At TNR today, Jonathan Chait examines the dynamics involving Democratic efforts to get 218 House votes for the Senate health plan (presumably in conjunction with Senate action to “fix” its bill along the lines set out in the “President’s Proposal”). In noting that a few “no” votes on the earlier House bill would have to flip to “yea,” he cites the honorable 1993 precedent of Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinksky, who supplied the 218th vote for the first Clinton budget bill knowing full well she was probably dooming her own re-election.
But there’s another dynamic in the saga of getting the final votes that was illustrated in 1993: because the budget passed by exactly one vote, Republicans were able to attack vulnerable Democrats all over the country for casting “the deciding vote” for the bill. The same could happen on health reform with Democrats running in hostile territory.
So word to Speaker Pelosi: go for 219!

There are a couple of interesting articles out today offering meditations on the theatrics of the contemporary American Right. At TAP, Paul Waldman mocks the American Revolutionary trappings of the conservative movement in its efforts to get down with the Tea Party folk–most notably the staging of the Mount Vernon Statement, featuring a rogue’s gallery of old-school conservative power brokers:

What [former Attorney General Ed] Meese and his aging colleagues no doubt realized was that if you want to be relevant in the quickly changing conservative movement of 2010, you’d better pretend it’s 1776. Donning revolutionary regalia — sartorially or rhetorically — is becoming to today’s right what slipping on a tie-dye was to Grateful Dead shows back in the day. It tells other participants that you’re all part of the same tribe. It may seem silly to pretend to be a radical agent of change fighting against “tyranny” — the word you hear over and over again from conservatives these days — from a corner office in a corporate-funded D.C. think tank, but they’ll do their best.

Meanwhile, at Salon, Michael Lind characteristically sees something more profound going on, as the Right adopts a self-conscious counter-cultural stance similar to the one that got the Left off course in the 1970s. Lind notes how far conservatives have been backsliding in recent years towards the zaniness that kept them in the political wilderness before the rise of the organized conservative movement:

When [William F.]Buckley came on the scene in the mid-1950s, the American right was dominated by kooks: right-wing isolationists, Pearl Harbor and Yalta conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites and members of the John Birch Society like the palindromical y-named Professor Revilo P. Oliver. Buckley and his movement conservatives, and later the early neoconservatives, struggled to purge the right of crackpots and create an intellectually serious movement capable of governing the country.
And yet the right of 2010 looks like the fever-swamp right of 1950 instead of the triumphant right of 1980. The John Birch Society, which Buckley and Goldwater expelled from the conservative movement in the early 1960s, was a co-sponsor of this year’s Conservative Political Action Convention (CPAC). Folks who claimed that Eisenhower was a communist now insist that Obama is a socialist.

Calling tea partiers the “hippies of our time,” Lind goes on to compare today’s conservative counter-culture with its leftist forebears, noting a common anti-system radicalism, a Luddite tendency to disparage science and technology, a flair for street theater, and an underlying desire to secede from the broader society. This last observation is interesting; I suppose “going Galt” really is the contemporary equivalent to “getting back to the land,” and could portend a retreat from political activism by tea partiers if they become frustrated by the failure of Americans to embrace their cause.
In any event, Lind concludes, the counter-cultural tendencies of the Right may represent good news for progressives:

The rise of the conservative counterculture may provide the beleaguered Democrats with a stay of execution. A serious Republican counter-establishment, putting forth credible plans for addressing the nation’s problems and determined to collaborate with the other party to govern the country in this crisis, would be a greater threat to the new, shaky Democratic establishment than the theatrics of the right’s Summer of Love.
Or should it be called the Winter of Hate?

I tend to agree with Lind on this point, and also think Waldman may not be taking the implications of the conservative movement’s flirtation with revolutionary rhetoric quite seriously enough. The tea partiers have seized on 1776 rhetoric and imagery not just because of the anti-tax nature of the original Tea Party, but because they argue with considerable consistency that the cure for America’s ills is a rollback of much of the country’s political and constitutional developments over not just years or decades, but centuries. It’s no accident that there’s been a remarkable revival of talk on the Right, even among elected officials, of such discredited nineteenth century theories as the “right” of states to nullify federal laws or even express their “sovereignty” by secession. And the prevailing school of constitutional “thinking” among conservatives is a sort of crude fundamentalist originalism that dismisses health care reform as unconstitutional on grounds that the Constitution itself does not mention health care (an argument Glenn Beck, among others, often makes).
This is powerfully radical stuff, and it will not be easy for Republican pols to whip up crowds by embracing it and then going back to the twenty-first century where the machinery of modern government depends on hundreds of Supreme Court decisions (not to mention a Civil War) that have modified the strict letter of the Constitution.
It’s not clear how long and far today’s counter-cultural trends on the Right will last; maybe Mark Schmitt is correct in predicting this is just another populist wave that will soon recede.
But in the mean time, these are some fine days for conservative-watching, whether it’s Ed Meese posing as a revolutionary or conservatives raptly listening to the deep jurisprudence of Glenn Beck.

To continue some thoughts about the growing contradiction between conservative policy predilections and the GOP’s violent anti-spending rhetoric, there’s a specific political factor that’s intensifying the dilemma: the heavy, heavy reliance of Republicans on support from whiteseniors.
Several smart commentators (Chait, Douthat, and Larison) have drawn attention to a new Pew survey on generational political attitudes which shows the exceptionally geriatric nature of the Republican Party’s current base of support. That’s a good thing for Republicans in the very short term, since seniors tend to vote at disproportionately high levels in midterm elections. But it’s not easy to be the Party That Hates Government Spending when your most important constituency is receiving Medicare and Social Security benefits. Here’s how Ross Douthat puts it:

[Y]ou can win an awful lot of elections just by mobilizing the over-65 constituency — they’re well-informed, they turn out to vote, and there are more of them every day. But the easiest way to do it, as the Democrats proved for years and years and years, is to defend Medicare and Social Security like McAuliffe at Bastogne. This means that while the energy of activists may be pushing the Republicans to the right on size-of-government issues, the concerns of their central constituency could end up pulling them inexorably leftward on entitlements….
This wouldn’t be a terrible thing if Social Security and (especially) Medicare accounted for, say, ten percent of the federal budget. But where the size of government — and if we ever want to cut the deficit, the burden of taxation — is concerned, they’ll be the whole ballgame soon enough. And if the Republican Party depends too heavily on over-65 voters for its political viability, we could easily end up with a straightforwardly big-government party in the Democrats, and a G.O.P. that wins election by being “small government” on the small stuff (earmarks, etc.) while refusing to even consider entitlement reform.

Now that’s how it looks if you are simply considering the fiscal numbers. But from a psychological point of view, there’s another problem for conservatives: how to rationalize a posture of maximum defense of Social Security and Medicare with a general hostility to transfer payments. The only obvious way to do that is to treat senior entitlements as benefits earned by virtuous old folks, as opposed to unvirtuous younger folks whose demands for “welfare” are to be resisted and demonized at all costs. You don’t have to hold a negative view of conservative motives to see how this can lead to highly invidious, and perhaps semi-racist, political appeals. Indeed, the current position of Republicans all but demands that they encourage seniors to view public life as a struggle to keep their own public benefits and their own private wealth against rapacious efforts by “elitists” and welfare “looters” to reduce their share of federal spending while increasing their taxes. And that’s a temptation Republican politicians don’t seem inclined to resist, illogical and immoral as it might be.
It’s not clear how long GOPers will continue to maintain this odd mixture of pro-government policies and anti-government rhetoric (a contradiction that extends, of course, to conservatives’ lust for ever-higher defense spending and foreign policy adventurism). But at present, they might as well emblazon on their Tea Party banners the legend: “Don’t Tread On My Medicare!”
UPDATE: One obvious way around the GOP’s dilemma on entitlements is simply to “grandfather” current beneficiaries and introduce radical changes for younger generations. That’s how Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare Voucher proposal–central to the congressional Republican “plans” for both health care and the budget–operates. And that’s explicitly what Tim Pawlenty is talking about doing with both Medicare and Social Security.
It remains to be seen if this approach, which for all the talk about “keeping promises to seniors” sure looks like a cynical effort to buy off a demographic group that favors Republicans at the expense of groups less inclined–will fly with seniors or with anyone else. It does nicely comport with the “I’ve got mine! To hell with the rest of you!” spirit that Republicans are carefully cultivating among older white voters.

Glenn Beck”s weird tutorial that ended this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference seems to have been a big hit among attendees. Yes, it’s a bit ironic that he expressed views highly similar to those of Ron Paul, whose student-driven victory in the CPAC straw poll was heavily panned and booed by the “regular” conservatives at the conference. Yes, some may have been put off by his constant use of Alcoholics Anonymous metaphors (people who need any form of government assistance are apparently just like alcoholics who haven’t “hit bottom” yet). But there really didn’t seem to be much dissent in this crowd with the idea that “progressivism” dating all the way back to Wilson and TR has been demonic, or that Republicans have to repudiate all forms of activist government if they want to get back on the paths of righteousness.
I was particularly struck by John Fund’s analysis of Beck’s appearance for the Wall Street Journal, which treated it as a constructive warning to Republicans against the temptations of governing.
It’s true that people like Beck and Paul, and most obviously the Tea Party Movement, are encouraging Republican politicians to take an ever-more-rigid position against government spending which, in combination with perpetual demands for both fiscal discipline and major new tax cuts, suggest a level of government retrenchment far beyond anything Americans have experienced since Hoover. But it’s surprising how few observers on the Right seem to be aware of the exceptionally perilous political direction of such talk.
Chris Bowers recently offered a useful summary of recent polling on specific cuts in government spending. And the bottom line is that Americans really, really don’t want them except in small categories like NASA and non-defense foreign assistance. And this is why symbolic anti-spending measures like never-to-be-enacted constitutional balanced budget amendments (Tim Pawlenty’s favorite panacea) and various “freezes” have always been so popular among GOP politicians. It’s probably poetic justice for conservatives that decades of anti-government demagoguery have convinced so many people that it would be easy to slash spending by attacking “waste” or “bureaucrats” or “welfare” or “foreign aid,” but the reality is that any serious attack on federal spending will have to include major cuts in defense; very popular domestic entitlement programs; or very popular domestic discretionary programs like public education and law enforcement.
So all the white-hot rhetoric about spending you hear from GOPers these days carries some pretty interesting implications, particularly for the bulk of Republicans who also favor a big escalation of the Afghanistan War (and perhaps a new war with Iran), and who have no prescriptions for economic growth other than still more tax cuts. I’m sure that Beck and Paul would have no problem calling for the abolition of Medicare and Social Security as they exist today, but are GOP politicians ready to follow? I don’t think so. And this is the real reason they struggle to articulate a governing agenda for 2010 and beyond.
Maybe John Fund thinks it’s good for Republicans to regularly get a kick in the pants from right-wing figures whose own views, if put to a vote, wouldn’t get support from more than a quarter of the electorate. But it looks to me more like a push into a political abyss. Maybe they can get away with fierce-but-vague rhetoric and opposition to Democratic initiatives for a while, but ultimately they will have to come right out and admit that the fiscal arithmetic of their own “thinking” would lead to a federal government more like that of the Coolidge administration (Beck’s favorite) than that of the Reagan administration. If they do, it won’t be Beck or Paul who has to pay the political price.

So, it’s finally out there: the “President’s Proposal” for health care reform which Obama will explain and defend in the “summit” with bipartisan congressional leaders on Thursday.
It’s unclear to what extent this plan reflects completed House-Senate negotiations on various sticking points between the bills each chamber has already passed. But it certainly addresses many of them. Think Progress has a useful chart comparing House, Senate, and Obama provisions. The biggies in terms of “improvements” to the Senate bill that would be enacted via reconciliation include a significant watering-down of the excise tax on high-cost insurance plans; bigger subsidies for insurance purchases; a sizeable increase in the federal share of costs associated with Medicaid expansion (accompanied by elimination of the special deal for Nebraska that the Senate included to get Ben Nelson on board); and the closing of the so-called “donut hole” in Medicare prescription drug coverage. These do represent the most often cited problems House Democrats have cited in the Senate bill, aside from the more fundamental failure to include a public option.
The two “surprises” in the proposals were that it did not authorize national health insurance exchanges (probably because of fears that such a step could trigger an adverse parliamentary ruling as non-germane to a reconciliation bill), which could be a serious issue for some House members; and a new provision that would enable federal regulators to stop large health insurance premium increases, which was almost certainly motivated by the recent big Anthem premium increases in California.
Republicans, of course, have immediately denounced the proposal as “partisan,” and appear ready for total war at the summit. Interestingly, the only spurned Republican “ideas” specifically mentioned in House Minority Leader John Boehner’s official response to the Obama proposal were interstate insurance sales and a total ban on private abortion coverage for people receiving federal subsidies (the Obama proposal tracks the Senate bill on abortion, which requires separate accounts for supplemental abortion insurance, but doesn’t try to outlaw it outright like the House bill’s Stupak Amendment does).
For those readers most concerned with a late revival of the public option, it should be noted that this possibility remains strictly contingent on progress towards getting 50 Democratic senators signed on. At this point, including it in the Obama proposal would have probably been counter-productive, even among Senate Democrats, while creating a new distraction going into the summit.
So we’re now ready for some serious Kabuki theater on Thursday. Obama’s objective will be three-fold: to rekindle some momentum for final action on health reform; to explode some of the Republican “ideas” like interstate sales; and to force Republicans to show the back of their hands while identifying them with potentially very unpopular proposals like voucherizing Medicare.

Despite recent conservative success in the politics of distraction, the American public remains strongly supportive of progressive policies in three key areas, according to TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira, who explains in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot‘ at The Center for American Progress web pages. On taxes:

…The public remains enamored of a wide range of progressive policies, as polling data regularly document. Consider these findings from the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. In that poll the public was asked whether the 2001 tax cuts for those making $250,000 or more should be allowed to expire, explicitly pointing out that that would raise taxes on that group of people. The public deemed it a good idea to eliminate these Bush-era tax cuts for the rich by a 2-1 ratio (62-31).

On bank regulation:

In the same poll, the public was asked whether we should increase regulations on banks to help prevent future financial crises or not increase regulations because that would discourage private investors. The public endorsed increasing bank regulation by 56-36.

On the filibuster:

…Conservatives have been very proud of their use of the filibuster in the Senate to “protect” the people from progressive legislation. But apparently the public is not convinced they need this kind of protection. By 50-44 the public backed eliminating the filibuster option and allowing legislation to pass with a simple majority.

As Teixeira concludes:

Majority rule—now that’s a novel idea! Unfortunately, conservatives seem uninterested in promoting this concept, preferring to block progressive legislation by any means available, democratic or not. Perhaps it’s time for progressives to more forcefully remind the public of this conservative disregard for democracy. By these data the public is ready to listen.

Could opinion polls spell it out any better? The time for progressives to counter-attack has arrived.

This is becoming a pretty old story (Alan Abramowitz wrote about it definitively last year, as did John Sides), but since it hasn’t much sunk in amongst mainstream media political observers, its worth repeating ad infinitum: Mark Blumenthal makes the case that most “independent” voters aren’t very independent. The general consensus is that of the 30% to 40% or so of Americans who call themselves independents, no more than ten percent are independent voters in any meaningful sense of the term. And “pure independents” are also less likely to vote than partisans.
This is important for a whole lot of reasons. For one thing, the idea that “independents” are a third force in politics positioned in some moderate, bipartisan space equidistant from the two parties is entirely wrong. They are not a bloc of voters who think just like David Broder or David Brooks, spending their days pining for deficit reduction and “civility.”
More immediately, the high percentage of Tea Party activists who call themselves “independents” obscures the fact that most of them are in fact highly partisan Republicans who are close ideologically to the right wing of the GOP. Here’s how Blumenthal puts it:

Remember the 52 percent of Tea Party activists who [in a recent CNN poll] initially identify as independent? It turns out that virtually all of them lean Republican. According to CNN, 88 percent of the activists identify or lean Republican, 6 percent identify or lean Democratic and only 5 percent fall into the pure independent category.
Remember that CNN pollster Holland reported that 87 percent of the Tea Party activists would vote Republican if there were no Tea Party-endorsed third-party candidate running? That makes perfect sense for a group that is 88 percent Republican.

Why do functionally partisan, and sometimes quite ideological, people self-identify as independents in such large numbers? Some of it is just fashion: many folk conflate “independence” with “intelligence” or “thoughtfulness.” Some of it reflects short-cuts by pollsters, who often give respondents the impression that voters who have ever split a ticket should call themselves “independents.” In the case of the Tea Party activists, there is undoubtedly some mistrust of the godless moderate “GOP establishment” and its Beltway habits–mistrust that will not, however, keep them from voting uniformly for Republican candidates in any two-party contest, and which in any event may not last long given the rightwards trajectory of the party as a whole.
In any analysis, wherever possible “independents” should be broken down into D and R leaners and “true” independents, and the vast array of “independent” ideological tendencies should be explained. Better yet, pollsters should ask follow-up questions to determine actual voting behavior and specific views rather than self-identification by partisan or ideological labels. Otherwise, we’re allowing those labels to distort reality in major ways.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Because Congress failed to adopt a bipartisan deficit commission on its own, President Obama created one through executive order on Thursday. This comes as a disappointment to members of both parties who had endorsed the Conrad-Gregg bill: that proposal would have forced the Congress to vote on the commission’s recommendations, while the administration’s initiative does not.
The failure of Conrad-Gregg was surprising as well as troubling. By last December, the bill had garnered almost three dozen cosponsors across party lines and seemed to be gaining momentum. Although Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell had not formally signed on, he had made a number of favorable public statements. (Last May, for example, he proclaimed on the Senate floor that the Conrad-Gregg proposal was “the best way to address the crisis” and that it “would provide an expedited pathway for fixing these profound long-term challenges.”) And just days before the vote, President Obama endorsed the bill.
But it wasn’t enough. On January 26, the bill went down to defeat: 53 senators voted in favor, but it needed 60 to pass. Democrats assembled a solid majority of 37 votes, while Republicans could muster only 16. As has been widely reported, seven of the bill’s Republican cosponsors ended up voting against it; had they remained resolute, it would have passed. Reversing his earlier position, the minority leader also voted against the bill.
So what happened between December and January? Put simply, the forces within the conservative movement who oppose any and all tax increases mobilized against legislation that might have produced the long-sought grand bargain—significant entitlement reform coupled with additional revenues.
On December 9, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform sent a letter to Conrad and Gregg expressing his opposition to their proposal. “Despite the appearance of protection for taxpayers,” he wrote, “this commission would guarantee a net tax increase. … In order to make this commission acceptable from a taxpayer perspective, language must be included that explicitly removes tax increases and/or new taxes from commission consideration.” The substantial anti-tax coalition Norquist leads then swung into action with a steady drumbeat of op-eds and open letters to elected officials.
Even more significant was a lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal on December 29. After issuing a thinly veiled warning to Republicans who might go along with the plan and denouncing past bipartisan efforts–including the 1983 Greenspan Social Security commission and the 1990 Andrews Air Force Base summit–the Journal launched a preemptive strike against the kind of deal it feared a Conrad-Gregg commission would reach: “Democrats would agree to means-test entitlements, which means that middle and upper-middle class (i.e., GOP) voters would get less than they were promised in return for a lifetime of payroll taxes. … In return, Republicans would agree to an increase in the top income tax rate to as high as 49% and in addition to a new energy tax, a stock transaction tax, or value added tax. The Indians got a better deal for selling Manhattan.”
In short, the Journal opposed not only new taxes, but also progressivity in spending cuts. The only remaining alternatives to national bankruptcy (although the editorial writer wasn’t candid enough to say so) are draconian cuts imposed on those Americans who can least endure them.
In the few weeks following the editorial, the intensifying pressure proved too much for many Republicans. The seven Conrad-Gregg deserters included Robert Bennett, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and John McCain, all of whom are embroiled in tough primary campaigns, along with Sam Brownback, who’s running for governor of Kansas, and John Ensign, who’s already in more than enough trouble.
Also of interest is the roster of 16 Republicans who stood up to the pressure and held their ground. In addition to four senators who are retiring and have little to lose, the honor roll includes a dozen who will have to answer to the forces that Norquist and the Journal represent: Lamar Alexander, Saxby Chambliss, Susan Collins, Bob Corker, John Cornyn, Mike Enzi, Lindsey Graham, Johnny Isakson, Mike Johanns, Dick Lugar, David Vitter, and Roger Wicker. (Olympia Snowe is conspicuous by her absence, yet another in a lengthening list of disappointing performances.) Whatever their substantive views on fiscal policy, these are public servants who at least take the responsibility of governance seriously and understand that no single party—whether today’s Democratic majority or a possible future Republican majority—can discharge this responsibility on its own.
And that’s the issue: Will the Republican party remain beholden to the forces that Grover Norquist and The Wall Street Journal represent? Does the party just want to mobilize popular grievances in the effort to regain power, or is it willing to help govern our country and address its mounting problems? Beyond undermining campaign finance legislation, Mitch McConnell is interested in only one thing—winning elections—an outlook apparently shared by two-thirds of his colleagues. The question is whether the minority of the minority party can ever get together with the majority of the majority to find real solutions—and then level with the people about what these solutions will mean. The alternative to a new governing coalition is the intensification both of our problems and of public contempt for its elected representatives.

Ron Paulites are elated because their man won his first presidential straw poll of the Conservative Political Action Conference Saturday, with 31 percent of the vote. Paul decisively whipped Mitt Romney (22 percent) and Sarah Palin (7 percent), as well as Tim Pawlenty (6 percent) and Newt Gingrich (4 percent) and Mike Huckabee (4 percent).
No, it’s not a scientific poll, but it is an indicator of the preferences of the conservative activist base. What is most disturbing about the vote, however, is Paul’s long history of supporting racism, in his newsletter, and in his personal remarks.
Maybe the best thing written about Paul’s racial views comes from New Republic article “Angry White Man: The bigoted past of Ron Paul” by James Kirchick. As Kirchick explains:

The Freedom Report’s online archives only go back to 1999, but I was curious to see older editions of Paul’s newsletters, in part because of a controversy dating to 1996, when Charles “Lefty” Morris, a Democrat running against Paul for a House seat, released excerpts stating that “opinion polls consistently show only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions,” that “if you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be,” and that black representative Barbara Jordan is “the archetypical half-educated victimologist” whose “race and sex protect her from criticism.” At the time, Paul’s campaign said that Morris had quoted the newsletter out of context. Later, in 2001, Paul would claim that someone else had written the controversial passages. (Few of the newsletters contain actual bylines.) Caldwell, writing in the Times Magazine last year, said he found Paul’s explanation believable, “since the style diverges widely from his own.”
…the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul’s name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him–and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

Read more…

The National Journal.com‘s Hotline Online has a short video interview with TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg on the topic of Democratic strategy toward the tea party movement. Greenberg urges Dems to show “respect for the voters” protesting their grievances, while supporting the President’s policies which, unlike the Republicans’ positions, actually address the concerns of many tea party supporters.