Editor’s Note: we’re very happy to feature this item, originally published at The Huffington Post, by Mike Lux, founder and CEO of Progressive Strategies, LLC, and author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came To Be. This is an important contribution to our ongoing discussion of intraparty and intraprogressive debates.
There has been some interesting writing lately on the whole Obama and the left thing, a wave of discussion that started when Obama declared his candidacy for president, and won’t end until humans stop writing history books.
The first was kind of a silly article by Josh Gerstein in Politico, which basically described the left as being Rachel Maddow, some civil liberties groups, and some LGBT activists. Not surprisingly given that definition, all “the left” in Gerstein’s article cared about were civil liberties, gay rights, and having a Supreme Court Justice picked.
Now don’t get me wrong, all of those are incredibly important issues and activists, but to describe “the left” in that way seems like pretty bad reporting. Doesn’t mention the labor movement, health care advocates, advocates for low-income people, environmentalists, bloggers, community organizers, progressive think tanks, feminists, progressive activists of color, MoveOn and other online activists, the progressive youth movement, the peace movement, or any other parts of the remarkably diverse and interesting progressive movement. He didn’t mention how progressives had both pushed for the stimulus package to be bigger but also were an essential part of getting it passed in the end; or how progressives have been organizing big coalitions on behalf of helping Obama get health care, immigration reform, climate change reform, and a re-write of banking legislation passed; or how progressives have expressed concern on a range of issues like trade and banking.
There have also been articles in the Washington Post about how Obama’s election and the sausage making of passing legislation had deadened progressive excitement, and the excellent grasp of the obvious file — one about how progressive groups now had more power in lobbying than they had under Bush.
Easily the most thoughtful pieces of all have been two recent pieces by members of the progressive movement themselves (both personal friends, so I’ll admit my bias upfront). The first, by Gara LaMarche of Atlantic Philanthropies, was a thoughtful and nuanced discussion of the challenges of both Obama and progressives, and was fairly hopeful in general, both about Obama and about the relationship between him and the movement. The second, by Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, was a more frustrated discussion of the way progressive leaders aren’t challenging Obama enough, and the distancing of Obama from progressives.
From my experience in the Obama transition as the Obama team’s liaison to the progressive community, and in all my conversations with folks both inside and outside of Obamaland before and since, the tension between being hopeful about the possibilities and upset that better things aren’t being realized will always be there. If managed right by both Obama and progressive leaders, it can be the kind of constructive, creative tension that leads to the kind of big breakthrough progressive changes we saw in this country at key moments in our history- the 1860s, the early 1900s, the 1930s, and the 1960s (the Big Change Moments I write about in my book, The Progressive Revolution). If managed poorly, it can lead to the kind of presidential meltdowns we saw with the LBJ and Jimmy Carter presidencies, and on the Republican side with the first Bush presidency: Presidencies that started with high hopes but ended with destructive conflicts between the base and the presidency, tough primary challenges, and lost re-election hopes.
So far, I’m feeling quite good about Obama’s chances for the former. After some initial stumbles, he pushed through the stimulus package — and the biggest progressive public investment package — in history. His budget was very bold and as strongly progressive as any budget at least since 1965, and it has made its way through the first rounds of the congressional budget process in good shape. He has so far handled the politics around his first big legislative initiatives, health care and climate change, very pretty, giving us a solid chance at success.
Progressive leaders have handled themselves well on balance, too. A lot of us thought the stimulus was too small, but we pushed hard to get it passed once the die was cast. A lot of us prefer a single-payer health care system, but are also pushing hard to see a strong public option kept in this reform package, and are putting big resources into the passage of a good plan. Progressive groups and leaders are working hard and constructively to push Obama and other Democrats to improve the climate change bill that came out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and to move forward on the strong financial regulation and immigration reform legislation. And where Obama has disappointed many of us — on civil liberties, on LGBT issues, on Afghanistan, and on financial regulation — we have pushed back strongly but generally not been destructive in doing so.
Going forward, though, there are certain things history and common sense teach us that both sides need to understand very clearly:
1. We need each other. Progressives need to understand that our fates for several years to come are tied, fundamentally and completely, to Obama’s success as president. If he loses his big legislative fights, we won’t get another chance at winning them for a generation (see health care, 1993-94), and early losses will make the Democrats more cautious, not more bold (see health care, 1993-94). If Obama’s popularity fades, Democrats will lose lots of seats in Congress. If he loses re-election, Republicans and the media will say he was a failed liberal and run against him for many elections to come, even if his actual policies are more centrist (see Jimmy Carter). But Obama’s team needs to understand that they need a strong progressive movement as well, and as Jane alluded to, they haven’t generally acted like they do. Without progressives’ passion, activism, lobbying, and money, Obama can’t win those incredibly challenging legislative battles. Just as Lincoln never would have won the civil war or ended slavery without the passion of the abolitionists, just as FDR never would have won the New Deal reforms without the labor and progressive movement, just as LBJ would never have passed civil rights bills without the civil rights movement, Obama can’t win these big fights alone. And he can’t win re-election either without the passion of his base: see LBJ, Ford, Carter, George H.W. Bush, and many other presidents for more info on that topic.
2. Obama needs a left flank. It is a natural tendency of any White House to be dismissive of criticism, and to play hardball when people disagree with you. The Obama team should not hesitate to defend itself when being pushed from the Left, but I would caution against playing too hard at hardball. The Obama team needs a vibrant and vocal Left flank, because the stronger their Left flank is, the more Obama seems solidly in the middle. The White House would be well-served to fully support and empower progressive groups, media, and bloggers — even when they sometimes disagree with Obama.
3. There needs to be both an inside and an outside strategy for progressives. Progressive leaders who get jobs in the administration are sometimes derided as sell-outs, and progressive groups who are not openly critical of the Administration are sometimes criticized as being too cozy with those inside. At the same time, insiders get very worked up about “irresponsible” bloggers and outside activists who they say don’t understand the system and the challenges they are facing.
Having been both on the inside and the outside, I see the grain of truth in both sides’ perspective, but also respectfully disagree with both sides.
We need progressive people in government, even if the cost of that is that they have to trim their sails on issues where they disagree with administration policy. We need progressive groups in regular in-depth policy meetings with the administration, even if that means they have to soft-pedal their criticisms some of the time to keep that access. And we need outsiders who will push like crazy for doing the right thing now no matter what.
Change and progress never happened in this country without both insiders and outside agitators playing a strong role. The administration needs to respect the role of those outsiders, and those working for progress from the inside and the outside need to respect each other. There is no other way this is all going to work for the good.

Ruy Teixeira’s latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ post at the Center for American Progress strongly suggests that the conservative wing of the GOP has lost its cred with voters on one of their party’s most reliable issues, national security. As Teixeira explains:

In a May Democracy Corps poll, 57 percent said they supported Obama’s national security policies, compared to just 30 percent who were opposed…In the same poll, 58 percent endorsed the idea that America’s security depends on building strong ties with other nations, compared to 37 percent who believed America’s security depends on its own military strength.

And when it comes to former VP Dick Cheney’s broadsides against President Obama’s national security policy, the Republicans have little to smile about:

…When asked in an early June Democracy Corps poll whether Obama or Cheney has better ideas for keeping the country safe, they chose Obama’s ideas over Cheney’s by 54-39.

Teixeira credits the tanking of the conservative’s national security cred to President Obama’s “progressive approach to our nation’s foreign policy that provides a sharp break with the belligerent, go-it-alone practices of the Bush administration.” Perhaps progressives should also give a pat on the back to Cheney, for providing a timely reminder of the failed policies of Republican rule.

As numbers-oriented folk here at TDS, we can’t resist a shout-out for Paul Waldman’s article for The American Prospect today, which examines why the extraordinary availability of good data these days hasn’t translated into a rejection of bad data, at least in the United States.
Waldman blames some of the bogus credibility of bad data on the media, where the quality of data is rarely policed::

How many times in recent years has [the press] treated some bogus figure put out by one side of a political debate as though it might be true, depending on how you look at it? To take just one example, consider the gift that The New York Times offered up to anti-union forces last November, when a now notorious article by Andrew Ross Sorkin claimed that Big Three autoworkers were being paid $70 per hour. It was false — the average worker was actually making $28 an hour. The $70 figure came from disingenuously combining four separate expenses incurred by the automakers, only one of which is actual wages. But that didn’t stop conservative opponents of aid to the automakers from turning factory workers into the villains of the story, a bunch of greedy layabouts sucking the companies dry and driving them to ruin. The truth didn’t much matter — the idea ricocheted around the media for weeks.
The right thing for any reporter to do when confronted with the claim would have been to say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Conservative Think Tank guy, but you and I both know that autoworkers don’t make $70 an hour. Is there anything else you’d like to add — that’s not a lie — that I can use in my story?” But reporters don’t necessarily say that sort of thing. And this is just one case. Journalists’ lack of even the most rudimentary understanding of statistics is evident on the news pages and broadcasts nearly every day.

But Waldman goes on to suggest that cultural factors are at play, including the taste for quackery evidence in popular culture; the poor math and statistical skills of the American population; and a general inability to differentiate between those questions “the numbers” can help answer, and those they can’t.

Let’s say you’re running a gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, and you want turnout in Northern Virginia to be relatively high. This is probably not the early-morning headline you want to see in the Washington Post: “Severe Thunderstorms Hit As Polls Open in VA.” The story beneath that headline says that in some areas experiencing hail, radio stations are telling residents to stay indoors, presumably even if that van shows up to take you to the polls.
For whatever reason, it looks like God had some definite ideas about turnout patterns in Virginia today.

Virginia’s Democrats are holding a primary today, and the headliner event is the contest to see who will face Republican Bob McDonnell in November in an effort to secure a third straight Democratic governorship. As Jonathan Martin of Politico explains this morning, there are scenarios under which each of the three candidates–Creigh Deeds, Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran–could win, with turnout being a crucial variable. But Deeds has been the surprise leader in all four of the polls released during the last week.
I have a post up at fivethirtyeight.com that explores some of the issues we may be discussing when the returns are in, including the ancient debate between mobilization and persuasion strategies; the role of timely media endorsements; and Virginia’s relatively restrictive early voting rules, which Gov. Kaine unsuccessfully tried to change this year.
The polls in VA close at 7:00 p.m.; the whole state’s in the eastern time zone; and given the expected low turnout, we may have a result pretty early unless it’s very close.

Al Quinlan, president of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research has a post up at gqrr.com on their new survey (PDF here), which reveals overwhelming public support for investing in illness prevention as a leading priority of health care reform. Among the findings of the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner/Public Opinion Strategies bi-partisan report, which was commissioned by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation:

When we asked people whether or not we should invest more in prevention , a big majority (76 percent) said yes, against just 16 percent who said no. This is truly an overwhelming level of support for any initiative—it’s rare to get three-quarters of the country to agree on anything these days (much less on something that involves spending more money)—and it underscores the importance Americans place on prevention as part of their health care and their lives.
Now for those of you who would ask if it is just certain parts of the population who support this, our answer would be, “No.” At least 65 percent of every demographic subgroup supports increasing our investment in prevention. From coast to coast (79 percent in the Northeast, 78 percent in the South, 76 percent in the West, and 72 percent in the Midwest) and across the political spectrum (86 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of Republicans, and 70 percent of Independents), people believe we should invest more in prevention. Even two-thirds of the least healthy among us want a greater investment in prevention.
The importance the country places on prevention represents a real change in attitudes toward health in this country over the past couple decades. In 1987, 45 percent of the country believed we should be giving more emphasis to prevention (11 percent wanted more emphasis on treatment). Today, 59 percent say we need more emphasis on prevention, an increase of 14 percentage points in the prevention column (a real shift, albeit occurring over 20 years).

And the public views prevention as a highly cost-effective investment, as Quinlan notes:

No good discussion of any type of program would be complete without discussing the always-burning question—what about the costs? Does the cost associated with investing in prevention dampen support for it? It doesn’t appear to. By a wide margin (77 – 16 percent), Americans believe that prevention will save us money, rather than cost us money. But saving money isn’t the real reason they want more prevention—health is. Seventy-two percent say that “investing in prevention is worth it even if it doesn’t save money, because it will prevent disease and save lives,” while only 20 percent feel that investing in prevention is not worth it if it doesn’t save money. When it comes to prevention, it’s less about cost and more about reducing disease, keeping people healthy, and improving quality of life.

When it comes to building a consensus in support of health care reform, it appears that investing in prevention as a central priority may be the focus that can unite Americans.

Every martyr needs her hagiography, and according to David Weigel at the Washington Independent, the Governor of Alaska is getting her own, tentatively entitled The Persecution of Sarah Palin. Penned by The Weekly Standard‘s Matthew Continetti, it’s due out in 2010, just in time for the launch of a Palin presidential run.
I don’t know how smart it is to make your first big political biography an extended whine, but then again, there is definitely a persecution-complex faction in the GOP that loves St. Joan of the Tundra not so much for the enemies she has made, but for the mockery she has inspired. The Torquemada of the Palin Passion, Tina Fey, ought to demand a cut of the book’s proceeds. Or if Continetti has a taste for historical puns, he could entitle the chapter on Palin’s Saturday Night Live ordeal: “Auto da Fey.”
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

Normally American conservatives don’t much care what happens in Europe. But there are already signs that they will interpret this weekend’s European Parliamentary elections, which produced poor results for social democratic parties and an outcropping of far-right victories. The leading indicator was a Drudge Report banner that read: “USA Moves Left, EU Moves Right.”
You know how this will go, of course: Obama is “driving” the US towards “European-style socialism” just as Europe is abandoning it.
There’s only one big problem with this story-line: Europe ain’t abandoning what passes for “socialism” among American conservatives. Indeed, the kind of social policies that largely dwarf anything proposed by Obama in this country are so much a part of the landscape that parties of the Left can’t find traction in hard times, as the Financial Times‘ Tony Barber explains:

[I]n France, Germany and Italy, voters preferred to stick with ruling centre-right parties, even though economic conditions are as severe as anything in living memory.
One reason is that centre-right leaders, alert to the risk of being portrayed as defenders of a heartless or irresponsible capitalist system, have sought to protect citizens against the worst effects of the recession by preserving jobs where possible and letting the welfare state take care of those in need.
Unemployment benefits, access to medical care and other forms of social expenditure, which come into effect automatically during a recession, form a large part of the €400bn fiscal stimulus that EU policymakers claim to have been implementing over the past six months.
This Franco-German model, criticised in the US and UK in the boom years as an unaffordable, bloated welfare system, has turned out to be exactly what most voters want during the recession.

You can understand why conservatives here would want to seize on any evidence from any source to create optimism for their embattled cause and their shrinking party vehicle, the GOP. But unless they want to associate themselves with the relative success of anti-immigrant or neo-fascist parties in the EU elections, they should probably look somewhere else.

E.J. Dionne, Jr.’ “Harry and Louise Have Changed” in today’s WaPo explores the strategic implications of the fact that comprehensive health coverage for all Americans means “fifty million new customers” to the industry. It is an important point, and one which gives significant leverage to the reform movement. Not that the insurance companies won’t fight the public option, forced coverage for pre-existing conditions and other specific reforms with a multimillion dollar ad campaign. However, as Dionne explains:

Many have expressed amazement that the interest groups historically opposed to fixing the health system seem ready to work with the reformers. Their public-spiritedness reflects enlightened self-interest: The health system is so unstable that even the drug industry and the insurance companies are worried that it will crash on top of them.
Health-care reform could bail out these interests by adding the currently uninsured — fast approaching 50 million people — to their customer base and by preventing more individuals and employers from dropping insurance altogether…Leaders of the health industry know that unless more government money flows into the system, they will suffer along with everyone else.

It’s a survival issue, and they know they need government help to stay afloat. They will fight the public option, but they know that some form of expanded government health coverage is inevitable. Still every health insurance company, hopes to get a share of the 50 million new customers. Dionne says the real fight in congress will be about cost containment, and he concludes “So by all means, let’s welcome the drug and insurance companies to the health-care bargaining table. But let’s also remember that they are sitting at that table as a matter of urgent necessity.”
Lisa Girion riffed on the same topic in the Sunday L.A. Times, explaining that

The customer base for private insurance has slipped since 2000, when soaring premiums began driving people out. The recession has accelerated the problem. But even after the economy recovers, the downward spiral is expected to continue for years as baby boomers become eligible for Medicare — and stop buying private insurance.
…The industry’s real trouble begins in 2011, when 79 million baby boomers begin turning 65. Health insurers stand to lose a huge slice of their commercially insured enrollment (estimated at 162 million to 172 million people) over the next two decades to Medicare, the government-funded health insurance program for seniors

Meanwhile John Harwood reports in The New York Times “The Caucus” that a new “sense of inevitability” about health care reform has taken root, as key political leaders and interest groups begin an earnest search for consensus. Regarding funding for reforms, Harwood adds:

No one has spelled out how to finance the roughly $1 trillion over 10 years for an overhaul that would provide care to the uninsured. But two recent Obama White House shifts have made that easier.
First, Mr. Obama vowed to find another $200 billion to $300 billion in savings from Medicare and Medicaid, beyond the $300 billion or so already proposed. That would leave lawmakers needing about $500 billion in higher taxes.
Second, Mr. Obama signaled that he could support acquiring part of that money from limiting the existing tax exclusion for employer-provided health benefits — a concept he criticized Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, for proposing in the 2008 presidential campaign. Taxing only the most lavish 10 percent of benefit plans would raise an additional $336 billion in income taxes, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

Via Consortium News, Alternet leads today with an article by Robert Parry, “119 Million Americans Want a Public Health Option — Why Aren’t Politicians Listening?” Parry discusses Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s assertion at Politico that,

“As many as 119 million Americans would shift from private coverage to the government plan,” Grassley wrote in a column for Politico.com. That migration, Grassley said, would “put America on the path toward a completely government-run health care system. … Eventually, the government plan would overtake the entire market.”
Grassley’s logic is that so many Americans would prefer a government-run plan that the private health insurance industry would collapse or become a shadow of its current self. That, in turn, would lead even more Americans entering the government plan, making private insurance even less viable.

Wait a minute. Polls indicate millions are happy with their current insurance, so where does the 119 million figure come from? Are they so happy with their current plan that they would be willing to switch to a public plan just for kicks? Perhaps Grassley’s argument is based on some other factor. In one of the more revealing graphs, Parry also notes,

…Grassley’s various political action committees have collected nearly $1.3 million in donations from the industries related to the health insurance debate, according to OpenSecrets.org. Grassley’s top four donor groups were Health ($411,956); Insurance ($307,348); Pharmaceuticals ($233,850); and Hospitals ($197,137). Eighth on Grassley’s donor list were HMOs at $130,684.

Today’s Wall St. Journal ‘Review and Outlook’ section has a more thougthful critique, “Obama’s Health Cost Illusion,” which notes:

Now the White House — especially budget chief Peter Orszag — claims there is new cause for hope. The magic key is the dramatic variations in per patient health spending among U.S. regions. Often there is no relationship between spending and the quality of care, according to a vast body of academic research, most of it coming out of Dartmouth College. If the highest spending areas could be sanded down to the lowest spending areas, about 30% in “waste,” or $700 billion each year, would be saved. More than enough to pay for ObamaCare. Or so the theory goes.
But — how? Mr. Orszag’s ideas include more health information technology; emphasizing prevention and healthy living; rejiggering reimbursement policies so doctors and hospitals are paid more for quality care; and funding federal research that compares the effectiveness of medical treatments. These are the lovable bromides of all politicians, and some of them may or may not improve health overall. But there’s scant evidence that any of them will ever save real money.

Most worrisome of all, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich writes in Salon today that “Big Pharma and Big Insurance go on the attack: Lobbyists are working behind the scenes to kill the public option in the healthcare bill. And they’re succeeding.” Says Reich:

So they’re pulling out all the stops — pushing Democrats and a handful of so-called moderate Republicans who say they’re in favor of a public option to support legislation that would include it in name only. One of their proposals is to break up the public option into small pieces under multiple regional third-party administrators that would have little or no bargaining leverage. A second is to give the public option to states where Big Pharma and Big Insurance can easily buy off legislators and officials, as they’ve been doing for years. A third is to bind the public plan to the same rules that private insurers have already wangled, thereby making it impossible for the public plan to put competitive pressure on the insurers.

Reich’s challenge ought to send reform advocates to the barracades:

This is it, folks. The concrete is being mixed and about to be poured. And after it’s poured and hardens, universal healthcare will be with us for years to come in whatever form it now takes. Let your representative and senators know you want a public option without conditions or triggers — one that gives the public insurer bargaining leverage over drug companies and that pushes insurers to do what they’ve promised to do. Don’t wait until the concrete hardens and we’ve lost this battle.

Yesterday when trolling regional newspaper websites, I ran across an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution with this depressingly familiar intro:

State government incentives offered to lure technology company NCR to Georgia are worth at least $96 million, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis. That is $36 million more than the state estimated when the deal was announced last week.
The $96 million tally does not include another part of the incentive package, a state grant. Officials confirmed late last week that Georgia has offered the grant but refused to say how much money is involved.

Everything about those two graphs is typical of the game of mega-project competition among the states, where taxpayer subsidies of corporations always seem to creep ever upward as time goes by, and with state officials happy to boast about the payoff (in this case, 2,120 jobs split between two locations) for their pinstriped safaris, but less forthcoming about the costs.
The NCR deal was significant because it was the first big Georgia corporate giveaway under a new law designed to cut special deals for big projects–the famous “mega-deals” that get headlines and provide rich press conference opportunities for pols (usually a trifecta of investment announcements, ground-breakings and ribbon-cuttings where the same relative handful of jobs gets feted repeatedly). As the AJC story noted::

Georgia offered the incentives at a time when the state is desperately in need of cash as the recession depresses tax revenues. But economic development experts said it would have been virtually impossible to attract a major employer without a lucrative package of incentives.

Anyone familiar with this issue knows, of course, that the kind of “economic development experts” who perpetually justify big corporate subsidies are often the very people who are paid to put them together, working for elected officials who don’t much think corporations should have to pay taxes in the first place.
The sad thing is that Georgia used to be very proud of refusing to engage in race-to-the-bottom competitions to thrown public money at high-visibility corporate relocation projects. When I was working there in the 1980s, state officials scoffed at our neighbors in Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina for trading years and years of revenues for foreign-owned auto plants whose owners demanded massive concessions in multi-state negotiations. Indeed, the state’s tradition of resisting special-interest tax breaks was symbolized by a sales tax exemption for purchases of crab bait by commercial fishermen–which was famous because it was the only such exemption that had ever gotten through the state fiscal watchdogs in the General Assembly.
Those days are long gone. The NCR deal almost looks efficient compared to the $410 million package put together by Georgia in 2006 to get a 2,500-job plant built along the Alabama border (and probably employing many Alabama taxpayers) by Kia.
Worse yet, you get the sense that economic-development-via-corporate-subsidies–a practice so ancient and notorious in the South that opposing it was a primary impetus for the original Populist movement–is getting less controversial, even, or perhaps especially, at a time when state government officials are cutting essential services to balance their books.
A separate AJC article yesterday on the NCR deal ought to come with a Raiders of the Lost Ark sound-track to illustrate its tale of swashbuckling GA bureaucrats outpandering those in Ohio, NCR’s previous home. Wonder how it would all come across if the actual costs had to be reflected: “Yessir, we’ll ante up 5,000 kids losing health insurance, and raise you a freeze in school construction. And have we mentioned we don’t like unions around here?”
Check out this 2007 article by John Sugg in the libertarian magazine Reason for a good if intermittently nauseating account of the use of corporate subsidies as a development tool in the South. He managed to find a number of “economic development experts” who don’t think these giveaways pay for themselves, or are actually necessary for development, or are really much more than an especially perverse form of public financing for the campaigns of the politicians who sign the deals and take the credit.