So, the longest August in history is over, Labor Day is past, all the bigfoot journalists are back from Martha’s Vineyard, and we can now have something approaching a real debate over health care reform.
At TNR, Jonathan Cohn has a good, if somewhat tenative, assessment of where were are on health reform. He points to the decision to deal with Olympia Snowe, the one Senate Republican who actually seems to be negotiating in good faith, as a good sign (not just in terms of her own vote, but because she can provide cover for shaky Democrats), as is the more serious attention being paid to the reconciliation option for moving a bill through the Senate.
Right now the biggest problem for the White House may be the enormous expectations building up around the President’s speech tomorrow. Today and tomorrow he’ll get a lot of armchair advice for what he ought to say, and how he ought to say it. The one thing everyone will agree on is that he need to be clear, clear, clear on one of the murkiest policy issues imaginable.

It was not only Democrats but a wide spectrum of Americans who were deeply appalled and offended by the demagogic Republican attacks on Obama’s planned speech to schoolchildren today. A New York Times editorial well expressed the sincere outrage many Americans felt:

The American right has directed many silly and offensive attacks at President Obama. But so far nothing compares with the news that right-wing demagogues on talk radio and the Web, along with Republican Party officials, are trying to stop children from hearing the president urge them to stay in school — because, they say, that is socialist propaganda.
Perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise after a summer in which town hall meetings on health care have been turned into mindless shouting matches, where protesters parade guns and are cheered on by elected officials… Still, it was startling to read in Friday’s Times about the overheated and bizarre response to Mr. Obama’s [planned speech]…
The White House says Mr. Obama will talk about the importance of education — hardly, we hope, a controversial topic. But the article said that in a growing number of school districts, especially in Texas, parents, talk-show hosts and some Republican officials are demanding that schools either refuse to show it or allow parents to keep their children home. The common refrain is that Mr. Obama will offer a socialist message — although nobody said what they meant by that…
There is, of course, nothing socialist in any of Mr. Obama’s policies, as anyone with a passing knowledge of socialism and its evil history knows.

Unfortunately, this was not the only reaction among the “mainstream” media. Many print and TV commentators took a far more timid approach. Consider, for example, the editorial in the Washington Post:

Education, not politics, should drive the president’s pitch to students on Tuesday.
…One would think that this message about the importance of education — by a president making it a priority — would be universally welcomed. Instead, the planned speech has drawn denunciations from conservatives. School districts around the country are refusing to air the broadcast, and some parents are even threatening to keep their children out of school that day…Particularly egregious have been comments, like those of the Florida Republican Party, accusing the president of wanting to spread a socialist agenda, at taxpayer expense. Who knew that doing homework and setting goals was part of “The Communist Manifesto”?
But, Democrats aren’t exactly blameless, either. They were the ones who criticized President George H.W. Bush for making a similar address in 1991. They accused Republicans of using children as political pawns and questioned the use of federal dollars to stage the event…It also was a goof for education officials to suggest as part of the original menu for classroom activities that elementary students write letters to themselves “about what they can do to help the president.” That has been changed in the wake of the controversy to writing letters “about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals.”
A complete list of resources and suggested lesson plans appears on the Education Department’s Web site, and there is nothing objectionable thereof. Moreover, the White House’s promise to post the full text of the speech online Monday should be further reassurance that the president’s interests are educational, not political.

What in God’s name is this editorial actually implying — that Obama really needed to be warned by the Washington Post editorial writers that “education, not politics, should drive [Obama’s] pitch to students on Tuesday” – because otherwise he would give a campaign speech? Or that Democrats are equally guilty of this kind of behavior — although they never called on a single school district to boycott Bush’s 1991 speech or told a single Democratic parent to keep their children home that day?
Of course, the editorial does not explicitly say either of these things. Quite the contrary, it is a particularly elegant example of a widespread modern genre of commentary that attempts to hem and haw so acrobatically that it says nothing substantial at all — and most important of all, avoids expressing any genuine and categorical moral outrage.
The purpose of this exercise is, of course, to avoid offending the powerful thunder gods of Fox News and the vocal foot-soldiers of the conservative right. At least half of the editorial writers who wrote equivocal, “on the one hand, on the other hand” commentaries about the Republican attacks on Obama’s address were actually as offended as most Americans and privately agreed with the New York Times editorial but were unwilling to “go out on a limb” with their audience by expressing the moral outrage they actually felt.
Commentators weren’t always this timid. In the 50’s when major American papers began to challenge Joe McCarthy, they had the courage of their convictions.

The Evening Star of Washington It was a bad day for everyone who resents and detests the bully boy tactics which Senator McCarthy so often employees…
The New York World Telegram: Bamboozling, bludgeoning, distorting way…
St. Louis Post Dispatch: Unscrupulous, McCarthy bullying.
The New York Times: The unwarranted interference of a demagogue — a domestic Munich…
The Herald Tribune of New York: McCarthyism involves assaults on basic Republican concepts…

In a TV broadcast that was widely viewed as dealing a major blow to McCarthy, Edward R. Murrow summed up the challenge:

We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.
We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men…
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.

50 years later those words are still taught in J-schools and honored as one of the proudest moments in American journalism. In contrast, editorials that offered “on the one-hand, on the other hand” equivocations are now forgotten.
Today the time has come for all American journalists to face their responsibility – as Murrow said “to stand up for America’s heritage and history”. It is time for mainstream journalists to stop being intimidated by the bullies at Fox News, talk radio and the Republican Party. It is time for them to stand up for what they know is the truth – to show whether or not they are “descended from fearful men”

When I was a child growing up in the textile company town of LaGrange, Georgia, during the 1960s, we began school each year on Labor Day. That was the town fathers’ way of expressing contempt for the labor movement, and their determination to keep LaGrange union-free. The word “union” was rarely uttered other than in whispers, and there were tales of organizers being beaten and locked up during brief efforts to unionize the mills in the 1930s and 1940s.
As I grew older, I came to realize exactly how atavistic this deep hostility to the right of workers to organize really was by national standards. Outside the Deep South, conservatives and business people often privately hated unions, but they had learned to live with them, and it wasn’t unusual for Republican politicians to court union leaders and rank-and-file alike for support. In my own memory, the partriarchal company-town mentality that I grew up with seemed as embarrasingly shameful as its psychological big brother, Jim Crow.
Now, so many years later, even though Jim Crow is long dead, and unions represent a much smaller share of the work force (particularly in the private sector), the old Dixie attitude towards unions has become commonplace among conservatives from coast to coast. The economy “can’t afford” collective bargaining, conservatives often say, as often as they say we “can’t afford” universal health coverage, action on climate change, or much of anything that addresses the inequality and powerlessness that chronically afflict working people. Even as conservatives have regressed from neo-Keynsianism to neo-Hooverism in their thinking about how to deal with a deep recession, they seem to have regressed in the direction of nineteenth century assumptions about unions as inherently illegitimate and anti-competitive.
It’s too bad that Labor Day has largely become a partisan holiday, but for that very reason, Democrats should celebrate it with genuine conviction, particularly at a time when no sane person can blame working people for the economic straits facing our country. Those so richly blessed by our capitalist system have once again blighted the standard of living enjoyed by those struggling to get by. Now more than ever, unions represent a last line of economic self-defense for millions of Americans, and we should honor them as such.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
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.

Buzz is building around the so-called “trigger mechanism” as a compromise provision to make the public option palatable to centrist Senators. Marc Armbinder reports from The Atlantic‘s ‘Politics’ blog that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is “pushing the idea of a “trigger” internally,” and he and Senator Olympia Snowe “regularly trade legislative and political intelligence.” In their New York Times article, “Health Care Idea Has Public Plan Only as Backup,” Robert Pear and Jackie Calmes report that,

The idea of such a backup plan or “trigger mechanism” has emerged in negotiations between the White House and the one Republican willing to engage with them on the issue, Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, on whom the White House rests its hopes of finding a middle ground…Despite Mr. Obama’s impressive victory last November, the White House finds itself trying to satisfy Ms. Snowe for several reasons: other Republican senators have turned against Mr. Obama’s approach, the White House cannot count on the support of moderate-to-conservative Democratic senators, and efforts to forge a bipartisan bill in the Senate Finance Committee have bogged down.

Senator Snowe’s ‘trigger mechanism’ is, well, complicated, as the authors explain:

Under Ms. Snowe’s proposal, a new government corporation would offer health insurance in any states where affordable coverage was not readily and widely available from private insurers. The corporation would not be part of the Department of Health and Human Services, although federal officials would serve on its board.
The public insurance plan would be offered in any state where fewer than 95 percent of the residents had access to affordable coverage…Congress would define “affordable” with a sliding scale based on income. Under a proposal being considered by the Finance Committee, Medicaid would be extended to anyone with income less than 133 percent of the poverty level ($29,327 for a family of four).
For people with incomes just above that level, insurance would be considered affordable if they could find a policy with premiums equal to no more than, say, 3 percent or 4 percent of their income. For people with incomes exceeding three times the poverty level ($66,150 for a family of four), insurance might be deemed unaffordable if the premiums were more than, say, 12.5 percent to 15 percent of their income.

However, Chris Good of The Atlantic ‘Politics’ blog, reports that Reps. Lyn Woolsey (D-CA) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), co-chairs of the House Progressive Caucus, who spoke with thge President on a Friday conference call, have expressed their strong opposition to a ‘trigger mechanism.’ Woolsey said she was “skeptical that such a trigger would ever get pulled,” according to Good.
In their L. A. Times article “Democrats Consider Setting ‘Trigger’ for Government Health Care,” Peter Nicholas and Christi Parsons report:

The plan might win over moderate Republican and wavering Democratic senators, who do not want to give the government blanket authorization to enter the insurance market and compete with private companies. At the same time, President Obama could make the argument that he has not abandoned the prospect of a government-run plan, also called a “public option,” which liberals contend is needed to inject competition into the insurance industry…”This is the best shot we’ve got for getting a public option,” said one House Democratic advisor, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “It’s better than nothing.”

Parsons and Nicholas report that the views of key Democratic leaders on the “trigger mechanism” are skeptical:

“I will support nothing short of a robust public health insurance plan upon implementation — no triggers,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.). “I believe Congress will pass and the president will sign such a bill this fall.”
In an interview Thursday, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) cited the high salaries of health insurance executives and rising premiums as reasons for adopting a public plan without delay. Giving insurers a chance to prove themselves anew is a waste of time, she said…”I support a public-interest option now because we already know the problem,” Boxer said….She added: “We don’t need to test out the insurance companies. We’ve tested them out for years.”
…One Democratic senator, speaking on condition of anonymity because negotiations were ongoing, said that there were no guarantees that a trigger would create a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate…”We don’t even know what this buys us,” the senator said. “Does it get us to 58 votes? And if that’s all it does for us, why do we want to go down this route?”

I looked in vain for articles that said positive things about the “trigger mechanism.” Logic suggests there could be a point at which a “trigger” produces broad coverage for everyone. But the main benefit of the idea seems to be to get Sens. Snowe, Collins and perhaps one other Republican to support the Democratic plan. Still, the distrust of a trigger among progressive legislators seems broad and deep — a tough sell

To their credit, Patrick Ruffini and Jon Henke of NextRight have been on something of a crusade to get their fellow conservatives to disassociate themselves from Birthers, WorldNetDaily, and other objectively crazy people (and also from the cheesiness of the Joe the Plumber type stunts).
Today, though, reflecting on the resistance of conservatives to these attempts to instill some policing of crazy people, Ruffini suggests that it really takes a seriously right-wing intellectual to have the credibility to build opposition to anti-intellectualism on the Right. He cites William F. Buckley’s excommunication of the John Birch Society from respectable conservative company as the model:

Buckley provided an ideal — and set a standard — for conservatives to position themselves as scholarly thought leaders within the broader culture that simply no longer exists today — despite numerous conservative academics toiling facelessly in the vineyards. This gave a Buckley the credibility to cast out the movement’s lesser lights, and impose a layer of discernment between fact and fiction inside the movement. In politics, symbols matter….
The automatic problem that arises when someone who is not a William F. Buckley (and none of us here pretend to be) is that you’re instantly tagged a RINO for calling out something that is objectively and demonstrably false. The space between fact and fiction is confused as a litmus test between right and left.

Unfortunately, Ruffini’s argument sorta kinda sounds like a suggestion that you have to be a little bit crazy to call out the crazy people. The “space between fact and fiction” isn’t clear enough that it can survive an ideological prism.
And that’s a real problem, not just for conservatives, but for all of us who have to grapple with the “news” and the “debates” spawned by crazy people.

Alex Koppleman of Salon.com‘s ‘War Room’ flags an interesting YouTube video (10 mins) showing how Al Franken adroitly handled a group of tea party constituents. Franken respectfully considers their concerns and calmly explains why the Democratic health care reform package is economically-feasible, without getting too wonky. It’s a good training clip for dealing with concerned constituents. What is interesting here is that initially-skeptical constituents appear to be somewhat reassured by Franken’s command of the details.
Another audio-visual resource for messaging on health care is the new film, “Money-Driven Medicine,” which aired on Bill Moyers Journal a week ago. The film is based on Maggie Mahar’s book, “Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much.” Alternet’s report on the book and film features an interview and transcript of a segment.

As regular readers have probably noticed, I’m not as freaked out as most Democrats over the President’s approval ratings–generally, or on specific issues like health care. A lot of what’s happened is simply that people are (as Alan Abramowitz pointed out in July) beginning to return to the perceptions of Obama and of Ds and Rs that they had last election day. The process has probably been speeded up by the anxiety surrounding the economy and big policy debates, not to mention the opposition party’s decision to adopt a Total War stance against Obama quite early in his term.
But there’s one factor about Obama’s popularity that was troubling even on the last election day, and is perhaps even more troubling looking forward to 2010: his low standing among seniors. As Tom Schaller explains at fivethirtyeight.com today, drawing on analysis from the Cook Report’s David Wasserman, older voters tend to turn out at much higher relative rates in midterm elections as opposed to presidential elections. For example, voters over 45 comprised 54 percent of the electorate in 2004, but 63 percent of the electorate in 2006. Since Obama’s vote was more or less inversely related to voter age (at least among white voters), a replay of 2008’s results in a midterm could, if normal turnout patterns persist, be a losing proposition for Democrats.
It’s sometimes forgotten that Democrats were actually winning seniors as recently as 2000, and it’s one of the few voter categories where Obama fell noticeably below John Kerry’s percentages from 2004. So obviously, Democratic success in 2010 will depend on either better performances among seniors than in 2008, or better turnout–or even higher Democratic percentages–elsewhere. Another X factor, of course, is that Obama’s popularity isn’t the only factor here: individual candidates from both parties will be competing in actual contests, and disapproval of Obama’s job performance will not automatically translate into votes for every Republican, particularly the type of Republican who spends most of his or her time howling at the moon. And with respect to the emotion being displayed by conservative base voters–old or young–against health care reform of late, it’s worth remembering that you only get to vote once, and “intensity” only matters as it affects turnout, or if it is communicable to others.
Still, Democrats need a 2010 strategy that takes it for granted that disproportionate white senior turnout could be a big problem. Stronger-than-usual turnout among young and minority voters is obviously one way to deal with it, and that will take some serious work.

Given the continuing back-and-forth discussions of how much political risk Democrats are willing to take to enact health care reform, I thought it might be worth a closer look at that hit list the National Republican Congressional Committee put out in August, of 70 House districts they are allegedly targeting in 2010.
Whatever you think of the list, which is certainly ambitious, it does provide some sense of the Democratic Members of the House that have some reason to be politically sensitive to cross-partisan opinion on key votes.
Of the 70 districts in question, 49 went for John McCain in 2008, and 45 are represented by Members from the two Democratic “wave” elections of 2006 and 2008. These are all extraordinarily obvious targets for a midterm election campaign.
In terms of ideological affinity, 25 of the 70 targeted Democrats are members of the Blue Dog Coalition (nearly half the Caucus’ total membership); 30 are members of the moderate-ish New Democrat Coalition; and just three are members of the Progressive Caucus. Since twelve people on the hit list are members of both the Blue Dogs and the NDC, that means 43 of the 70 targeted Dems are self-identified in the House as moderate-to-conservative.
It’s true that many prominent Blue Dogs can’t much plead political peril in taking positions at odds with the congressional Democratic leadership or the White House. But as a group, they’re a lot more vulnerable than their more liberal peers. That’s why it’s helpful to keep reminding them that a failed Obama administration is not going to help any Democrat politically.

As we get down to the lick-log on health care reform, a lot rides on how reform supporters frame the debate. There’s a lot of support among progressives for going after private health insurers in a big way, and for pointing to Medicare to show the relative competence and efficiency of government.
In a post at The New Republic, TDS Co-Editor William Galston agrees the first tactic might work, but warns against the second. Mistrust of government, which naturally increased during the incompetent-government Bush years, has not much revived, which is a real problem for the health reform agenda:

Mistrust of concentrated power is part of America’s cultural DNA. Most Americans regard government as at best a disagreeable necessity. Even this March, at the low point of the recession and confidence in the future, and at a time when a majority of Americans favored more government control of the economy to stave off disaster, only 40 percent opted for a bigger government providing more services, versus 48 percent who preferred a smaller government providing fewer services. In this context, health reform must be spoken of by its defenders not as a positive good, but rather as medicine needed to arrest a disease—namely, the erosion of wages and the employer-based insurance system—that will eventually damage even the healthy parts of the body.

Skepticism of government, says Galston, is an even bigger problem because big majorities of Americans are actually pretty happy with their current health insurance. Adding it all up:

Today, fully 51 percent are more worried about the health reform bill they expect Congress to pass than by the possibility that reform will be delayed beyond this year. On the other hand, only 6 percent believe that the ills currently afflicting the health care system as a whole will get better with no government action, versus 54 percent who say it will get worse.

That’s a prettty big obstacle to the idea that reform needs to happen this year. And that needs to be taken into account when the administration and congressional Democrats plot their strategy for the autumn. Those unhappy with the current health care system should be mobilized; those relatively happy with it should understand how ittle reform effects them now, and how much it benefits them in the future. And the federal government should not be lionized as the indispensable health care provider–just as the indispensable catalyst for making sure the system works for everyone.