John F. Wasik’s commentary, “No Reason to Demonize U.S. Single-Payer Health” in today’s edition of Bloomberg.com offers a convincing argument that the most promising form of health care reform has been wrongly taken off the table by both the Obama administration and the mainstream media. On Obama’s strategy:

If President Barack Obama wants real change in American health care, he will have to get over the fear of even mentioning single-payer concepts. At his health-care summit last week, only the threat of a demonstration garnered late invitations for Oliver Fein and Congressman John Conyers, two leading proponents of the single-payer plan.
…Obama has said he would keep an open mind on health-care solutions. Yet when asked on March 5 about why he was against single-payer medicine, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs replied: “The president doesn’t believe that’s the best way to achieve the goal of cutting costs and increasing access.”

Wasik supports Rep. John Conyers’ National Health Insurance Act, which has 93 co-sponsors in the House of Reps, and he makes a strong case for the economics behind the plan.
Obama may see single-payer health care reform as a longer-range goal to be achieved in stages. Polls indicate that despite widespread discontent about the current health care system and strong support for single-payer reform, millions of Americans want to keep their current insurance coverage. In a Gallup Poll conducted 11/13-16, for example, 26 percent of respondents said their current coverage was “excellent” and another 41 percent said it was “good.” Obama’s reform team may have concluded that angering them at this stage may imperil reforms that could improve coverage for millions more.
Wasik is dead right however, about the mainstream media’s “sheepish” failure to give single-payer reform a fair hearing. From the Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting study he cites:

Single-payer–a model in which healthcare delivery would remain largely private, but would be paid for by a single federal health insurance fund (much like Medicare provides for seniors, and comparable to Canada’s current system)–polls well with the public, who preferred it two-to-one over a privatized system in a recent survey (New York Times/CBS, 1/11-15/09). But a media consumer in the week leading up to the summit was more likely to read about single-payer from the hostile perspective of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer than see an op-ed by a single-payer advocate in a major U.S. newspaper.
Over the past week, hundreds of stories in major newspapers and on NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, NPR and PBS’s NewsHour With Jim Lehrer mentioned healthcare reform, according to a search of the Nexis database (2/25/09-3/4/09). Yet all but 18 of these stories made no mention of “single-payer” (or synonyms commonly used by its proponents, such as “Medicare for all,” or the proposed single-payer bill, H.R. 676), and only five included the views of advocates of single-payer–none of which appeared on television.
Of a total of 10 newspaper columns FAIR found that mentioned single-payer, Krauthammer’s syndicated column critical of the concept, published in the Washington Post (2/27/09) and reprinted in four other daily newspapers, accounted for five instances. Only three columns in the study period advocated for a single-payer system (San Diego Union-Tribune, 2/26/09; Boston Globe, 3/1/09; St. Petersburg Times, 3/3/09).
The FAIR study turned up only three mentions of single-payer on the TV outlets surveyed, and two of those references were by TV guests who expressed strong disapproval of it: conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks (NewsHour, 2/27/09) and Republican congressman Darrell Issa (MSNBC’s Hardball, 2/26/09).

And that may be the biggest problem for single-payer advocates — opening up the discussion. The campaign to stigmatize single payer reform as “creeping socialism” is well-underway, and the fear-mongers are ascendant. For now, it’s up to the progressive blogosphere to push the idea on to the front pages and nightly news programs.
Single-payer advocates argue that presidential leadership ought to be about forging consensus, not searching for it and Obama’s best shot at comprehensive health care reform has to be taken sooner, rather than later, while his approval ratings are still high. Yet, Obama’s strategy choices and timing have been pretty good so far. Still, opening up the discussion to include single-payer reform might help make his current proposals more acceptable to moderates. It’s hard to see much of an upside to taking single-payer totally off the table.

Greg Sargent’s Plum Line blog has some great news — the launching of “Progressive Media,” a new activist “war room” focused on pushing the Obama Administration’s agenda and message du jour. Progressive Media will be based at the Center for American Progress and will be staffed by a “nearly a dozen” activists. Sargent explains:

The Democratic operatives running the project are already holding a daily early morning call with dozens of operatives from liberal groups — labor, health care, the environment — to coordinate messaging and to deliver usable talking points for the day, according to liberal operative Jennifer Palmieri, who’s the project’s communications director.
The new war room — which is called Progressive Media — represents a serious ratcheting up of efforts to present a united liberal front in the coming policy wars. The goal of the war room will be to do hard-hitting research that boils down complex policy questions into usable talking points and narratives that play well in the media and build public support for the White House’s policy goals.
“We’re trying to break policy down into digestible bits that mean something to people,” Palmieri says, citing as an example an analysis the group did finding that 14,000 people a day are losing health care.

Progressive Media is a joint project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Media Matters for America Action Network and will be headed up by Tara McGuinness, an anti-war activist and former aide to Sen. John Kerry.

When Obama came before Congress to deliver a prime-time, nationally-televised address, he made a point to note that the White House had launched a new website to track the impact of the economic recovery package. He created recovery.gov, he said, “so that every American can find out how and where their money is being spent.”
Last week, the Obama administration unveiled a three-color logo that will be used to identify all the projects across the country funded by the economic recovery bill. The only thing written on image are the words, “recovery.gov,” and the logo is now featured prominently on the recovery website.
“These emblems are symbols of our commitment to you, the American people — a commitment to investing your tax dollars wisely, to put Americans to work doing the work that needs to be done,” Obama said. “So when you see them on projects that your tax dollars made possible, let it be a reminder that our government — your government — is doing its part to put the economy back on the road of recovery.”
Of course, the website and the logo are more than a symbol of commitment — both are instantly recognizable as an extension of the greater Obama brand.
During the campaign, the Obama organization made a concerted effort to cultivate that brand. By election day, the rising sun logo was ubiquitous, the whole world knew that Barack Obama stood for hope and change, and anything printed in the Gotham font was associated with the campaign.
Even the Shepard Fairey poster — an iconic image that the Obama organization did not create — was rolled into the broader cultural phenomenon.
The Obama brand is defined by three things:
It manages to be both forward-looking and seeped in history.The recovery logo is a perfect example — but for the web address, there is nothing about it that would seem out of place in a New Deal program. The Fairey image is deeply nostalgic, but it uses the Gotham font, which was created in 2000.
It’s deeply tied to the web — every offline program has an online component. As the official transition began, for instance, Obama was represented online with Change.gov. The moment Obama was sworn in as president, his staffers launched a new version of WhiteHouse.gov which fit the brand.
It is connected directly to real people. During the campaign, supporters were invited to join MyBarackObama — to set their own fundraising goals, discuss their own priorities for the country, and bring their friends and family into the effort. During the transition, citizens were invited to apply for positions in the government, to weigh in on policy goals, and to offer their vision for the new administration. Now, with the recovery, people are invited to see their tax dollars at work and to hold the government accountable for this spending.
Barack Obama, as an individual, is not the brand. He is its most powerful symbol and its strongest advocate. But the brand is larger than even the president. It is both an argument about what government should be and a movement to make that vision reality.
On Monday afternoon, John Dickerson — a political writer for Slate — posted a link in his Twitter feed. “A first for this WH?,” he wrote, “Emailing articles supportive of policy. How an administration acts like a campaign: http://bit.ly/12U1yt”
The Obama administration isn’t so much campaigning as it is continuing to advance the brand.

It’s reasonably safe to say that there are few vital issues on which the United States Supreme Court has been so consistently inconsistent of late than in the area of so-called “racial gerrymandering”–the consideration, in pursuit of federal voting rights laws, of racial data in considering congressional and state legislative districting schemes.
Yesterday’s 5-4 SCOTUS decision on a North Carolina case (Bartlett v. Strickland) continues that ignoble tradition of Supreme confusion. In a majority opinion written by confusion-meister Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court held that the federal Voting Rights Act in no circumstances dictates adoption of districts in which minority voters represent less than a majority of the electorate. This directly affects the previous practice (particularly during the last decennial redistricting round) of promoting on VRA grounds so-called “crossover” or “minority-influence” districts where candidates favored by minority voters had a good chance of winning by putting together a biracial coalition composed of most minorities and some whites–typically in places where minority voters represented somewhere between 40% and 50% of the electorate.
This means the only VRA-required districts henceforth will be those where minority voters are in an actual majority. The effect, as Justice Souter observed in his dissent, may well be to encourage “packing” of minority voters into some districts, enabling the “bleaching” of others. And the consequences of that approach, as we learned during the 1991-92 redistricting cycle, is often to significantly reduce Democratic representation, and (in the South at least) virtually eliminate white Democratic legislators and Congressmen who rely on robust minority voting.
In other words, if you don’t want to get into all the legal complexities, yesterday’s decision could be bad news for the Democratic Party, and for the biracial coalitions that the Democratic Party so often depends on for success. Indeed, if, as expected, the election of an African-American president heralds a growing willingness of white voters to cross racial lines (as black voters, of course, have so often had to do), reducing those “crossover” districts could reduce the number of minority candidates in office–a rather perverse outcome given the overriding purpose of the Voting Rights Act.
It’s important not to overstate the immediate impact of this decision, however: it only affects redistricting decisions made in order to comply with the VRA ban on “dilution” of minority voting rights. States are perfectly free to draw up maps identical to those at issue in North Carolina, but not as a matter of VRA compliance (to get technical about it, the district in question ostensibly violated a state law against districts that subdivided counties; the Court simply ruled that the VRA didn’t apply, and thus didn’t override that state law). But states, particularly in the South, where Republicans control the redistricting process are quite likely to go back to the “packing” and “bleaching” practices of the recent past in response to this decision.
(Another complication is that the ruling only directly applied to lawsuits under the VRA, not to the “preclearance” requirement that most southern states and a few areas outside the South get Justice Department approval for redistricting maps. But it’s highly likely that a subsequent decision will extend the same logic to that process).
The Democratic-controlled Congress could, of course, moot the whole issue by amending the VRA to make it clear that “crossover” districts are favored; that’s exactly what Justice Ginsberg suggested it do in her own dissent in Bartlett. But Kennedy’s opinion hinted that such a construction of minority voting rights might raise constitutional problems under the Equal Protection Clause (another irony, given the origins of that Clause as a basis for protecting African-American rights).
In the end, the only sure remedy for Bartlett is for Democrats to win as many governorships and legislative chambers as possible in 2010, particularly in states with large minority populations.

To put this campaign into context, for a moment just imagine the following scenario. Suppose that John McCain had been elected president last November and by this point in time,

1. A minor Democratic presidential candidate had directly accused him of being a member of a secret Nazi organization. A second Democratic presidential candidate said Hitler and Mussolini would approve his policies.
2. A significant liberal journal of opinion had said that McCain was following Hitler’s political strategy and quoted Hitler to prove it.
3. The leading liberal commentators in the New York Times and Washington Post wrote commentaries about McCain’s program using political expressions with absolutely clear and unmistakable connotations of fascism (e.g. “Aryan superiority”, “racial purity”, “national culture” etc.),

“Why would Obama inflict these destructive policies while the economy is collapsing? Simple. Each step strengthens the role of government in people’s lives…That’s exactly what Lenin sought to do. In a cheery volume called State and Revolution, for example, Lenin explains how:

The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy….the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists.

Lenin, too, wished to “spread the wealth around.” And Obama, like Lenin, has been perfectly frank in recommending that we need to go beyond the “merely formal” rights enunciated in the Constitution in order to “bring about redistributive change” in society.

3. The leading conservative commentators in The New York Times and The Washington Post use buzzwords that any political science graduate or well-read person can recognize as directly rooted in classical Marxist and socialist theory.

Charles Krauthammer describes Obama’s “big bang agenda to federalize or socialize” the “commanding heights of the post industrial economy” and calls it the “most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.”
Michael Gerson calls the budget “ideologically ambitious, politically ruthless and radical to its core…This is not merely the rejection of “trickle-down economics,” it is a weakening of the theoretical basis for capitalism — that free individuals are generally more rational and efficient in making investment decisions than are government planners”
David Brooks (who has since stepped back from this approach) says America [is] “skeptical of top-down planning” and “has never been a society riven by class resentment.”Obama’s administration, on the other hand, is: “swept up in its own revolutionary fervor”, “caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it”, is “a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new”, “expands state intervention”, is “predicated on a class divide”

Notice the roundabout way that this process works. On the one hand the columnists can argue with technical accuracy that they are not directly calling Obama a socialist or Marxist-Leninist — and from one point of view they are quite right. The quite evident purpose of their attacks are to not to smear Obama’s personal reputation but rather to demonize the basic ideas of progressive taxation and a robust public sector as policies that should be outside the pale of civilized discourse – ideas that can only be justified by un-American ideologies.
But at the same time, their comments unavoidably and unmistakably tend to imply and reinforce the more extreme accusations. With Rush Limbaugh bellowing that Obama is a “socialist” and Huckabee, Kimball and Keyes calling him a “Leninist” and a “communist”, it is simply impossible not to recognize that politically loaded terms of the kind the leading conservative columnists are using do seem to suggest some degree of sympathy for more extremist claims. The result is that the extremists feel a sense of partial “wink and a nudge” vindication while moderates and middle of the road voters perceive a kind of broad conservative consensus that Obama and his advisors actually are following a secret radical program to which they do not publically admit.
David Brooks realized that his column had contributed to this kind of unacceptable innuendo and, to his very real and substantial credit, the day after his initial column wrote a follow-up piece in which he carefully reformulated his position. As he said:

I had conversations with four senior members of the administration and in the interest of fairness, I thought I’d share their arguments with you today.
In the first place, they do not see themselves as a group of liberal crusaders. They see themselves as pragmatists who inherited a government and an economy that have been thrown out of whack. The budget, they continue, isn’t some grand transformation of America. It raises taxes on energy and offsets them with tax cuts for the middle class. It raises taxes on the rich to a level slightly above where they were in the Clinton years and then uses the money as a down payment on health care reform. That’s what the budget does. It’s not the Russian Revolution.
…I didn’t finish these conversations feeling chastened exactly. ..I’m still convinced the administration is trying to do too much too fast and that the hasty planning and execution of these complex policies will lead to untold problems down the road.
Nonetheless, the White House made a case that was sophisticated and fact-based. These people know how to lead a discussion and set a tone of friendly cooperation. I’m more optimistic that if Senate moderates can get their act together and come up with their own proactive plan, they can help shape a budget that allays their anxieties while meeting the president’s goals.

You should read the whole column. It distinguishes quite well between legitimate conservative disagreements over policy on the one hand and what is simply unjustified innuendo on the other.
Other conservative commentators like Krauthammer and Gerson don’t necessarily have to agree with Brooks’ quite dramatic re-evaluation of his position. But they owe it to their readers to display a basic level of personal intellectual honesty.
Here is the acid test: if they honestly think Barack Obama, along with Larry Summers and Obama’s other advisors are actually using Marxist or socialist doctrine to guide their thinking, they should say so, and provide support for their position. If they don’t really believe that this is true they should stop lending “a wink and a nudge” support to conservative extremists who make those accusations by using politically loaded terms that unavoidably suggest that they believe such accusations might have some element of truth.
That crosses the line from policy disagreement to character assassination and it doesn’t discredit Obama. It discredits them.
And, in addition, it’s bad for America.

There have been some amusing reports lately about earmark-bashing Republicans in Congress themselves securing earmarks. But they represent something more important than just an example of GOP hypocrisy producing a “gotcha” moment for Democrats.
Mark Schmitt gets at the broader issues in a fine TAPPED post today:

Republicans are far more dependent than Democrats on their ability to take some credit for federally funded projects. In the world with earmarks, Lindsay Graham is able to stand against the president on stimulus, on the budget, on Iraq, on health care. And then he’s able to go home, cut a ribbon, get his picture in the paper, and tell everyone that he delivered the money for the new Myrtle Beach Convention Center.
But in a world without earmarks, what does Lindsay Graham bring home? Just words, and great stories about how he fought bravely against health care and economic stimulus.

Schmitt goes on to describe earmarks as an example of what he calls congressional “small ball,” something Members of Congress can do to distinguish themselves in an atmosphere where they have no real influence over big policy decisions, which are, in any event, largely resolved on party-line votes. And as he suggests, Republicans who are in the minority in particular need “small ball” accomplishments to give themselves something positive to talk about in their re-election campaigns, aside from their negative ranting against godless big-government liberals. Indeed, the implicit message a lot of Republican pols send to voters is: “I hate government and government programs just like you do, but by God, until we get rid of them, I’m going to make sure we get our piece of the pie.”
But I think the Republican “small ball” habit goes well beyond earmarks, and when Republicans are actually in power at any level of government, has an impact that is by no means “small.”
One example common at the state level, particularly in the South, is the strong tendency of Republican (and alas, some Democratic) governors to spend a lot of time throwing taxpayer dollars into “megadeals” to secure large industrial investments, most famously foreign auto plants. Such activities sure seem like active governing; they have the same kind of tangible political payoff as earmarks; and moreoever, they can be sold to conservative voters as giving the private sector back the tax payments and control they ought to have anyway. That they also tend to directly and indirectly undermine the kind of “liberal” public investments and policies that are most helpful for long-range economic development strategies is of no concern to most Republican politicians, if they don’t consider it an added bonus. As with those congressional pols who vote against every budget, every program, and every appropriations bill while raking off earmarks, conservative leaders who give away the state revenue base for years to come in order to “deliver jobs” are the position of deploring “pork” while living off the bacon.
Moreover, at an even deeper level, conservative ideology in a competitive political environment almost invariably produces this sort of ostensibly self-contradictory behavior, and with it a great deal of predictable corruption. It’s pretty simple, really: if you don’t believe in the missions of government programs and agencies, but don’t have the guts or the ability to get rid of them altogether, then what do you do with them? Unless you have an unusual degree of integrity, you turn them into patronage and vote-buying systems.
That was a big part of the story of the Bush-DeLay Era of Republican-dominated politics in this decade, and also a source of great confusion in interpreting it. A lot of progressives wasted time arguing about whether it was “ideology” or “incompetence” that caused the disasters of this era. It was both, because the ideology encouraged the incompetence and corruption, from New Orleans to Baghdad and in every corner of Washington. And a lot of conservatives have deluded themselves that Bush and company were “moderates” or “liberals,” when they were really just conservatives who never convinced the public to support massive reductions in government, and then convinced themselves that using government to build a political machine was the next best thing.
To put it another way, when you fundamentally think government spending is a waste of money, then when you are given power over it, it’s not that surprising that you do your best to waste it for your own political benefit, rationalizing the hypocrisy as the shortest path available to that great gettin’ up morning when you have total power and can abolish all those terrible programs once and for all.
Giving conservatives total power would undoubtedly be a horrible disaster for this country. But it’s important to understand that giving them some power, or a lot of power that is limited by the inherent unpopularity of their ultimate goals, is going to help produce precisely the kind of wasteful and corrupt government they claim to deplore. And yes, they’ll protest it all the way to the next earmark announcement or auto plant ground-breaking.

Republican “renewal” strategist Patrick Ruffini of The Next Right published a very revealing post late last night showing that even the most open and innovative of GOP tacticians don’t really favor an open and innovative discussion of the conservative movement’s ideological problems.
Reacting to the flak, some of it from fellow-Republicans, taken by Rush Limbaugh, Michael Steele and Bobby Jindal over the last couple weeks, Ruffini seems to want to designate all three as “made men” whom GOPers are not allowed to criticize. More generally, and dangerously, he wants to make evaluation of the words and deeds of fellow-Republicans strictly contingent on each person’s utility–not, you know, stuff like facts and truth:

Conservatives need to decide who we want to see succeed and who we want to see fail. We then need to calibrate our reactions to the inevitable missteps from either camp accordingly. If someone we want to succeed comes under attack, we hold our fire and close ranks — unless it’s clear they’ve become a long-term liability. If it’s someone we want to see fail — like Jim Bunning — we unload until they get off the stage.

Aside from the coldly instrumental nature of this judgement about wheat and chaff, Ruffini is engaging in some not-very-hidden circular reasoning about who “we want to succeed.” Is Bobby Jindal useful because he’s a smart young GOP politician? Or is he useful because he’s a smart young GOP politician with a strongly ideological background who’s just proven, in his quasi-idiotic response to Barack Obama’s address to Congress, that he’ll subordinate smart politics to the overriding imperative of Being a Real Conservative who will echo the True Faith like a cicada?
Now I know that some folks in the progressive netroots tend to similarly flirt with the feeling that politics is all about Teams and Noise, with not much room for objective reality, and the Team that makes the most Noise wins. Under that rather hammer-headed approach, what you most want to avoid is having anybody on Your Team making discordant Noises. Still, I think the pride in representing what we have often called the Reality-Based Community has kept nearly all progressives from a full surrender of their higher brain functions when it comes to political judgments.
But you will notice something glaring about Ruffini’s hard line against Republican self-criticism: it involves a very blatant double standard. For all the time Rush Limbaugh spends demonizing Barack Obama and Godless Liberals generally, what makes him distinctive is his activity as a commissar policing ideological conformity among fellow-Republicans. So the only rule against GOP self-criticism that Ruffini is really interested in enforcing is one against “moderates” or “centrists” or “reformers” who buck the pre-established party line. To adapt the old Popular Front slogan, there are “pas d’enemi a droite.,” which happens to reinforce the perpetual supremacy of the hard-core ideologues.
I hope progressives reflect on Ruffini’s “thinking” on this subject, and treat it as an object-lesson in the perils of the perennial temptation to idolize or demonize people on “Our Team” not in terms of the Democratic Party’s general principles and strategic needs, but in the pursuit of ideological conformity and “Noise.” Inevitably, this way lies suppression of open discussion and elevates the least thoughtful in our ranks to the status of “made men” who are happy to open up the guns on heretics but cannot be touched themselves.

For an updated profile of President Obama’s top strategist David Axelrod, see Jeff Zeleny’s “President’s Political Protector Is Ever Close at Hand” in the Sunday New York Times.
Also in the Sunday NYT, a good editorial urging President Obama not to cave in to GOP filubuster threats in appointing federal judges nor to defer to Republican Senators’ demands to be able to veto Obama’s nominees from their home state. The Times challenges Obama not to be intimidated from “appointing the kind of highly qualified, progressive-minded judges the nation needs.”
Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake expound on liberal “Blogging in the Obama Era” in Mark Preston’s column at CNNPolitics.com . Video interview here.
Colbert I. King explains in his WaPo column, “Stabbing D.C. in the Back” why the D.C. House Voting Rights Act might not be such a hot deal for Dems, as well as for residents of “Washington D. Colony.”
For a succinct update on Dems chances of getting to 60 in 2010, see Nate Silver’s “Senate Rankings: March 2009 Edition,” plus more than 100 comments.
The Hill‘s Alexander Bolton feeds the buzz that Sen. Arlen Specter is considering a GOP-to-Dem switch, and barring that, Dems’ chances for picking up his seat, while TNR‘s Jason Zengerle wonders in “The Plank” if Specter may pull a “modified Lieberman” and become an Independent.
Bart Jansen reports at CQpolitics.com on the increasing influence of 501(c) 4 and 6 nonprofits in financing political campaigns — tripling in ’08 the amount they spent in ’04.
Again at CQPolitics.com, Adriel Bettleheim’s “For Obama, Popularity Means Don’t Sit Still” discusses the impressive power of Obama’s not-so-secret weapon — his road game.
Chris Bowers ponders Christian demographic shrinkage at OpenLeft.
Has the GOP become the party of deficit concern trolls? Dean Baker gets the meme rolling at The American Prospect.

There’s an important point that has largely been missed (by myself as well) in the debate over Obama’s approach to the budget. Folks like David Brooks (who did a partial recantation today, but not on the issue I am discussing right now), not to mention the entire Republican Party, have been kvetching that Obama is using the economic crisis to sneak all sorts of big-government, socialist ideas into law, instead of just dealing with the economic crisis in a direct and responsible way. My own response to Brooks argued that you can’t divorce the economy from health care and energy costs, or from efforts to restore the progressivility of the tax code to more or less where it was before George W. Bush went on his upper-end tax cut crusade.
But there’s a bigger point to be made: you can’t “do the budget” without making policy choices. If you try to, by simply tinkering with funding levels for this or that, you are making policy choices in favor of the status quo, which in today’s case often means policy choices made by a Republican president and Congress during the period from 2001-2007.
If you want a precedent for policy-based budgeting, look no further than Republican idol Ronald Reagan, whose famous 1981 budget was loaded with all sorts of ideological freight. As Jonathan Chait pointed out yesterday:

Obama is trying to put his imprint on federal policy. I think he’s right to do so. Ronald Reagan governed the country with little worry about its fiscal health. His goal was tilt the structure of the tax code and federal outlays so that conservatives would have an advantage when the bill came due. It worked: when the Democrats recaptured the White House, they mostly played janitor, cleaning up the Republican mess. Not only did Democrats mosty fail to impose their priorities to anything like the degree Republicans had, voters penalized them in 1994 for imposing fiscal pain. And then, when Republicans regained the presidency, they returned to the Reagan strategy.

Jon’s talking about Reagan’s mega-strategy, but highly significant policy decisions were weaved throughout Reagan’s budget. One very good example, which I happened to see up close as a lobbyist for the State of Georgia, was an effort by Reagan to produce Medicaid savings by “capping” the federal share of costs for that federal-state program. In the administration’s one significant budget defeat, the House substituted a provision that produced the same short-term savings by reducing state Medicaid expenditures. The difference was that Reagan and his budget director, David Stockman did not achieve a permanent shift in the share of Medicaid costs to the states, which was part of a broader effort to ultimately devolve both Medicaid and AFDC (a.k.a., “welfare”) to the states.
The point is simply that you can’t divorce the numbers from the policies that produce them. And totally aside from your assessment of various Obama policies, expecting him to fail to pursue them in the context of a comprehensive budget bill makes no sense.

In a useful article for The American Prospect, Matt Yglesias draws attention to a basic disconnect between U.S. and Israeli thinkers and doers that has often been obscured by internal differences in both countries:

Differing coverage of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to Israel on Tuesday captured the divergence of opinion. The Associated Press’ headline kept the focus on Clinton’s somewhat news-making proclamation about Palestine: “US: ‘Inescapable’ movement to Palestinian state.” The story highlighted how Clinton emphasized to Israeli leaders across the spectrum — including Benjamin Netanhayu, almost certainly Israel’s next prime minister and an opponent of a sovereign Palestine — the vital need to continue work toward a two-state solution.
The Jerusalem Post headline, by contrast, was “Netanyahu, Barak urge Clinton for Iran dialogue deadline.” Israeli leaders, from the Labor Party to the Likud Party, think that the most important thing they can be doing right now is urging the United States to get tough on Iran. The March 3 Haaretz had an article about Israeli leaders intending to present Clinton with “red lines” on talks with Iran.
How the client state in this relationship got in the position to start dictating red lines is an issue I’ll leave for others. The larger issue is that this Israeli consensus on priorities is dangerously out of line with reality.

You should go on to read the full article for Yglesias’ arguments about why he thinks the Israeli perspective is “out of line with reality,” mostly having to do with his fear that a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine may soon no longer be an option. But any way you look at it, he’s absolutely right that Americans assume the Palestinian issue is always front-and-center for Israelis, while Israelis increasingly perceive Palestinians as pawns in a bigger geopolitical struggle with Iran. The disconnect here is pervasive, and dangerous.