GOP Rep. Paul Ryan has provided an instructive lesson in the folly of advocating the privatization of Medicare, the latest form of self-mutilation for his party. Now comes a new wave of Medicare critics, who hope to appease the knee-jerk Republican ideologues with more modest, but equally ill-considered “reforms.”
Fortunately, New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman eviscerates the latest version of the raise-the-age-of-Medicare-entitlement proposal in his Sunday column, “Medicare Saves Money”:

Every once in a while a politician comes up with an idea that’s so bad, so wrongheaded, that you’re almost grateful. For really bad ideas can help illustrate the extent to which policy discourse has gone off the rails.
And so it was with Senator Joseph Lieberman’s proposal, released last week, to raise the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.
Like Republicans who want to end Medicare as we know it and replace it with (grossly inadequate) insurance vouchers, Mr. Lieberman describes his proposal as a way to save Medicare. It wouldn’t actually do that. But more to the point, our goal shouldn’t be to “save Medicare,” whatever that means. It should be to ensure that Americans get the health care they need, at a cost the nation can afford.

Krugman’s lazer-like analysis will leave Medicare-slashers sputtering predictable government-bashing drivel, which convinces almost no one outside the wingnut choir. As Krugman explains further:

…Medicare actually saves money — a lot of money — compared with relying on private insurance companies. And this in turn means that pushing people out of Medicare, in addition to depriving many Americans of needed care, would almost surely end up increasing total health care costs.
The idea of Medicare as a money-saving program may seem hard to grasp. After all, hasn’t Medicare spending risen dramatically over time? Yes, it has: adjusting for overall inflation, Medicare spending per beneficiary rose more than 400 percent from 1969 to 2009.
But inflation-adjusted premiums on private health insurance rose more than 700 percent over the same period. So while it’s true that Medicare has done an inadequate job of controlling costs, the private sector has done much worse. And if we deny Medicare to 65- and 66-year-olds, we’ll be forcing them to get private insurance — if they can — that will cost much more than it would have cost to provide the same coverage through Medicare.
By the way, we have direct evidence about the higher costs of private insurance via the Medicare Advantage program, which allows Medicare beneficiaries to get their coverage through the private sector. This was supposed to save money; in fact, the program costs taxpayers substantially more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare.

We pause here to allow privatization ideologues a few moments to squirm. Krugman then notes the global evidence, which clearly shows the U.S. performing poorly in terms of cost and quality, compared with other industrial nations, and explains, “…High U.S. private spending on health care, compared with spending in other advanced countries, just about wipes out any benefit we might receive from our relatively low tax burden.”
Then there is the thorny problem of many 65-67 cohorts being unable to qualify for or afford private insurance coverage, delaying needed and preventative health care and becoming more expensive Medicare recipients later, when they do qualify.
Krugman acknowledges that “major cost-control” measures are needed, exactly “the kinds of efforts that are actually in the Affordable Care Act.” He concludes, however, that “…If we really want to hold down costs, we should be seeking to offer Medicare-type programs to as many Americans as possible.”
The partial privatization proposals of Sen. Lieberman and others are as economically untenable as they are morally regressive. Krugman’s simple, but compelling analysis of the true costs of even partial privatization should be noted and mastered by Democrats, who want to hold the white house and take back congress next year.

One of the byproducts of Newt Gingrich’s meltdown is a resurgence of interest in the possibility of Texas Gov. Rick Perry as a late entrant in the GOP 2012 field. Partly that’s because two of his long-time political advisers were among the hordes who have just left Gingrich’s campaign. Perry himself has been making slightly more positive noises about his interest in becoming the 45th president of the country he once implied Texas might consider abandoning (he will supposedly announce his intentions at the end of the current special session of the Texas legislature, which is due to wrap up before Independence Day). And he’s always been a favorite of handicappers on grounds of his fundraising potential and his popularity among Tea Folk.
I’m a little less sold on Perry as a candidate, if only because he’s never been wildly popular with the people who know him best, Texans (yes, he fought off a primary challenge from Kay Bailey Hutchison last year, and won a relatively close general election race against Bill White, but you have to ask why Perry was so vulnerable in the first place). I’m not sure he’s a great cultural fit for places like Iowa (where he’d been starting from scratch very late) and New Hampshire, either.
But in any event, the game for the immediate future will be guessing how a Perry candidacy would affect the rest of the field, most notably quasi-front-runner Mitt Romney. RedState’s Erick Erickson has an interesting post on that subject making a counter-intuitive but persuasive argument that Perry would help the Mittster:

The constant factor in the 2012 Republican Presidential race right now is that Mitt Romney has the highest name ID of declared candidates. While you and I know who Rick Perry is, we are not normal primary voters. Those people are only now just becoming engaged and they remember Romney from 2008, but many do not know Perry.
So Perry would have to build up his name identification and raise money. This leaves Romney in the lead as the clock continues ticking.
Every day that the media is focused on the ups and downs of other candidates, including an obsessive media rectal exam of Rick Perry as he gets in and starts hitting the stump is another day that Mitt Romney stays in the lead….
There is a lot of money on the sidelines waiting to find who is going to be the legitimate leader of the anti-Romney coalition. Rick Perry getting in delays finding that leader, keeping that money on the sidelines, keeping Mitt Romney on top. It really is that simple.

Erickson might have added more specifically that a Perry candidacy could delay or even endanger the emergence of Tim Pawlenty as the electable-conservative-alternative-to-Romney, which is already being threatened by the strength being shown in Iowa by Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann. But that leads me to a contrary observation: If Perry runs, the number of electable-conservative-alternatives-to-Romney would double. By the same token, the odds drop that Romney will get a post-NH match-up against someone (i.e., Cain or Bachmann) considered unacceptable by the Republican Establishment, and/or unelectable against Obama. That’s bad news for Mitt, since the one-on-one-with-a-crazy-person scenario may be the only way Republicans will hold their collective noses and nominate a guy they don’t actually like.

Has any political party in history been as hypocritical as the modern GOP in terms of paying lip service to principles they undercut with policies?
Republicans say they are all about supporting our troops, and then they slash veterans benefits. They loudly proclaim their religious devotion to gatherings of evangelicals, but their philosopher queen is the faith-hating atheist Ayn Rand (see video in Noteworthy box above). Turns out they have two faces even for matters of critical national security, as yesterday’s editorial in the New York Times, “Budgeting for Insecurity,” makes disturbingly clear. An excerpt:

House Republicans talk tough on terrorism. So we can find no explanation — other than irresponsibility — for their vote to slash financing for eight antiterrorist programs. Unless the Senate repairs the damage, New York City and other high-risk localities will find it far harder to protect mass transit, ports and other potential targets.
The programs received $2.5 billion last year in separate allocations. The House has cut that back to a single block grant of $752 million, an extraordinary two-thirds reduction. The results for high-risk areas would be so damaging — with port and mass transit security financing likely cut by more than half — that the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King of New York, voted against the bill as “an invitation to an attack.”

The Times editorial goes on to explain that the “Republicans made clear that budget-cutting trumped all other concerns…One $270 million cut, voted separately, would eliminate 5,000 airport-screening jobs across the country, according to the Transportation Security Administration.” They also fought to cut more than half of funding for first responder training, but the Democrats were able to restore most of it.
As the Times editorial asks, “Are these really the programs to be cutting?” Not if we put national security before politics.

Recent highly publicized national jobs reports showing private-sector gains being offset by public-sector losses have drawn attention to the macroeconomic costs of the austerity program already underway among state and local governments, and gaining steam in Washington. But the effect on the most vulnerable Americans–particularly those out of work–is rarely examined in any systematic way.
At The American Prospect, Kat Aaron has put together a useful if depressing summary of actual or impending cutbacks (most initiated by the states, some by Congress) in key services for the unemployed and others suffering from economic trauma. These include unemployment insurance, job retraining services, and family income supports. In some cases, federal funds added by the 2009 stimulus package are running out. In others, the safety net is being deliberately shredded.
A recent report from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes that the most important family income support program, TANF (the “reformed” welfare block grant first established in 1996) is becoming an object of deep cuts in many states, precisely at the time it is most needed:

States are implementing some of the harshest cuts in recent history for many of the nation’s most vulnerable families with children who are receiving assistance through the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant. The cuts will affect 700,000 low-income families that include 1.3 million children; these families represent over one-third of all low-income families receiving TANF nationwide.
A number of states are cutting cash assistance deeply or ending it entirely for many families that already live far below the poverty line, including many families with physical or mental health issues or other challenges. Numerous states also are cutting child care and other work-related assistance that will make it harder for many poor parents who are fortunate enough to have jobs to retain them.

This is perverse precisely because such programs were once widely understood as “counter-cyclical”–designed to temporarily expand in tough economic times. Not any more, says CPBB:

To be effective, a safety net must be able to expand when the need for assistance rises and to contract when need declines. The TANF block grant is failing this test, for several reasons: Congress has level-funded TANF since its creation, with no adjustment for inflation or other factors over the past 15 years; federal funding no longer increases when the economy weakens and poverty climbs; and states — facing serious budget shortfalls — have shifted TANF funds to other purposes and have cut the TANF matching funds they provide.

This retrenchment, mind you, is what’s already happening, and does not reflect the future blood-letting implied by congressional Republican demands for major new cuts in federal-state safety net programs–most famously Medicaid, which virtually all GOPers want to convert into a block grant in which services are no longer assured.
If, as appears increasingly likely, the sluggish economy stays sluggish for longer than originally expected, and both the federal government and states continue to pursue Hoover-like policies of attacking budget deficits with spending cuts as their top priority, it’s going to get even uglier down at the level of real-life people trying to survive. If you are unlucky enough to live in one of those states where governors and legislators are proudly hell-bent on making inadequate safety-net services even more inadequate or abolishing them altogether, it’s a grim road ahead.

I swear I didn’t intend to do two posts today about doomed Republican presidential candidacies, but it’s hard to avoid comment on the mass resignations of most of Newt Gingrich’s campaign staff.
Chris Cillizza confirms that the deal-breaker for Team Newt wasn’t so much his disastrous campaign launch as his decision to follow that up with a Mediterranean cruise with Callista, leaving his minions to clean up his mess. The canary in the mine-shaft for that dumb decision was the resignation last week of Newt’s Iowa political director, Will Rogers, who publicly doubted his candidate’s willingness to run a viable campaign.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Jim Galloway reports this rather telling quote from Bill Byrne, a long-time Gingrich backer from Georgia:

When on a national news station, Newt slammed Congressman Ryan and his proposal as right wing extremist, at that point in time his campaign ended,” Byrne said. “And I think if you watch any of the polling data from any source — Republican, Democrat, Independent — Newt never breaks in to double digits.
“Of the announced candidates he’s always been at the very bottom and the last poll I saw yesterday showed Herman Cain has passed him. Political people realize his campaign is over with and he has self-destructed. Those who signed up now realize that,” Byrne said.

Newt, of course, is pledging to move on to victory without his staff. That’s probably a brave, temporary holding position while he figures out exactly how to bow out. But maybe he’s going to emulate the post-disaster strategy of Democratic candidate Gary Hart in 1988: running a quasi-campaign that mainly depends on free media opportunities like televised debates, and getting a reputation for saying impolitic things no serious candidate would say. It would certainly help boost Newt’s book and video sales, which he’ll now need more than ever.

A lot of Republicans have been pining for late entries into their 2012 presidential nomination contest. The apparently imminent announcement of a campaign by Rudy Giuliani is probably not what most of them had in mind.
But Bill Kristol gives the old college try to an argument that somehow the former America’s Mayor could succeed in 2012 despite his abject failure in 2008:

Rudy’s theory of the race: In the fall of 2007, he decided he couldn’t compete with both Mitt Romney and John McCain in New Hampshire, and disastrously decided to try to pull back there and pitch his tent in Florida. This year, he’ll commit everything to New Hampshire, where he thinks he has a good shot at beating Romney–whom he criticized there earlier this week. He then thinks he can beat whichever more socially conservative candidate(s) is left by winning what are still likely to be winner-take-all primaries in big states like California, New York, and New Jersey.

It’s not at all clear to me why Rudy has “a good shot of beating Romney” in New Hampshire in 2008 any more than he had a good shot in 2008. And bad as his back-loaded strategy of waiting until Florida turned out in 2008, waiting for late-season primaries in big states in 2012 sounds even worse. Sure, you can construct some scenario where Rudy’s slugging it out with Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain in California and New York after the rest of the field has vaporized, but in today’s GOP, it’s not all that obvious Giuliani would win even with that fortuitous series of developments.
Put aside all the negative stuff about Giuliani you can imagine–his marital history, his questionable associations, his less-than-Reaganesque personality–and the simple fact remains that the Republican Party will not nominate a pro-choice candidate for president. The very idea that John McCain was considering a pro-choice running mate in 2008 nearly produced a convention revolt, and instead led McCain to bend the knee by selecting anti-choice ultra Sarah Palin. The powers-that-be in the conservative movement will destroy Rudy the moment it appears–if it ever appears–he looks viable. They would rather take their chances with a nominee who looked weak against Obama than to give up their iron control over the GOP.
Put it in the bank: Rudy 2012 ain’t happening.

At Politico today, Glenn Thrush writes the first of what will be a vast number of articles about the state-by-state targeting strategy of the two parties in 2012, this time focusing on Obama’s map. There’s actually not a lot of mystery about its basic outlines; there are only so many winnable states and so many ways to get to 270 electoral votes. But the 2008 Obama campaign’s willingness to put resources in an “expanded map,” which helped produce upset wins in states like Indiana and North Carolina, has created expectations for surprising decisions on targeting this time around, and Thrush gets Obama sources talking about the possibility of Arizona and Georgia being in play.
Much of the piece, however, is absorbed by quotes from Republican officials mocking this or that possible targeted state on grounds that Democrats did horribly there in 2010. Here’s RNC political director Rick Wiley:

You are going into Arizona and Georgia to expand? Republicans control everything in those states. It’s lunacy. We welcome their expenditure of resources in states we are going to win. What’s next? Montana? Nebraska?

A lot of this talk on both sides is just spin. But for the record, there are at least three factors that make the 2010 performance of the two parties in this or that state a less than reliable indicator of 2012 results:
1) It’s a different electorate. Yes, dear readers, I apologize in advance for beginning to bring this up as incessantly as I did between the 2008 and 2010 elections, but it’s a big deal. The shape of the electorate in 2012 is likely to be much more similar to 2008 than to 2010, with very significant partisan implications thanks to the polarization of the electorate by age and ethnicity.
2) A “two-futures” election is entirely possible. The challenge for any re-election campaign in difficult economic times is to make the results turn on a choice of two future courses for the country rather than simply a referendum on the status quo. Democrats signally failed to do that in the midterm election of 2010. But Republicans are cooperating quite nicely with current Democratic efforts to draw attention to the radicalism of their agenda, most notably via heavy congressional GOP support for Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. Republican behavior over the debt limit issue could reinforce negative impressions that they’ve lurched in a dangerous direction more thoroughly than at any time since 1995 or maybe even 1964. The identity of their presidential nominee could also trouble voters, given the nature of the field as it has emerged so far.
3) Republicans aren’t helping themselves in battleground states. As noted here before, Republican administrations in numerous battleground states (especially Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan) are pursuing highly unpopular policies that seem deliberately provocative. This could hurt their presidential ticket in those states, though the precise effect is very difficult to predict (after all, the deep unpopularity of some Democratic governors in battleground states in 2008 didn’t seem to hurt Obama). Let’s just say is will be a serious complicating factor for the GOP in 2012. How does a presidential campaign in Florida deal with a political landscape dominated by Rick Scott? How does the Republican candidate avoid us-versus-them demands to exhibit solidarity with Scott Walker and John Kasich? If nothing else, traumatized Democratic groups in such states won’t have to rely strictly on the Obama campaign to motivate get-out-the-vote efforts.
These are just three of a host of factors that will affect targeting strategies in 2012. Republicans would be foolish to assume it will just be a do-over of 2010 with similar results, and Democrats obviously need to take advantage of every opportunity the GOP gives them.

When a candidate for President of the United States publicly talks about his or her campaign strategy, it’s typically because there are questions about said candidate’s viability that need to be addressed by the articulation of a plausible path to victory. That’s usually not the case with a candidate who is consistently running first in national polls. But in an interview with Piers Morgan, Mitt Romney went out of his way to let people know he was going to be pretty scarce on the early campaign trail, to the point where he claimed to be happy that Sarah Palin stepped on his formal announcement speech:

“In a lot of respects it’s the best thing that could happen to me,” he said on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight.”
“Right now, your greatest enemy is overexposure. People get tired of seeing the same person day in and day out”….
“People are going to start focusing on the elections probably after Labor Day,” he said.
“For us, I’m not doing a lot of TV – just a couple of very key interviews where I get a chance to talk about things I care about,” Romney revealed.
“Until Labor Day hits I’m going be pretty quiet.”

I’d say this solves any mystery about whether Romney is going to succumb to the temptation created by his relatively high Iowa poll numbers to compete in the August Iowa State GOP Straw Poll, unless he’s figured out a way to get thousands of Mitt-o-Maniacs on buses to Ames on August 13 without making any noise. He could still theoretically go for broke in the Caucuses a few months later, since a win might well propel him to the kind of winning streak that could lock up the nomination. But Iowa Caucus-goers tend to look dimly on candidates who refuse to help them hoover up money at the Straw Poll, which is the state party’s principal fundraiser.
More generally, his remarks indicate that he really does seem committed to a late start for his campaign. If he more or less skips Iowa, his strong position in New Hampshire and Nevada would indeed make it less important for him to get out there early. But this strategy runs the risk of exposing him to a slow bleed of support as other candidates pound him on RomneyCare day in and day out. It’s not as though his major problem is the possibility of committing some new gaffe; he committed his big gaffe by signing health reform legislation in Massachusetts in 2006, and then defending it to the point of no return.
Perhaps Mitt thinks if he marshals his resources carefully, he can manage early expectations and then drown the rest of the field in a sea of money. But contrary to his claim that nobody’s paying attention to the campaign, a lot of impressions are going to be made among Republican elites and the rank-and-file as well between now and Labor Day, and he’ll just have to accept the hand he’s dealt after rivals have begun to shape the contest.

In joining the widespread mockery towards Tim Pawlenty’s Big Economic Speech in Chicago yesterday, TNR’s Jonathan Cohn makes an interesting comparative point.

The contrast to the environment for Democrats seeking the presidency is fairly stunning. At this point four years ago, John Edwards and Barack Obama had put out detailed health care plans that had realistic assumptions, vetted by economists and health care experts, and actually looked pretty similar to what eventually became the Affordable Care act. Hillary Clinton would soon do the same. By the time the primary season was over, all three had also put out detailed plans on the economy and foreign policy.
They were running for president and so, no, they didn’t tell every “hard truth.” Their numbers didn’t always add up and some of their boasts turned out not be true. But, by and large, Democratic domestic policy proposals were both more detailed and more realistic than anything we’re seeing from the Republicans, partly because Democrats knew analysts would demand rigor and partly because they understood these plans could become templates for actual governing.

The notable wonkery of the 2008 Democratic candidates was quickly forgotten. In 2009, many Beltway pundits quickly joined conservative complaints that Barack Obama was “overreaching” on grounds that he was elected on a platform that didn’t extend much beyond a pledge to work with Republicans. He surely didn’t have any mandate to pursue health care reform, a subject on which even relatively small differences between the Democratic contenders were endlessly aired in debates, press releases, and even in paid campaign ads. Perhaps T-Paw is counting on a similar amnesia to afflict the commentariat if he is elected president.
But the threshold for being taken seriously on policy issues is definitely a lot lower for Republicans, if only because there are only so many ways you can say you want to cut high-end taxes and ravage the social safety net. Even the title Pawlenty is giving his economic program–“The Better Deal”–sounds like it was pulled out of the air ten minutes before he made his speech. By contrast, Democratic wonkiness seems almost quaint in its concern for facts and details.

When a bad idea tanks in politics, it’s smarter proponents usually move on to something else. But sometimes denial and delusion prolong the agony, as appears to be the case with Republican ‘Vouchercare.’ As TDS Co-editor Ruy Teixeira’s reports in his most recent ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages:

Amazingly, despite the strongly negative reaction so far to the Ryan budget’s plan to end Medicare as we know it, conservatives are continuing to back it, arguing that all they need is better messaging about the plan. This is clearly delusional. No message is going to change the simple fact that the public doesn’t like the plan and wishes it would go away…

Teixeira cites recent CNN polling data which “make this fact about as clear as polling can make it.”:

…58 percent say they oppose the plan to change Medicare with just 35 percent in favor. Moreover, strong opposition is present across the age spectrum. Those 50 and over oppose the plan 60-33 but those under 50 are nearly as strong in opposition (57-36). And independents, whom conservatives have so assiduously courted, oppose the plan 57-34.

If that’s not clue enough,

…Just 25 percent of those under 65 believe they will be better off under the plan when they are eligible to receive Medicare, compared to 43 percent who think they will be worse off. And among seniors–who of course are already receiving Medicare–a scant 13 percent think they will be better off, compared to 58 percent who believe their situation will be worse.

You would think the recent Dem pick-up in NY-26, in which GOP Vouchercare was a pivotal factor, would give the Republicans yet another clue. Not so, as Teixeira explains: “…Alas, common sense of any kind seems in short supply among today’s conservatives.”