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Everything You Need To Know About The Health Care Debate... In One Post!

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The Nuclear Option

For the record, here is what Republicans used to mean when they used the phrase "the nuclear option":

In U.S. politics, the nuclear option is an attempt by a majority of the United States Senate to end afilibuster by invoking a point of order to essentially declare the filibuster unconstitutional which can be decided by a simple majority, rather than seeking formal cloture with a supermajority of 60 senators. Although it is not provided for in the formal rules of the Senate, the procedure is the subject of a 1957 parliamentary opinion and has been used on several occasions since. The term was coined by Senator Trent Lott (Republican of Mississippi) in 2005;[1] prior to this it was known as the constitutional option.

The maneuver was brought to prominence in 2005 when then-Majority Leader Bill Frist (Republican ofTennessee) threatened its use to end Democratic-led filibusters of judicial nominees submitted byPresident George W. Bush. In response to this threat, Democrats threatened to shut down the Senate and prevent consideration of all routine and legislative Senate business. The ultimate confrontation was prevented by the Gang of 14, a group of seven Democratic and seven Republican Senators, all of whom agreed to oppose the nuclear option and oppose filibusters of judicial nominees, except in extraordinary circumstances.

As you can see, that is in no way comparable to the Democrats proposed use of the reconciliation process to pass health care reform. Also for the record, here is the history of the use of reconciliation over the past 25+ years:

...health care and reconciliation actually have a lengthy history. "In fact, the way in which virtually all of health reform, with very, very limited exceptions, has happened over the past 30 years has been the reconciliation process," says Sara Rosenbaum, who chairs the Department of Health Policy at George Washington University.

For example, the law that lets people keep their employers' health insurance after they leave their jobs is called COBRA, not because it has anything to do with snakes, but because it was included as one fairly minor provision in a huge reconciliation bill, she says.

"The correct name is continuation benefits. And the only reason it's called COBRA is because it was contained in the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985; and that is how we came up with the name COBRA," she says.

COBRA, which confusingly did not become law until 1986, was actually a much larger bill, including many nonhealth provisions and many other important health provisions as well (see chart). Among them was the so-called Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires hospitals that accept Medicare or Medicaid payments to at least screen patients who arrive for emergency treatment, regardless of their ability to pay.

Children's Health

But the budget reconciliation process has been used for more far-reaching health policy changes as well, says Rosenbaum. The expansion of health insurance coverage for low-income children is a prime example.

"In 1980, children who were living at less than half the poverty level in the United States could not get a Medicaid card in half the states if they had two parents at home," she says.

But via a series of budget reconciliation bills, beginning in 1984, Congress began expanding Medicaid coverage. In 1997, also in a budget reconciliation bill, it created the Children's Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP. Today, says Rosenbaum, who helped write many of the children's health provisions in those bills, Medicaid and CHIP together cover 1 in every 3 children in the United States.

"So literally we've changed everything about insurance coverage for children and families, and we've changed access to health care all across the United States all as a result of reconciliation," she says.

Medicare Changes

Budget reconciliation has also been an important tool for changing the Medicare program.

"Going back even close to 30 years, if you start say in 1982, the reconciliation bill that year added the hospice benefit, which is very important to people at the end of life," says Tricia Neuman, vice president and director of the Medicare Policy Project for the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Over the years, budget reconciliation bills added Medicare benefits for HMOs, for preventive care like cancer screenings; added protections for patients in nursing homes; and changed the way Medicare pays doctors and other health professionals.

Because the point of budget reconciliation was usually to cut the deficit, the huge Medicare program was nearly always on the chopping block. But there's another reason it became the bill of choice for other far-reaching changes.

"This happened primarily because it was the only train leaving the station, so if policymakers wanted to make a change in health policy, the only way to do it would be to amend a reconciliation bill, and that's really why it happened," says Neuman, a former congressional health policy staffer.

In fact, over the past three decades, the number of major health financing measures that were NOT passed via budget reconciliation can be counted on one hand. And one of those — the 1988 Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act — was repealed the following year after a backlash by seniors who were asked to underwrite the measure themselves. So using the process to try to pass a health overhaul bill might not be easy. But it won't be unprecedented

Want more? Here's more:

...look at the Senate roll call on the conference report for the 1996 welfare reform bill, the most momentous piece of social legislation to become law in the last 20 years. The bill's formal name was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (italics mine). It was called that because it passed the Senate through budget reconciliation, even though the bill's purpose ("ending welfare as we know it") was only peripherally about trimming the federal budget. Yet McConnell voted for the bill. So did Hatch, Grassley, Snowe, and every other Republican in the Senate. So, for that matter, did most Democrats.

Why did the Republican-controlled Senate use reconciliation to pass welfare reform? Interestingly, when I posed that question to several welfare-reform experts—including one person (Ron Haskins, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution) who's published a narrative history of it—none could immediately remember why. Why couldn't they remember? Because the decision to use reconciliation was one of the least remarkable things about the bill.

Reconciliation has been used to raise taxes. It's been used to cut taxes. It was used (by a Republican-controlled Senate) to create COBRA, the program that compels employers to allow departing employees to buy into their health plan for 18 months. COBRA stands for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986 (italics mine), signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. Reconciliation was used several times to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit for the working poor during the 1990s and the early aughts. It was used (again, by a Republican-controlled Senate) to create in 1997 the beneficial Children's Health Insurance Program and the wasteful privatization experiment known as Medicare Advantage. It's been used repeatedly to set federal policy regarding higher education loans and grants. "It's done almost every Congress," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Feb. 23, "and [Republicans are] the ones that used it more than anyone else."

All that said, I'm with Yglesias. If the press is going to go along with this Republican nonsense and stick Democrats with the nuclear option label anyway, maybe we should just go ahead and do what Republicans originally proposed when they invented the phrase and do away with the filibuster entirely. Then we can pass things with a simple majority, up or down vote. Right?

Republicans Respond to the Health Care Summitt

Following up on this weekend's post, it looks like the Republicans have formally responded to Obama's call for a televised health care summit. Ezra Klein breaks out their key questions to the President:

1) "Assuming the President is sincere about moving forward on health care in a bipartisan way, does that mean he will agree to start over?"

2) "Does that mean he has taken off the table the idea of relying solely on Democratic votes and jamming through health care reform by way of reconciliation?"

3) "If the President intends to present any kind of legislative proposal at this discussion, will he make it available to members of Congress and the American people at least 72 hours beforehand?"

4) "Will the President include in this discussion congressional Democrats who have opposed the House and Senate health care bills?"

5) "Will the President be inviting officials and lawmakers from the states to participate in this discussion?"

6) "The President has also mentioned his commitment to have 'experts' participate in health care discussions....Will those experts include the actuaries at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), who have determined that the both the House and Senate health care bill raise costs?"

7) "Will the special interest groups that the Obama Administration has cut deals with be included in this televised discussion?"

8) "Will the President require that any and all future health care discussions, including those held on Capitol Hill, [be televised]?"

Here's Ezra's advice to the administration:

I think the administration should release a counter-proposal. They will agree to literally every one of the GOP's demands -- including the ones that don't make any sense -- in return for one, simple promise: The final legislation is guaranteed an up-or-down vote in the House and the Senate. No filibusters. No delays. No procedural tricks. If the GOP wants a clean process, I bet a deal can be struck here.

Steve Benen has something similar in mind:

Tell you what, GOP. You take the filibuster off the table as a "show of good faith" and I'm sure Democrats would be willing to take reconciliation off the table as a "show of good faith." What do you say?

If the Obama Administration doesn't counter with this, I'm gonna be pretty disappointed. Because the Republicans most definitely have set themselves up here.

Also, Too, More Like This Please!

TPMDC:

Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-WI) "roadmap" budget plan -- which calls for balancing the budget in 50 years by privatizing Social Security and Medicare -- could become an excellent political tool for the Democrats, says former Clinton adviser Paul Begala.

Begala, in an interview today with TPM, said Democrats should force the GOP to bring their ideas into the public eye.

"Why don't we put Mr. Ryan's budget up to a vote?" he said. "Make them vote on it."

Democrats, he argued, should stop calling Republicans the "party of no."

"They have ideas, and lots of them. And their ideas ruin the country," Begala said.

What the Democrats have to do, he said, is make the 2010 elections a choice between Democratic and Republican ideas, instead of a referendum on just the Dems. (A point Chuck Todd made earlier this week.) The way to do it, he said, is to highlight those GOP ideas.

Begala said the White House has already begun to do this, with both President Obama and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag mentioning Ryan's budget.

And Congressional Dems have seized on the opportunity to call out the provisions that would privatize Social Security. Reps. Chris Larson and Linda Sanchez have introduced a resolution opposing such privatization, which would force Republican lawmakers to vote on the idea.

And this!

Obama Speaks!

Obama speaks! And the blogosphere wrings its hands.

I don't get it. What's wrong with this?

Mr. Obama said he would first work with Congress to enact a jobs package that would encourage new hiring, which he said was “the thing that is most urgent right now, in the minds of Americans all across the country.” But he also said that he would take the time to refute false statements and misunderstandings about the health care legislation and to hear alternate ideas from Republicans.

After “several weeks” of work, he said, he would be prepared to live with whatever decision is made by Congress, but he also warned that voters, too, would be watching and would decide at the polls in November whether lawmakers had made the right choice.

Mr. Obama still did not chart a specific legislative strategy for moving a bill through Congress...

At the fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee later on Thursday, however, Mr. Obama said that once Congressional Democrats had worked out their differences and settled on a final bill, he would push for a vibrant, public debate over the health care legislation. He said he planned “to call on our Republican friends to present their ideas.”

“What I’d like to do is have a meeting whereby I am sitting with the Republicans, sitting with the Democrats, sitting with health care experts and let’s just go through these bills,” Mr. Obama said. “Their ideas, our ideas. Let’s walk through them in a methodical way, so that the American people can see and compare what makes the most sense. And then I think that we have got to move forward on a vote. We have got to move forward on a vote.”

Mr. Obama said that Americans were apprehensive about the health care legislation because there was too much misinformation that he would now work to clear up.

“They are certain that they would have to go onto a government plan, which isn’t true,” the president said. “But that’s still a perception a lot of people have. They are still pretty sure that they would have to give up their doctor. They are still pretty sure that if they are happy with their health care plan, that it’s bad for them. They are still positive that this is going to add to the deficit. So there is a lot of information out there that people understandably are concerned about.”

He continued, “That’s why I think it’s very important for us to have a methodical, open process over the next several weeks, and then let’s go ahead and make a decision. And it may be that if Congress decides, if Congress decides we’re not going to do it, even after all the facts are laid out, all the options are clear, then the American people can make a judgment as to whether this Congress has done the right thing for them or not. And that’s how democracy works, and there will be elections coming up and they will be able to make a determination and register their concerns one way or another during election time.”

At one point, as the president insisted that he would continue to fight for the health care bill, the crowd chanted, “Yes, we can! Yes, we can!”

One of the most under-appreciated aspects of the Obama's approach to the presidency is his desire to see congress reemerge as a co-equal branch of government. For people who want action! this can be extremely frustrating, particularly when at most moments it seems Congress isn't up to the task. But let's be real about this, people. It is the Congress, and not the President, that is supposed to be the most powerful brach under our constitution. And although this all may be very frustrating to watch, there's nothing about modern American politics that suggests to me that our presidents have been too weak.

We desperately need Congress to reassert itself in our political system. We desperately need more, not fewer, checks on the executive branch. But I promise you, people, if we get what we need we'll end up with a system that is far more noisy, rude, chaotic, and messy than what we currently have now.

Democracy isn't supposed to be pretty. Its not supposed to be neat. Or tidy. Or fun to watch. It is supposed to require work. And effort. And near constant input from the people. But its been so long since we've lived with anything even remotely approaching a pre-eminent congress that literally no one alive remembers what it might look like.

I hope Obama continues to force Congress to lead. I don't want a president - even one I support! - to be able to dictate to Congress. And I hope Congress continues to get its act together. That's right, I said "continues." Because where you see chaos I see baby steps, and where you see the end I see the beginning. But its a long damn walk from there to there. That change you believed in? It won't come overnight. You're gonna have to keep working, keep fighting. You're gonna have to get back out there this Fall. And then again in 2012. And again in 2014. We're a long, long way down an awful hole, one that took decades to dig, and it'll take at least as long to climb out as it did to empty out.

So call me crazy, but I think this is precisely the right approach to take with the Congress. You wanna hammer Obama on something? Hammer him on his pledge to engage Republicans directly. Hammer him on his pledge to hold a public debate. Hammer him on his promise to "refute false statements and misunderstandings." Make him do it on a daily basis. He's your president. Make him work. Because that's how our system of self-government is supposed to work.

UPDATE: Worth noting - Jon Chait understands the short-term politics of this. The public debate proposal is a "heads we win, tails the GOP loses" proposal. Jon Cohn gets it too. So maybe I should take back. Nice to know I'm in good company here!

Great Quotes

Loads of stuff stacked in the Clippings folder. Let's clear it out:

Steve Benen riff's on partisanship and political disagreement reminds me of something that a partisan newspaper editor would have written during the 1790s. The elites wanted comity; the rabble wanted them to fight! The rabble won then, and I have no doubt they will win now. It just won't be pretty getting from here to there. But who said it should be! Steve's take:

The goal for congressional Republicans isn't to find "common ground" or "bipartisan solutions" with those they completely disagree with; their goal is to fight for what they believe in, opposing the majority's agenda.

The remarks should make it pretty clear that Republicans have no interest in working with Democrats on finding solutions to pressing policy challenges. But here's the thing that so often gets lost in the discourse: Republicans are the minority party, which means it's their job to oppose the majority's agenda.

"There aren't that many places where [the two parties] can come together"? Well, no, of course not. Democrats and Republicans perceive reality in entirely different ways, and advocate for wildly different solutions to various problems (they don't even agree on which problems exist).

Political Scientist John Sides, on the myth of political "independents" that just WILL NOT DIE:

INDEPENDENTS ARE NOT A “VAST MIDDLE GROUND.”

INDEPENDENTS DO NOT COMPRISE MORE THAN “A THIRD OF AMERICANS.”

How many DAMN TIMES must this be said before this MOST BASIC OF FINDINGS — first explicated at length almost 20 YEARS AGO! — sinks into the heads of pundits.

I will keep linking to this post as long as it takes. To repeat: true, honest-to-God independents are about 10% of the American population. Declining support for Obama among independents accounts for less than a fifth of Obama’s overall decline in support.

As a fellow political scientist, I totally appreciate his need to scream about this. Independents are NOT a vast middle ground, both because they are neither vast nor in the middle. Just because someone describes themselves as independent doesn't mean they actually are. Deeds, people, not words. Deeds.

Greg Sargent offers a nice short chronology of the use of reconciliation under Republican rule:

* The College Cost Reduction Act of 2007, which passed through reconciliation;

* The Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005, which passed through reconciliation;

* The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which passed through reconciliation;

* The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003, which passed through reconciliation;

* The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, which passed through reconcilation;

* The Marriage Tax Penalty Relief Reconciliation Act of 2000, which passed through reconciliation; and

* The Taxpayer Refund and Relief Act of 1999, which passed through reconciliation.

Wait, I forgot. Its OK If You Are A Republican. My bad.

Professional Congress watcher Norm Ornstein corrects perceptions of the Democratic Congress:

Congress is on a path to become one of the most productive since the Great Society 89th Congress in 1965-66, and Obama already has the most legislative success of any modern president -- and that includes Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson. The deep dysfunction of our politics may have produced public disdain, but it has also delivered record accomplishment.

The productivity began with the stimulus package, which was far more than an injection of $787 billion in government spending to jump-start the ailing economy. More than one-third of it -- $288 billion -- came in the form of tax cuts, making it one of the largest tax cuts in history, with sizable credits for energy conservation and renewable-energy production as well as home-buying and college tuition. The stimulus also promised $19 billion for the critical policy arena of health-information technology, and more than $1 billion to advance research on the effectiveness of health-care treatments.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has leveraged some of the stimulus money to encourage wide-ranging reform in school districts across the country. There were also massive investments in green technologies, clean water and a smart grid for electricity, while the $70 billion or more in energy and environmental programs was perhaps the most ambitious advancement in these areas in modern times. As a bonus, more than $7 billion was allotted to expand broadband and wireless Internet access, a step toward the goal of universal access.

Any Congress that passed all these items separately would be considered enormously productive. Instead, this Congress did it in one bill.

Lawmakers then added to their record by expanding children's health insurance and providing stiff oversight of the TARP funds allocated by the previous Congress. Other accomplishments included a law to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco, the largest land conservation law in nearly two decades, a credit card holders' bill of rights and defense procurement reform.

The House, of course, did much more, including approving a historic cap-and-trade bill and sweeping financial regulatory changes. And both chambers passed their versions of a health-care overhaul. Financial regulation is working its way through the Senate, and even in this political environment it is on track for enactment in the first half of this year. It is likely that the package of job-creation programs the president showcased on Wednesday, most of which got through the House last year, will be signed into law early on as well.

Most of this has been accomplished without any support from Republicans in either the House or the Senate -- an especially striking fact, since many of the initiatives of the New Deal and the Great Society, including Social Security and Medicare, attracted significant backing from the minority Republicans.

The only ways to think this Congress has been a failure are if you either disagree with these policies or if you aren't paying attention.

Back on bipartisanship, check out this great riff from one of James Fallows' readers:

"The way parliamentary parties maintain their discipline is straightforward. No candidate can run for office using the party label unless the party bestows that label upon him or her. And usually, the party itself and not the candidate raises and controls all the campaign funds. As every political scientist knows, the fact that in the U.S. any candidate can pick his or her own party label without needing anyone else's approval, and can also raise his or her own campaign funds, is why there cannot be and never really has been any sustained party discipline before -- even though it is a feature of parliamentary systems.

"The GOP now maintains party discipline by the equivalent of a parliamentary party's tools: The GOP can effectively deny a candidate the party label (by running a more conservative GOP candidate against him or her), and the GOP can also provide the needed funds to the candidate of the party's choice. And every GOP member of Congress knows it. (Snowe and Collins may be immune, but that's about it.)

"I've missed almost all the punditry this past week... but what I've seen seems almost like a lot of misleading fluff designed to fill the void that should follow an understanding of the foregoing, at least on the subject of 'why no bipartisanship?' There's really nothing more to be said about "why no bipartisanship," once one recognizes the GOP party discipline. On this issue, it's absolutely astounding to blame Obama or even the Congressional leadership (although Pelosi and Reid leave much to be desired otherwise). It's doubly astounding that the GOP did it once before, less perfectly, but with a very large reward for bad behavior in the form of the 1994 mid-term elections. Yet no one calls them on it effectively, and bad behavior seems about to be rewarded again...

"Ironically, the one thing that might lubricate some bipartisanship -- earmarks, or their functional equivalent in specific amendments of general policy -- is becoming unavailable just when needed, and when it might help."

Steve Benen explores how Reagan is so badly mis-remembered:

Reagan's first big tax cut was signed in August 1981. Over the next year or so, unemployment went from just over 7% to just under 11%. In September 1982, Reagan raised taxes, and unemployment fell.

We're all aware, of course, of the correlation/causation dynamic, but as Krugman noted, "[U]nemployment, which had been stable until Reagan cut taxes, soared during the 15 months that followed the tax cut; it didn't start falling until Reagan backtracked and raised taxes."

Want to know what conservative policies look like on the local level when fully put into action? Check out Colorado Springs:

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won't pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.

People hate taxes! And they hate government! But only because they don't realize all the wonderful but largely invisible benefits that government provides.

What would Jesus do? Andrew Sullivan explains:

Christianity, after all, was founded on a culture of marginalization, persecution and martyrdom, not political mastery and imperium. Jesus saw true faith in those without power - the marginalized and despised and powerless. You could argue, in fact, that Constantine's adoption of Christianity as a state religion was an original sin from which Christianity has still not recovered.

The truth is: if your faith is strong, you are indifferent to worldy power and influence. You try to live your faith - which is hard enough - and leave the rest to God.

Jesus repeatedly, insistently refused the political option. Others may be changing the culture in different and disturbing ways; and a Christian will bear witness to this - but primarily by example, not through enforcement on others of a particular doctrine others may not share.

Totally unrelated, but also from Andrew, a great quote from the Judge presiding over the trial of Shoe Bomber Richard Reed:

We are not afraid of any of your terrorist co-conspirators, Mr. Reid. We are Americans. We have been through the fire before.

There is all too much war talk here. And I say that to everyone with the utmost respect. Here in this court where we deal with individuals as individuals, and care for individuals as individuals, as human beings we reach out for justice.

You are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist.

You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist.

To give you that reference, to call you a soldier gives you far too much stature.

Whether it is the officers of government who do it or your attorney who does it, or that happens to be your view, you are a terrorist. And we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not treat with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice.

So war talk is way out of line in this court. You're a big fellow. But you're not that big. You're no warrior. I know warriors. You are a terrorist. A species of criminal guilty of multiple attempted murders. In a very real sense Trooper Santiago had it right when first you were taken off that plane and into custody and you wondered where the press and where the TV crews were and he said you're no big deal.

You're no big deal...

It seems to me you hate the one thing that to us is most precious. You hate our freedom. Our individual freedom. Our individual freedom to live as we choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not believe as we individually choose. Here, in this society, the very winds carry freedom. They carry it everywhere from sea to shining sea.

It is because we prize individual freedom so much that you are here in this beautiful courtroom. So that everyone can see, truly see that justice is administered fairly, individually, and discretely. It is for freedom's seek that your lawyers are striving so vigorously on your behalf and have filed appeals, will go on in their, their representation of you before other judges. We care about it. Because we all know that the way we treat you, Mr. Reid, is the measure of our own liberties.

Make no mistake though. It is yet true that we will bear any burden; pay any price, to preserve our freedoms. Look around this courtroom. Mark it well. The world is not going to long remember what you or I say here. Day after tomorrow it will be forgotten. But this, however, will long endure. Here, in this courtroom, and courtrooms all across America, the American people will gather to see that justice, individual justice, justice, not war, individual justice is in fact being done.

The very President of the United States through his officers will have to come into courtrooms and lay out evidence on which specific matters can be judged, and juries of citizens will gather to sit and judge that evidence democratically, to mold and shape and refine our sense of justice.

See that flag, Mr. Reid? That's the flag of the United States of America. That flag will fly there long after this is all forgotten. That flag still stands for freedom. You know it always will. Custody, Mr. Officer. Stand him down.

Pwnage!

Full Video:

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Great Quotes

I was hoping to write a fairly significant response to the State of the Union (SOTU), but I'm down in DC for my grandmother's funeral, and won't likely get the time for a few days. But there are loads of good things being said today, and I've got a ton of posts saved up from the past week or so for comment. And since I've got a few hours and need to distract myself, let's do some quotes.

First, a post from Political Scientist John Sides on the role of "independents" in our political system. Know this. Understand this. And repeat it constantly whenever you are discussing politics with your friends:

I want to yell.

INDEPENDENTS ARE NOT A “VAST MIDDLE GROUND.”

INDEPENDENTS DO NOT COMPRISE MORE THAN “A THIRD OF AMERICANS.”

How many DAMN TIMES must this be said before this MOST BASIC OF FINDINGS — first explicated at length almost 20 YEARS AGO! — sinks into the heads of pundits.

I will keep linking to this post as long as it takes. To repeat: true, honest-to-God independents are about 10% of the American population. Declining support for Obama among independents accounts for less than a fifth of Obama’s overall decline in support.

OK, now some SOTU reactions:

CBS News:

83 percent said they approved of the proposals the President made. Just 17 percent disapproved

CNN:

48 percent of speech watchers had a very positive reaction, with three in 10 saying they had a somewhat positive response and 21 percent with a negative response.

Mark Blumenthal on a Democracy Corps dial test:

The shifts there are very extraordinary. On the issue of whether he puts Wall Street ahead of the middle class, it was a 50 point shift on people saying that [doesn't describe him] well. There was a 40-point shift...on fighting special interests. On banking reform, on support, it was a 38 point shift in favor of that. And that's clearly, far and away the place where he showed the greatest strength and clarity.

Andrew Samwick:

I give President Obama high praise for the parts of his speech this evening where he chastised his own party in the Congress for its ineffectiveness and for telling the Senate Republicans that if they are going to insist on supermajorities to get any policy passed, then they are going to have to share in the responsibility for governing. Good for him. Nobody's perfect, but I cannot help but think that the conduct of the Congress in recent years, and the Senate in particular, would be enough to make a Founding Father vomit.

Kevin Drum:

Obama was dead serious most of the time, but he also seemed loose and engaging, at times even sparring good-naturedly with the Republican side of the aisle. My guess is that this is a combination that works pretty well. At the very least, he didn't seem freighted down with the burdens of office, and that's an accomplishment all on its own given the events of the past couple of weeks.

James Fallows:

One moment when I couldn't believe what I was seeing: the Roberts-led stare whatsis? Supreme Court sitting directly in front of the President and being equally-directly dressed down by him, while the politicians right next to them in the chamber leapt up and cheered. Don't recall any moment quite like that before.

Steve Benen:

Given the public's palpable frustrations and the struggles the nation endured in 2009, there was a sense that the president would have to be vaguely apologetic during the address. He'd have to explain himself, acknowledge mistakes, and lay a new course for the year ahead. The pundits' use of words like "reboot" and "scaled back" were ubiquitous going into the speech.

The president, though, decided not to follow the conventional script. When he was supposed to be meek, he showed confidence. When expected to be contrite, Obama seemed proud. When Republicans sought deference, the president responded with strength. Indeed, while the GOP believes electoral winds are at their backs, Obama didn't mind teasing, confronting, challenging, and even mocking them in a good-natured way.

The fear that the president might shrink from the moment was backwards -- Obama stepped up and seemed larger than ever.

Matt Yglesias:

Obama seized the mantle of responsibility, pragmatism, and seriousness while challenging the GOP to show some good faith and willingness to be a constructive partner in government. But what he’s never been able to do is to generate the kind of specific, concrete political pressure on incumbent Republican senators that inspires them to vote “yes” on his bills or confirm his nominees.

Jonathan Chait:

I haven't seen a convincing explanation as to why it's so awful for Republicans to disagree with a presidential speech. The answer is "decorum," but to me, decorum suggests giving latitude to the opposition. The State of the Union, remember, was originally delivered elsewhere in order to avoid the appearance of a president dictating to Congress. Forcing Congress and the Supreme Court to defer to the president as a ceremonial head of state, rather than the head of a co-equal branch of government, runs counter to the deepest spirit of our form of government.

Moreover, it represents the Washington establishment's prudish aversion to debate. I can see why a loud outburst might be objectionable -- though I'd prefer a feisty back-and-forth, like in Great Britain -- but to scold Alito merely for moving his lips in such a way as to show disapproval seems to be taking the prudishness to a new extreme. Yes, he's a Supreme Court Justice and we're supposed to believe he has no political beliefs or agenda, but in the post Bush v. Gore world it's a little late for that.

Andrew Sullivan responds to Clive Crook, who asks "What does it matter who caused the problem?":

Let me try to explain: it matters who caused the problem and why because if we do not understand the causes we cannot fix the problem and it matters because any adult judgment of a politician's first year that does not take into account the inheritance he was bequeathed is impossible.

It matters because the most important fact in American politics is the worst presidency in modern times that preceded Obama.

Two failed, unwinnable wars that continue to destroy lives and cripple our finances, a massive splurge in entitlement and discretionary spending, a huge increase in defense spending and massive tax cuts: this we now have to forget? This context should be removed from the picture?

It matters too because the very people who gave us this mess are now adamantly refusing to do anything to get us out of it, and pledge to return to exactly the same policies that got us there in the first place: more tax cuts, more war, more entitlement spending, more debt, no health insurance reform, no action on climate change. Clive acts as if there were some viable alternative out there. There isn't.

I'm not saying that Obama should not be held responsible for actions he has taken; I am saying he should not be held responsible for actions he did not take and an appalling inheritance he was forced to grapple with. Removing that context, as the GOP has largely done, and Crook now endorses, is to rig the entire debate so that Obama cannot win. It is a function of the kind of punditry that is, in fact, far more of a problem for the country than anything Obama has done - because it bases political judgment on unreality, and distorts the body politic's capacity for reasoned argument. It treats all of this as a game.

And some non-SOTU related thoughts:

Matt Yglesias on taxes:

As long-time readers know, I’m a big believer in taxes. The American people are big believers in government services, but they like them to be paid for by magic. The political system thus often winds up directing policy in a weird direction—doing policy through tax subsidies and “credits” and regulatory mandates rather than simply taxing and spending. This is bad, in my view, but the people don’t seem to agree.

There are, however, two recent little glimmers of hope. One is that in Oregon a ballot measure to enact sharply progressive increases in income taxes on high earners passed. The other is that in last night’s State of the Union address the idea of a new tax on large banks was a big applause line. The President put it front and center, and many members of congress stood and cheered for it. Neither of those things fundamentally gets us to where I want us to be, but they’re both steps in the right direction.

Steve Benen on the role of Republicans in the vote against the budget commission they proposed:

Six GOP senators co-sponsored the legislation to create the commission, and then voted against their own idea. Asked for an explanation, the Republicans said the commission -- which was intended to push policymakers to make uncomfortable decisions -- might have told them what they didn't want to hear, and should therefore not exist...

These six Republican senators said they'd welcome a commission -- it was, after all, their idea to co-sponsor the bill -- just so long as the GOP isn't asked to make concessions or compromises at all.

We've heard plenty of rhetoric of late about how President Obama just needs to reach out more to Republicans to strike bipartisan compromises. But how can anyone take such an approach seriously when leading GOP lawmakers oppose their own ideas because they may be asked to accept bipartisan concessions?

Neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol, on his son Bill Kristol:

My poor son has got it wrong again

Kate Sheppard reports on Frank Luntz recent findings on the need to reframe the climate change conversation:

Luntz suggests less talk of dying polar bears and more emphasis on how legislation will create jobs, make the planet healthier and decrease US dependence on foreign oil. Advocates should emphasize words like "cleaner," "healthier," and "safer"; scrap "green jobs" in favor of "American jobs," and ditch terms like "sustainability" and "carbon neutral" altogether. "It doesn't matter if there is or isn't climate change," he said. "It's still in America's best interest to develop new sources of energy that are clean, reliable, efficient and safe."

Ron Brownstein on our dysfunctional political system:

We are operating in what amounts to a parliamentary system without majority rule, a formula for futility.

Lanny Davis (I cannot believe I'm quoting him on this, but he's right, so...) on the need to refram the health care debate:

The Democrats have a simple message on health care that has still not really gotten through: If our bill passes, you never have to worry about getting, or losing, health insurance for the rest of your life. How is it that so few people have heard that message?

Matt Yglesias on voting in the United States:

Consider, for example, America’s staggering quantity of elected officials. If you live in Toronto, you vote for a member of the Toronto City Council, you vote for a member of the Ontario Parliament, and you vote for a member of the Canadian Parliament. That’s one large Anglophone city in North America.

What happens in New York City? Well, you’ve got a city council member, a borough president, a mayor, a public advocate, a comptroller, and a district attorney. You’ve also got a state assembly member, a state senator, an attorney-general, a state comptroller, and a governor. Then at the federal level, there’s a member of congress, two senators, and the president. That’s sixteen legislative and elected officials rather than Toronto’s three. New Yorkers don’t have three times as much time in their day to monitor the performance of elected officials. Instead, New Yorker elected officials simply aren’t monitored as closely. That creates more scope for corruption. What’s more since campaign money has diminishing marginal returns, the proliferation of elected makes money matter more than it otherwise would.

A big country like the United States is never going to have public officials who are as well-monitored as the ones in a place like Denmark. But we make the situation much, much worse by proliferating the quantity of elected officials to the point where most people have no idea what’s happening. How many people can name their state senator? How many people know what things their school board has authority over and what things their mayor decides? And this is all without considering the absolutely insane practice of electing judges.

And last but not least, a few must-reads that are quite difficult to quote:

Matt Yglesias on the Marginal Cost Pricing For Mass Transit

NPR on the role of the bail bond industry in our messed up criminal justice system.

Imagine if the United States redrew its political borders by population size. James Fallows explains.

Bipartisanship!

Check out this report from Nicholas Beaudrot:

The Senate amendment to enact statutory pay-as-you-go passed 60-40. By agreement among members of the World's Laziest Deliberative Body, this amendment required 60 votes to pass. Zero Republicans voted for it. This meas deficit peacocks like Judd Gregg, John McCain, George Voinovich, and moderates such as Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe couldn't bring themselves to support it. Had Scott Brown been sworn in, unless he had a sudden bout of conscience, the amendment would not have passed.

The commitment to PAYGO was probably the singular most important instrument in driving down the deficit during the 1990s. It forces Congress to make actual decisions about budgeting, not fantasy Republican decisions as we saw during the Bush years. But since it might be a back-door way of making it slightly more likely that taxes might be increased a smidge, or since it might be some sort of legislative victory for Democrats, every single Republican remained opposed to it.

I hope that the Peterson Foundation and other balanced-budget types keep this in mind the next time they think there's a bipartisan commitment to get the deficit under control.

I don't know how many more times this has to happen before, a) our nation's pundits figure out that the Republicans have no interest whatsoever in governing or solving problems; and b) Republicans aren't even remotely serious about budget deficits. Reagan and Bush created massive deficits. Clinton fixed the problem. Bush II and the GOP Congress then made them worse than anyone could have possibly imagined. And once Obama got in office they flip flopped back to pretending they cared about the mess they just finished making!

Except, as this vote shows, they don't actually care! It's all just a big political game for them. For god's sake - they are voting against their own proposals!

UPDATE: Oh thank god! More like this, Mr. Axelrod, please!

"It's time to put up or shut up," Axelrod said. "We will put the other party to the test and they will have to explain why they are standing in the way."

On a similar note he criticized 7 Republican senators including John McCain for voting against a debt commission measure they had co-sponsored.

"You can't pretend to be deficit hawks and then be chicken when the votes come up," Axelrod said.

He also highlighted that last February just three Republicans voted for the stimulus plan, which had 25 different tax cuts.

"We're going to put the onus on them, we're not going to let them sit it out," he said.

Pelosi On Health Care

Don't think Presidential rhetoric matters? Here's Pelosi today on health care:

“You go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll poll vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”

Why Is Evan Bayh A Senator?

After reading comments like these, I cannot help but wonder why the man decided to become a Senator.

What precisely does he think he is doing in DC? He can't be after power, since he doesn't seem willing to exercise it. He can't be after money, since he'd obviously make much more int he private sector. Clearly he has no interest in solving the nation's problems, since he's always among the first to complain that things are too "hard" or "contentious" to do. Maybe he thought it would be an easy gig that didn't require any real work or effort? I honestly don't know.

I Got This!

Once upon a time, roughly a century and a half ago, partisan newspaper editors had the ear of the President. you've heard of Jackson's Kitchen Cabinet, right? They were newspaper editors or printers, and were in some very real ways more powerful than the President's formal cabinet. That era, the era of the partisan press, lasted more than a half century, and was eventually killed off by the rise of the supposedly nonpartisan urban newspapers.

Although my dissertation has many moving parts, at the end of the analysis is the argument that we are returning to an era much more like the Jacksonian one than anything we've seen in the last 150 years. It will obviously be very different in very many ways, but in a few crucially important ones - the ability and interest of average citizens to engage directly in the public sphere, the importance of partisan news outlets and editors, and a deeply polarized political system - I believe it will be strikingly similar.

The transition is only just now beginning. But for the sake of both my country and my dissertation, I hope it dramatically accelerates tonight. Because the White House, Congressional Democrats, bloggers, and the pundits who work in the old world of the corporate media really need to read this post from Josh Marshall. And then they need to act on it.

Josh Marshall - What's The Prez Made Of?

The central problem the president is laboring under is the fact that the economy remains in a shambles. And unemployment remains at a toxic 10%. Beyond that though the Democrats are suffering because they have shown voters an image of fecklessness and inability to deliver results at a moment of great public anxiety and suffering. Big changes provoke great anxiety, especially in such a divided society. But Democrats are not just having dealing with the ideological divisions in the country -- which is what the Tea Party movement is about. They're also losing a big swathe of the population that is losing faith that the Democrats can govern, that they can even deliver on the reforms and policies they say are necessary for the national good. As I wrote earlier, this is about meta-politics. If the Democrats, either from the left or the right, walk away from reform, they will get slaughtered in November. They'll get it from the people who want reform, from the people who never wanted reform and from sensible people all over who just think they can't get anything done.

What the Democrats -- and a lot of this is on the White House -- have done is get so deep into the inside game of legislative maneuvering, this and that 'gang' of senators and a lot of other nonsense that they've let themselves out of sync with the public mood and the people's needs.

The president needs to find way to say, we've heard you. We've gotten so focused on working the Washington channels to get this thing done that we've lost a sense of the public's mood and urgency. Well, we've heard you. We're going to stop playing around and get this thing done. And then we're going to work on getting Americans back to work. We know the urgency of the moment and we know you expect results.

...This is the biggest testing time the president has yet faced. It could be a key turning point in his presidency. Over the next forty-eight hours the president is going to come under withering pressure to walk away from reform. It'll come from the left and the right, and in various different flavors. It will come from shocking directions. The president is going to have to find a way to say, No. We're doing this. He'll need to stand down a lot of cowardly and foolish people in his own party. He'll have to stand down the vast and formless force of establishment punditry and just say, No. We're going to do this. And he's going to have to make the case to the public, not necessarily convince all those who have doubts about health care reform but make clear that he thinks this is the right direction for the country and because he thinks it's the right thing to do that he's going to make it happen.

In most moments, the power of the presidency is vastly overestimated. This is not one of those moments. For the next 48 hours, rhetoric is action, and words are deeds. One special election in one state a crisis does not make. Take a deep breath, relax, and then step back up and fight like hell to finish this battle. And then move on to the next.

Mr. President, this is why we elected you. This is why so many of us worked so hard for so long. We trusted not just that you were the right man for the job, but that you were the right man for a moment precisely such as this. None of us thought this would come easy. Least of all you. You knew the test would eventually come. Here it is. You got this. No worries. No worries...

Great Quotes

I'm going to try and do posts like this once every few days. I wish I had time to respond to all of these. I don't but I don't want you to miss them. So...

Matt Yglesias:

It’s the miracle of capitalism!

Two guys are in the woods and they spot a vicious bear. One starts tying his sneakers. The other says “you’re never going to outrun that bear.” The first says, “I only need to outrun you.” And yet our society is so determined to worship money and success that this idea has developed that guys like Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein who managed to outrun the other guy actually outran the bear.

ThinkProgress:

Temperatures in “most places” are actually “above average for this time of year.” Record high and low temperatures are set every year, but there have been consistently more highs than lows in recent decades, as the National Center for Atmospheric Research demonstrates:

Ezra Klein:

According to Congressional Quarterly, President Obama "did better even than legendary arm-twister Lyndon Johnson in winning congressional votes on issues where he took a position." That is to say, if Obama told Congress he wanted X, Congress was more likely to give him X than any president in the past 60 years.

On the one hand, you could take this as evidence that Obama is an awesome president. But I'd say it's a bit more complex than that.

You're seeing the triumph of three things here. First, an uncommonly large Democratic majority. Second, a long-standing historical trend toward party discipline. And third, the White House's relentless strategy of focusing on what it can pass rather than what it thinks is needed.

The American people, via CNN:

Please tell me whether you agree or disagree that Barack Obama has the personality and leadership qualities a President should have.

Agree 64%
Disagree 35%

David Axelrod, via the National Journal and Steve Benen:

"It's almost impossible to win a referendum on yourself," Axelrod insisted. "And the Republicans would like this to be a referendum. It's not going to be a referendum."

Asked what has to happen in the next 10 months to produce the best possible result for Democrats in November, Axelrod didn't hesitate in identifying his top priority: an economy that is adding, rather than losing, jobs each month. "I think job growth is certainly number one," he said. "I think that's how most people measure a recovering economy."

To nudge that process along, he says, he expects Congress to quickly conclude legislation to promote job growth: "We have to take that up right away," he said....

"They want to stand with the insurance industry on health care and protect the status quo, then let them defend that in an election," Axelrod said. "If they want to stand with the banks and the financial industries, and protect the status quo, then let them explain that in an election. If the party that over eight years turned a... surplus into the most significant growth in national debt by far in the history of the country and left this president with a $1.3 trillion deficit when he walked in the door and an economic crisis, let them campaign on fiscal integrity. You know... we're certainly willing to have that discussion. The difference is that we'll have that discussion in the context of a campaign, and we haven't, in the midst of a crisis, tried to campaign every day in the halls of Congress."

Paul Campos:

The world's greatest nation seems bent on subjecting itself to a similarly humiliating defeat, by playing a game that could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts as long as there are terrorists who want to harm Americans; and

(2) If terrorists should manage to kill or injure or seriously frighten any of us, they win.

These rules help explain the otherwise inexplicable wave of hysteria that has swept over our government in the wake of the failed attempt by a rather pathetic aspiring terrorist to blow up a plane on Christmas Day. For two weeks now, this mildly troubling but essentially minor incident has dominated headlines and airwaves, and sent politicians from the president on down scurrying to outdo each other with statements that such incidents are "unacceptable," and that all sorts of new and better procedures will be implemented to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

Conservative think tank AEI:

The real economy also responded to the massive stimulus but remained heavily dependent on it. In the United States, growth during the second half of 2009 probably averaged about 3 percent. Absent temporary fiscal stimulus and inventory rebuilding, which taken together added about 4 percentage points to U.S. growth, the economy would have contracted at about a 1 percent annual rate during the second half of 2009.

Steve Brill:

“Over the last 50 years, the ratio of top pay to average pay at public companies has multiplied roughly 11 times (24:1 to 275:1). That’s more pay in one workday for the chief executive than his average employee makes in a year.”

Happy Health Care Day!

It's been nearly a month since I've posted an update here - blame my dissertation! blame Twitter! blame the slow pace of progress in the Senate! - so long that I've now got 100's of items saved in my Feed Reader for future comment. At this point, there's obviously no way I can get to all of them, but given that the end of the decade is fast approaching... and given the historic nature of today's vote in the Senate... I feel like I have no choice today but to try. So let's get to it!

On Health Insurance Reform:

We're nearly there people! The bill's not perfect, but no bill ever is. Social Security was far from perfect when it first passed. Medicare and Medicaid were far more modest than they are today. Civil Rights legislation was nowhere near perfect when it was first adopted. It took decades of fighting to create robust protections for our nation's parks and forests. Why? Because this is how democracy works. It is a method and a process, not an outcome. We fight. We argue. We talk. We convince. We stand up. We act. And then we do it all over again, each and every day, until it is time for the next generation to take the lead in the fight.

Is it messy? Yes. Is it contentious? Yes. Because it is supposed to be. Because it needs to be. If the fight was easy, it wouldn't be a fight. The status quo, no matter how wretched, never easily gives way. Creating change requires more energy than defending stasis. Know this. Understand it. Accept it. And never, ever let it prevent you from doing what needs to be done.

I understand why some people on the left are unhappy with this bill. But I cannot for the life of me figure out why they think its smart politics or policy to oppose it, or worse, to join with the most hideous elements on the right in an effort to see it killed. On that count, I'm with Nate: "Progressives Are Batshit Crazy To Oppose The Senate Bill." And with Josh: "In real politics, there are no opt-outs, only cop-outs." And with Max, with a nod to Matt, who wrote:

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth--that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say 'In spite of all!' has the calling for politics.

To repeat myself, this bill isn't perfect. But it is, as John Chait wrote today, "the most significant American legislative triumph in at least four decades." And, as KDrum wrote, "the biggest progressive advance in my adult life." And, as John Cohn wrote, "the most ambitious piece of domestic legislation in a generation." And, as Ezra wrote, "arguably the most important piece of legislation the body has passed since 1963." This is an enormous achievement. Do not let your quest for your idea of the perfect blind you to the immense good that is happening right in front of your face. We're winning one of the most important political fights in more than a generation.

And while we're on the subject of Ezra, Jon, John, Kevin, Nate, and the rest of the wonky progressive bloggers around the 'sphere, let's be sure to also acknowledge just how much these guys have done to enlighten our nation's political debate. A decade ago, citizens who wanted to follow the ins and outs of our nation's policy debates quite literally had nowhere to turn. TV and print media covered the people and the politics, but they never - and here I am using that word quite deliberately - dug into the details of policy in anything even remotely approaching the level of detail that these bloggers have. Once, maybe twice during a debate you'd get a giant, multi-thousand word piece that attempted to cover the subject, but that's about it. And god help you if you happened to miss that day's edition, because there were no archives for you to return to.Today? Today you can read thousands of words a day, all part of an ongoing conversation that this nation's citizens are having with themselves. Ezra and Jon and Nate and others are leading a national clinic, and in so doing, are helping to re-democratize our nation's public sphere.

Nothing like this has ever existed before. What we are doing, what we are creating together, is something entirely new. The consequences for our system of government are immense, even if they aren't yet clear. Don't believe me?

But back to health care before moving on.... Do not underestimate what an historic achievement this will be. Ignore the cable teevee pundits. This issue represents a HUGE win for the left and for the Democratic Party. Some parts of the party are unhappy right now, but this will pass. Remember how divided we supposedly were during the primary? Remember how everyone said the wounds would not heal in time for the fall campaign? Remember how wrong all of those people were?

I know its fashionable to claim that Democrats don't know what they are doing. Ignore this too. With the help of the people - both activists and average citizens alike - the party is finding its soul and its spine again. Its leadership is rising to the occasion. Health care reform will be a huge issue next fall, and again in 2012. And I promise you, it will be an issue we will win on, both because we have the people on our side and because our opponents are so far beyond lost I don't have the words to describe them....

On the Continuing Collapse of the GOP:

State Attorneys General from several Southern states are planning to mount legal challenges to the law - never mind that the clause of the constitution they are citing makes explicit reference to ports

Congressional Republicans plan on making their opposition to health care the centerpiece of the upcoming campaign - never mind that their opposition comes without any positive proposals of their own.

Republican pundits, the people opinion polls consistently ID as the real leaders of the Republican Party, continue to hyperventilate about how this bill will end civilization as we know it - never mind that this tactic utterly failed them in the fall of 2008.

And its newest leading light, a morning zoo DJ turned political movement leader, is set on leading the effort to remove all the "Marxist code words" from the Bible. Because God knows his Son wasn't in favor of helping the poor. Or the sick. Or the downtrodden. Or the outcast. Or the weak. Or minorities. Or anyone other than himself, right?

Mark my words: The Republican Party is collapsing. If it does not pull itself out of this tailspin soon, it may soon cease to exist as a truly national political power. No political party is forever. The Federalist Party collapsed in the early 1800s under the weight of its own contradictions. The Whigs followed suit in the decade before the Civil War. The Populists misjudged their era and disappeared at the turn of the 20th century.

And then... something changed, and the two "major" parties reached a form of stasis. What was that change? In large part, I believe it was the rise of top down, national broadcast networks, a new system of political communication that privileged those in power over those now forced to watch from the outside. And that system of communication is dying. As a vertical system of one-to-many communication gives way to a horizontal system that interconnects the many unto itself, the elites are losing control. The information infrastructure atop which the last great party system was built is disappearing. And as it goes, it is entirely conceivable that it will take one of our nation's parties with it. It has happened before. It will happen again. And yes, that's precisely what my dissertation seeks to show.

Like the Federalists before it, the modern Republican Party is on the wrong wide of every major issue facing this country. It is opposed to universal health care. It is opposed to climate change legislation, even if it helps create jobs. It is opposed to any and all forms of non-punitive Immigration reform. It is opposed to the use of science in the creation of public policy. But its for tax cuts! And wars! And white people! It stands, in short, for the past, no matter how obviously disastrous that past is.

Political parties do not live forever. Like all living things, they must evolve or they must die. Denying the power of evolution does not make it go away.

On Realignments:

Republicans are becoming Democrats, and Democrats are becoming Republicans. Will this help the GOP find its way? I doubt it. But only time, of course, will tell.

Meanwhile, OFA, the organization that we built for the Obama campaign, is still out there, alive and well. We made 1 million calls to Congress over the past few months. We held more than 25,000 events in congressional districts. And now, our opponents are beginning to copy us. The future? Why, I think its already here.

On Obama:

Not surprisingly, I cannot say it better than this: Meep Meep, mutha fucka....

On the Filibuster:

Its nice to see people across the political world finally turning their attention to just how absurd and undemocratic this rule really is. James Fallows, Matt Yglesias, Mark Schmitt, and eventually even Pres. Obama himself have commented at length recently.

For me, its simple. The Senate is already ridiculously undemocratic. Despite the fact that California's two senators represent more than 12% of the US population, their votes count for only 2% of the US Senate. Meanwhile, despite the fact that the smallest 20 states have a population roughly equal to that of California, they hold 40 of the chamber's votes. Add Connecticut, and you've got enough under current Senate rules and practices to block any and all legislation.

Let me repeat myself: The smallest 20 states + Connecticut = a filibuster.

I think I'll leave it there for now.

On Climate Change:

Im running out of time for this update, so let's go to the links:

Uncertain about uncertainty? Read this.

What the hacked ClimateGate emails do - and do not - show.

Scientific American offers Seven Answers To Climate Contrarian Nonsense

How Science is supposed to work.

A climate skeptic's conversion.

Bits and Bobs:

Zen and the Art of Politics

A solution to the black carbon problem?

The Bright Side Of $26 Drone Hacks? Makes me wonder if it wasn't intentional.

Michelle Bachmann is a welfare queen!

Teddy Roosevelt is still a badass.

RedState's Erick Erickson is still a moron.

Donald Duck loves taxes.

Even in Obama's socialist utopia, taxes are still at historic lows.

And Obama, no matter what pundits might say, is still, in the one way that matters most, like Reagan. Believe it.

I'm out. Merry Christmas to each and every one of you. Peace....

On Lieberman

Has anyone out there in pundit land considered the very real possibility that CT Senator Lieberman might be deliberately undermining Democrats before switching parties in advance of his 2012 re-election effort?

Also, why aren't Dems rolling out the Republican "nuclear option" playbook from 2005? I'm not suggesting they should use it, necessarily. But as a trial balloon, it might help clarify things for the ridiculously named "moderates" in the Senate.

UPDATE: Jon Chait offers another hypothesis: Lieberman isn't devious; he's just dumb.

UPDATE II: Ezra Klein looks to have gotten into a tangle with one of his colleagues at the Post. After detailing how their only disagreement appears to be around the fact that Ezra followed the facts they agree on to their logical conclusion, he writes something that everyone must read:

We have a very sterile policy debate in this country. We talk about things in terms of costs, not lives. It's the equivalent of conducting wars from the air: You hide the damage. That might be helpful, in some cases. Too much passion can impede clear thinking. But we run the danger of forgetting the implications of our actions. It's fine to speak in terms of costs so long as we do not forget to think in terms of lives. 

Joe Lieberman is insured. Chuck Lane is insured. I am insured. If we get sick, we can go to the doctor. Studies show that our risk of death is substantially lower than those who are uninsured, as is our risk of medical bankruptcy, and chronic pain or impairment. Health-care reform, with or without the public option and the Medicare buy-in, will extend coverage to more than 30 million people. It will improve the coverage of tens of millions more. 

The debate over this policy is whether it cuts the deficit, but the point of this policy is that it saves lives. Making that clear using numbers derived from the best empirical evidence we've had is not venomous. It's responsible. Threatening to sink the effort because you don't like a small corner of it is morally irresponsible. And we columnists should not grow so accustomed to the forced courtesies of Washington that we forget how to say so. 

Not too long ago, Lieberman agreed that these lives were far too important to be sacrificed due to political pique. “Every campaign, as President Clinton reminded us, is about the future," Lieberman said in a 2006 debate against Ned Lamont. "And what I'm saying to the people of Connecticut, I can do more for you and your families to get something done to make health care affordable, to get universal health insurance." 

If this is doing more, I'd hate to see doing less.

I've come to believe that this tendency to view everything from an antiseptic 30,000 ft view-from-nowhere has, more than anything else, destroyed the trust Americans once had in the news media. And by extension, the trust they once had in their political system. If every policy story is presented in cold, impersonal terms, over time it is only natural for people to conclude the details of policy simply do not matter. It's all presented as if its a big interpersonal drama, with the only effects felt by elite political actors who aren't actually affected by the issues they are debating. 

But that's just not how things actually work. This government is our government. It is no more and no less than what we make it, together, each and every day. And this policy debate is a perfect example of that. This isn't about the Senate. It isn't about the President. It is about us. And although it might not be convenient for either our political or media elites, in our 21st century America, some of our fellow Americans die each and every day because they do not have health insurance. Saying that might make people uncomfortable. But so what? It should. 

Why does one of the writers at the Washington Post think it is a "venomous smear" to point out that Joe Lieberman's personal grudge will in point of fact cause some people to needlessly die. He doesn't disagree with Ezra on the facts. In fact, he accepts that studies show that "the lack of health insurance contributed to the deaths of 137,000 people between 2000 and 2006." Each and every day, more than 50 Americans die, Lane admits, because they were unable to get the care they needed. But connect that to Lieberman's endless need to delay things, and oh my! Ezra has just gone much too far. But why? What is journalism for if not speaking truth?

It might be uncomfortable for everyone to think about public policy is like this, but to repeat myself: so what? If it makes you uncomfortable to deal with the world as it is, don't become a journalist. Or a politician. Go do something else that better suits your fragile nature. 

UPDATE III: Via Ezra, a video from just 3 months ago of Lieberman strongly endorsing the Medicare buy-in that his principles demand he reject today: Ezra adds:

I'm still awaiting an explanation of how it's principled for Lieberman to threaten to derail a bill that will save more than a hundred thousand lives because it includes a policy he supported as recently as three months ago.

And then this, via Twitter:

If all these insured people think health care insurance doesn't reduce mortality, why do they buy so much of it?

I can't wait to hear the answers to that last one! UPDATE IV: At this point, this really is just a long "go read Ezra" post. But in the interest of covering the entire debate today... another must read from Ezra. FINAL UPDATE: None of this should be read as a suggestion that Dems bail on the reform project. As I've said on numerous occasions: public option, no public option; Medicare expansion, no Medicare expansion, it doesn't matter. Passing this bill is the beginning, not the end. If you don't think it goes far enough, that's great! Go out and fight for it, both before and after passage. But to suggest that the whole thing should be scrapped so that we can start over? That's as ridiculous as what Lieberman is doing. You go to reform with the political system you have, not the one you wish you had. The world isn't perfect. Welcome to adulthood.

Weekend Bits + Bobs

Got a ton of posts saved in the clippings folder. Might as well clear 'em all out while watching some football....

+ I keep hearing from all my conservative friends that deficits are going to be Obama's undoing. Ignoring for the moment that conservatives have absolutely no credibility whatsoever on this issue... and ignoring for the moment that the current federal debt as a percentage of GDP is only slightly higher than it was at the end of the first Bush presidency... Obama hasn't yet completed his first year in office. He's got plenty of time to tackle this problem. And - shocking! - he's already planning to!

+ This might fall under the "things you already know" category, but its still worth a review. Attackerman offers this conclusion from a new Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation on how bin Laden escaped from Tora Bora in December 2001:

The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, the architects of the unconventional Afghan battle plan known as Operation Enduring Freedom. Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned that too many U.S. troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency. Reversing the recent American military orthodoxy known as the Powell doctrine, the Afghan model emphasized minimizing the U.S. presence by relying on small, highly mobile teams of special operations troops and CIA paramilitary operatives working with the Afghan opposition. Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching more U.S. troops, Franks refused to deviate from the plan.

+ Meanwhile... Socialism!

"We need to start thinking like the Chinese," [Glenn] Beck said at a recent rally. "I’m developing a 100 year plan for America."

But its Obama we're supposed to be afraid of, right?

+ Sen. Lieberman won't appear on Rachel Maddow's show because she has a "point of view." Good to know. So I assume from now on he will only do interviews with robots?

+ Why are bills so long? Combine this, this, and this and you have the answer.

+ This one is for my California people. Ummm... What the hell is wrong with you? Would you please do something about this?

+ Tom Schaller offers a great response to the Tea Party / Tenthers here.

+ This tweet from Sen. Claire McCaskill is a few weeks old, but it deserves a second look:

After you do one really, really big, really, really hard thing that makes everybody mad, I don't think anybody's excited about doing another really, really big thing that's really, really hard that makes everybody mad

I hear this all the time from politicians, and no matter how many times it is repeated, it never makes any sense. What's the point of getting elected to office if you don't want to do hard things? No one forced you to run for office. It was your choice to run now, during a time of economic crisis, and not later. If the country has lots of "really, really hard things" that need to be done, its your job. Suck it up and deal! As Ezra says, "they can solve fewer problems when there are fewer problems to solve." Which, you know, is what will happen if they actually do the job they were elected to do.

And please... don't come back to me with this "I might not get reelected!" nonsense. The point of getting elected isn't to enable some future reelection effort. Its to get things done. I'd love to have a permanent Democratic majority, but not if it doesn't actually lead to policy change.

+ Via Andrew Sullivan, this is the best fact check I've yet seen of Palin's new book:

“That is the most cockamamie bullshit. She didn’t have a damn thing to do with it, and she didn’t know what it was about," - Dave Oesting of Anchorage, lead plaintiff attorney in the private litigants’ civil case against Exxon and its successor, Exxon Mobil Corp.

+ This, however, is the quote of the month:

"I meet with the gays here and there. They were in my house two weeks ago. I don’t mind gays. But I don’t want ‘em stuffing it down my throat all the time," - Utah Senator Chris Buttars, explaining his opposition to allowing same-sex couples to adopt children.

+ Back to Andrew Sullivan for a strange but nevertheless typical defense of states' rights:

Because these are areas of deep and principled disagreement and this is a vast and diverse country. Getting Massachusetts and Alabama to agree on a deep moral issue is almost impossible. And I remain a conservative who wants to see necessary change occur as far as possible with as broad a consensus as possible and who believes that decisions made closest to the ground are the least worst ways of avoiding massive errors or hideous unintended consequences.

He's right about the problem of settling deep moral issues in a country as large and diverse as this. But... why are states the best political unit in which to locate these decisions? Why not counties? Or metro areas? Or some other, much smaller political unit? State lines, after all, weren't originally drawn up along demographic lines. They were entirely arbitrary decisions made by people who weren't even remotely local. What the lines drawn by King George, for example, have to do with today's political questions? I'll tell you what: Nothing. And yet you hear this sort of thing from states' rights people all the time. I just don't get it.

+ And last but in no way least... two must read posts from TNC. Here's a fantastic take on the role of the MC and the DJ in hip hop culture. And here's a must-read on how Palin supporters misunderstand the role of fear in politics. It's so good I have to quote the conclusion:

People misunderstand fear. It doesn't always cause your foes to cower in a corner. Sometimes it causes them to beat the crap out of you with a bag of rusty nails.

On Health Care

I don't care what it takes to get the deal done. Make the compromises, and then get the deal done. We can always improve it later. A start, any start, is better than nothing. Do the best you can, then keep fighting until you get what you want. That's the essence of politics in our democratic republic. Never, ever forget that.

Mid-Week Bits + Bobs

Lots of interesting things going on out there that are too long for a Twitter post and too short for their own blog post. And no, I don't need no damn micro-blog either. Something like this works just fine:

+ Let's put this right up top. John Farmer, senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, has just written a book that provides evidence that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney provided false testimony to the 9/11 Commission. Even worse, he uses FAA and NORAD records to show that the Bush Administration sought to alter official government records to make their performance on 9/11 look much, much better than it actually was.

Wondering why you haven't heard about this yet? The NYT buried the story in its Sunday Book Review. Isn't it crazy how liberal that newspaper is? And how biased against conservatives?

+ Via Ezra Klein, a great quote from Rahm Emanuel on the pragmatic politics behind health reform:

“Let’s be honest. The goal isn’t to see whether I can pass this through the executive board of the Brookings Institution. I’m passing it through the United States Congress with people who represent constituents... I’m sure there are a lot of people sitting in the shade at the Aspen Institute — my brother being one of them — who will tell you what the ideal plan is. Great, fascinating. You have the art of the possible measured against the ideal.”

+ Meanwhile, Republicans continue to drive themselves off an ideological cliff. Political Wire / CNN / Ezra:

The poll indicates that a slight majority, 51%, of Republicans would prefer to see the GOP in their area nominate candidates who agree with them on all the major the issues even if they have a poor chance of beating the Democratic candidate. Forty-three percent of Republicans say they would rather have candidates with whom they don't agree on all the important issues but who can beat the Democrats."

In constrast, Democrats polled "seemed to place a slightly higher priority on electoral victory: 58% say that they would like their party to nominate candidates who can beat Republicans, even if they don't agree with those candidates on all the issues."

A party ceases to be a national political party when its members care more about ideology than about winning elections. Why? Because the only purpose a political party has is to win elections. It serves no other purpose.

+ Via Kevin Drum, a great example of SoCal conservative thinking:

It's like living in a Third World country not to have sewers. But nobody wants to pay that sort of exorbitant fee. If we need a sewer system, you expect government to provide that service.

Those fees the gentleman is complaining about? They are otherwise known as taxes. This approach is very typical of conservatives, particularly in California. Government ought to provide the services middle class people need to live a middle class lifestyle, but it must never ever collect money from middle class people to do so. Nor from small business. Nor from big business. And that, in a nutshell, is why the budgets of both CA and the USA are such a disastrous mess.

This really is quite simple: Taxes pay for the things that the people ask their government to do on their behalf. Without taxes, no services. No police. No fire fighters. No military. No 911. No public hospitals. No courts. No jails. No prisons. No roads. No public parks. No sewer systems. No food safety. No public transportation. No street lights. No national forests. No air traffic control. No airport security. No public universities. No public schools. No NIH. No bank deposit insurance. No... are you getting my point here?
Here's the less ranty version from CBO director Doug Elmendorf

The country faces a fundamental disconnect between the services the people expect the government to provide, particularly in the form of benefits for older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are willing to send to the government to finance those services.

Without taxes, there is no government. Period. Full stop. The end. No government whatsoever, including all of the things that we take for granted, and that in the words of this jackass, separate us from the "Third World."

+ Not to turn this into all taxes, all the time, but this from a recent Attackerman guest blogger is just too good to pass up:

A key part of living in a democratic society is accepting the fact that a majority of your fellow-citizens might favor a policy that you’re opposed to, morally or otherwise. Hell, a key part of living in a democratic society is accepting the fact that the government will grant certain rights – like reproductive freedom inclusive of abortion – that you find deeply immoral. Now, as a full person within said society, you can work and lobby to restrict the extent to which that right can be exercised. But what you can’t do is force the government to abandon rights or responsibilities that you find distasteful. For instance, I’m not a huge fan of bloated defense budgets or open-ended imperial adventures, and ideally, I would not want my tax dollars to support said projects. As a society however, we’ve agreed that I am not allowed to not pay taxes because I don’t like a particular action. Instead, I have to convince my fellow citizens that my stance is the correct one, and watch it go from there.

That's just one of two ways that the recent debate over insurance coverage for abortions highlights some very basic misperceptions people have about how money works in both our economic and political systems. Here's another, this time from Steve Benen:

As we talked about this morning, all the RNC has done here is opt out of abortion coverage for RNC employees. RedState wants an explanation of how this went unnoticed for 18 years.

But more important is the underlying logic. The new-and-improved RNC policy will insure its employees through Cigna, and Cigna will still pay for abortions, just not for RNC employees. In other words, RNC premiums will go to the company, and the company will then use its pool of money to pay for abortions. That's the "fix" RNC Chairman Michael Steele scrambled to make.

RedState and the Republican National Committee support the Stupak amendment, and according to its reasoning, the RNC will still be indirectly subsidizing abortions with its premiums. Leon H. Wolf wants an explanation for the previous mistake, without realizing that very little has actually changed here.

One of the most very basic qualities of money is its fungibility. Since all dollars are equal, any dollar collected by a single organization is the same as any other. Once its been collected, it can't be separated out. Any one dollar is interchangeable with any other.

For hard core pro-lifers, this should present a very serious problem. If abortion is so evil that it cannot be supported, then pro-lifers cannot buy insurance policies from companies that provide abortion coverage to anyone. Their individual policy is irrelevant. When their insurance company collects premiums, it puts all of the money into one giant pool. That's true with all financial transactions in general, but its specifically true with insurance, which is built entirely around the idea of pooling risks and costs across a giant group of people.Thus, if you are pro-life and you purchase insurance from a company that provides even one person with coverage for abortion, you have supported something you find morally abhorrent. If you really are as serious about this as you say, you will cancel your insurance right away. Right?

+ Here's a second great example of the bizarre contradictions in what passes for modern conservative thought. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) recently suggested that Carrie Prejean, the beauty queen turned anti-gay marriage activist turned conservative hero turned sex tape star, might make a good candidate for office. His reasoning:

[Carrie] has the ability to draw crowds and if she has a strong message to go with that, who knows what she can do? She has star power which can open doors.

We’ve all made mistakes when we were 17. [The sex tape] is going to be an impediment, but people are excited about her convictions and her beliefs.

Sure thing, she's done something that conservatives abhor. And that might be a problem. Except she says all the right things! And people like her! So no matter. After all, morals are about what you say, not what you do, right? Its words that matter, not deeds. Just like Jesus wanted. Wait. Hang on...

+ Andrew Sullivan writes about the real lessons of both 9/11 and Ft. Hood:

The awful truth is: what 9/11 revealed, and what it was designed to reveal, is that there is nothing we can really do definitively to stop another one. They had no weapons but our own technology. The training they had was not that sophisticated and the costs of the operation were relatively tiny. There were 19 of them. None of the key perpetrators has been brought to justice. Bin Laden remains at large. If you calculate the costs of that evil attack against the financial, moral and human costs of the fight back, 9/11 was a fantastic demonstration of the power of asymmetry to destroy the West.

Everything that has subsequently transpired has merely deepened that lesson. The US is now bankrupt, trapped in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of our lives, unable even to prevent the two most potentially dangerous Islamist states, Pakistan and Iran, from getting nukes, morally compromised and hanging on to global support only because of a new president who is even now being assaulted viciously at home for such grievous crimes as trying to get more people access to health insurance.

Yes, security is much better. Yes, it's amazing that more attacks have not taken place. Yes, Muslim-Americans have not joined Jihad the way many Europeans have. Yes, we have gained some small benefits from ousting the Taliban, and Saddam ... although at terrible costs. But we have done nothing to show that we can really win this war by the methods we have used so far. The biggest blow to al Qaeda as a global brand has not been what we have done to them, but what they have done to themselves, by their flagrant violence against fellow Muslims, their nihilism, and their barbaric brutality.

And now, in the wake of Fort Hood, we face the possibility of radicalizing Muslims in America and polarizing more Americans against them. This does not help.

+ Marc Lynch follows on:

The grand strategy of al-Qaeda and its affiliated ideologues is, and has always been, to generate a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West which does not currently exist. Their great challenge is that the vast majority of Muslims reject their theology, ideology, strategy and tactics. That's especially true of American Muslims. They therefore feel the need to change the environment in which Muslims live in order to change their calculations about the appropriateness of extremist identities and ideologies and actions.

Terrorism is a means towards that end. The object is to create a violent, polarized environment in which Muslims are forced to embrace a narrow, extreme version of Muslim identity. They want Muslims to accept a master narrative in which the Islamic umma is existentially threatened by Western aggression, and the only theologically and strategically appropriate individual response is to join the jihad in the path of god (as they have defined it).

+ Meanwhile, Bruce Schneier (via Kevin Drum) takes on our nonsensical approach to preventing terrorism:

Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No-one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards.

....Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders. When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense.

....Unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are largely invisible. Such measures include enhancing the intelligence-gathering abilities of the secret services, hiring cultural experts and Arabic translators, building bridges with Islamic communities both nationally and internationally, funding police capabilities — both investigative arms to prevent terrorist attacks, and emergency communications systems for after attacks occur — and arresting terrorist plotters without media fanfare. They do not include expansive new police or spying laws. Our police don't need any new laws to deal with terrorism; rather, they need apolitical funding. These security measures don't make good television, and they don't help, come re-election time. But they work, addressing the reality of security instead of the feeling.

The arrest of the "liquid bombers" in London is an example: they were caught through old-fashioned intelligence and police work. Their choice of target (airplanes) and tactic (liquid explosives) didn't matter; they would have been arrested regardless.

+ TNC nails why Dragon Age: Origins is one of the best games of its generation. And yes, I've already completed one play though. As a Dalish 'you can take our lives, but you will never take our freedom!' Elf, thank you very much.

The Art of the Possible

Via Steve Benen, here's something from Paul Begala written last August that should be kept in mind as the debate over the Stupak Amendment unfolds over the next few weeks:

No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt's original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers -- a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn't even cover the clergy. FDR's Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn't work, you got nothing from Social Security.

If that version of Social Security were introduced today, progressives like me would call it cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist. Perhaps it was all those things. But it was also a start. And for 74 years we have built on that start. We added more people to the winner's circle: farmworkers and domestic workers and government workers. We extended benefits to the children of working men and women who died. We granted benefits to the disabled. We mandated annual cost-of-living adjustments. And today Social Security is the bedrock of our progressive vision of the common good.

Politics is the art of the possible, not the perfect. I understand this specific issue is a very, very big deal to some people. But big enough to sink a once in a generation chance at meaningful heath care reform?

As with all legislation, these reforms can always be altered and improved later on, particularly because the major provisions don't take effect for as many as 3 or 4 years. If it cannot be corrected now, it can always be corrected later. But if this bill fails to pass, we lose everything in it. There is no a la carte option here.

Lieberman is willing to let the whole thing die because of the public option, exhibiting a level of self-interested short-sightedness that drives his opponents on the left nuts. But now, some of his fiercest critics want to draw a similar line over abortion funding. And so I have to ask: would the women that so many are fighting to defend be better off with a reformed system that doesn't provide insurance coverage for abortions, or with no reform at all? Because if this fight is pushed too far, those will be the choices.

I'm not saying that this isn't a fight worth having. If you believe it is, then fight! But as you do, keep the biggest possible picture in mind.

UPDATE: If you are going to fight, this line of attack from Markos (via Twitter) is a great one to take:

@markos: The thing the Stupak amendment is that I thought Republicans didn't want government between a doctor and patient.

[Updated to correct an absurd number of typos. Never blog before coffee!]

A Losing Strategy

For the past week or so, I've been unable to figure out what to write about the special election being held in NY-23. But the news that the Republican Party's candidate, Dede Scozzafava, has dropped out to make way for the Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, has fixed that.

The district should be a safe seat for the GOP. The party's nominee, Scozzafava, is actually to the right of the median member of her party in the NY State Assembly. Hoffman, meanwhile, doesn't even live in the district. And his party is mostly a joke. Here, for example, is the entirety of their position on NATO, one of the 20 major issues listed in their drop-down menu:

"NATO must redefine its mission or we should deem it an institution that outlived its usefulness."

But once a weird collection of national conservative activists got involved, Scozzafava's campaign tanked and Hoffman's took off. And the result? The GOP is now rallying behind the Conservative Party candidate.

Looking back over the entirely of American history, there are plenty of examples of a strong majority party co-opting the ideas, ideals, and language of a small third party that posed a threat to its coalition. But its hard to find an example where a party that had recently badly lost a series of national elections found their way back to the majority by embracing the candidates and ideologies of a fringe third party. In fact, so far as I know, there aren't any examples of that. And my guess is, this won't be the first.

The point of a political party is to build an organization that can bring together a diverse coalition of peoples and groups to win elections, at the state, local, and national levels. You don't do that by having out of state activists overrule the decisions of leaders at the local level. You can try it if you like, but in the end you'll discover I'm right. It won't work.

UPDATE: Well, okay then. Apparently Newt Gingrich agrees with everything I just said.

UPDATE II: And then Scozzafava endorsed the Democrat Bill Owens. Here's her statement:

"You know me, and throughout my career, I have been always been an independent voice for the people I represent. I have stood for our honest principles, and a truthful discussion of the issues, even when it cost me personally and politically. Since beginning my campaign, I have told you that this election is not about me; it's about the people of this District.

"It is in this spirit that I am writing to let you know I am supporting Bill Owens for Congress and urge you to do the same.

"It's not in the cards for me to be your representative, but I strongly believe Bill is the only candidate who can build upon John McHugh's lasting legacy in the U.S. Congress. John and I worked together on the expansion of Fort Drum and I know how important that base is to the economy of this region. I am confident that Bill will be able to provide the leadership and continuity of support to Drum Country just as John did during his tenure in Congress.

"In Bill Owens, I see a sense of duty and integrity that will guide him beyond political partisanship. He will be an independent voice devoted to doing what is right for New York. Bill understands this district and its people, and when he represents us in Congress he will put our interests first.

"Please join me in voting for Bill Owens on Tuesday. To address the tough challenges ahead, we must rise above partisanship and politics and work together. There's too much at stake in this election to do otherwise."

This is exactly, precisely why the party purification strategy that hard core conservatives are pursuing will drive their party further into the minority. You cannot grow if you insist on purging anyone at the margin of your party that's closest to the center.

And while I'm updating... several of you wrote me to ask how this is different from the strategy the Netroots pursued from 2004-2008. One or two even suggested that I'm being hypocritical. But no, I'm not.

The Netroots pursued a "more Democrats, better Democrats" strategy, which meant that you first expand the size of the party by welcoming in people at the rightward edge of the coalition, then you improve your candidates by nominating people who better represent the party's core values. Or in terms of voters, first you convince them to vote with your party, then you convince them to vote with you on the issues.

Conservatives have inverted this, and are instead pursuing a "better conservatives, more conservatives" strategy, and that won't grow their party back into the majority.

“I feel relevant.”

“I feel relevant.”

That quote comes from Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, who in three words has perfectly captured the absurdity of his approach to representing his constituents.

Hey Joe? It's not about you. It's about them.

Good to know that CT is still a Federalist stronghold, even after all these years.

UPDATE: This from Lieberman a few days ago is also worth highlighting:

There’s a hard core of partisan, passionate, hardcore Republicans. There’s a hard core of partisan Democrats on the other side. And in between is the larger group, which is people who really want to see the right thing done, or want something good done for this country and them — and that means, sometimes, the better choice is somebody who’s not a Democrat.

The first quote perfectly captures Lieberman's neo-federalism. This one perfectly captures Village Politics. Partisans, according to the good Senator, don't "want to see the right thing done" and don't "want something good done for this country." They must be ignored! But the mass of people in the middle! They are virtuous! And wise! And intelligent! Just like Joe.

If I didn't dislike the state so much, I'd consider moving there in 2012 just to help the candidate nominated by the Democratic Party knock this pompous ass out of the Senate.

E Plurbus Unum

Maria Kalman goes to Congress. Amazing.

No, Sen. Burris, This Is NOT "The Meat That Caused Us Political Scientists To Even Exist."

God save the republic.

Friday Night Bits + Bobs

No reason not a guy can't watch baseball and blog at the same time....

+ Jon Chait comes around to my "if you take the longview, Obama's doing just fine" point of view.

+ Moments like this are precisely why I have no - and by no I mean none, zero, zip, zilch, nada - worried about the 2010 or 2012 elections.

+ Peter Beinart, however, is still clueless. To suggest that liberals should "lay off Obama" is to completely misunderstand how progressive politics work. Our system was designed to make change very, very hard. Without constant pressure from the left, conservative forces will inevitably dominate. So as always, please ignore Beinart.

+ I've never paid much attention to Alex Castellanos, both because I very rarely watch CNN and because I think Castellanos' is a dick. Hunch confirmed.

+ Why don't I watch CNN? Yglesias nails reason #1. Ezra nails reason #2.

+ Why do polls say that Americans think crime is on the rise? If you ask me, its because polls no longer, and perhaps have never, accurately measured how the public feels about anything beyond how they plan to vote. I mean, what to make of this poll from FoxNews? Does anyone anywhere actually think this is measuring a pre-existing attitude? Of course not. And that's one of the big problems with polls - the evidence that they measure pre-existing attitudes is almost entirely nonexistent. And yet people spend millions on them.

+ Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.), meanwhile, is straight up insane. Expect much more of this as we move into a new, 1790's partisan political system.

+ Oh look! Here's more! But again, everyone should start getting used to this sort of thing. Because in our new world of hyper-partisan media (like this blog!), this is going to become the new normal. Which is what my dissertation is all about.

+ Also, this! The more hyper-partisan the media gets, the more we will see parties moving towards their respective bases. So this study should be seen as a sign of a beginning, not an end. The problem for the GOP, as Eric Kleefeld implies here, is that the positions of the great uninformed middle are much, much closer to those of the Democrats than of Republicans. To which I would add: the GOP needs to be very, very careful about where it heads the next few years. Should they take the Palin path, I suspect they may find themselves facing a similar future to the Federalists and the Whigs. When was the last time you had a chance to vote for one of them?

+ Last but not least, just because:

OK, back to the game.

Neo-Federalists Everywhere

I don't care what party you belong to. If you are a neo-Federalist, you gotta go:

At this point, I kind of hope Rangel is guilty. There's no room for this sort of behavior in a system of self-government. Rude? We, the people, can never be 'rude' in demanding accountability from our elected representatives.

Once upon a time not all that long ago - think 1790's, people - there were two political parties in this country. On the left, the Democratic-Republicans, who were led by Jefferson and Madison and committed to the ideas and ideals expressed by the Decleration of Independence. On the right, the Federalists, who believed it was the duty of the masses to leave politics to their betters in the upper classes, and who abhorred any attempt by 'the mob' to comment on the behavior of the gentry. Why and how the Federalist spirit came to infiltrate both parties is a tale for another day. For now, its enough to say this:

Charlie, you've done good work in the past. But its time for you to get out. Go home. Retire while you've still got some of your dignity left.

He who is not with the people is against the people. Believe it.

Great Quotes From Posts I Missed

Some great quotes from some posts I collected over the past few weeks....

Nate Silver on polling data:

It is hard to weed out response bias -- people who are more interested in politics are more likely, maybe much more likely, to take a political survey. Although weighting for demographics can remove some of this response bias, it probably cannot remove all of it, or it may do so in weird ways that tend to cause the polling results to be less reliable. This is one reason why polls on policy issues tend to be less consistent with one another than polls on elections.

Matt Yglesias on political participation:

It’s probably worth emphasizing that a lot of the things that bien pensant types deplore—like this past summer of crazy rallies and political polarization more generally—are inextricably tied up with things that bien pensant types claim to want, namely an increased level of civic engagement. The politics of the late-19th century was incredibly vicious, polarized, and un-edifying. It was also an era of high turnout and booming newspapers.

Andrew Sullivan on the power of the idea of America:

America is exceptional not because it banished evil, not because Americans are somehow more moral than anyone else, not because its founding somehow changed human nature—but because it recognized the indelibility of human nature and our permanent capacity for evil. It set up a rule of law to guard against such evil. It pitted branches of government against each other and enshrined a free press so that evil could be flushed out and countered even when perpetrated by good men. The belief that when America tortures, the act is somehow not torture, or that when Americans torture, they are somehow immune from its moral and spiritual cancer, is not an American belief. It is as great a distortion of American exceptionalism as jihadism is of Islam. To believe that because the American government is better than Saddam and the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Americans are somehow immune to the same temptations of power that all flesh is heir to, is itself a deep and dangerous temptation. The power to torture is a case in point. Because torture can coerce truth, break a human being’s dignity, treat him as an expendable means rather than as a fragile end, it has a terrible power to corrupt. Torture is the ultimate expression of the absolute power of one individual over another; it destroys the souls of those who torture just as surely as it eviscerates the dignity of those who are its victims. And because torture is so awful, it also often requires a defensive embrace of it, a pride in it, an exaggeration of its successes.

Ezra Klein on the Senate:

Senators know each other. They're friendly with each other. They trust each other. So when Chuck Grassley told Max Baucus he wanted to work with him, Baucus trusted that Grassley would, and could, do so. After all, this was Chuck we were talking about! They're friends! When that eventually failed, a lot of excuses got made. Obama didn't give them enough time. The politics changed. Liberals just wouldn't compromise. But the fundamental reality was that senators act like individuals, but on big issues, they tend to vote like automatons. They never think they'll do that in advance, and they always come up with rationalizations for why they did it in that specific case. But that's what happens.

I'm convinced that we'd all be better off if legislators just assumed that everyone would vote with their party, and anyone who was willing to exchange a firm promise of support for a discrete set of changes could then come forward to make that deal. It would be sacrificing an important ideal, but the model would better fit the reality. And we'd waste a lot less time.

Matt Drudge on the announcement that the United States will not host the summer olympics:

Bad day for USA. Good day for GOP?

Eric Martin on Afghanistan:

The narrative of US forces as peace-bringers, and defenders of the virtuous, is an archetypal story, a common form of wartime propaganda prevalent amongst warring populations intent on buttressing their efforts with some moral undergirding (also, often detached from reality - see, ie, US armed support for the "good guys" in Central and South America, Southeast Asia and elsewhere). It's a good war, after all, and we are the good guys, defending the foreign born good guys, in pursuit of a common humanitarian good. While there are elements of truth to this characterization, the story begins to break down upon closer scrutiny - as touched on above. In truth, we fight wars to further our interests. Sometimes those align with local groups. If so, we champion their cause - often regardless of how "good" or "bad" that group is.

Not only is it the case that the continuation of our mission involves both intentionally and unintentionally killing thousands of actual Afghan people (that we are ostensibly there to protect), so too are the factions that we are championing far from the virtuous liberal-minded freedom fighters that the good guys vs. bad guys narrative demands.

A trial attorney (and Andrew Sullivan reader) on torture:

The interrogator told al-Rabiah:

“There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent.”

Court Memorandum and Order, p. 41 (emphasis mine).

This was an agent of the United States saying this.

This was not a statement pulled from the transcripts of the Nuremburg trials, nor archival evidence taken from reports smuggled out of one of Stalin’s gulags. This was a statement made by an agent of this government less than 7 years ago to a detainee. The enormity of that is nearly incomprehensible.

But even worse – far worse – is the fact that the government would nevertheless still seek to convict based on the resulting confession.

To those of us who read that passage and who vowed and make it our vocation to serve and protect the Constitution of the United States, that fact is a gut-punch. For me and my colleagues, it literally took our breath away. It makes one wonder how far down into the abyss we have allowed ourselves to drop. And whether there is the political will to find our way out.

Wired's Chris Anderson on Terminator and the Singularity:

it stopped me in my tracks for a few minutes as I reflected on how amoral invention is. Technology wants to be invented and we are almost powerless to stop it. We are hard-wired to create the future, be it good or bad. Invention is its own master.

Last but certainly not least, this may be the coolest physics lesson ever:

And this is absolutely the most amazing prediction in the history of predictions:

Just Like 1994?

I keep hearing from conservatives who tell me that next year' midterms will be just like 1994. OK, people... what about this from Pew (via Dave Weigel)?

...approval ratings for Democratic leaders in Congress have plummeted, from 47% in March to 33% currently. Approval ratings for Republican congressional leaders now stand at 24%, which is down slightly from March (28%). This is the lowest approval measure for GOP leaders in 15 years of Pew Research Center surveys.

Any prediction of 2010 has to take into consideration that the GOP is destroying itself much, much faster than it is harming its Democratic opponents. So far, none of the predictions I'm seeing are.

UPDATE: Looks like Ezra already covered this here.

They Ask, I Answer

Kevin Drum, channeling Jon Stewart, asks:

Why are Democrats so lame? ...They have a huge majority in the Senate, the public is strongly in favor of a public option, and yet....for some reason they can't round up the votes to pass it. Hell, they can't even round up a normal majority to pass it out of the Finance Committee, let alone a supermajority to overcome an eventual filibuster.

This one is simple. In the House, a strong public option has already passed. The House is the branch of our bicameral legislature designed to directly represent the people. In the Senate, it faces an uphill battle. Given that the Senate was designed to represent the states, and not the people, and as such is not even remotely representative of the will of the people, this makes perfect sense.

It isn't the Democrats that are the problem here. It is the constitution. Make the Senate more representative, or better yet get rid of it entirely, and you wouldn't face this problem.

Welcome To The Crack Brain Zealot For Democracy Project

A month or two back I changed the name of this blog from "Good People Better Rise Up!" to "Crack Brain Zealot For Democracy." At the time, I promised that it would be the first of several big changes to the blog, and today I'm going to start making good on that promise.

As most of you know, for the better part of the last 2 decades electronic music has been the soundtrack of my life. What began as a passion turned into a hobby, and before I knew it, that hobby had turned into a career. But then came 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Bush Administration. In a matter of months, the life I built in the music industry just didn't seem like enough anymore. I decided to shift focus.

The new direction I chose was actually an old one. Politics runs deep in my family, one way or another, and that is no doubt what led me to study politics as an undergrad at Mr. Jefferson's University back in the early 1990s. Returning to school in 2004 to work on a PhD in political science may not have been the fastest way to make a difference, but I knew it was the right way for me.

Not knowing how hard grad school would be, I hoped heading in that I'd be able to continue DJing and producing music, even if at a somewhat slower pace. I see now how utterly insane that was, but I swear I didn't know it at the time! Over the past few years, the gigs were fewer and further between, and I find myself now in a situation where I haven't played out for over a year.

But in a way, that time away has helped me see a new way forward. And this is that way.

Welcome, my friends, to the Crack Brain Zealot For Democracy project. The website is over here. The podcast over there - with both audio and ipod ready video versions just as soon as I can get them uploaded. The YouTube channel is that way. And for those too lazy to click, the video is below.

Do me a favor... please... if you like this, let me know. Better yet, let your friends know. Please. You have no idea how much work I put into this, and although the act of creating it was enough, I wouldn't mind if well, you know....

So without further ado...

Episode One: The Dream Shall Never Die