This item was cross-posted at The New Republic.
Chris Orr’s post at TNR about the early assembly work on Tim Pawlenty’s 2012 presidential bid is interesting in that he handicaps the Minnesotan primarily in terms of who he is not: not the flip-flopping, health-care-reforming Mormon Mitt Romney, not the disorganized and “goofy” Mike Huckabee, not the divisive and erratic Sarah Palin, and not the non-candidate David Petraeus.
Thus Chris captures the basic problem with Pawlenty ’12: what, precisely, is his positive appeal? Yes, he’s a bona fide cultural conservative; that checks an essential box, but you can’t throw a rock at any Republican meeting these days without hitting ten people avid to end legalized abortion and stop gay people from getting married. Yes, he coined a nice phrase–“Sam’s Club Republicans”–to illustrate the need for a broader GOP base. But absent any real agenda for appealing to these folks, it’s nothing but a slogan, and when two young conservatives, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam sought to fill out the phrase with actual policies in a recent book, they were generally hooted off the stage by their ideological brethren. Yes, he’s governed a blue state, but has never been terribly popular in Minnesota or had any real national following.
Pawlenty’s rather bland political profile was probably best reflected by the circumstances under which he was passed over for the 2008 vice-presidential nomination. According to Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson’s recently published book on the 2008 campaign, Pawlenty was a finalist along with Palin in the veep sweepstakes after other candidates were eliminated for a variety of reasons (Lieberman and Ridge because they were pro-choice, Romney because McCain forgot how many houses he owned and couldn’t have a rich running-mate). Fully understanding the riskiness of Palin, McCain went with her anyway after his pollsters told him Pawlenty wouldn’t win him any votes.
In other words, Pawlenty was, and remains, a fine “on-paper” candidate who doesn’t have much else going for him. Yes, he seems to be putting together a pretty good campaign team. And yes, he’s made at least one attempt to get into the manic spirit of today’s conservativism by flirting with “tenther” nullification theories. But unless he undergoes both an ideological and personality change of a major nature, he’s never going to be more than a third or fourth choice among the kind of hard-core conservative activists who dominate the Republican presidential nominating process (particularly in Iowa, where familiarity with Pawlenty as the mild-mannered governor of a neighboring state might actually hurt him).
Probably the best case for Pawlenty ’12 is that he’s the kind of candidate you might want to nominate in one of those years where your party can only lose by taking chances. You know, kind of like Bob Dole just after the 1994 elections.

I am flattered that Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics devoted a long column to a point-by-point response to my recent piece on all the predictions that 2010 is shaping up into a reprise of the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” I won’t conduct a point-by-point response to his response, because in many important respects, that misses the whole point I was trying to make.
The meme I was trying to refute was the idea that Democrats are doomed to disaster in 2010 because Barack Obama has “overreached” his barely-existing mandate by trying to implement his campaign platform, inviting a massive rebuke from the electorate that will confirm the country’s enduring “center-right” political character, and retroactively confim that the 2006 and 2008 Democratic victories were an ephemeral response to the incompetence (or according to some Republicans, liberalism) of George W. Bush and his congressional allies. I won’t attribute that pattern of thinking to Sean Trende, but it’s unquestionably at the heart of much of the GOP confidence about 2010, much more so than any close analysis of the PVI of specific House districts.
Given my motives, I should not, in retrospect, have succumbed to the temptation of making my own predictions, suggesting that House losses for Democrats might well come it at about ten. The truth is that I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2010, and nor does anyone else (as Trende admits). And that’s in part because I have no real clue what will happen to the U.S. and global economies between now and then–which, as Trende notes, I didn’t discuss in my own piece–or, of equal importance, the extent to which the Democratic Party will be blamed for bad economic conditions that palpably began during the Bush administration, driven largely by forces closely aligned with the GOP.
But that observation leads to a disconnect between 1994 and 2010 which I did mention, and Trende did not comment on: the exceptional weakness of the Republican Party right now. In 1994, Democrats were the eternal party of the congressional status quo. Anyone seriously desiring “change” in Congress had to seriously hope for a Republican victory, if only to shake things up. Voters today have a very recent experience with GOP rule at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and it’s doubtful that the corruption, extremism and partisanship of the Republican Party at the height of the Bush-DeLay era will be forgotten very soon. That’s why the declining popularity of the Democratic Party this year has largely translated into dealignment, not realignment. And while you can make a credible case that an energized Republican base will dominate a low-turnout election in which the “dealigned” refuse to participate, it’s by no means certain or even probable at this point.
“Wave” elections, much less “revolutions,” depend heavily on these sort of national dynamics. District-by-district analysis of likely outcomes don’t produce “revolutionary” expectations, which is why most of the serious number-crunchers, from David Wasserman to Michael Barone, aren’t predicting a 1994-type result.
There is one specific point Trende makes that I want to talk about: his argument that the relatively high number of Democratic House members in districts with a pro-Republican PVI means that the “ideological sorting out” of the two parties in the 1980s and 1990s, which I cited as a big and nonrecurring factor in the 1994 results, was temporarily “reversed” in 2006 and 2008 by “pro-life, pro-gun” Democrats beating “corrupt or incompetent” Republican incumbents. These Democrats, argues Trende, are now ripe targets for the GOP.
Keep in mind that PVI measures the presidential performance of each party as compared to national percentages. So of the 66 Democratic House members in districts with a pro-Republican PVI, a significantly lower number, 49, are in districts actually won by John McCain (as compared to 34 Republicans representing districts carried by Barack Obama).
While the comparable 1994 numbers were in the same ballpark, they were in fact higher (79 Democratic incumbents in districts with a pro-Republican PVI, and 52 in districts carried by Bush 41, a number that is probably misleadingly low because of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy). That matters when you are talking about major losses and “revolutions.” But the bigger factor, particularly in the South, in 1994 was the combination of open seats via retirement and redistricting (Trende dismisses the former factor because it’s too early to know if today’s tiny number of Democratic retirements won’t rise, and doesn’t mention the latter). And the “ideological sorting-out” I discussed refers to the irrefutable fact that 1994 marked the end of a decades-long situation where entrenched conservative Democratic incumbents benefitted from habitual ticket-splitting. That era is long gone, which is why I say that today’s Democrats in pro-Republican PVI districts seem to have gained some advantage that their 1994 predecessors (or at least those who didn’t retire or get gerrymandered out of office) didn’t have.
Consider a perpetually targeted southern Democrat, Jim Marshall of Georgia. Marshall’s district carries a pro-Republican PVI of +10, yet he won with 57% of the vote in 2008, and back in 2004, when there was no pro-Democratic “wave,” won with 63% of the vote (as Bush 43 carried the district with 58%) against a celebrated and lavishly financed Republican opponent making his second race against Marshall. Is he an exceptionally large bet to lose in 2010? I don’t think so. At this point, the Cook Political Report does not list his race as competitive. That could change, but then again, so could everything else that analysts are pointiing to as indicating a big Republican year.
One final point: Trende suggests that my notes on the invulnerability of the Senate Democratic majority is “knocking down a straw man,” since no one is specifically predicting a Republican takeover. That’s true, but that’s also why the 1994 analogies need to be tempered considerably. It was the top-to-bottom landslide nature of the 1994 results that made them constitute a “revolution,” however short-lived. Whatever happens in 2010, it’s not likely to constitute a “revolution,” and all the partisan and ideological freight carried by that term–the “center-right nation” meme, the Clinton analogies, and the constant mockery of Obama’s “over-reaching”–should be put back on the agitprop shelf where it belongs.

If you haven’t been following the dust-up over Rep. Alan Grayson’s (D-FL) take-down of the GOP health care “plan,” do check out this clip, posted by Open Left‘s Adam Green. Grayson responds con brio to GOP outrage over his recent remarks saying “the Republican plan is don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.”
Natch, the Republicans got all hufty-pufty and bent out of shape about it and are demanding an apology. But rather than cave in and grovel, Rep. Grayson is turning the brouhaha into a teachable moment, shrewdly using the media attention to hammer home the fact that the GOP really doesn’t have much of a plan, other than obstruct and crush all reform. (Also check out Grayson’s earlier refusal to apologize here). Even when CNN Situation Room anchors Gloria Bolger and Wolf Blitzer try to nail him for being uncivil, Grayson refuses to back off, and attacks the GOP’s do-nothing approach to health insurance. They try to make him eat the false equivalency of his remarks with Rep. Wilson calling the president “a liar,” but Rep. Grayson ain’t having it, and uses the opportunity to deliver another broadside against the GOP’s non-existent health care plan.
Grayson’s response to GOP protests against his remarks is instructive. First time I heard Rep. Grayson’s remarks, I winced, thinking it was a tad over the top. Dems who are squeamish about incivility and such may have problems with Grayson’s attacks. But the GOP has been getting a lot of coverage with their incivility. The way Grayson has handled it turns the controversy into a net plus. What he is doing is deploying the GOP’s media manipulation tactics to good effect, using a controversy to make a case for Democratic reform in stark contrast to Republican obstruction. It translates into more coverage for the Dem reform proposals, which have gotten squeezed off TV by various GOP bomb-throwers, like Sarah Palin. Grayson’s media strategy is don’t spend much time defending yourself; Instead, use every opportunity to attack, and that’s a good lesson for Democrats. Well-done, Rep. Grayson.

it’s easy enough to find doomsayers who pronouce the public option a dead issue after the negative votes in the Senate Finance Committee this week. But Robert Creamer, author of Stand up Straight: How Progressive Can Win, has a potent antidote for the faithless in his HuffPo column on “Growing Momentum for Public Option.” According to Creamer:

First and foremost, voters’ support for a public health insurance option is as strong as ever…Last weekend’s New York Times poll showed that 65% of all voters support giving Americans the choice of a public option and only 26% oppose it.
More importantly, the public option is also popular in swing Congressional districts. The firm of Anzeloni Liszt just released the results of a poll it conducted in 91 Blue Dog, Rural Caucus and Frontline districts. The poll found that 54% of the voters in these battleground districts support the choice of a public option.
And the poll also found that the voters in these districts want reform and want it this year. The polling report says: Overall, 58% of voters believe the health care system is in need of major reform or a complete overhaul, and almost 59% are concerned that Congress will not take action on health care reform this year. The risks of inaction to Democrats in swing districts increases if voters perceive opposition stems from ties to the insurance industry, as 74% are concerned that the health insurance industry will have too much influence over reform.
Those kinds of polling results get the attention of Members of Congress.

Creamer goes on to argue that members of congress are beginning to face up to the fact that they have to produce reform that is actually affordable, if they want to get re-elected, and the public option is an essential element of any reform package that accomplishes this central objective. As Creamer concludes, “the odds are better by the day that before the holidays President Obama will sign a health insurance reform bill that for the first time provides Americans universal health insurance coverage — and includes the choice of a robust public option.”

Washington veterans were probably shocked yesterday when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he was cancelling the chamber’s traditional Columbus Day Recess in order to make time for action on health care reform.
Pretty much everywhere other than in DC, Columbus Day is a minor holiday mainly beloved of Italian-Americans. But in Washington, it’s generally the occasion for a weeklong congressional recess, and often, in even years, the official excuse for the pre-election break.
To be clear, the Senate will take off two of the five days in the week of October 12, so Columbus’ legacy will not be completely profaned.

A week ago I reported that famed right-wing agitator Richard Viguerie was extremely upset with House Minority Leader John Boehner for conceding on Meet the Press that he didn’t believe President Obama was a “socialist.” So Viguerie polled his own readership on the question of the president’s ideology, and got this response:

An online poll conducted by the Web site ConservativeHQ.com found that a near-unanimous 95 percent of respondents disagreed with House Republican Leader John Boehner’s recent statement that he did not consider President Obama to be a socialist….
Only 4 percent agreed with Boehner, with 1 percent undecided.
The poll then asked to evaluate Obama’s political philosophy. Of the 975 respondents, the results were:
Centrist–1%
Traditional Liberal–1%
Socialist–37%
Marxist–59%
Other–2%
Undecided–0%

Now granted, the kind of people who look to Viguerie for leadership tend to come from the hard-core conservative fringe. And I can only guess how they would define the word “Marxist.” But the fact that well over five hundred people, offered the alternative of “socialist,” insisted on the “Marxist” label is pretty bizarre, since it implies they think the President of the United States is determined to seize the means of production on behalf of the industrial proletariat (not, BTW, the most pro-Democratic of demographic groups these days).
No wonder a Newsmax columnist has just published a piece suggesting that the U.S. military might need to launch a coup d’etat to overthrow the U.S. government. With secessionist and nullification views making a big comeback, and plenty of people still believing the president is some sort of foreign Muslim “plant,” it’s no surprise the completely hallucinatory idea of Barack Obama as a Marxist has some purchase in the same precincts of the Right.

One vote in the Senate Finance Committee’s markup of health reform legislation should be of positive interest to progressives: the committee defeated an amendment proposed by Orrin Hatch that would have prohibited use of federal subsidies to purchase private health plans offering abortion coverage. The vote was 10-13, with Democrat Kent Conrad supporting Hatch, offset by Republican Olympia Snowe’s opposition.
While Hatch’s amendment was advertised as maintaining “government neutrality” on abortion, it would have actually rolled back existing abortion coverage in private plans. Moreover, as Jonathan Cohn has pointed out, the tax writeoff for employer-sponsored health plans already provides significant taxpayer subsidies for optional abortion coverage, so allowing subsidies to be used (particularly since the Baucus bill already requires segregation of public and private money for such purposes) for the same coverage doesn’t really change anything.
Hatch will undoubtedly offer his amendment again on the Senate floor. And there remains the separate issue of whether any public option would offer abortion services (which didn’t come up in the Finance Committee since the Baucus Bill has no public option). But the fears of some progressives that the White House or Senate Democrats would surrender on an anti-choice amendment don’t seem to have been borne out so far.

It’s a bummer that Sen. Rockefeller’s more robust public option was voted down (8-15) — almost 2-1 — in the Senate Finance Committee, despite Dems being 60 percent of the U.S. Senate. How large a majority do we need before we can pass a bill that provides a genuine public option for health insurance?
Worse, Chuck Shumer’s “level playing field” amendment, in which the public option is modified to the point where it is no drain of reimbursements from rural hospitals, also failed 10-13. (Carper and Nelson voted with the other Dems on this one.)
No doubt there will be calls for the heads of Sens. Max Baucus, Blanche Lincoln, Kent Conrad, Tom Carper and Bill Nelson, who voted with the Republicans and are now being attacked around the blogosphere for being leading recipients of health insurance donations. It’s not quite fair to demonize them as rubber stamps for the Republicans, inasmuch as their most recent (’08) ADA ratings show them to be fairly progressive: Baucus 80; Carper 85; ; Conrad 90; Lincoln 80; and Nelson 75, all of which are way higher than Republican Grassley’s 25, for example. Still many, if not most, Democrats feel the public option ought to be a cornerstone of Democratic health care principles.
At this point, opponents of the public option are reduced to a version of the “slippery slope” argument, which says in essence that “even though it would not be available to all that many consumers, the public option should be opposed because it sets a bad precedent by expanding government’s role at the expense of for-profit business.” I doubt that any of the five senators actually believe this so strongly as a matter of principle; it’s more because they can get away with voting against it. Unfortunately Dems against the public option are over-represented on the Senate Finance Committee.
I understand the strong feelings of betrayal many Dems feel about the votes of the five. But after all of the splenetic denunciations of the five have been uttered, we are left with the fact that we are a Big Tent party, and tolerating differences of opinion on various legislative reforms is necessary, if we want to hold a majority. But, as Ed has persuasively argued, party discipline should kick in on cloture votes in a big way. No Democrat should be able to screw his party on a cloture vote without paying a significant price.
One thing is clear. With few exceptions, Dems have not done a great job of educating the public — to the point where these Senators would feel secure with their constituents in supporting the public option. Limp constituent education remains the Dems’ Achilles’ heel. Yes, the trifling, servile MSM bears much of the blame. But it’s still on us to do something about it.
The public option may not be toast just yet. Shailagh Murray and Lori Montgomery report in The Washington Post that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may insert a public option when he has to merge the Finance Committee’s bill with Senate health committee legislation (approved in July), which includes a government plan. If Reid, who Murray and Montgomery report is undecided at present, omits a public option, it’s supporters will try to amend the bill when it gets to the Senate floor. They have another shot at it during final negotiations with the House, where Speaker Pelosi, a strong public option advocate, can use her leverage to insert the provision. In addition, as Ed notes below, there is always the problematic budget reconciliation route. And who knows, a “triggered” public option amendment might gain traction before it’s all over. In any case, five Democrats ought not to be empowered to thwart the will of an overwhelming majority of Democrats — and the majority of Americans who support the public option.

Now that the Senate Finance Committee has voted down two versions of a public option for health care reform, many progressives will undoubtedly start focusing on the possible use of the budget reconciliation process for this legislation to reduce the threshold for passage (in theory, at least) to 51 votes.
Anyone tempted to say “Reconciliation or Bust!” should give a gander to a post by Mark Schmitt at The American Prospect that reviews the history and purpose of the reconciliation process in some detail.

This wasn’t originally meant to be a grand process for big policy changes. Rather, it was designed to “reconcile” the modern budget process with the arcane congressional process. In 1981, Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, figured out that the process could be used to package together and force a vote on the big budget cuts they envisioned. Later that decade, Sen. Byrd created the rule that bears his name to put some boundaries around the process, although it has still been used for both bipartisan (1990 and 1997 budget deals) and single-party bills, including welfare reform and tax cuts. But even in those cases, legislation has been sharply trimmed to accomodate the constraints of the process — for example, that’s why the Bush tax cuts had to be set to expire.
The reason this history is important is because it is a reminder that reconciliation was not designed to create a “50-vote Senate.” It was really a limited scheme intended to connect the old spending process with the new.

In other words, any health reform bill enacted via reconciliation would almost certainly have to be “sharply trimmed to accomodate the constraints of the process.” It’s not just a convenient way to brush aside filibusters.
And for the same reason, as I’ve argued myself on occasion, the decision whether or not to utilize reconciliation for health reform is not just a matter of how bold or audacious or progressive you are. It’s a question of risks and tradoffs.
Schmitt’s even more impatient than I am with the “damn the torpedos” approach to reconciliation, using a rather arresting analogy:

In the lead-up to the Iraq War, there was a saying among neoconservatives: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” Now, among progressives, one might say, “Everyone wants to do health reform. Real men want to use reconciliation” to cut out all Republicans and a few Democrats. But legislative strategy, like foreign policy, is not a test of manhood. It’s a very arcane and limited process that will leave many key provisions behind, and a weak and limited health plan.
One way or another, we’ll have to compromise. We’ll either compromise with the most conservative Democrats and one or two Republicans, or we’ll compromise with the limits of a process that was designed for a totally different purpose. The political question is simply going to be which compromise is worse.

To put it more positively, health reform supporters have several strategic options remaining for getting acceptable legislation through this Congress and onto President Obama’s desk. The reconciliation process is but one of them, and the fact that it would theoretically make it possible to bypass “centrist” opinion, while perhaps emotionally satisfying, doesn’t necessarily recommend it as the best way forward.

As you may have heard by now, the Senate Finance Committee voted down two different amendments adding a public option to its health care reform bill. The first, offered by Jay Rockefeller, was a so-called “robust” public option linked closely to Medicare. It went down 8 to 15, with all the Republicans and five Democrats voting nay. The second, offered by Chuck Schumer, was the “level-playing-field” public option, which would compete with private plans but without forcing down provider payments to Medicare levels. It picked up two senators, Tom Carper and Bill Nelson, who voted against the Rockefeller amendment, but lost 10 to 13 as Democratic senators Baucus, Lincoln and Conrad still voted no.
After the second vote, Schumer concluded rather obviously that there weren’t 60 votes in the Senate for the public option. That’s not the same, of course, as saying there are 60 votes to filibuster a bill with the public option (which could still reach the floor after the Finance and HELP bills are merged) , and should Senate leaders decide to pursue the budget reconciliation route, 60 votes aren’t necessary anyway. And ultimately, 60 votes for a bill with the public option in the Senate isn’t the same as 60 votes for a conference committee report including the public option, if the alternative is to kill health reform entirely. On top of everything else, a “triggered” public option, for those who consider that acceptable, remains a very live possibility.
So there’s a long way to go on this issue. But today’s votes, predictable as they were, may represent a shock to progressives who thought that public opinion polls and activist pressure would make Democratic opposition to the public option melt away.