Progressives preparing to engage in the battle for health care reform can get a little basic training at the Center for American Progress web pages, where two articles make it clear that taxpayers bear a hefty burden as a result of inaction on health care reform. In “The Cost of Doing Nothing on Health Care,” Peter Harbage, CAP health care policy advisor and CAP Research Associate Ben Furnas explain:

Our analysis shows that the broken health care system will cost us between $124 billion and $248 billion in lost productivity this year alone due to the almost 52 million uninsured Americans who live shorter lives and have poorer health. In fact an analysis by the Institute of Medicine found that, “the estimated benefits across society in healthy years of life gained by providing health insurance coverage are likely greater than the additional social costs of providing coverage to those who now lack it.”
These findings are based on a 2008 analysis by the New America Foundation, which found that the national economic cost from lost productivity in 2007 was between $104 billion and $207 billion. Economic costs from lost productivity have increased by about 20 percent during the two years since the New America Foundation conducted its analysis. The low bound of this estimate represents just the cost from uninsured Americans’ shorter lifespan. The high bound represents both the cost of shortened lifespan and the loss of productivity due to the reduced health of the uninsured.

The authors source their data from Institute of Medicine’s report on the economic cost of uninsurance, the Congressional Budget Office and the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research and North Carolina Institute of Medicine.
In the second CAP article David M. Cutler, Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University, offers some interesting statistics in his summary report “Health System Modernization Will Reduce the Deficit”

Health care modernization involves four broad steps: investing in infrastructure; measuring what is done and how well it is performed; rewarding high-value care, not just high-volume care; and realigning consumer incentives to encourage better health behavior.
This report (PDF here) analyzes how such reforms would affect the federal budget over time. It shows that health system modernization could increase productivity growth in health care by 1.5 to 2.0 percentage points annually starting in four to five years. The impact of such productivity improvement would be substantial. The federal government would save nearly $600 billion in health spending over the next decade, and $9 trillion over the next 25 years. Over time, these savings would more than offset the cost of providing insurance coverage to all Americans and put the United States on a path to long-term fiscal balance.

Of course the human costs of not enacting meaningful reforms would be absolutely staggering. As the debate over the economic costs of health care reform intensifies this summer, however, reform advocates would do well to note these figures in marshalling their arguments.

In a move that places yet another dent in conservative claims that Barack Obama is a hyper-partisan extremist who was lying about bipartisanship during the campaign, the President announced today that he was tapping New York Republican congressman John McHugh to serve as Secretary of the Army. With two other GOPers in his Cabinet (Gates and LaHood), and another recently agreeing to become Ambassador to China (Huntsman), you have to start wondering why so many prominent Republicans are agreeing to join the administration of this Democrat Socialist.
Political junkies are already speculating about the special election to fill McHugh’s House seat; his historically Republican district was carried comfortably by Obama last year.
But in the meantime, it is interesting that Obama is outdoing most of his predecessors in reaching out to the opposition party for high appointments, inside and outside the Cabinet.
Bush 43 had his one token Democrat, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta (he publicly touted Sen. John Breaux as his personal favorite for Energy Secretary, but that’s probably because he wanted to flatter him for his help in the Senate).
Clinton had Defense Secretary Bill Cohen, and another GOPer, David Gergen, served as his chief of staff for a while.
Bush 41 had no prominent Democrats in his administration. Reagan had a very nominal Democrat, arch-conservative Bill Bennett, as Education Secretary, and another, Jeane Kirkpatrick, as UN ambassador. Carter had a sort-of Republican, Energy Secretary Jim Schlesinger. I won’t go through the whole modern list, but Ford had one Democrat in his Cabinet, as did Nixon (the soon-to-be Republican John Connally); Kennedy and Johnson had two, though one, Defense Secretary Robert McNamera was very nominally Republican.
Democrats nervous about Obama’s Republicans at the Pentagon should remember that FDR picked Republicans for both of his military cabinet positions, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. And actually, two other famously progressive figures, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and Agriculture Secretary (and later vice-president) Henry Wallace, were nominally Republican upon joining Roosevelt’s Cabinet, though both endorsed FDR in 1932.
What makes Obama’s GOP appointments significant is that they are occurring in an era of extraordinary partisan and ideological polarization; none of his Republicans have been nominal types or endorsed his candidacy last year; one of them, Jon Huntsman, was reportedly getting ready to run against Obama in 2012.
Nobody knows, of course, whether any of these appointees will come out of the Obama administration as Republicans after listening to their party-mates apply every term of abuse in the English language to their boss and their administration’s policies day in and day out so long as they serve. If any of them do flip, it will serve as a nice symbol of Obama’s efforts to build a majority coalition on the foundation of GOP ruins.

The vicious circle in which the Republican Party currently finds itself is nicely illustrated by a new survey out from Gallup that looks at the ethnic composition of self-identified Democrats, Republicans and Independents. Democrats are Independents are quite diverse: 36% of Democrats and 27% of indies are Hispanic, African-American or from some other non-white ethnic groups. The number for Republicans is 11%. And of the 89% of Republicans who are non-Hispanic whites, fully 63% self-identify as conservatives. Furthermore, about half of Republicans are non-Hispanic whites who attend church weekly or more (that category represents 25% of indies and 20% of Democrats).
Demography isn’t always destiny in politics, but it matters, and Republicans simply don’t look like the fastest growing categories of the U.S. population. The Gallup survey doesn’t get into age, but a recent Pew poll showed under-30 voters splitting 58-33 (with leaners) in favor of Democrats.
So it isn’t terribly surprising that the faces and voices most associated with the national Republican Party belong to Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich: old, white conservative men. And whether it’s a matter of supply or demand, it’s natural that the latter two of these gentlemen have come to specialize in a sort of white identity politics, representing the smoldering resentment of some white folks–particularly men–towards those uppity people of color with their strange cultures.
Former Republican congressman Tom Davis made an interesting comment recently about the psychology of his party’s base that does a lot to explain its trajectory towards self-isolation: “I think the grass roots right now is in an ornery mood — ‘we are who we are.'”
That’s not a group of people who are terribly interested in greater diversity, demographically or ideologically. And in the long run, the more they insist on being “who we are,” the less anyone else will consider joining them.

Yesterday, J.P. Green concluded his post on health care reform politics with a warning to fellow Dems to get their act together to confront the coming ‘tidal wave’ of propaganda from health care providers. Bernie Horn reports in his post “We’ll Win Health Care in 2009 with a Strong, Coordinated, Progressive Movement” at the Campaign for America’s Future ‘Blog for Our Future’ that progressives are doing just that. As Horn notes,

This year, progressive organizations are ready to fight. They have the money, boots on the ground, and the passion to win.
First, the money: Progressive groups are poised to spend more than $82 million this year to enact legislation guaranteeing quality, affordable health care for all. This includes campaign funding that has been committed by Health Care for America Now; the two main labor federations, AFL-CIO and Change To Win; and mobilization groups such as MoveOn.org and Democracy for America. For progressives, that’s an unprecedented financial effort.
Second, the organizing: The Health Care for America Now (HCAN) coalition started last year with a bit more than 100 organizations. Today, it includes 1,000 groups that collectively represent over 30 million members. HCAN’s national campaign manager, Richard Kirsch, emphasizes that “the heart of this campaign is not inside the Beltway.” HCAN now has more than 140 paid organizers in 40 states working exclusively to build support for federal health care reform while other organizations, such as SEIU and CWA, have hundreds more organizers in the field.

Horn, Senior Fellow at Campaign for America’s Future and author of the book, “Framing the Future: How Progressive Values Can Win Elections and Influence People,” also quotes Eli Pariser, president of MoveOn.org:

The Bush years have taught progressives how to do political campaigns in a different way. It’s not enough to state your argument and hope for the best. You have to get out into the country and build constituencies in key districts and have the apparatus and enforce discipline.

Horn’s concluding cri du coeur:

Enough is enough! We will not allow the health care crisis to continue. We will not stand by as thousands or even millions of Americans inevitably die because they can’t afford health insurance. We will not calmly watch our friends and neighbors, and sometimes our families, be bankrupted by health care costs. We will not say it’s okay for private health insurance companies to enrich themselves at the expense of our wellbeing and our lives. We lost in 1994, but will not lose again.
This is our time. This is our chance.

If you want to understand just how pitbullish conservatives are feeling right now, consider this: Before Sonia Sotomayor makes her first appearance on Capitol Hill, and long before her first confirmation hearing, conservative activists are already pitching a public fit about the possibility that Republicans won’t filibuster her confirmation on the Senate floor months from now.
Politico’s Manu Raju has the story:

In a letter to be delivered to Senate Republicans Tuesday, more than 145 conservatives – including Grover Norquist, Richard Viguerie and Gary Bauer — call for a filibuster of Sotomayor’s nomination if that’s what it takes to force a “great debate” over judicial philosophy.
But in an interview with POLITICO, Manuel Miranda – who orchestrated the letter – went much farther, saying that Mitch McConnell should “consider resigning” as Senate minority leader if he can’t take a harder line on President Barack Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee.

If Miranda’s name rings a bell, it’s because he achieved some notoriety back in 2004 when he got fired from his Senate leadership job after he was caught hacking into the computer files of Democratic staffers and stealing thousands of internal documents. Sounds like Miranda hasn’t exactly mended his hyperpartisan ways.
The letter appears to have been motivated by anger at Senate Republicans who have been critical of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, among others, for over-the-top attacks on Sotomayor.
The not-so-subtle message is: don’t forget who’s the boss here!

The murder of Dr. George Tiller yesterday in the middle of Sunday services at his church in Kansas has been generally deplored by people on all sides of the abortion issue (some rather less convincingly than others). But it’s time to come to grips with the fact that violence against abortion providers is always a strong possibility, and is very likely to get worse.
While it’s not right to hold anti-abortion activists generally responsible for such acts of violence, there is no getting around what Damon Linker, an expert on the Cultural Right, calls the “radicalizing logic of pro-life rhetoric:”

If abortion truly is what the pro-life movement says it is — if it is the infliction of deadly violence against an innocent and defenseless human being — then doesn’t morality demand that pro-lifers act in any way they can to stop this violence? I mean, if I believed that a guy working in an office down the street was murdering innocent and defenseless human beings every day, and the governing authorities repeatedly refused to intervene on behalf of the victims, I might feel compelled to do something about it, perhaps even something unreasonable and irresponsible. Wouldn’t you?
This is the radicalizing logic of pro-life rhetoric.

I’d go a little further than Linker here. It’s important to remember that to sincere hard-core right-to-lifers, we are currently living in the moral equivalent to the Third Reich, happily conducting an annual Holocaust of murder; abortion clinics are death camps; Obama is Hitler; the Democratic Party is the Nazi Party; anti-abortion activists are the German Confessing Church or The Resistance; most Americans are either Nazis or complicit by laziness in monstrous evil. And if I shared their core premise that a fetus at any stage of development and under any circumstance is equivalent to a Jew being herded onto trains and sent to Auschwitz, and if I could somehow ignore the whole issue of the wishes and interests of that fetus’ mother, I’d probably feel the same way–pretty violently.
There’s a tendency of many pro-choice Americans to deny this “radicalizing logic,” in favor of dismissive theories that people who say they oppose abortion in all cases are just lying, or are hypocrites, or are misogynists, or are just culturally reactionary, or are terrified by sexuality. Some of them may be all these things, but there’s no reason to believe that many of these people aren’t sincere in their position on fetal life, and on the goal of ending legalized abortion as the alpha and omega of their own civic life. And so long as that is true, there will always be a significant risk of violence, particularly right now, when it’s beginning to sink in that the tantalizing possibility of overturning Roe v. Wade through Republican Supreme Court appointments is receding into the far distance.
But aside from efforts to brush away anti-abortion activists as yesterday’s news, there’s another misconception that must be addressed in the wake of Tiller’s murder: the idea that a “compromise” on abortion policy that eliminates “controversial” abortions like those performed by Tiller will make the risk of violence–yea, even the conflicts over abortion–go away. That is dangerous nonsense.
To anyone who really takes seriously the belief that (as articulated in the Republican National Convention Platform of 2008) “life begins at conception” and should be protected by law from that point, there is literally no difference in moral quality between the late-term abortions performed (where justified by health concerns) by George Tiller and any other abortion at any stage of pregnancy. And indeed, from that point of view, a woman taking a Plan B pill, if she has actually conceived (according to a very strict definition of that term), is just as much a “murderer” as Tiller, and just as deserving of violent intervention on her “victim’s” behalf, or of punishment. The only real difference is that Tiller, like every other abortion provider on the planet, is a “mass murderer,” so stopping him–by legal or illegal means–is relatively more justified and will have a more salutory effect.
But “compromising” to outlaw “disturbing” abortions like those performed by Tiller just eliminates one mass murderer among many hundreds, from the serious RTL perspective. And the whole focus on relatively rare late-term abortions or on very rare intact dilation and extraction procedures–a.k.a. “partial-birth” abortions–by anti-abortionists is just tactical propaganda aimed at the mushy middle of abortion opinion. Demonizing George Tiller as opposed to any other “mass murderer,” or for that matter, waving fetus posters, is simply intended to create a “wedge” whereby the population is “educated” in the direction of opposing abortions generally.
So for pro-choice Americans, regardless of their exact position on abortion, the idea that “compromise” can end violence or even “end the culture wars” over abortion is completely illusory and arguably immoral, if you believe that women should generally have first and final say over their own pregnancies. Sacrificing fundamental rights on the altar of phony “compromises” is, by most standards, both immoral and ineffective, as Americans learned in the long run-up to the Civil War.
So what is to be done about the risk of violence? Ann Friedman at The American Prospect suggests today that the Justice Department reactivate a task force on violence against health care providers that was created under the Clinton administration but shelved under Bush.
That makes sense. It also makes sense to pay anti-abortion activists the respect of taking seriously their radical views, and even of defending their right to express them in ways that don’t threaten or intimidate, much less shoot and kill, abortion providers or the women who have every right to obtain their services. The “radicalizing logic” of the the right-to-life movement isn’t going away and can’t be abetted short of surrender. We all need to learn to live with that reality, and try to keep the peace as best we can.

Contending forces are streaming on to the field for what is certain to be the fiercest battle over health care reform ever fought. The health and economic security of millions of Americans are at stake, along with the fate of a huge industry and many billions of dollars. One important change over the last great battle, over “Hillarycare”: Thanks primarily to the blogosphere, this time around there will be a surfeit of good information about reform options immediately available to health care consumers who want to make informed choices. Those who want to get up to speed on the politics of health care reform will find no shortage of good reporting on the eve of the battle.
Here’s the basic timetable, according to a succinct summary by USA Today‘s Susan Page:

This year’s fast-track timetable on health care calls for leaders of key congressional committees to unveil legislation this month, debate it next month and pass it before leaving for the summer recess in August. Final passage would follow in September or October, before next year’s elections start to complicate things.
That, at least, is the plan.

Deepak Bhargava’s Huffpo article “Health Insurance You Can Trust,” makes a short, but tight case for insisting that there be a public insurance option. Bhargava notes:

According to the Harris Poll only 7% of people judge private health insurance companies to be “honest and trustworthy.”…a Lake Research poll found that a whopping 73% of voters want everyone to have a choice of a public health insurance plan while only 15% want everyone to have private insurance.

Bhargava recounts a familiar litany of horror stories of care denied and economic disaster for consumers and adds,

A Harvard study found that 50 percent of all bankruptcy filings were partly the result of medical expenses. Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem.

At Daily Kos, RDemocrat has a long post that covers a lot of interesting ground regarding the politics of health reform. The author makes a strong case for establishing a single-payer system, which most observers believe is off the political table this year. But he also provides a wealth of facts for challenging the argument that the private sector can best deliver quality affordable coverage, including:

Fact One: The United States ranks 23rd in infant mortality, down from 12th in 1960 and 21st in 1990
Fact Two: The United States ranks 20th in life expectancy for women down from 1st in 1945 and 13th in 1960
Fact Three: The United States ranks 21st in life expectancy for men down from 1st in 1945 and 17th in 1960.
Fact Four: The United States ranks between 50th and 100th in immunizations depending on the immunization. Overall US is 67th, right behind Botswana
Fact Five: Outcome studies on a variety of diseases, such as coronary artery disease, and renal failure show the United States to rank below Canada and a wide variety of industrialized nations.

Meanwhile the U.S. Senate’s two Democratic heavyweights on health care, Ted Kennedy and Max Baucus are talking unity, despite their differences about providing a public option. Kennedy is leading the charge for “a robust public public health care plan,” while Senator Chuck Shumer reportedly has a compromise in the form of a watered down public option Baucus may find acceptable. Baucus wants a bill that passes with a filibuster-proof 60 vote majority, while Kennedy and other Senate liberals are ready to rumble with 51 votes in the budget reconciliation maneuver. According to a head count by Open Left‘s Chris Bowers, the 51 votes are in place.
Bring it on. Whatever it takes to put an end to profit-driven health care in America and the unending stream of horror stories, a few of which were recounted by Bhargava in his HuffPo post, will be long overdue. Given the amount of money at stake, we can safely assume that we are about to see a tidal wave of health care provider propaganda on a scale never before experienced. Democrats of all stripes have two choices this summer: get rolled or get unified and bring their “A” game.

There’s a nasty undertone to much of the opposition to Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court that she is what some people call a “diversity hire”: someone selected for a position to achieve a certain demographic balance in a particular work-place, regardless of qualifications. We are led to believe that such extraneous factors weren’t considered when the 106 white men (out of 110 total appointments) who have served on the Court were selected.
But as legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin explains in The New Yorker today, there have always been “diversity” factors heavily influence Supreme Court appointments, dating back to the Court’s very beginnings:

In the early days of the republic, when regional disputes were the foremost conflict of the era, nominees were generally defined by their home turfs. So Presidents came to honor an informal tradition of preserving a New England seat, a Virginia seat, a Pennsylvania seat, and a New York seat on the Court. In the nineteenth century, as a torrent of European immigrants transformed American society, religious differences took on a new significance, and Presidents used Supreme Court appointments to recognize the new arrivals’ growing power. In 1836, Andrew Jackson made Roger B. Taney the first occupant of what became known as the Catholic seat on the Court, and that tradition carried forward intermittently for more than a century, with Edward White, Joseph McKenna, Pierce Butler, Frank Murphy, and William J. Brennan, Jr., occupying the chair. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis D. Brandeis, establishing the Jewish seat, which later went, with brief overlapping periods, to Benjamin N. Cardozo, Felix Frankfurter, and Abe Fortas.

In other words, the “diversity” considerations that affected the Court’s composition evolved over time, and are still evolving, as women and African-Americans have finally achieved representation. Meanwhile, some of the factors that used to matter don’t any more, as today’s increasingly Catholic SCOTUS (Sotomayor will make it six of nine) illustrates. It’s unlikely that when John Paul Stevens retires, people will take of the need to maintain the “Protestant seat” on the Court.
But the fact that Sotomayor’s gender and ethnicity affected her appointment to the Court makes her part of a very old story, Toobin reminds us:

Earlier Presidents didn’t apologize for preserving the geographic balance, and this one need not be reluctant to acknowledge that Hispanics, the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic group, who by 2050 will represent a third of the American people, deserve a place at this most exclusive table for nine. (Nor, of course, did he note that the nomination was in part to satisfy Hispanic voters—the electoral benefit being another constant among Presidents.) As Barack Obama knows better than most, it is a sign of a mature and healthy society when the best of formerly excluded groups have the opportunity to earn their way to the top.

Indeed, “mature and healthy” minds don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that a Hispanic woman must be disqualified for service on the Supreme Court, other than as a “diversity hire.”

Today Alternet gives George Lakoff the lead article, “Conservatives Are Waging a War on Empathy — We Can’t Let Them Win.” Lakoff’s concern here is what he sees as an attack on one of the Democratic Party’s defining values, through “reframing.” As Lakoff explains:

The Sotomayor nomination has given radical conservatives new life. They have launched an attack that is nominally aimed at Judge Sotomayor. But it is really a coordinated stealth attack — on President Obama’s central vision, on progressive thought itself, and on Republicans who might stray from the conservative hard line.
…Empathy is at the heart of progressive thought. It is the capacity to put oneself in the shoes of others — not just individuals, but whole categories of people: one’s countrymen, those in other countries, other living beings, especially those who are in some way oppressed, threatened, or harmed. Empathy is the capacity to care, to feel what others feel, to understand what others are facing and what their lives are like. Empathy extends well beyond feeling to understanding, and it extends beyond individuals to groups, communities, peoples, even species. Empathy is at the heart of real rationality, because it goes to the heart of our values, which are the basis of our sense of justice.

Lakoff sees the GOP reframing of empathy as a sort of code for the feelings of the ‘bleeding heart liberal.’ As Lakoff puts it:

Empathy in this sense is a threat to conservatism, which features individual, not social, responsibility and a strict, punitive form of “justice.” It is no surprise that empathy would be a major conservative target in the Sotomayor evaluation.
But the target is not empathy as it really exists. Instead, the conservatives are reframing empathy to make it attackable. Their “empathy” is idiosyncratic, personal feeling for an individual, presumably the defendant in a legal case. With “empathy” reframed in this way, Charles Krauthammer can say, echoing Karl Rove, “Justice is not about empathy.” The argument goes like this: Empathy is a matter personal feelings. Personal feelings should not be the basis of a judicial decision of the Supreme Court. Therefore, “justice is not about empathy.” Reframe the word “empathy” and it not only disqualifies Sotomayor; it delegitimizes Obama’s central moral principle, his approach to government, his understanding of the nature of our democracy, and progressive politics in general.

Lakoff goes on to discuss the spins on empathy by various conservatives, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, Newt Gingrich and G. Gordon Liddy. But Lakoff feels it’s important to understand the subtext of their attacks:

The real target here goes beyond Sotomayor. In the last election, conservative populists moved toward Obama. Conservative populists are working people, mostly white men, who have conservative views of the family, of masculinity, and of the military, and who have bought into the idea of the ‘liberal elite” as looking down on them. Right now, they are hurting economically, losing their jobs and their homes. Empathy is something they need. The racist card is an attempt to revive their fears of affirmative action, fears of their jobs — and their pride — being taken by minorities and women. The racist attack has a political purpose, holding onto conservative populists. The overt form of the old conservative argument is made regularly these days: liberalism is identity politics.

But the real danger, according to Lakoff is Democratic complacency in underestimating the power of the Republican echo chamber:

Radical conservatives know that Sotomayor will be confirmed. They also know that their very understanding of the world is being threatened by Obama’s success. But they have a major strength. They have their message machine intact, with trained spokespeople booked on TV and radio shows all over the country. Attacking Sotomayor, even when they know she will win, allows them to rally their forces and get swing-voting conservatives thinking their way again.

And the needed response by Dems — to confront the challenge head-on:

Democrats should go on offense. They need to rally behind empathy — real empathy, not empathy reframed as emotion and personal feeling. They need to speak regularly about empathy as being the basis of our democracy. They need to point out that empathy leads one to notice real social and systemic causes of our troubles and to notice when and how judicial decisions and legislation can harm the most vulnerable of our countrymen. And finally that empathy is the reason that we have the principles of freedom and fairness — which are necessary components of justice…Above all, Democrats should be aware that the attack on Sotomayor is not just about Sotomayor. It is an attack on the basis of our democracy and must be answered.

A worthy challenge, and one which Dems should meet, lest we cede the ability to define our core values to our adversaries.

One of the settled rituals of the Republican Party is to refer constantly and almost exclusively to Ronald Reagan as the lodestar of conservative ideology, communications and governance. It’s gotten to the point where you half-expect a Republican audience to quickly bow heads at every mention of his name, like some Christians do at church when Jesus is mentioned.
But for all the hagiography, memories of Reagan’s actual career are sometimes hazy or inaccurate, and don’t offer a lot of specific guidance for political strategy, other than “optimism” and “winning.” That’s why Noemie Emery’s long article in The Weekly Standard , offering Reagan’s pre-presidential politics between his unsuccessful 1976 primary bid and his victory in 1980 as a template for today’s Republicans, is of particular interest.
The parallels between the Republicans of 1977 and those of 2009 noted by Emery are pretty obvious. They’d just lost two straight national elections after a period of great optimism about their ability to create an enduring majority. They’d lost the White House after holding it for eight years, and were in a weak minority position in both Houses of Congress. Emery doesn’t mention this, but they were also in the shadow of a intensely disliked former president, though the Ford interregnum had helped put Nixon in the past. And there were all sorts of messy intraparty disputes that had been simmering for a while.
She does not, however, mention (beyond an exaggeration of Carter’s political luster upon taking office) some dynamics about the temporarily-ascendant Democrats of 1977 that aren’t necessarily paralleled today. Carter had very nearly lost the 1976 election to Gerald Ford after holding a huge early lead. His election was heavily dependent on winning southern states reacting to his “historic” candidacy as the first Deep South nominee since the Civil War–states that no knowledgeable observer expected to remain in the Democratic column in future elections. The ideological “sorting out” of the two parties that began in the 1960s was well under way, a development that offered nothing but grief to the ideologically diverse Democrats in the short term. And Democrats had controlled both Houses of Congress for twenty consecutive years.
It’s also probably not a stretch to observe that Jimmy Carter’s political skills–particularly in his dealings with Congress and with fellow-Democrats–were not quite up to the standards set so far by Barack Obama. Jimmy Carter’s image of fecklessness at home and abroad grew sharper with each year of his presidency, and was a large factor in Reagan’s 1980 victory (there’s a reason, after all, that Republicans still talk about Carter’s brief presidency as an object-lesson, much as Democrats will be talking about George W. Bush’s longer tenure for years to come). It will come as a rather gigantic surprise if Barack Obama faces a major challenge to his renomination, as Ted Kennedy posed to Jimmy Carter in 1980, or has to deal with a third-party candidate stripping away a significant number of liberal votes, as John Anderson did to Carter in the general election.
Moreover, Emery’s account of Reagan’s ideological positioning and messaging doesn’t seem immediately relevant to the needs of Republicans today. As Steve Benen observes today:

Emerie’s article doesn’t exactly offer modern Republican leaders a road map. According to the piece, Reagan, for example, spent much of 1977 emphasizing a hawkish approach to the Soviet Union. In 2009, there is no Cold War. In 1977, Reagan also encouraged the party to work in concert with the fledgling religious right movement. However, the religious right is no longer fledgling, it’s already part of the GOP coalition, and isn’t much of a movement anymore.

I’d add that even Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric and domestic agenda is hardly a panacea today. In 1977 the federal government had been steadily acquiring barnacles for 35 years. The top federal income tax rate was 70%. The number of violent crimes had more than doubled in the previous ten years, as had the number of Americans on public assistance. Just as importantly, the conservative domestic strategies that Reagan championed seemed fresh and new; neither of the previous three Republican presidents, Ford, Nixon and Eisenhower, had done much to change the New Deal or Great Society programs.
The spending buildup by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress underway may ultimately produce a comeback for anti-government rhetoric, but probably not so long as the economy is in a deep recession, and if the economy improves, it’s unlikely there will be much demand for a quick return to Republican governance.
If, of course, the entire Obama agenda dismally fails, or if there is some foreign-policy-oriented catastrophe, then obviously Republicans will have an opportunity to mount a big comeback. But that’s not a strategy for Republicans; it’s just a thinly disguised desire for bad times to get worse.
Emery’s more compelling set of lessons for today’s Republicans flow from her account of Reagan’s leadership style, which she breaks down into four components: (1) a focus on large central themes rather than individual issues or events; (2) a gracious and civil tone devoid of attacks on the opposition; (3) a relentless tone of optimism and a focus on the future; and (4) an ability to build up the conservative movement while building out a big-tent Republican Party into diverse constituencies.
But the question must be asked: are these qualities very evident in today’s breed of Republican leaders? I don’t think so. Today’s Republicans largely think of Reagan as a political winner with a charming personality who was a rigid ideologue. They don’t like to talk about his serial backdowns in budget confrontations; the two tax increases he signed during his first term; his appointment of “turncoat” Supreme Court nominees O’Conner and Kennedy; or his pattern of giving social conservatives rhetorical comfort rather than actual victories. And for all their admiration of his sunny personality, civility and optimism, they don’t seem capable of emulating these characteristics. Look at how the putative Republican presidential field for 2012 is behaving towards the Obama administration, towards Republican “moderates,” and most recently, towards Sonia Sotomayor, and see how much sunniness and civility and tolerance is being exhibited.
And that brings me to one final observation about Emery’s advice to Republicans: you can’t emulate “Reagan in opposition” without someone who is vaguely like Ronald Reagan. In 1977, Reagan had been the unquestioned leader of the conservative movement for a decade, and a major celebrity since at least the early 1940s. The conservative movement today is probably as factionalized as the GOP as a whole was in 1977, and the closest things they have to universally recognized celebrities are the serially-damaged Newt Gingrich and the highly-controversial Sarah Palin. In 2008 Mike Huckabee made a brief bid for the sunny-side Reagan heritage of the GOP, but is now sounding like a bitter and angry insurgent. The party’s most visible leaders at the moment are Rush Limbaugh, who spends much of his time acting as an ideological commissar lashing Republicans into craven submission, and Dick Cheney–chief of staff to Gerald Ford when he defeated Reagan in 1976–who could hardly be described as sunny or optimistic.
While Noemie Emery has injected some real history into the hagiography of Ronald Reagan, it’s by no means clear that his current worshipers are willing or able to follow his path.