15th tea party movement claimed that they held events in over 1,000 cities and towns and Nate Silver documented events in around six or eight hundred. Because of the more concentrated geographic distribution of the Democratic coalition this project can aim to achieve lower numerical targets. The project should, however, set clear timetables for creating “on-call” networks in first 50, then 100, and ultimately about 200 smaller U.S. cities and medium-sized towns. If possible, at least the first two and preferably all three of these goals should be achieved before the 2010 elections.
Also, by next spring, some of these Democratic minutemen will also need to receive a certain amount of training in non-violent methods because by that time it is virtually certain that there will be young right-wing “skinheads” and other quasi-military groups openly participating in anti-Obama demonstrations. The strategy of intimidation and physical aggression employed by such groups can best be defeated by disciplined non-violent tactics.

This item, by James Vega, is the first section of a three part TDS Strategy Memo that appeared during the week of September 14, 2009. A PDF version of the complete Memo is available here)
Three of the critical mistakes that led to the setbacks in the campaign for health care reform this summer actually preceded the launch of the health care campaign itself and were not the direct result of the specific legislative and political strategies the administration employed. They were rooted in decisions made in the first month or two after Obama took office.
They were:

1. A failure to create a clearly defined “core” message expressing Obama’s basic agenda and general philosophy of government.
2. A failure to immediately begin organizing an effective mass mobilization for that agenda.
3. A failure to begin building ongoing social and cultural community institutions to support that agenda.

There were understandable reasons why these failures of strategy occurred and why they were in significant measure unavoidable – Obama took office in the most chaotic economic circumstances of any president since the Great Depression. The point is not to assign blame but rather to accurately identify the critical tasks that have still not been accomplished and to develop a strategy for achieving them
Introduction
On inauguration day, Obama began his term amid the most dramatic expression of grass roots enthusiasm for a president in living memory – an unprecedented groundswell of support not just from African-Americans but from an extremely broad coalition of the young, the urban, the educated and other groups. The masses of people who traveled to Washington on January 20th or who gathered in other places across the country to celebrate Obama’s inauguration reflected a popular energy and degree of identification with a political figure and a political campaign that had not been previously exhibited since the Roosevelt era.
Within a short time, however, the widely shared feeling that the Obama campaign had not just been a standard political campaign but rather the dramatic beginning of a dynamic mass social movement began to sharply decline. By the time the April 15th “tea parties” rolled around there was barely any sign of spontaneous and energetic grass roots activity among Democrats – there was no nationwide outpouring of local community social activities like “support Obama” rock concerts, street parties, theme evenings at restaurants and clubs or special events to draw people together on an ongoing informal basis. There was no wide viral promotion of new post-election symbols like buttons, tea shirts or bumper stickers carrying forward the “Yes We Can” spirit and linking it to an emerging social movement organized around an agenda for change. There were no tables at shopping centers, people handing out leaflets on street corners or new post-election pro-Obama signs on lawns or lampposts or bulletin boards.
As long time grass-roots organizer Marshall Gans and Peter Drier noted in a Washington post op-ed:

Once in office, the president moved quickly, announcing one ambitious legislative objective after another. But instead of launching a parallel strategy to mobilize supporters, most progressive organizations and Organizing for America — the group created to organize Obama’s former campaign volunteers — failed to keep up… Organizing for America, for example, encouraged Obama’s supporters to work on local community service projects, such as helping homeless shelters and tutoring children. That’s fine, but it’s not the way to pass reform legislation…
Meanwhile, as the president’s agenda emerged, his former campaign volunteers and the advocacy groups turned to politics as usual: the insider tactics of e-mails, phone calls and meetings with members of Congress. Some groups — hoping to go toe-to-toe with the well-funded business-backed opposition — launched expensive TV and radio ad campaigns in key states to pressure conservative Democrats. Lobbying and advertising are necessary, but they have never been sufficient to defeat powerful corporate interests.

The DNC did send out letters. Organizing for America did invite its members to meet in small groups and gatherings and reminded the people on its e-mail lists to visit the OFA website. But the energy and scale of these efforts were deliberately low-key. The DNC letters were in essence standard fundraising appeals and the OFA events were quite specifically designed as “insider” activities for loyal supporters and not as energetic outreach to the general public.
The conservative opposition to Obama’s agenda, on the other hand, created a unique public event in the April 15th Tea Parties, developed a new nationwide set of internet-based social networks and widely popularized a broad ideological framework and perspective with which to attack the entire Obama agenda and administration – the notion that the individual elements of the Obama agenda were actually part of a general movement toward “a government takeover ”, “socialism” or “fascism” and represented an aggressive attack on traditional American values and institutions.
Democrats responded to this threat with an uncoordinated mixture of sputtering outrage, bemused ridicule and point by point refutation of more specific accusations. The charge of “socialism” seemed so absurd that a thoughtful attempt to refute it seemed unnecessary. There was no serious national communications strategy devised to clearly answer the simple but vital question “OK, if the Democratic agenda is not socialism or “government takeover” then exactly what is it?”
This underlying Democratic weakness at the levels of both communications strategy and grass roots organizing led directly to the near-total breakdown during August. The opponents of health care reform were mobilized, organized, armed with basic talking points and backed by professional communications and PR firms. Grass-roots Democrats were looking around in vain for someone to offer leadership and direction.
By late in the third week of August the Democrats had cobbled together a sufficient response to meet the conservative offensive and slow the media narrative of massive public opposition to Democratic plans. But the substantial slide in Obama’s job approval left the campaign for health care reform substantially weaker than it had been in the spring.
At this point, the urgent need is not only for short-term organizing to regain the initiative on health care reform but also for longer range efforts to build a nationwide movement that that revives the “Yes We Can” spirit of Jan 20th and transforms it into a sustained and active social movement to support the overall Democratic agenda. To do this Dems need to do three things.

1. Develop one simple, standardized “core” message that clearly defines the basic goals—as well as the limits — of Obama’s agenda
2. Develop a deeply committed and highly organized group of volunteers specifically dedicated to advocating that core message in meetings and discussions wherever they occur.
3. Develop local activities that can mature into enduring local community social and cultural institutions – institutions that can support a renewed “Yes We Can” movement and allow it to grow.

Read more…

This item by James Vega was originally published on September 13, 2009
In order to judge the significance of the conservative-led demonstration that took place in Washington D.C. this weekend, it is important to begin with a realistic estimate of the number of people who actually participated. This is unusually difficult in this particular case because Matt Kibbe, the President of the organizing group Freedomworks — understandably concerned as he was about the danger of liberal media bias — came up with the innovative solution of simply claiming that ABC news had estimated that1.2 to1.5 million people had participated – something the network itself most emphatically denied ever having done. Several conservative blog posts and tweets later this number had been carefully and judiciously narrowed to an even two million participants, making the demonstration larger not only than Obama’s inauguration – which shut down the entire transportation grid of Washington D.C. — but also the entire population – every man woman and child — of both Delaware and the District of Colombia. Say what you will about chairman Kibbe, whatever he may lack in empirical rigor, he certainly compensates for in audacity.
The only official estimate that was provided – by the Washington D.C. fire department – was that about 60,000-70,000 people participated, a number that was generally in line with standard crowd estimation techniques ( As it happened, because all the marchers were funneled through the narrow rectangle formed by Pennsylvania avenue between the white house and the capitol and time lapse photographs were taken, it was possible to use a number of standard “per square foot” and “flow per minute” crowd estimation formulas to roughly gauge the number of demonstrators. Both methods indicated a crowd size clearly below 100,000).
On the one hand, bringing 60,000-70,000 protestors to Washington is undeniably a substantial achievement, one that firmly establishes the existence of a new kind of conservative political organization – a composite organization that is a fusion of (1) a major TV network that provides popular political commentators and massive free advertising for a demonstration (2) a professionally managed coordinating organization (Freedomworks) that in this case provided $600,000 in direct funds, 14 full-time staff workers for logistics and planning and a robust, technically sophisticated web and social network infrastructure and (3) a set of decentralized social networks that enabled communication among the grass-roots protesters.
Although Freedomworks as an organization is as completely “Astroturf” as any firm in Washington, the large majority of the participants in the demonstration were undeniably “authentic” grass-roots conservatives – they were neither full-time Republican operatives nor members of traditional right-wing organizations. They generally paid their own way to participate in the demonstration and the vast creative and artistic panoply of their hand-made signs – which generally ranged from the histrionic and lurid to the clinically delusional – bespoke a perspective and sensibility that — whatever else it might be — could not seriously be described as regimented and obedient to any organization.
The demonstration apparently left most of the participants feeling optimistic and energized. “We are the real America” they confidently asserted to each other, and “the vast majority of Americans are now waking up” and joining the struggle to “take back our country”
The demonstrators’ sense of having reached an important milestone was not necessarily wrong, but among the organizers and strategists of the protest there was a different perception – that the critical objective of bringing a sufficient mass of protesters to Washington to actually intimidate wavering, “on the fence” members of congress had clearly failed. For this purpose the demonstration would have had to be at least in the 250,000-300,000 range, and preferably around a half a million. The demonstration needed to convince wavering members of congress that the protesters represented more than just the well-known conservative/Republican base and in this critical regard it simply did not succeed.
The consequences for the “Tea Party” (or, as Glen Beck has for some obscure reason renamed it, the “9/12 Movement”) are substantial. Mass demonstrations in Washington D.C that do not achieve their key objectives are subject to a form of diminishing returns. It becomes harder and harder to convince the same number of people to return to Washington for subsequent events. This is particularly the case with a new social movement like the Tea Party protests whose participants can become deeply demoralized when they begin to perceive that their efforts are actually having very little effect on the steady progress of health care reform and other Obama initiatives.
As a consequence, it is likely that by this November or December if not before the Tea Party/9-12 movement will begin to experience a major schism over strategy and tactics.

Read more…

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on September 10, 2009.
I watched the President’s address on a jumbotron screen at a rally in the MLK National Historic Site in Atlanta. The rally and viewing, which were put together by Organizing for America, featured some of the better local agitators, including the state AFL-CIO president, the pastor of King’s church, a firebrand state senator, a couple of people who had been badly burned by insurance companies and OFA leaders, all of whom stoked the crowd leading up to the President’s address.
About 300-350 people attended, maybe 75-80 percent African Americans, plus a subtantial number of people with disabilities of all races. These were not just Obamaphiles, but people who felt strongly about health reform, and, moving around in the crowd, I heard pieces of quite a few health care horror stories. The event seems to have been designed mostly for the local TV cameras, which is understandible, since the tube still rules in the battle for hearts and minds.
Predictably enough, the crowd cheered the President’s stronger statements, and booed lustiily when the camera panned to Rep. Boehner and other GOP stiffs. I imagine the scene was replicated in cities across the country. I wondered what political moderates viewing the speech thought about the stolid Republicans, who have offered no reform proposals of their own thus far. I especially like how Robert Creamer puts it in his HuffPo post, that the heckling S.C. Rep. Joe Wilson is “the poster child for the new Republican Party.”
As for President Obama’s address (transcript here) , I thought he scored key points with impressive brevity. Never did I feel, “this is too wonky,” which has been an issue with other health care reform advocates. I liked the way he directly addressed the lies and distortions foisted by Republican fear-mongers. His tone was a little sharp. But there is really no way to make nice when debunking some of the nastier allegations they have smeared on his reform proposals. He unsheathed a few good zingers, such as the reference to the monstrous deficit he inherited, but wisely kept them to a minimum. Better to let the glowering Republicans marinate in bitterness on national TV, and they obliged.
President Obama endorsed the public option, but he kept an escape hatch open, saying he would consider alternatives. There was only a vague reference to what has elsewhere been called the “trigger mechanism” that would make the public option available. Even less was said about the possibility of taxing health care benefits. Those who were looking for heightened clarity on these controversial issues in the Presidents’ speech were probably disappointed. He tossed out a bit of an olive branch to the Republicans, in the form of a hint that some kind of tort reform should be part of the enacted legislation, which may be small comfort to them, but it’s more conciliatory than anything they have offered.
I expect that the President’s approval ratings will improve, as they generally do after a televised address. But I do think he needs to do more, perhaps in a warmer format, such as a series of televised “fireside chats,” as has been suggested. The President’s address was a pretty good beginning, especially if he will follow it with more visible, assertive leadership.
Among progressives, the reaction has been more favorable than not. Open Left‘s David Sirota and Mike Lux heard different speeches, with Lux giving Obama’s address a rave review and Sirota a pan. E. J. Dionne, Jr. noted a positive transformation in his WaPo column:

It seemed as if a politician who had been channeling the detached and cerebral Adlai Stevenson had discovered a new role model in the fighting Harry Truman. For the cause of health-care reform, it was about time.

And that’s all to the good.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it first appeared on September 7, 2009.
In all the debate over public opinion polls, town hall protests, and “bipartisanship” (or the lack thereof), not to mention the complex details of this or that plan, it is easy to forget that the key obstacle to enactment of health care reform remains the threat of a filibuster in the Senate. Since 60 votes are required to “invoke cloture” and proceed to a vote, the White House strategy on health reform has oscillated between efforts to pull a few Senate Republicans across the line (shoring up “centrist” Democrats as a byproduct) to get to 60, and schemes to use budget reconciliation procedures, which prohibit filibusters.
This latter possibility has aroused dire threats of Armageddon from conservatives, most notably from New York Times columnist David Brooks, who said use of reconciliation for health reform would be “suicidal,” and would “permanently alienate independents.” Brooks cleverly conflated public misgivings about health reform with support for a filibuster, and equated a simple majority vote with an effort to “ram health care through” Congress. There is zero evidence at this point that voters are versed in the intricacies of Senate procedure, or cherish the right of 41 senators to dictate national policy.
There are, however, other problems with the use of reconciliation for health reform. The loophole is vulnerable to an adverse parliamentary ruling, which can stop items that don’t really have anything to do with the budget; this ruling can only be waived by a three-fifths vote, defeating the whole purpose of reconciliation. Also, reconciliation places certain structural limitations on the scope and duration of reforms. Politically, it will be used by Republicans and High Broderist pundits to hammer Obama as a partisan dictator (though the former are somewhat constrained by the use of reconciliation to enact the 2001 Bush tax cuts).
That leaves Democrats searching for a way to reach the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster, which has proven quite difficult for them. Democrats understandably need to allow for some amount of political diversity within their caucus. But the time has come–and in fact, it is long overdue–for them to begin forcefully making the case that being a member in good standing of the party’s Senate caucus means supporting cloture motions on key legislation even if a given senator intends to vote against it.
This case was, in fact, briefly made in July by Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin–but it gained little traction. Durbin’s argument should be revived in and outside the Senate. Right now, progressive groups around the country are in the midst of efforts to agitate for a “public option” as an essential feature of health reform, and eventually will devote enormous efforts to support final passage of health reform, if we ever get to that point. Wavering Democrats have been targeted for ads and other communications, with mixed results. A significant fraction of that pressure should be devoted to a very simple message: Democrats should not conspire with Republicans to obstruct a vote in the Senate on the president’s top domestic priority. Vote your conscience, or your understanding of your constituents’ views, Ben Nelson, but don’t prevent a vote.
There are those who would respond to this suggestion by arguing that a senator voting for cloture but against the bill could be accused of flip-flopping or deviousness. Let them provide the evidence that voters understand or care enough about Senate procedures to internalize that charge. When John Kerry got into so much trouble in 2004 by saying that he “actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it,” he was the one trying to explain arcane Senate procedures. “I voted against ObamaCare, but I didn’t try to keep the Senate from voting” should be a pretty easy sell for any Democrat, particularly since the contrary argument requires an explanation of cloture, not exactly a household word.
The harder question is whether public pressure to support one’s party and president on a cloture vote could be supplemented by more tangible sanctions against senators who won’t at least let health reform or other critical legislation get to the floor–such as withholding choice committee assignments or party committee funds. But until Democrats begin to question the right of certain Democratic senators to maintain their tyranny, possible sanctions are beside the point.
In any event, this is a project that progressives should embrace sooner rather than later, and even if a “bipartisan” 60 votes are rounded up for health reform, or the reconciliation route is pursued. The same problem will bedevil Democrats on other legislation. The constitutional structure of the Senate will always tend to produce a more conservative body than the House, and than the national body politic.
There’s no real “down side” for Democrats to a campaign for party discipline on cloture votes, because Republicans already largely have it on legislation that matters. Democrats need to stop kowtowing to “moderates” who see a vote for cloture as the same thing as voting for the actual bill. These moderates can show their centrist bonafides by voting against the actual bill–and Democrats, free of the 60 votes needed for cloture, can finally pass the bill with the simple majority it deserves.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it appeared on August 31.
It’s becoming more obvious each day that the conservative assault on Barack Obama’s legislative agenda, including his incrementalist efforts towards universal health coverage, isn’t much about the details. It is, instead, a counter-revolutionary campaign to revive 1980s-era middle-class resentments of particular beneficiaries of government social programs. Beneath the hysterical talk about Obama’s “socialism” or the “Democrat Socialist Party,” conservatives are actually revolting against the ancient targets of the New Deal and Great Society, and indeed, against the very idea that “interference” with the distributional implications of free markets is ever morally legitimate.
Consider a long, classic column published at National Review last week by the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, entitled “Obama and Redistributive Change.” It’s an angry screed against the egalitarian underpinnings of progressive politics, past, present and future. It goes over-the-top in suggesting that Obama is determined to wipe out absolutely every distinction in wealth and status among Americans. But the self-righteous fury against any “redistributive” activity by government seems perfectly genuine, representing as it does a rejection of virtually every way of ordering society other than laissez-faire capitalism:

When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.

Hanson is clearly looking beyond our current political debates at much of the history of civilization, and it infuriates him. But if Obama’s health care reform efforts represent a drive to “enforce equality of results,” what existing government program can’t be described the same way?
Social Security is redistributive. Medicare is redistributive. Public education is redistributive. Public investments in highways, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure are most definitely redistributive. The land reforms that accompanied the rise of every society, dating back to feudalism, are inherently and overtly redistributive. Even defense spending is redistributive, insofar as the benefits of national security are rarely captured by current taxpayers.
Beyond government and politics, it’s not only “socialists” who have embraced “redistributive” thinking. The Hebrew lawgivers and prophets; Jesus Christ; Mohammad–all were blatant redistributionists. All denied that wealth or status was invariably the product of productivity and virtue, and rejected the idea that redistribution was theft.
If Hanson and the many conservatives who so often sound like him want to openly take the posture that much of American–not to mention, world–history is a long, disastrous saga of tyranny in the pursuit of “enforced equality,” they are free to do so. But they should at least acknowledge that the rage against Barack Obama is really just displaced rage at democracy; at the mild forms of collective social action embraced by most Americans during the last century; at the longstanding policy positions of both major political parties; and at many of the very people they are calling upon to kill Obama’s agenda–including Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries, people with government-protected mortgages, farm-price-support recipients, military veterans, and public employees tout court. At an absolute minimum, Hanson should rush to publish a column savaging Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele for trying to position the GOP as the Party of Medicare this last week.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on August 27, 2009.
To get a full sense of the void Senator Kennedy leaves in his party and Congress, consider the likely successors to replace him at the top of the powerful Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP), which plays a vital role in protecting living standards across the nation. In order of seniority, they are: Chris Dodd; Tom Harkin and Barbara Mikulski — fine Senators all, but none with the clout and skill of Kennedy. As Paul Kane explains in WaPo:

Kennedy ruled as the top Democrat on the committee for more than two decades, using the perch to serve as the Senate’s lead agitator for increasing the minimum wage, expanding civil rights to cover the handicapped and gay Americans, and for promoting what he long called “the cause of my life” — universal health care.

Atop The HELP committee is clearly a great place to be for aspiring national leaders, addressing core concerns of the Democratic Party. Yet, to run HELP, Dodd would have to give up the chairmanship of the Senate Banking Committee and Harkin would surrender the the helm of the Agriculture Committee, important committees, particularly in their respective states. The new chair won’t be selected until after the recess.
The stature of Democratic senators shrinks considerably in Kennedy’s fading shadow. As the media turns to other congressional Democrats to articulate their Party’s agenda, the ranks will likely appear even thinner. Kennedy was a mediagenic star of unrivaled magnitude in Congress, as well as a highly-skilled legislator. There is no other U.S. Senator with anything close to the progressive gravitas and leverage Kennedy commanded.
All of which is likely to strengthen President Obama’s hand as the leader of his Party. But it will almost certainly increase the demands on him to speak out more forcefully. Absent Ted Kennedy, there is no one other than Obama who can credibly be called “the real leader of the Democrats.” Obama will have to abandon much of his low-key approach to legislative reform and step up. It might be a good idea for him to hire a couple of Kennedy’s top staffers to help navigate health care reform and other key bills through Congress.
Obama has another burden, to lift the spirits of a nation coming to grips with the end of the Kennedy era. I know it may not mean so much to the younger generation. But I and a millions of other Americans can still remember what America felt like under JFK’s administration, the can-do spirit and sense of hope that was shattered in Dallas. We remember how RFK grew a heart in Marks, Mississippi, and how he went on to inspire a renewed faith in America’s potential as a nation where opportunity and brotherhood could flourish, his journey also clipped by assasination, just two months after MLK was killed. And then EMK, who did much to translate their dreams into legislative reality (see Ed Kilgore’s post yesterday), his life ending on the eve of fulfilling his greatest dream — health security for all Americans.
It’s a huge burden the President is called to bear. Fortunately, he has the smarts and inspirational skills to lead the struggle ahead. But he will need all the help he can get, including the expertise of Senator Kennedy’s best and brightest, and especially the support of America’s progressive community. For the President, and for all who hold fast to the dream, answering this call is the great challenge of our time.

This item by Ed Kilgore was cross-posted from The New Republic, where it appeared on August 20.
As the Dog Days of August descended upon us, there developed across the progressive chattering classes a deep sense of malaise bordering on depression, if not panic–much of it driven by fears about the leadership skills of Barack Obama. The polling numbers seemed to weaken every day, and Democratic unease was matched by growing glee on the airwaves of Fox and in Republican circles everywhere.
Within ten weeks, however, Obama was elected president and joy returned to the land.
Yes, dear reader, I am suggesting that this August’s sense of progressive despair feels remarkably similar to last August’s. This week last year, the Gallup Tracking Poll had McCain and Obama in a statistical tie. The candidates were fresh from a joint appearance at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, which was widely viewed by progressives as a strategic error by Obama. More generally, Democratic confidence, so high earlier in the year, was sagging. “Liberals have been in a dither for several weeks now over Barack Obama’s supposedly listless campaign performance following his return from Europe,” influential blogger Kevin Drum summed up sentiments at that time, “and as near as I can tell this turned into something close to panic.”
These doldrums dissipated by the time of the Democratic convention later in the month, but reemerged in September, when McCain actually moved ahead in some polls. And the diagnosis of the problem was typically that Obama was too passive, and wasn’t articulating a clear enough message. This should sound familiar to connoisseurs of contemporary progressive concerns about Obama.
Now, this deja vu sensation I’m having obviously doesn’t guarantee that the current struggles over health care reform and climate change will have as happy an ending as the presidential contest. But it may well provide a plausible argument for giving the president the benefit of the doubt today as we should have done a year ago.
Part of the psychological problem now may be a matter of unrealistic expectations. Much of the trouble Obama has encountered in promoting his agenda has been entirely predictable. His approval ratings are gradually converging with the 2008 election results. Health care reform is a complicated challenge that threatens a lot of powerful interests and unsettles people happy with their current coverage. Major environmental initiatives lose steam in a deep recession. A new administration gradually begins to assume blame for bad conditions in the country. Republicans, adopting a faux populist tone, are fighting Obama tooth and nail. Democratic activists are frustrated by compromises and sick of having to put up with the Blue Dogs. The Senate is still the Senate, a monument to inertia, pettiness, and strutting egos.
Progressives are waiting for Barack Obama and his team to work the kind of political magic they seemed to work in 2008–except when they didn’t. Cutting through all the mythologizing of the Obama campaign, the real keys to his stretch-run success last year were his legendary calm (“No Drama Obama”); his confidence in his own long-range strategy; his ability to choose competent lieutenants and delegate to them abundantly; and his grasp of the fundamentals of public opinion and persuasion. There was zero sense of panic in the Obama campaign itself late last summer, because they stuck with their strategy and organization and didn’t let the polls or news cycles force them off the path they had chosen.
The administration’s demure approach should thus not be terribly surprising, nor a sign that it has lost its heart or its mind. Obama has not, presumably, lost the qualities he showed in the tougher moments of the 2008 campaign. As it planned its legislative agenda for 2009, Team Obama knew health care reform was going to be challenging, and also knew they could probably get away with blaming the economic emergency for paring it back or slowing it down. They decided this was the right time to act, and it’s far too soon to assume they were wrong.
This particular moment might be more endurable if, as it used to be, August was a political and legislative dead zone. We’d all get a breather, maybe calm down and look ahead to the real deal going down in the fall. But the “August Doesn’t Matter” era has ended–perhaps dating back to the grand jury testimony in the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal in August 1998, if not earlier. (It arguably began to fade when Washington got air-conditioning.) Now, even if nothing substantive is actually happening this month, the absence of action is itself painful, and feels like defeat.
While I certainly don’t know if the Obama game plan for the next couple of months is going to be successful, I’m reasonably sure a game plan exists. On the issue most on everyone’s mind, I certainly don’t know how to reconcile the sharply contrasting demands of House Democrats and Senate “centrists” on sticking points like the public option. But the odds remain good that the House will pass a bill, the Senate will pass a bill, and then we will find out if the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership have the skill to make something happen that we will be able to recognize as “change,” and perhaps even a victory for progressives. Until then, it’s probably a good idea to drink a tall glass of cold water and wait out the August political heat.

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on August 18, 2009.
Sorting out the pros and cons of the co-op option vs. the public option is the challenge of the hour for progressives who want real health care reform, and it will certainly be hotly debated. Most just-published articles and blogs equate ‘public option’ with a government plan. But it seems important to ask, is there any way that a co-op can be a public option? There is no shortage of opinions on the topic:
The New York Times has “Alternate Plan as Health Option Muddies Debate,” a probing article by by Robert Pear and Gardiner Harris. The authors spotlight some key problems with the co-op approach:

As the debate rages, lawmakers are learning that creating cooperatives — loosely defined as private, nonprofit, consumer-owned providers of health care, much like the co-ops that offer telephone, electric and other utility service in rural areas — will not be easy.
The history of health insurance in the United States is full of largely unsuccessful efforts to introduce new models of insurance that would lower costs. And the health insurance markets of many states suggest that any new entrant would face many difficulties in getting established.

More specifically:

The government would offer start-up money, perhaps $6 billion, in loans and grants to help doctors, hospitals, businesses and other groups form nonprofit cooperative networks to provide health care and coverage.
The co-ops could be formed at the national, state or local level. Proponents say that a health co-op might need 25,000 members to be financially viable, and at least 500,000 members to negotiate effectively with health care providers…they would need time to buy sophisticated information technology and to negotiate contracts with doctors, hospitals and other health care providers.
…In the 1990s, Iowa adopted a law to encourage the development of health care co-ops. One was created, and it died within two years. Although the law is still on the books, the state does not have a co-op now, said Susan E. Voss, the Iowa insurance commissioner.

Not a very promising prospect, according to ‘the newspaper of record.’ Worse, $6 billion is about what we spend occupying Iraq in one month. Iraq and Afghanistan are the ignored elephants in rooms where health care reform is being debated. Few would doubt that half of what we spend on these two wars annually could go a long way toward bringing real health security to America.
Columnist Bob Herbert is even more dismissive in his NYT op-ed, “Forget about the nonprofit cooperatives. That’s like sending peewee footballers up against the Super Bowl champs.”
In his Alternet post “It’s Now or Never for a Public Option: Why We Need to Take a Stand Against the Insurance Industry’s Greed” Joshua Holland explains,

In 2000, the Government Accountability Office conducted a study of the impact similar purchasing schemes had had to date. “Despite efforts to negotiate lower premiums,” the GAO concluded, “cooperatives have only been able to offer premiums that are comparable to those in the general small-group market. The cooperatives we reviewed typically did not obtain overall premium reductions because: 1) their market share provided insufficient leverage; 2) they could not produce administrative savings for insurers.”
The Commonwealth Fund did an analysis of the impacts nonprofit co-ops would have as well (PDF), and its findings were similar. Researchers found that, “with very few exceptions,” premiums offered through co-ops “have not been lower than those available to small employers elsewhere” because they “have not been able to reduce administrative costs … they have not had enough market share to bargain for discounts.”
Because of their inherent limitations, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean told me in an interview last month that the co-op scheme is a “fake public option,” and “really not [a] serious health reform.” He predicted that if they were created, they would “be crushed just like Blue Cross was crushed. Most Blue Cross chapters are now for-profit. They’ve been taken over by the insurance industry. Any reasonable-sized insurance company can crush a not-for-profit co-op.”

And, in The Nation, Katha Pollit writes of co-ops,

…They’re untested, small, unregulated, that they exist in twenty states and that Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota really likes them–but I didn’t discover what they actually are. I understand “public option,” and “public” has a good, strong ring to it–it says, Healthcare is a right, part of the common good, something everyone should have, and if you can’t afford it in the marketplace, the government will provide it. “Insurance co-op” speaks a whole other language, of commerce and complexity and exclusivity

Writing in the Washington Post, David S. Hilzenrath and Alec MacGillis explain:

“It’s very difficult to start up a new insurance company and break into markets where insurers are very established,” said Paul B. Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change. “I don’t see how they’re going to obtain a large enough market share . . . to make a difference.”
Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation focused on health care and social policy research, said co-ops may not enroll enough people to negotiate favorable rates with health-care providers.
…Co-ops would lack perhaps the main advantage of the public option: reimbursement rates for doctors and hospitals set by federal law, like those paid by Medicare, the program for older Americans. Federally determined reimbursement rates were central to the cost-saving promise of a government-run health plan and a potentially powerful competitive advantage. They were also a lightning rod for intense opposition from health-care providers and private insurers, who denounced the public option as a threat to their financial survival…Co-ops would lack the ability to piggyback onto existing government institutions, like the ones that help administer Medicare.

On the other hand, Co-ops have some advantages and “could serve a useful purpose in health care — just as credit unions compete effectively with banks, prompting them to offer higher interest rates on deposits and lower rates on loans,” explain Pear and Harris, summarizing the views of Ann Hoyt, a University of Wisconsin economist who has written extensively about co-ops.

…Professor Hoyt said she had been a member of the Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin since 1985, and she reported that “the care is excellent.”…Larry J. Zanoni, executive director of the Wisconsin plan, said: “We are a testament to the success of a health care cooperative. But it took us over 30 years to get where we are today.”

Read more…

This item by Ed Kilgore was cross-posted from The New Republic. It was originally published on August 12, 2009.
The conservative attacks on health care reform and Barack Obama’s economic plan seem to have reached a fever pitch this week. Their obsession with the topics has been matched only by the inanity of most of their critiques. Why are the conservative talking points on these issues grounded in such weak arguments? Is there something else at play here?
This reaction seemed strangely familiar as I read Matthew Yglesias’s recent post about the Christian Right’s obsession with gay marriage. As a matter of course, your average Christian Right crusader against gay marriage acts as though the issue vitally affects non-gay people: It cheapens “real” marriage and threatens the “traditional family,” they argue. Others claim that it enshrines relativistic morals and violates the religious rights of Christians. What unites most of these arguments is that they claim not to be about denying gay people their rights, but protecting non-gay people.
None of these arguments are particularly strong. And not coincidentally, if you spend much time around regular conservative folk (rather than pundits or spokesmen) who oppose gay marriage, they won’t be making them. Rather, you hear various forms of personal and Biblical condemnation of homosexuality, usually combined with outrage that these people demand legal protection for their unsavory behavior. You don’t hear this in public in part because dehumanizing gay people isn’t as generally acceptable as it used to be. But it’s still there, under the surface, and may be one of the reasons why critics of gay marriage keep fighting against gay marriage despite the ludicrous nature of their public arguments.
This may actually help explain many of the absurd conservative attacks on Obama’s economic and health care agenda. We’re painfully accustomed to hearing that Obama is herding Americans into socialism, is destroying the private-sector economy, and is determined to create a health care system that combines the bureaucracy of Great Britain with the ethics of Nazi Germany. Do the people repeating and encouraging this sort of talk really believe it?
Maybe, but there may also be something a little more direct going on in the conservative psychology. There was an interesting vignette at one of the infamous town hall meetings last week in which a disabled woman on crutches who had lost her health insurance was accosted by another woman who shouted, “I shouldn’t have to pay for your health care!” amidst jeering applause from other health reform opponents. That was no more than a crude expression of what some conservative elite spokesmen have explicitly said, such as ABC’s John Stossel, who describes Obama’s plan as “a form of expensive, taxpayer-funded welfare.”
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it echoes what we heard repeatedly among angry grassroots conservatives during the 2008 campaign, particularly after the financial collapse: Irresponsible people (many of whom happen to be minorities) have wrecked the economy by taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford, and were subsequently trying to elect Obama to get themselves more welfare at the expense of good, productive people who didn’t live beyond their means. Indeed, long after welfare reform supposedly took this conservative wedge issue off the table, anger about “welfare”–as applied to mortgage relief, progressive taxes, and now health reform–has made quite a comeback. One of the most potent things about the 1980s-vintage attacks on “welfare” was that they endowed some pretty ugly emotions with self-righteousness, and even a sense of victimization, for people who felt they were being punished for being productive. It seems clear that many of Obama’s right-wing critics are motivated as much by moral judgments about the beneficiaries of his polices as by their alleged impact on the economy or the health care system.
But in the same way that it’s no longer acceptable to publicly hate on gay people, it is not terribly respectable to publicly hate the poor, to consider minorities inherently inferior, or to express indifference towards the sufferings of fellow citizens. And so instead of the woman screaming “Why should I pay for your health care?” we get a host of specious public-spirited arguments about the destruction that health care reform will inflict on us all, be they elderly Medicare beneficiaries or the middle-class mother of a disabled child.
Conservatives are hardly unique in reacting selfishly or self-righteously to political issues, or dressing up personal prejudices with public policy arguments; we all do that from time to time, and to one extent or another. But whether we are talking about gay marriage, government-backed mortgages, or health care reform, there may well be a strongly dynamic relationship right now between privately held feelings of strong disdain for the purported beneficiaries of Obama’s agenda, and some of the wilder arguments being made publicly to attack it.