Note: this is a special guest post from Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute. We hope to hear from other Democrats offering varying views on the political and policy strategy challenges facing the Obama administration.
We’ll find out soon enough whether President-elect Obama is as adept at governing as he is at campaigning. But this much is already certain: Barack Obama has presided over a spectacular presidential transition – maybe the best in modern times.
In picking a crew of political heavyweights to run his administration, Obama has radiated both self-confidence and seriousness about governing. And in recent weeks, he has crystallized the key dilemmas facing the country with greater candor and specificity than ever before.
Yesterday, for example, the President-elect promised to reform Medicare and Social Security. “This, by the way is where there are going to be very difficult choices and issues of sacrifice and responsibility and duty,” Obama told The Washington Post. “You have to have a president who is willing to spend some political capital on this. And I intend to spend some.”
Now that’s audacity. Despite some vague rhetorical gestures toward social security reform during the campaign, Obama gave little reason to believe he would give high priority to modernizing America’s mammoth social insurance programs. This might strike some as nothing more than a bow to fiscal reality, but it’s a reality that many in his party have had a hard time accepting.
Looking back ruefully on his White House tenure, President Bush has conceded that his 2005 push to “reform” Social Security was a miserable flop. The public’s negative verdict, however, had the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing the “just say no” reflex that grips many liberals when the subject of entitlement reform comes up.
But Obama, like President Clinton before him, knows that the unsustainable growth of retirement and especially health care costs, poses a threat not only to America’s fiscal health, but also to progressive government itself. Already, the big entitlements consume more than half the federal budget. If unchecked, their automatic spending growth will squeeze out space for public investments in health care, education, childrens’ well-being, public safety and everything else progressives care about.
As Obama told the Post, social security is, relatively speaking, the easy fix. Its funding gap is modest (“only” around $4.3 trillion, according to the Social Security trustees) compared to Medicare’s (an estimated $36 trillion). The menu of options for closing that gap while at the same time strengthening Social Security’s ability to lift seniors out of poverty are well known.
Obama, for instance, has called for raising the cap on salary subjected to the social security payroll tax. But rebalancing the generational compact embedded in social security will also require action on the benefit side of the equation. The best approach, developed by Bob Pozen, is the “progressive indexing” of social security benefits. It would trim benefits only for well-off retirees who are less reliant on Social Security than middle- and low-income people. The proposal is detailed in Memos to the New President, a “big idea” book the Progressive Policy Institute released this week.
While social security essentially presents a demographic challenge – fewer workers supporting a rapid expansion of the nation’s elderly population – fixing Medicare is a more complicated matter. In addition to the worsening “dependency ratio” as the baby boomers flood into retirement, the costs of medical services themselves are growing much faster than the economy. Unless the Obama Administration can find ways to reduce the rate of health care cost growth, even as it expands coverage to the uninsured, the United States is headed toward a fiscal trainwreck.
Obama also announced his intention to hold a fiscal responsibility summit. He clearly recognizes that America’s faces a dual economic crisis. Our immediate challenge is to get credit markets working again, and stimulate the economy to reduce the severity and duration of today’s recession. The long-term challenge is to impose discipline on the federal budget, so that America’s burgeoning debts won’t undercut our future growth or shrink our childrens’ economic prospects.
Striking the right balance between the short- and long-term needs of the country will be the central drama of the Obama administration. It will require the President to pursue ostensibly contradictory policies over the next four years: first, a spending surge, then, as the economy starts to recover, a smart pirouette toward fiscal restraint. It will be a tricky maneuver and will require consummate political skill. Obama’s full-throated embrace of fiscal realism suggests he is up to the task.

No, I didn’t watch George W. Bush’s “farewell address” last night, figuring my blood pressure was high enough. Reading it today brings no particular insights, other than the feeling that Bush’s once-proud claims have now become bits and pieces of self-exculpatory evidence of the sort that criminal defendents offer at sentencing hearings.
Spencer Ackerman, in the Washington Independent, offers the best brief take I’ve seen:

It’s hard to remember, but in 2000, Bush’s campaign plane was called Accountability One. Nearly nine years later, his speech is about why he shouldn’t be judged by his disastrous results, but instead by what was in his heart.
If there’s any real parting gift that George W. Bush has given conservatives, it’s that they can no longer use Jimmy Carter’s presidency as a laugh line. Carter never seriously argued that his presidency succeeded because only 3000 people died from terrorism on American soil while he was president. Indeed, the speech’s most inspiring stories are about people who persevered despite his policies:
“We see America’s character in Dr. Tony Recasner, a principal who opened a new charter school from the ruins of Hurricane Katrina … We’ve seen it in Staff Sergeant Aubrey McDade, who charged into an ambush in Iraq and rescued three of his fellow Marines.”

Indeed, the only “results” Bush could cite in his speech was something that didn’t happen, another terrorist attack on the United States. I’ve always felt that this “accomplishment” was ultimately the reason he was re-elected in 2004, even if few Americans really bought the idea that invading Iraq had cowed or distracted al Qaeda into inaction. But eventually the visible results of Bush’s policies overwhelmed his one invisible claim to success. And that’s why he bids us farewell offering the plea of all failed leaders: I Meant Well.

In all the obsessive focus over the economic stimulus package, somewhat lost in the shuffle has been Barack Obama’s plan to overhaul the health care system. The CW is that the budgetary resources and political capital necessary to pass the stimulus bill are so large that any steps towards Universal Health Coverage (UHC) must be delayed until some indefinite point in the future.
In TNR’s new health care policy blog, The Treatment, Jonathan Cohn assesses the CW and suggests that a major health care system reform proposal could still arrive later this year:

[E]verything I’ve heard from both the transition team and Capitol Hill suggests nobody is backing off major reform yet. Staff and advisers are proceeding under the assumption that it remains a “year one” priority for Obama. That means they are continuing to do what they’ve been doing for the last few months: Crunching numbers, consulting experts, meeting with interested parties–all in the name of fleshing out a plan that Congress could formally consider sometime before year’s end.

Whether or not that’s accurate–and it will all probably depend on the economic and political situation a few months down the road–it’s worth noting that incremental steps towards UHC are actually moving along. The stimulus package itself includes a Medicaid “super-match” that will encourage states to maintain and in some cases actually increase coverage for low-income citizens. It also includes a provision allowing unemployed people over 55 to continue COBRA coverage (with new federal subsidies) until they are eligible for Medicare, which could affect a sizable group of the newly uninsured. Health care IT investments considered integral to UHC are included. And on a separate track, earlier this week the House passed the SCHIP eligibility expansion that Bush vetoed.
Cohn regards these steps as potentially representing a more cautious UHC strategy for Obama:

One thing to keep in mind, as the debate moves forward: Obama and his allies may well decide they need to address health care affordability sequentially. The “down payments” could then take the form of institutional changes (like setting up an institute to study the effectiveness of new treatments) and significant coverage expansions (starting with Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program) that might still fall well short of universal coverage. The idea, then, could be to return later on–maybe in 2010 or 2011–with additional legislation, backed by additional funding, designed to finish the job.

At a minimum, it’s clear that Obama is determined to avoid actual reductions in health care coverage due to loss of employer-based insurance or state budgetary decisions. Beyond that, it’s hard to say whether steps he’s taking now represent a return to an incremental strategy for achieving UHC, or a foundation for a big UHC proposal in the near-term future.

It was inevitable, I guess, that the departure of George W. Bush from the White House would stimulate at least a few would-be revisionists or sycophants to argue publicly that the man wasn’t really the disaster that most of us perceive him to have been. But a British historian named Andrew Roberts took to the pages of the Telegraph to pen a paen to W. that is my personal nominee for Worst Column Ever, worse even than Andrew Klavan’s infamous “Dark Knight” column lionizing Bush for his brave willingness to break or ignore laws.
You need to read the whole thing to fully absorb Roberts’ breathtaking mendacity on a variety of issues related to Bush’s tenure in office. It says a lot that perhaps his least objectionable assertion is the claim that warantless wiretaps by the administration saved many thousands of American lives. The following may contain more howlers than I’ve ever read in one sentence:

With his characteristic openness and at times almost self-defeating honesty, Mr Bush has been the first to acknowledge his mistakes – for example, tardiness over Hurricane Katrina – but there are some he made not because he was a ranting Right-winger, but because he was too keen to win bipartisan support.

Yeah, that’s George W. Bush in a nutshell, all right.
Then there’s this masterpiece of economic analysis:

The credit crunch, brought on by the Democrats in Congress insisting upon home ownership for credit-unworthy people, will initially be blamed on Bush, but the perspective of time will show that the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started with the deregulation of the Clinton era. Instead Bush’s very
un-ideological but vast rescue package of $700 billion (£480 billion) might well be seen as lessening the impact of the squeeze, and putting America in position to be the first country out of recession, helped along by his huge tax-cut packages since 2000.

I particularly like the phrase “credit-unworthy people” as the cause of the financial crisis. Not “people who could struggle to make their mortgage payments,” mind you, but “credit-unworthy people,” a fascist word-construction if ever I have read one. And it says a lot about Roberts’ sycophancy that he praises the Bush-Paulson “rescue package,” which most conservatives of the sort who like to sniff about “credit-unworthy people” absolutely loathed. As for the idea that Bush’s earlier tax cuts will help make America “the first country out of recession,” we are perhaps mercifully left in the dark about Roberts’ “reasoning.”
There are plenty of conservatives in the world of gab with whom progressives strongly, even violently, disagree. But they can be roughly divided into those who make the conservative case with logic and some reference to verifiable facts, and those who really don’t bother. One of the worst features of the Bush Era is the great encouragement his administration and its support network offered to the latter. For that reason, perhaps George W. Bush has found his most appropriate court minstrel in Andrew Roberts, who did not have to suffer the inconvenience of actually living in the United States over the last eight years. I do know this: as an avid reader of history, I will give the works of Andrew Roberts a very wide berth. Certainly his prediction that “history” will vindicate Bush as a great and misunderestimated man should stimulate some questions about his credibility to write “history” with anything other than crayons.

In case you’ve been waiting with bated breath, administration and congressional officials have largely finished up work on the economic stimulus package that will now wend its way through the legislative process. There will be slight differences between House and Senate versions, which means a House-Senate conference committee after bills have passed both Houses and the possibility of a trip-up on a final conference report.
The final price tag is around $850 billion, with $550 billion in spending and $300 billion in tax cuts. It looks like the most controversial tax cut–one letting companies write off current losses against tax liabilities dating back five years–could be modified or dropped by congressional Democrats, perhaps to include instead a “fix” on the Alternative Minimum Tax for this year, which will otherwise boost taxes on millions of upper-middle-class taxpayers, some of whom are already in financial trouble or unemployed. It’s a reminder of how radically things have changed in Washington that this AMT fix, priced at a cool $70 billion, is pretty much an afterthought.
Here you can find a fairly detailed summary of the House draft.

In 1929, just after he was elected governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the headline speaker at a dinner organized by Tammany Hall. The theme of the night was political oratory, and in his remarks, FDR talked about the importance of political speech in the formation of the republic. As H.W. Brands records in his new biography, Roosevelt told the audience, “Elections were won or lost, parties were driven out or swept into power entirely as the public speakers of one side or the other proved most able and convincing. It was the golden age of the silver tongue.”
That tradition, however, had changed with the advent of mass media in the form of the newspapers. Then, as now, publishers seldom printed speeches in their entirety, and voters learned to take their cues from quotes that reporters and editors chose to excerpt.
But on that night eighty years ago, FDR saw a new technological revolution taking hold. He told the guests:

The pendulum is rapidly swinging back to the old condition of things. One can only guess at the figure, but I think it is a conservative estimate to say that whereas five years ago 99 out of 100 took their arguments from the editorials and the news columns of the daily press, today at least half the voters, sitting at their own fireside, listen to the actual words of the political leaders on both sides and make their decisions based on what they hear rather than what they read. I think it is almost safe to say that in reaching their decisions as to which party they will support, what is heard over the radio decides as many people as what is printed in the newspapers.

Roosevelt’s recognition of this change and his success in using radio to appeal directly to voters made up no small part of his political genius. For the next sixteen years, when he needed to win a political argument, Roosevelt took the discussion straight from the White House into the homes of ordinary citizens, and the nation’s voters sided with FDR time and time again. Roosevelt didn’t just win elections; he changed the way that politics in America were practiced.
But time didn’t stand still, and politics changed again in 1960. Television became the dominant medium, and that in turn forced voters to process information in a new way.The most successful politicians were those who had the discipline to harness the format and the wealth to run slick media campaigns. Operatives adapted political speech to the new paradigm, and the soundbite was born.
In less than a week, we will swear in a new president who has already shown an extraordinary capacity to use the emerging technologies of the Internet to break through the television mindset and the scripted candidacy it produces. But there is a important difference between using the Internet to campaign and using the Internet to govern.
To make the transition from politics to policy, Obama should look to FDR.
The day after he took office, Roosevelt made his first policy decision as president and issued an order to declare a national bank holiday. His goal was to end the panic that led thousands to descend on financial institutions and withdraw the entirety of their savings.
In less than a week, Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act, granting Roosevelt new powers to deal with the crisis. Three days after that, nearly 1,000 banks across the country were up and running again. Many who had withdrawn their wealth in the weeks before lined up to deposit it back again.
Exactly one week after issuing that first executive order, at 10 o’clock in the evening on the East Coast, FDR settled into his study in the White House and gave a short talk about his decision and the actions he took. He explained why some banks would reopen and some would remain closed. He closed saying, “You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system; it is up to you to support and make it work. It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.”
The entire address was broadcast live over the radio, lasted for just a few minutes, and history remembers it as the first fireside chat. Will Rogers later said that the remarkable thing about Roosevelt’s talk was that he took “such a dry subject as banking and made everyone understand it, even the bankers.”
Roosevelt never believed that the problems of Washington, as difficult as they appeared, were too complex for the American people to understand. The genius of that first fireside chat and those that followed was that FDR spoke directly to his fellow citizens with respect, explained his actions as best he could, and as a peer, he asked the people of this country to join him in his work. “Together, he said, “We cannot fail.”
The tools of the Internet give Obama the same opportunity today.
When the president-elect gives his inaugural address on Tuesday, it will be watched in person by millions of people gathered in Washington to see it live. It will be watched by millions more across the world who will turn on their televisions to hear what Obama has to say.
But as the rest of Washington prepares to celebrate the new administration, a team working for the president will take the video of that speech, edit it for the web, and upload it to YouTube. And in the days that follow, it will almost certainly be watched from beginning to end, millions and millions of times.
This new political reality is an opportunity. It is a chance for a teaching moment.
With the network he built during the campaign, the pulpit offered by the White House, and the tools available to Obama online, the new president can appeal directly to the American people and do what FDR did: ask the people of this country to join with him in solving the problems we face as a nation.

The LA Times’ Peter Wallsten confirms today that the long-awaited successor to Barack Obama’s campaign organization–generally known as “Barack Obama 2.0”–is being designed as a privately funded arm of the Democratic National Committee, supplemented by a private-non-profit “service organization” that will keep grassroots supporters engaged.
But it appears that the DNC-affiliated organization will break precedent by lobbying Democrats as well as Republicans to support Obama’s legislative agenda, essentially continuing as a personal political machine:

Organizers and even Republicans say the scope of this permanent campaign structure is unprecedented for a president. People familiar with the plan say Obama’s team would use the network in part to pressure lawmakers — particularly wavering Democrats — to help him pass complex legislation on the economy, healthcare and energy.

This arrangement could mean that the Obama network will, as John Heilemann suggested in New York magazine the other day, dominate the DNC (chaired by close Obama associate Tim Kaine with, as executive director, his former campaign staffer Jennifer O’Malley Dillon) and state party organizations instead of simply putting on the party harness and fading away as a personal organization.
Barack Obama 2.0 would be financed with $75 million in campaign funds, an enormous amount for a non-election organization.
Wallsten’s account of the separate “service organization” is a bit sketchy, but it would supposedly enlist grassroots Obama supporters “to help victims of natural disasters, but would do so under the Obama umbrella while continuing to build the overall network’s massive e-mail database.”
As Wallsten notes: “The prospect of a president being able to guide a service or relief agency outside the framework of his government is a unique development.”
Sounds like it would also operate as sort of a ready reserve for the political organization as well, aside from its obvious utility in fundraising.
The whole plan, which is apparently still under development, is a pretty big and–if you will excuse the expression–audacious deal, and an indicator that what I’ve called Obama’s “grassroots bipartisanship” will benefit from a huge organization that will indeed dwarf the resources of the DNC and the state parties:

Strategists in both parties said the ideas being discussed would create an on-the-ground weapon for policy battles far more powerful than the speeches, news conferences and donor-targeting techniques traditionally used by presidents.
“No one’s ever had these kinds of resources,” said Republican strategist Ed Rollins, who led political operations under President Reagan. “This would be the greatest political organization ever put together, if it works.”

It will be most interesting to see if Barack Obama 2.0 is up and running in time to mobilize support for Obama’s stimulus package.

All mad props to Jeffrey Rosen for his TNR post on the new ABC show, “Homeland Security USA.” In case you have been blessed enough to miss the show’s premiere, it’s a breathless tribute to the “heroes” who work for this famously screwed-up federal mega-agency. As Rosen explains, the first episode trades heavily on the hope that DHS is protecting us all from terrorists, but actually focuses on more quotidian border control actions dealing with drugs, immigration documents, and, well, belly-dancing accoutrements.
Yes, a big chunk of “Homeland Security USA” deals with an incident wherein a Swiss belly-dancer seeking admission to the U.S. is detained and questioned, mainly because she lacks a work permit. The ABC voice-over for this segment tells you everything you need to know: “Something seems amiss with this Swiss Miss.”
This is relevant to a political site, and to U.S. taxpayers, because “Homeland Security USA” boasts of the cooperation it has secured from DHS, and because the show will obviously have a bearing on how Americans perceive DHS and their own degree of safety.
It’s pretty clear that this ludicrous show is the crown jewel of DHS’s own propaganda efforts, reflected in the establishment in early 2005 of a Office of Multimedia designed to vet Hollywood film and television projects and scripts that might requite cooperation from the Department. The original director of this office was a former actress (who once played a hooker on Designing Women) named Bobbie Faye Ferguson, whose one reported triumph was the torpedoing of a movie script that did not sufficiently meet DHS needs.
This all might be nothing more than a silly sideshow if not for the simple fact that DHS is haphazardly organized department whose only overriding mission is to enlist American citizens in a self-confident national effort to protect the country from the new threats of the 21st century, which do not, by most accountings, include poorly documented Swiss belly-dancers.
DHS badly needs new leadership and a new sense of coherent mission, even if, as it probably does, it also need a reconsideration of its component parts. If that can’t be accomplished, the whole idea of the department needs to be skeptically reviewed. What it doesn’t need is hamhanded and self-parodying propaganda via publicly-endorsed vehicles like “Homeland Security USA.”
Janet Napolitano has her work cut out for her at DHS, and as a big fan, I wish her well. But she could go a long way towards signalling a different philosophy for the department if she’d mock “Homeland Security USA” during her confirmation hearing.

It’s bad enough when diplomatic–or undiplomatic–pressure forces a president to repudiate the position of any foreign relations officer, much less the Secretary of State, whose credibility is a very important asset. It’s vastly worse when the source of that pressure publicly gloats about it, in the context of events that are at the very center of the whole world’s attention right now.
But that’s what happened yesterday as Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert gave a speech boasting that he got President Bush dragged off a podium in Philadelphia and secured instructions to Condeleezza Rice ordering her to abstain from a UN resolution calling for an end to the conflict in Gaza that she had helped draft and publicly backed.

“I said, ‘Get me President Bush on the phone,’ ” Mr. Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, according to The Associated Press. “They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care: ‘I need to talk to him now,’ ” Mr. Olmert continued. “He got off the podium and spoke to me.”
Israel opposed the resolution, which called for a halt to the fighting in Gaza, because the government said it did not provide for Israel’s security. It passed 14 to 0, with the United States abstaining.
Mr. Olmert claimed that once he made his case to Mr. Bush, the president called Ms. Rice and told her to abstain. “She was left pretty embarrassed,” Mr. Olmert said, according to The A.P.

The State Department is claiming that Rice intended to abstain on the resolution all along, but that barely passes the laugh test.
When Barack Obama officially takes over his constitutional duties as president, two of his most urgent challenges will be to set an entirely new tone in foreign policy, and to exhibit real leadership in the Middle East. In pursuit of both challenges, let’s hope that he makes it abundantly clear from the get-go that the kind of public manipulation of the United States that Olmert engaged in will not be acceptable.
Maybe he won’t have to say a whole lot. I somehow don’t think that even an erratic and embattled lame-duck politician like Olmert would dare to try to yank the chain of Hillary Clinton, much less in public. You’d want to think real hard about the consequences.

It’s hardly a surprise, but still it’s impressive how quickly media narratives of the debate over the Obama stimulus package have been slipping into the familiar grooves of the “Democrats In Disarray” story-line. Bill Scher at the Our Future blog has the appropriate response:

Crossfire from his own party! Key Democrats blast Obama stimulus plan! Political wrangling bogs down economic stimulus plan! At odds! Doubts arise!
Such is the traditional media interpretation of the policy deliberations going on between the incoming Obama administration and members of Congress.
But read deeper into the stories and you don’t find evidence of explosive hostility or deep conflict. There is civil debate and discussion, not “crossfire.” There is desire to modify aspects of Obama’s plan, but not its overarching thrust. Congress is still expected to pass legislation within a month of Obama’s swearing-in, which is not exactly getting bogged down, but moving pretty swiftly.

As Scher suggests, there’s a unwholesome taste for authoritarianism that’s implicit in media treatment of intra-party debate as unnatural :

Instead of one-party rule undermining checks and balances and stifling discussion, we may well be seeing how — when a progressive mandate for action points everyone in the right direction — a President, a Congress and their constituents can engage in calm debate to refine proposals while still acting in timely fashion.

Yes, it’s been a long time since either of the two major political parties was able to resolve disagreements without fearing the appearance of weakness. But just as there’s no time right now for genuine disarray among Democrats, there’s no time for prevarication or artificially imposed uniformity over the differences of opinion that actually exist. We’ll get over it.