Crack Brain Zealot For Democracy

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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:

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.

History Doesn't Hurt My Brain

Stories like the one The Daily Show told last night are exactly, precisely why I love teaching politics:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Where the Riled Things Are
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

Over the course of the 20th century, our government did a series of things that transformed our society for the better. Having come to accept those transformations as nothing more than "the way things are," we as a society came to take them for granted, eventually forgetting the role that government played in creating them in the first place. 

A vast majority of the American Southwest was a desert before the Bureaus of Land Management and Reclamation transformed it into one of the most prosperous and fertile regions in the world. But once the transformation was complete, the role of government was almost totally forgotten or ignored. Within a decade or two, that same region gave rise to modern anti-government conservatism, eventually leading to the piece Stewart highlights above. Sean Hannity has no idea what he's talking about. The farmers in that region don't understand their own history. And a teacher's job is never done.

Weekend Update

I don't expect to have any time to blog this weekend, and since its been awhile.... some thoughts:

+ Video of the Week: In case you haven't already seen it:

Josh Marshall responds:

With Sen. Kyl pointing out that men have no interest in having insurance cover child birth, no doubt women will note that they have little interest in covering prostate and testicular cancer. And surely men will get back into the act and want to get out of under the cost of covering breast cancer, which very few men get. Indeed, you can see how everyone should probably insist on special customized insurance policies which cover the ailments they plan on getting and avoid paying for the ones they don't. As long as everyone plans well and makes good predictions everyone should be able to save a lot of money.

+ The Paranoid Style: Hendrik Hertzberg is dead on in his description of the GOP as a party led not by politicians but by talk radio personalities. But the rest of this post? Nonsense. Anyone who thought that Obama wouldn't face this kind of backlash has forgotten the 2008 campaign. And the idea that "lunatic paranoia" has always been confined to the fringe is equally ridiculous. It only appeared to be on the fringe because that was where our top-down, elite driven media placed it. But it was always at the heart of the Southern Strategy, and the Southern Strategy is at the heart of Republican success for more than three decades. So much so, in fact, that the South is all they've got left.

But Hertzberg's conclusion is dead on:

The boorish South Carolina Republican who shouted “You lie!” at the President after he said, truthfully, that reform “would not apply to those who are here illegally” did the public weal a favor by underlining bipartisanship’s futility. A bill that reflects a necessary compromise among Democrats is bound to be stronger than one that reflects an unnecessary compromise between Democrats and Republicans. And that’s no lie.

What I don't understand is why people don't see that this was always understood by Obama's team as one of the possible outcomes of bipartisan outreach. Calling your opponents obstructionist is nothing more than name-calling if you don't first give them a chance to obstruct!

And - shocking! - although this seems to be something that neither our talking heads nor most of our elite bloggers understand, the American people get it. Greg Sargent reports on the results of a new CBS/NYT poll:

The poll finds that an overwhelming majority of 64% think Republicans are opposing Obama’s health care plans mostly for political reasons. But it also finds that an equally large number, 65%, say Democrats shouldn’t pass a bill without Republicans — even if they think it’s right for the country — and should instead compromise to win over some GOPers.

This shows, I think, that Democrats have convinced the public that the GOP wants Obama and Dems to fail at all costs. But they’ve failed to make the case to the public that GOP obstructionism may leave them no choice but to go it alone in order to realize reform.

Senator Chuck Schumer has been privately telling Dem colleagues that much more needs to be done to lay the political groundwork for doing health care alone through the “reconciliation” process, should it come to that. The numbers above suggest he’s right.

Greg frames that as a problem, but I don't see why. The Democrats have won the argument on its merits. They've also convinced the public that the Republicans aren't serious partners in reform. Now, and only now, can they move on to the final stage of convincing citizens that the GOP has left them no choice but to go it alone.

We're almost there, people. Almost there.... Oh, and for the record: I was right about what all the teabagging would do for public opinion. Oh ye of little faith....

+ Speaking of Talk Radio: Ezra Klein:

“In the course of a few years," writes Michael Gerson, "a fringe party was able to define a national community by scapegoating internal enemies; elevate a single, messianic leader; and keep the public docile with hatred while the state committed unprecedented crimes. The adaptive use of new technology was central to this achievement."

That party? The Nazis. That technology? Talk radio. But Gerson's subject is not talk radio or the Nazis, but the vast expanses of the Internet. "User-driven content on the Internet often consists of bullying, conspiracy theories and racial prejudice," writes Gerson, which is interesting, as I thought it consisted of porn and teenagers holding party cups. "The absolute freedom of the medium paradoxically encourages authoritarian impulses to intimidate and silence others," he continues. "The least responsible contributors see their darkest tendencies legitimated and reinforced, while serious voices are driven away by the general ugliness."

That doesn't describe the Internet I know (unless, for some reason, you don't think Autotune the News is a serious voice), but the Internet is big, and Gerson might visit parts I miss. "The exploitation of technology by hatred will never be eliminated," he concludes. "But hatred must be confined to the fringes of our culture -- as the hatred of other times should have been."

What's striking is that this doesn't really describe the Internet. Hateful voices remain on the fringe. And they stay on the fringe. The beauty of the Internet is that it's pretty much all fringe. Controlling a Web site or a blogspot domain is not like controlling a radio station or a television network.

Gerson's examples, in fact, come from comment threads, which virtually disproves his thesis. But there is a major medium where the hateful voices sit firmly in control of the content, and it's the same medium that begins Gerson's remarks: talk radio. And, to a lesser extent, cable news. That's where society's most hateful conspiracy theories sit and fester, where its most explosive lies are recounted and amplified, where its least responsible elites have control of the means of production. I don't worry about jewhater429, the 97th entrant in a comment thread. I worry about Beck and Limbaugh and Savage.

Look, this is really simple: Authoritarian political systems need hierarchical, top down systems of media to propagate their ideologies. Bottom up, decentralized networks are a direct threat to everything they stand for. You cannot build a system of absolute control atop something that is fundamentally uncontrollable.

Was the Nazi system built atop talk radio? Absolutely. Because talk radio is both hierarchical and centralized. It doesn't actually allow citizens to communicate with one another, or with their leaders. It, like TV, only makes it appear to others as if there is a conversation going on. And that appearance is part of what makes their system so seductive. It convinces you that you and your hatred are part of a vast, previously silent majority. But its a trick. An illusion. Nothing more than a funhouse mirror reflecting back a single image as if it were from a million unique sources.

"The beauty of the Internet is that it's pretty much all fringe." Think on that. Deeply. If you want to understand how the world has changed, you must understand this. Stop thinking of the world in 20th century mass broadcast terms. The center of the media universe is gone, and it is not coming back. In its place we now have a million centers. Like the ever expanding universe, no matter where you stand you are at the center, looking out on an infinite horizon that is moving away from you at the speed of light.

Gerson doesn't get it. Limbaugh doesn't get it. Beck doesn't get it. The empire they have built is an illusion. They scream into the void. Sometimes the void screams back. But in the end, all they are doing is screaming at themselves. Our national conversation? The real one that's happening between average citizens day in and day out? It is moving further and further away from them. Here's why:

+ It's About TIme: I'm really late getting to this one, but TNC had the best of all possible responses to the "Limbaugh blames high school bullies on Obama" ridiculousness:

For black people, the clear benefit of Obama is that he is quietly exposing an ancient hatred that has simmered in this country for decades. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of us grew tired of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, mostly because they presented easy foils for Limbaugh-land. Moreover, again rightly or wrongly, they were used to define all of us.

It's intensely grating to live say, in Atlanta, and have some dude in Harlem crowned as your unelected leader. It's even more grating if said dude's agenda seems, in large measure, come down to standing in front of cameras and tweaking his opponents. It's no mistake that O'Reilly and Sharpton would break bread together at Sylvia's--they feed each other.

But Barack Obama, bourgeois in every way that bourgeois is right and just, will not dance.He tells kids to study--and they seethe. He accepts an apology for an immature act of rudeness--and they go hysterical. He takes his wife out for a date--and their veins bulge. His humanity, his ordinary blackness, is killing them. Dig the audio of his response to Kanye West--the way he says, "He's a jackass." He sounds like one of my brothers. And that's the point, because that's what he is. Barack Obama refuses to be their nigger. And it's driving them crazy.

It's about time.

If everything is now the fringe, then there are no longer shadows in which demagogues can hide. Once upon a time they could mask their hatred by wearing a mask whenever they spoke to the wider world, only revealing their true natures when appearing before "friendly" audiences. But you cannot control who hears and sees you anymore. There still may be many publics, but the lines separating them are now so porous as to be virtually nonexistent.

TNC is right. None of this is new. What's changed is that it is all now being exposed. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it isn't the decentralized nature of our newly reborn public sphere. But if not this, what? What else explains this change if not our new grassroots system of communication?

+ The Coalition Cracks: The birthers and turning on one another. The talk radio hosts are turning on one another. This is what happens as a multi-decade coalition collapses into itself. And yes, as TNC just said, it is intensely gratifying to watch. Stay focused on the very long view and you'll see what I mean.

+ Making the Trains Run On Time: Speaking of the birthers, Glen Beck called them and their fellow travellers to DC a few weeks back, and a whole bunch of them came. Not a million. Not even close. But still... When they got back home, guess what? They complained that Metro - you know, the DC area's "public option" for ground transportation - wasn't properly prepared for their arrival. Because nothing says "die hard anti-tax conservative" like demanding low cost, high quality public transportation in the congressionally controlled District of "taxation without representation" Columbia. Morons.

+ Just Say No To PROPAGANDA: My "favorite" lowlight from last week's Texas Board of Ed meetings on rewriting the US history curriculum.

Propaganda is a "negative" so we shouldn't use the word, she says. She even cites our nation's experience under President Wilson as the reason for her plea. Ummm... OK. For the record:

Pres. Wilson hired George Creel to head the United States Committee on Public Information during World War I. Here is how Creel defined his mission:

Not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the "propagation of faith."

But since that word is too "negative" (you know, like on the SAT's!), students in Texas won't be allowed to hear it. Brilliant.

+ Somewhere Mr. Jefferson Is Smiling: If I had to describe my religious beliefs by fitting them into a single tradition, I'd almost certainly say I am a deist. I would have thought I was largely alone in this. But wow... as many as 1 in 5 of my students would be right there with me.

You want to know what the Founders really thought about God? Start here. If you understand what you find there - and much more importantly, what you do not find - you'll be a long way towards understanding the faith of our fathers.

+ Tipping Points: There are 9 climate change tipping points. All of them appear to be irreversible. For those who want to go deep into the weeds, Science has an in-depth set of articles on CO2 sequestration. Sadly, you either need a subscription or access to a university library. Here's the conclusion for those who cannot click thru:

On the 10-year time scale, it is not technology, but legal permission, business development, and public opinion that will determine whether CCS experiments and demonstration plants are built sufficiently rapidly for CCS to be deployed in 2020. On the 20-year time scale, these initial demonstrations must enable a new CCS industry to be born. Low-cost reliable capture at clusters of CCS power plants must emerge, and national pipe networks must be developed, delivering to aquifer storage capacity that must have been validated. CCS also needs to be built and operated in developing economies with high national but low per capita emissions. If CCS is difficult to afford now in Western economies, then it is even more so in India and China. Additional payments for CCS demonstrations will accelerate the above-mentioned actions.

Simply pricing carbon in a market is not enough to encourage CCS or to enforce decarbonization. During peak demand, venting of CO2 will be commercially beneficial. If the price of carbon is set very high to avoid such effects, that taxes the whole economy, not just dirty electricity. Additional policy levers will be needed to enforce CCS operation. Lessons from previous clean-up technologies applied to power plants—such as SOx and NOx removal from flue gases—show that voluntary codes do not work, but clearly signed and enforced rule changes do.

New power plants can now be built "capture ready," to be converted when CCS is established. This is the death-or-glory test of governments, as there is industry pressure to build new coal and gas plants now, increasing CO2 emissions, and perhaps convert to CCS later. Substantial difficulties can be anticipated in government-enforced plant-by-plant conversion. Another regulatory route is the introduction of emissions performance standards, expressed as amount of CO2 per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced. These standards are conceptually simple and directly address the issue. Care will be needed to avoid unintentionally incentivizing gas-fuelled plants, which are not fitted with CCS but lock-in CO2 emissions. A permitted emission amount decreases through time, enforcing innovation. A key difficulty is that firm rules and dates cannot be applied to technologies that do not yet exist.

Coal and gas combustion can become more sustainable. To change black fuel into green energy, the acceleration and scale-up of CCS is required, from tens of power plants within 5 years, to hundreds of large plants by 2025, and then to thousands of small power plants by 2035. This progression can defer climate change problems and buy time. To do this, bold policies of clear vision to include CCS emissions reductions must be explicit. CCS may be the single most effective and direct climate action available. It is not yet too late, but good words need to be matched by hard actions and good money; the present level of committed funds is too low and needs a 4- to 10-fold increase in order for this climate mitigation to be successful.

+ Julian Sanchez gets positively medieval on FireDogLake and other lefty blogs cheering on the DEms get tough approach to DOJ hearings:

So it looks as though Al Franken reading the Fourth Amendment to DOJ’s David Kris has blown up on lefty and/or privacy-friendly blogs. Look, I appreciate the sentiment, I really do.  I want to see Senators reciting the Fourth Amendment to representatives of the executive branch every time there’s a hearing.  I want them to tattoo it on their legislative aides’ foreheads and have it played as a background soundtrack in Dirksen like subliminal Brave New World programming. But for the serious? David Fucking Kris does not need to be schooled on the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirements by Stuart Smalley.  I spent Thursday afternoon reading the chapter David Kris wrote on how the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement applies to FISA taps in his ginormous reference book on national security surveillance.  If  the name doesn’t ring a bell, Kris is the stone cold killer who put a bullet in the head of the legal sophistry invoked to justify Bush’s warrantless wiretap program without breaking a sweat. Alternatively, you may recall him as the guy responsible for exposing the bogus claim that investigators needed broad new powers in order to be able to eavesdrop on wholly foreign conversations. Or the guy who torpedoed the dishonest technological argument for expanding FISA wireline intercept powers.

His job is now to defend the renewal of roving wiretap authority in foreign intel investigations. But you know what? There should be roving wiretap authority in foreign intel investigations. No sane person says there shouldn’t.  No, really. Call the ACLU or CDT and ask. The surveillance hawks want the debate to be “should this power exist or not?” because—since it should—that means they win. The real question is whether there should be clearer limits on roving applications to ensure that if a warrant gets to “rove” across communications “facilities” (e.g. disposable cell phone numbers) you at least have to specify an individual target precisely and follow robust, enforceable minimization procedures to guarantee you’re only picking up your target’s communications. When I hear Kris saying we shouldn’t implement that reform, I’ll shed a single sad-clown tear for the smart man we’ve lost to the Sarlacc Pit of government work. What I’m actually hearing so far are offers to work with Congress to fix the insane legislation that—who now?—oh yes, Congress passed when a different bunch were running DOJ.

Memo to Democratic legislators: The people there now are relative friendlies.  They’re extending olive branches, which you should probably stop setting on fire. You’re just giving Bushie dead-enders an excuse to paint this as “civil liberties hippies vs. the Brave Americans Fighting Terror.” I watched John Conyers spend a good chunk of Tuesday’s hearing on the House side being a condescending dick to Todd Hinnen, one of the fiercest critics of Bush-era detention and interrogation policies. This just leaves smarmtastic bottom-feeders like Jim Sensenbrenner and Jeff Sessions to cast themselves as solicitous Grima Wormtongues by contrast. It makes for an awesome YouTube clip on Firedoglake, right up until the part where you fucking lose.

Let’s write a new script.  I call it “Civil libertarians and sober intel people trying to craft good policy together, thereby depriving psychotic executive branch maximalists of the cover they need for their fearmongering.”  Not, admittedly, a particularly pithy title.  It’ll never be a Regnery bestseller.  But we’re talking C-SPAN here; work with me people.

+ The Future Is Crowdsourced: People are often skeptical when I tell them that crowdsourcing is the future of commerce. Not e-commerce. Commerce. But check it out: CBS Radio agrees with me. They're getting set to launch a Last.FM powered radio station. No DJs. Just the wisdom of the crowd. If that doesn't kill off satellite radio, nothing will.

Weekend Bits + Bobs

Some things that I didn't get around to commenting on this week....

+ Ron Brownstein parses the Census data on life during the Bush years:

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

The Census' final report card on Bush's record presents an intriguing backdrop to today's economic debate. Bush built his economic strategy around tax cuts, passing large reductions both in 2001 and 2003. Congressional Republicans are insisting that a similar agenda focused on tax cuts offers better prospects of reviving the economy than President Obama's combination of some tax cuts with heavy government spending. But the bleak economic results from Bush's two terms, tarnish, to put it mildly, the idea that tax cuts represent an economic silver bullet.

So for what should be the last time: trickle down economics is a pathetic excuse for a joke of an economic philosophy.

+ O'Reilly and Beck are clueless. We all know that, right? Doesn't matter. Watching them stumble their way into unintentional idiocy is still fun. Go check Attackerman and see what I mean. Brilliant.

+ Andrew Sullivan on the Tea Bag Brigades:

Here's a test: when you see as many posters lambasting Bush and Cheney and the GOP for getting us into this crisis in the first place, I will take these people seriously as genuine small government non-partisan conservatives and independents. In so far as they can pressure the Congress and president into taking the debt seriously in the future, good for them. In so far as they are proposing no practical solutions, and echo truly disturbing hatred of a president barely eight months in office, facing huge crises on all fronts, they are doing their own cause far more harm than good.

Steve Benen piles on:

As for what the overwhelmingly-white crowd had to say, I still think these protests could benefit from some focus. We learned today that right-wing activists don't like government spending (except when Bush and Republican lawmakers spent freely), don't like the size of government (except when Bush and Republican lawmakers increased the size of government), don't like deficits and debt (except when Bush and Republican lawmakers added trillions to the nation's tab), and don't like czars (except when Bush used dozens of them to implement his agenda).

They don't like health-care reform, though it's not clear why. They don't like gun control, though it's not clear why they think anyone's coming for their firearms. They also don't like taxes, immigration, abortion, Muslims, the U.N., and the idea of "socialism," though their understanding of the word is tenuous at best.

In other words, the point of today's rally was to let the country know there are a lot of right-wing activists with right-wing beliefs. We knew that before today, but I guess they wanted to remind us.

This is precisely why its been many decades since protests from the left were taken seriously. So yes, although it is a problem that the Washington Post considers these loons worthy of front page treatment, but over time that will fade. With all of this Nazi nonsense, they are delegitimizing themselves. As always, stay focused on the long view.

+ I wonder if the results of this study don't help to explain a good bit of the economic narcissism of the Baby Boom years:

[I]ndividuals growing up during recessions tend to believe that success in life depends more on luck than on effort, support more government redistribution, but are less confident in public institutions.

Boomers came of age during one of the greatest (both in terms of size and length - economic booms in all of human history. The post WWII boom was a direct result of government policy - think the Marshall Plan, the GI Bill, and even to some extent the policy of containment - but the Boomers, unlike their parents, never really understood that. To them, government wasn't what had created the boom; it was what had caused its end. Thus, the solution was to get government out of the business of regulation. And the result? Go back and reread that Brownstein piece.

I mean, even uber-conservative economist Friedrich Hayek understood things more clearly than the Boomer conservatives he supposedly inspired.

"Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance - where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks - the case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong... Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make the provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken," - Friedrich Hayek, The Road To Serfdom (Chapter 9).

+ Here's another take on the Obama as Community Organizer theme:

President Obama started his career as a community organizer. Which means he is used to (and most excellently skilled at) running an organization by “working for consensus”, a set of skills quite different from the ones needed for running the more usual top-down business/military/GOP organizations. In an authoritarian organization, for better or worse, at the end of the day what the Big Kahuna says goes is what goes. Even if he’s the best, most open-minded Big Kahuna in the universe, heading up a team of uniquely gifted & prickly talents – he can ask for input, he can get input he hasn’t asked for, but when hammer meets nail it’s the Big Kahuna’s hammer that gets to choose the nail. And the other members of the team are always aware of this reality; barring things get so bad that grenades get rolled into the colonel’s tent, no private in the army forgets for long that the colonel is the one setting the agenda.

In a consensus-driven organization, on the other hand, everybody must have a chance to give an opinion… even when their opinion is stupid, crazy, laughable, and wrong. Being a successful community organizer means knowing that the local Mr. Tinfoil or Ms. Crystal-Bunny will show up at every godsdamned meeting and waste everybody else’s time ranting about black helicopters or the necessity for regular high colonics. A large part of the job of being a successful community organizer is ensuring that the resident nutball gets a respectful hearing without being permitted to permanently derail the meeting. Because, sad as it may seem, the rest of us skittish flaky primates want to know (even when we don’t articulate it) that “our guy” will take our ideas seriously, even when we’re not sure our ideas are worth taking seriously. When Obama stands up before Congress and explains that his health care reform proposals will involve neither death panels or government-paid abortions (unfortunately, IMO), he is reassuring the 80% of his audience who have no strong feelings about either topic that he will, at another time, be open to their opinions, however formless and/or gormless. This is important, even when it means that the meetings keep running into overtime and that us sane people have to listen to an awful lot of extremely random crap.

After eight years of the Cheney Regency’s “My way or the Gitmo highway” authoritarianism, anything less forceful than sloganeering and explicit threats seems like pretty weak sauce to those of us who’ve been paying attention. The question, of course, is whether President Obama’s target audience—the vast quivering voting-eligible majority that isn’t ideologically wed to either Invisible-Hand-of-the-Marketplace-Uber-Alles or Medicare-for-All-Americans-Immediately —considers his speech, and his administration’s work over the next few weeks and months, as sensible compromise or timid obfuscation. Perhaps we’d get better proposals and a more useful final bill if President Obama would channel his Inner Authoritarian a little more, but his gift for seeking consensus seems to be why Obama is President and certain other people are not. Maybe all the histronics are simply a necessary part of the process of committing democracy.

+ Yet more proof that Cheney's rules were a danger to national security. This one comes from our staunchest ally, the Brits.

+ Tom Schaller details the political history of South Carolina:

I, for one, am not much surprised that such bleating-heart conservatism came from South Carolina. I mean, c'mon: This is a state that, more than any other, has been resisting progress for the Union--and the Union itself--since, well, before there even was a United States.

This is a state whose slaveowners pressured Thomas Jefferson to remove condemnations of slavery from the Declaration of Independence. This is a state where loyalists rallied by the British as part of their "Southern Strategy"--the Brits' term, not mine--recaptured South Carolina from the patriots in 1780 as part of a plan to flip SC and Georgia and roll northward from there to smother the very revolution that birthers and tea partiers and Glenn Beck sychophants point to today as inspiration. This is the state that gave us senator and Vice President John C. Calhoun, who advocated state “nullification” of federal powers. This is also the state which became the first to secede from the Union to start the Confederacy—and even threatened to secede from the Confederacy when the other southern states refused to join its calls to re-open the slave trade. This is also the state that boasts of Congressman Preston Brooks, who in 1856 bloodied abolitionist senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane. (Top that, Rep. Wilson!)

All ancient history, you say? Not so fast.

Well into the 20th century, this was the state where black citizens observed the Fourth of July mostly alone. Why? Because--get this--the vast majority of whites preferred instead to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, May 10, a practice that continued into the early 50s, which means there are some very senior South Carolina citizens who skipped a few Fourths back in their early years. (Why isn't Sean Hannity asking them to brandish their flag pins?) In 1920, this was the state whose legislature rejected the women’s suffrage amendment, only ratifying it for symbolic purposes a half century later, in 1969. In 1948, this was the state where the legislature declared President Harry Truman’s new civil rights commission “un-American,” and that offered segregationist favorite son Strom Thurmond as the so-called Dixiecrat party's presidential nominee. And it was this state's Clarendon County, not Topeka, that was the original case that later became--and only after political intervention by Gov. James Byrnes to replace SC with KS--the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Is anyone surprised that this was the state that brought the first court challenge to the 1965 Voting Rights Act?

Joe Wilson's outburst? Puh-lease. Merely a peep, folks. Merely a peep.

+ And then there's this - Michael Steele as the Humpty milk monitor:

+ Finally, I'm at a loss for words on this one. And no, it isn't meant as a joke.

This Week's Must Read

Ezra Klein on "Profit And The Insurance Industry."

He's right in his conclusion: many, many people on the left are fighting the wrong fight.

What TNC Said

TNC on Obama's use of the phrase "reasonable Republicans":

Interesting video from GMA. Obama, again, maintains that there are conservatives who he can work with, and who he hopes to work this. I think when you've got Obama shouting out Chuck Grassley and then Grassley turning around and running against health care reform, that sort of sentiment drives liberals crazy. I think Obama should have taken, and should take, the hysteria a lot more seriously. Stupid is seductive--and it kills.

That said, I think the "reasonable Republicans" line is a smart one--as long as legislation gets done. If you do get bipartisan support, great. If not, when time comes to run again, you get to cite all the times you tried, and decry your opponents obstructionism.

I've said this numerous times since the election, and I'l say it again here: You cannot demonstrate that your opponents are negotiating in bad faith unless you first try seriously negotiate with them.

The odd thing thing, for me at least, is that people on the left seem to get this when it comes to international relations. It is the left, for example, that insists we must negotiate with Iran. Why? Because it just might work, and we certainly won't know unless we try. And if it doesn't? In that case, they argue, we'll be much more likely to rally the world behind us to do whatever it is that we decide must be done.

Substitute "Republicans" for Iran "the American people" for "the world" and you'll see what I'm getting at here.

Democracy is supposed to be noisy. Its supposed to require hard work. Problems and questions become political precisely because they are contentious. Arguments can only be won by having them. You think you know the answer? Great! Come back to me when you've convinced your friends and neighbors and I'll congratulate you. Until then, I'm just going to keep nagging you to get to work....

UPDATE: As if on cue... Greg Sargent reports:

Top White House adviser Linda Douglass told a closed-door meeting of House Dem press secretaries yesterday that a key aspect of Obama’s speech will be to frame the current moment as offering a stark choice between true reform and the status quo, a person in the room recounts.

That’s perhaps not terribly surprising, but it’s interesting for a couple reasons. First, that framing left some in the room thinking the speech may help lay the groundwork for Dems to go it alone on health care if necessary, the person present says. If Obama can persuade Americans that Republicans, or reform foes in general, endorse doing nothing, it will make it easier for Dems to say they had no choice but to proceed alone.

Second, it suggests Obama may return to a refrain that served him so well during the campaign — change versus more of the same — only this time, the implicit target may be current Congressional Republicans.

That last bit should make clear why this is all so predictable. It worked for the man during the election. Why wouldn't he follow the same playbook here.

Step One: Let people have their say.
Step Two: Let people wear themselves out.
Step Three: Identify allies and adversaries.
Step Four: Define consensus
Step Five: Success!

By my read, we're not at step four, and should hit step five well before Thanksgiving.

Weekend Update

Last weekend's video project got me way behind on blogging. Here are some things I missed that still deserve attention:

+ Henry Farrell, who should get it, doesn't:

The real worry for the Netroots is that Obama is undermining their particular blend of online politics. He has taken the parts of Netroots politics that he likes (online organizing and fundraising), while dumping the parts that he doesn't (a strongly confrontational politics and emphasis on bottom-up decision making). There isn't much room for the Netroots and vigorous online partisanship in Obama's plans for the future of the Democratic Party...While the Netroots have had genuine impact, the president they helped to elect has no use for their style of politics, even as he steals some of their tricks.

At a recent blogger conference call (can't find a link, sorry!) Obama encouraged Netroots bloggers to go out and put pressure on him. Farrell's description would suggest that this action should be seen as Obama "dumping" the Netroots, but I don't see that at all. I see that as Obama recognizing that an independent ally can be far more powerful than a dependent one, and that given the decentralized nature of the movement and the medium, it wouldn't be possible to co-opt it anyway. Go read Al Giordano on this. And when you're done, read him again. And then think on this:

The importance of the Netroots and the blogosphere is not its ability to influence the media, nor is it its ability to force politicians to do any particular thing. Its about citizens reengaging directly with one another. The story isn't vertical; it's horizontal. And its not an ending, but a beginning.

Over the course of the 20th century, the growing dominance of mass media broadcasting networks turned politics into a spectator sport. Why, for example, did the Supreme Court hold in Buckley v. Valeo that money equals speech? Because in a society where the most influential and important forms of political speech take place on scarce, for profit broadcast networks, you cannot speak if you cannot pay. In that world, speaking and spending are essentially indistinguishable. Mass broadcasting networks turned everything they touched into a commodity, even politics.

But the Internet so drastically reduces the cost of speech that this cost is rapidly moving in most circumstances towards zero. And that's blowing that old system apart. We aren't there yet. But 10 or 20 years from now? I can only barely begin to imagine how different things will be. Thankfully, only one part of one chapter of my dissertation will be that forward looking, so I don't have to imagine too hard...

+ This may be the single best thing I've ever read about Obama's style of leadership. Via Kevin Drum, who found this in a comment at James Joyner's site:

“He operates like a community organizer: let people have their say, let them wear themselves out, then step in and define the consensus.”

This week's address before Congress will be the test of that final step. No one has ever tried this form of presidential leadership. I believe it will work. Obama believes it will work. But we don't yet know. One thing is clear, however. Given that it is premised on letting everyone exhaust themselves while having there say, we should see all the noise of the past few weeks as part of this new process. As TJ would have said, let us first hear all sides of the debate, and then let us decide how to proceed. We must understand both the truths and the falsehoods we face if we are to proceed honestly and intelligently.

I realize that a tremendous amount of print and teevee time has been spent on the nuttiness of the past few weeks, but in the end I see no reason for all the pesimissim. Transforming our health care system is going to be hard. Really hard. It's not going to happen in a single fight, nor in a single bill. So what if it takes a "trigger" to get a public option? The thing wasn't going to kick in for a few years anyway, so what difference does that make? Because if the reformers are right and the private sector is totally incapable of reforming itself, then the targets won't be hit and the public option will kick in. Only at that point, instead of a political fight, it will be based on a data-driven analysis. And this is bad how precisely?

Moreover, the noise and debate of this past month have accomplished something incredibly important. The fringe - the birthers, deathers, tenthers, etc - is now no longer in the shadows. Throughout most of our history, the paranoid style of American politics has always been with us. In the past, however, it usually lived in the shadows. The Birchers, as just one example, were too "weird" and "fringe" for Cronkite and his friends to cover, so they were ignored. But ignoring them didn't make them go away, did it? They were still there, only most of their citizens knew nothing about them. And how are you supposed to combat that sort of ignorance if you don't even know it exists?

Or take the militia movements of the 1990s. They were ignored, until one of their members blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City. Wouldn't it have been better for them to have gotten some attention before that?

At this point the fringe is very obviously the fringe, and so long as they don't actually take up arms against their fellow countrymen and women, their rantings don't really amount to much. It's crazy, but no crazier than what went on for most of the 19th century (thus the importance of the aside in the last sentence).

Could the industrial-era, mass broadcast media do a better job? Absolutely. Are they making the problem worse than it might otherwise be? In one sense, yes. But in another, no. Only by brining the darkness into the light can it be defeated.

Matt Yglesias gets us part of the way there with this:

I guess one thing I would say to this is that the change in the media is part of a much broader shift in American society. Technological and economic change has just made authority weaker and tended to fragment perspectives. If you think of, for example, popular music things like MTV and Top 40 radio stations don’t have the level of cultural power that they once did. It’s extremely easy for people to bury themselves in a subculture of their liking and not worry too much about the mainstream. Or maybe you ignore the dross that is prime time television programming and rely on cable channels and Netflix instead. Walter Cronkite broadcast at a time when when big cultural players could really run things in a way they can’t these days. That shift has had a lot of consequences, some good and some bad.

This argument is fine so far as it goes, but from my perspective it doesn't go nearly far enough. The mass broadcast era of which MTV, Top 40, and Cronkite were a part is only one era of American politics. Before that, we lived in a super-fragmented, hyper-partisan world. Before the telegraph, every community was a niche community. That's the story of most of human history, in fact. Teevee is an aberration in the normal patterns of human communication, not a baseline against which all things must be measured.

So how did people figure out what was and was not truth in the world before it was handed down from on high via the talking heads on the teevee? The truth, the only truth, is that they had to work for it. To learn. To seek. To strive. To question. In the end, that's all there is.

I mean, c'mon people.... Yglesias is right: even books aren't fact checked. It was all a myth, this whole "truth can be delivered to us as a pre-packaged commodity" thing. It was never real. Look past the myth to the historical record and you'll see that. Give me another 12-16 months, and I'll hand you a book that will present that argument to you. After that, it's on you. As it always has been.

+ Which brings me to this from Ezra:

...before the media reported the facts, they hyped the lies. There are a lot of things the average American doesn't know about. Before Sarah Palin talked about death panels, for instance, no one knew about Sen. Johnny Isakson's quiet crusade to persuade Medicare beneficiaries to adopt living wills. It did not lead every newscast and it was not reported in every paper. This despite the fact that Isakson (R-Ga.), unlike Palin, has a vote on health-care reform.

It is true that Palin's statements eventually got fact-checked. The New York Times, in particular, spoke clearly and forcefully, albeit well after the controversy had begun dominating the coverage. But the world is full of lies. There aren't enough reporters on the planet to fact-check them all. That's okay, as most lies aren't reported. Stories about the Obamas heading to Martha's Vineyard do not have to contend with stories about a crank who thinks they're really heading to a secret rejuvenation chamber in the Himalayas.

Long before the media ever fact-checks a debate, they construct it. Piece by piece, bit by bit. There is not, however, a whole lot of substantive news on any given day, even as health-care reform remains the central issue before Congress. So they cover the controversy. They cover the lies and the untruths and the angry ads. Sometimes they fact-check these documents and sometimes they don't, but it probably doesn't much matter in the long run: For the past few weeks, the casual consumer of news has heard about death panels and illegal immigrants and skyrocketing deficits and violent town halls. They may not believe all those things. But they assume they're part of the national conversation for a reason, and, quite naturally, they recoil from the center of it.

Media organizations must publish new content if they are to attract an audience. The easiest way to do this is to cover world events as if they are some sort of endless stream of consciousness. And now, this! And then this! And over there, that! And this too! And wait, what about this? [See E.J. Dionne for more on this phenomenon.]

But there is a way around this, should news organizations make that their goal. Rather assume that readers are following every jot and tittle of a story, they could instead recognize that most people only have a very vague sense of the details of the background of each story. Rather than shun recaps as redundant, they could instead embed them deeply into each and every story on a subject. In a world of print scarcity, that was impossible. Now, its not. News stories no longer need to be self-contained units. On the web there is no scarcity. It costs you nothing to embed links to background your news organization produces (and hopefully continually updates!) for any given story.

So far as I know, no one - not even the blogosphere! - is doing this right now. And I cannot for the life of me understand why. Aren't there any public interest groups or foundations that want to do something like this? And if not, why not?

If only I had more time... And money...

In the meantime, this from Ezra (via TNC) isn't quite right:

This is the market getting more efficient. This is the market learning how to deliver more of what people want (Sarah Palin) and less of what they don't want (the difficulties of adjusting Medicare payment rates). If policy stories begin swamping servers, people will hire more policy reporters. But there's not much evidence of that happening. That's not to say there's no room for substantive policy coverage. But the more eyeballs matter, the less substantive coverage there'll be, and I don't think it'll be the fault of reporters. A lot of the policy coverage that happens right now exists not because the audience wants it, but because the media decides they need it. As the market becomes competitive, that type of reportorial paternalism will become less and less viable.

But this assumes that people's preferences for news are created independent of the media environment in which they live. And that's just not true. In the 19th century world of partisan presses, people participated in politics first, read about it in the papers second, and then returned to participate with whatever new information they had just acquitted third. In the 20th century world of industrial strength mass broadcasting, people watched politics first, and, well... often there was no second. In that environment, is it any wonder that people showed preferences for news stories that treated politics as if it was a spectator sport. After all, for most people it was!

But now we're moving into a new world, one where parallel horizontal communications networks will dominate human communication patterns. We're moving back, I believe, to a system where people participate first and watch second. It will take years, perhaps even decades, before we see all the ramifications of this, if for no other reason than that the older generations will have to die off. (Yes, death is inevitable, and it does produce change).

But the early signs of a very profound change are already around us. I mean, c'mon... when was the last time this country spent the better part of a month talking about town hall meetings. Think on that. Don't let the ancient novelty of that pass you buy.

While you are doing that, some other random bits and bobs....

+ Van Jones. My opinion? As a political issue, it doesn't matter. Glenn Beck dug up some silly dirt on the guy, and he resigned. So what? Inside the Village its a big story. But to the 300+ million Americans who don't live in DC its totally irrelevant. Both because his position wasn't all that important, and because they don't have the first clue who Jones is. It's a sideshow. Just like Glenn Beck.

This is a sideshow. Don't be distracted. Fight back, but on the terrain most favorable to you. Van Jones isn't the point. The public option isn't the point. What's at stake here is far bigger than either of them. Stay focused on what matters. And always remember, this is a campaign, not a single battle. We won't win every one. The fight wouldn't be worth fighting if it were that easy.

+ And this stupid "children must not be forced to listen to speeches by the President" nonsense. Yes, its dumb. Yes, its hypocritical. But let's be honest: its also totally predictable. When conservatives impose their ideology on schools (evolution is from teh devil!) they believe they are speaking the truth, so it isn't from their point of view indoctrination. When they claim you must support the president in everything he does, they mean the presidents they consider legitimate. They weren't making universal arguments. Everything about their claims is situational and relativistic. It always has been.

Recognize that. Admit it. And then call bullshit. On your blog. Via Twitter. In newspapers. And on the radio. We all have soapboxes. Use them. Truth isn't handed down from on high. It must be fought for. If not you, who?

Don't worry about calling the liars liars. Just focus on how their words are lies. Tell a better, more truthful story and you will win. Change the metaphor, change the world.

+ There's a poll showing George Allen could make a comeback in VA? Don't believe the hype. What it actually shows is that people have forgotten what it was that Allen actually did. A campaign would remind them of that.

+ Pres. Bush picked the guy who wrote Dow 36,000 to be the founding executive director of his new think tank? This cannot possibly be true, can it? God really does have one hell of a sense of humor....

+ You know all that nonsense about how torture "saved live" and "made us safe." Here's an interesting twist on that: Despite extensive torture, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave us nothing on al Qaeda's leadership. Nothing. I wonder what would have happened had we interrogated him with the techniques that we know actually work?

+ If you didn't read Ta-Nehisi Coates's masterful series recounting his first trip to the Civil War battlefields of the South, you really need to correct that. Parts one, two, three, and four.

Why Newspapers Are Dying

WaPo Ombudsman Andrew Alexander looks at his paper's health care coverage and comes away seriously unimpressed:

The Post publishes health-care reform stories almost every day as it tracks the twists and turns of the epic debate. So it's surprising to hear from so many readers who ask: Why hasn't The Post explained what this is all about?

"Your paper's coverage continues in the 'horse race' mode," complained Bill Byrd of Falls Church. "Who's up, who's down . . . political spin, personal political attacks.

"How I would love to read more actual journalism on this issue," he e-mailed.

Make no mistake, The Post has produced some stellar health-care coverage. It's exposed heavy industry campaign contributions to key members of Congress who are drafting legislation. It's revealed those with personal investments in corporations that could be affected by the health-care laws they write. And it's burrowed into thorny questions about who should be authorized to deny patient requests for expensive but non-critical medical care.

However, readers say that too many other stories have been about process or politics. That's coverage The Post must own, of course. Washington is filled with policy wonks and decision-makers.

But readers seem to be saying: What about the rest of us? Over the past month, dozens have called or e-mailed to urge more explanatory journalism.

Many have said that Post stories routinely assume a foundation of knowledge that they simply don't have. Some said that they don't understand basic terms like "public option" or "single payer." They want primers, not prognostications. And they're craving stories on what it means for ordinary folks and their families.

In my examination of roughly 80 A-section stories on health-care reform since July 1, all but about a dozen focused on political maneuvering or protests. The Pew Foundation's Project for Excellence in Journalism had a similar finding. Its recent month-long review of Post front pages found 72 percent of health-care stories were about politics, process or protests.

"The politics has been covered, but all of this is flying totally over the heads of people," said Trudy Lieberman, a contributing editor to Columbia Journalism Review, who has been tracking coverage by The Post and other news organizations. "They have not known from Day One what this was about."

It's not for lack of interest. About 45 percent of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center for People & the Press recently said they have been following the health-care story more closely than any other.

But nearly half of those surveyed this month in a nationwide poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation said they are "confused" about reform plans.

I've titled this post "Why Newspapers Are Dying" in response to the paragraph that I've put in bold. Readers - you know, the people who pay for the paper, either in their subscriptions or in the advertisers they attract? - want information about policy. But because the Post also feels it "must" serve a tiny audience of policymakers and wonks, and because it believes it "must own" coverage about them, it covers almost nothing but the horse race aspect of things.

But why "must" the Post "own" this coverage? Alexander doesn't say. Most likely he assumes the answer is obvious. The problem is that I have absolutely no clue what the answer is..

What would happen if the Post abandoned the coverage of the game in favor of stories that educated readers about the issues? There's no shortage of other news outlets providing similar coverage: CQ, The Hill, Politico, etc. If the Post didn't provide that information, it wouldn't disappear. Nor, for that matter, would the audience it attracts. Does Alexander really think that policymakers would stop reading the Post, the only legitimate daily in DC, if it primarily offered substantive coverage of the issues?

Finally, to admit the Post "must own" this type of coverage is to admit upfront that the Post must allow political actors to set the newspaper's agenda. If they do it, it must be covered. If they say it, it must be reported. "The Post is here," Alexander is essentially saying, "to act as stenographer for government officials and political actors."

Alexander admits that readers want substance, but in response offers that his paper has no choice but to do what it is doing. It must, in essence, ignore the needs of the audience it supposedly serves in favor of the people it covers.

You want to know why the Post is dying? That's why.

On Polling Data

Remember how a few days back I warned you to ignore any and all polling data on public policy? This is a perfect example of why. Nate Silver explains::

A new survey by Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates for the AARP reveals widespread uncertainty about the nature of the "public option" -- a government-run health insurance policy that would be offered along with private policies in the newly-created health insurance exchanges. Just 37 percent of the poll's respondents correctly identified the public option from a list of three choices provided to them

The other 63%? They either thought that the plan was to create a British-styled NHS (i.e. socialism!), create a network of co-ops, or they had no idea. And that last group was a full 23% of the people surveyed.

Think that's bad? Nate explains why you aren't thinking hard enough:

This should serve as something of a reality check for people on both sides of the public option debate. If the respondents had simply chosen randomly among the three options provide to them, 33 percent would have selected the correct definition for the public option. Instead, only 37 percent did (although 23 percent did not bother to guess). This is mostly a debate being had among policy elites and the relatively small fraction of the public that is highly knowledgeable and engaged about health care reform; for most others, the details are lost on them.

This is also why relatively small changes in wording can trigger dramatic shifts in support for the public option, which has been as high as 83 percent in some polls and as low as 35 percent in others depending on who is doing the polling and how they're asking the questions. You don't see those sorts of discrepancies when polling about, say, gay marriage or the death penalty, where the options are a little bit more self-evident.

And the worst part? This is an Internet poll, which means these people actively self-selected into the sample.

Repeat after me: Polling data on public policy options is useless. It must be ignored.

I'll leave you to ponder why this means we're exceedingly lucky that we live in a republic, and not a democracy.

His Greatest Political Failure

At this point in the news cycle, there's not much I can add about Kennedy that hasn't already been written. So rather than offer yet another take on this great man's life, I'll simply say this:

Kennedy considers his greatest political failure to have been not making a deal with Nixon in the early 1970s on national health care. What Nixon proposed wasn't perfect, but in retrospect, the decision to hold out for something closer to the liberal idea of perfect meant that this nation went more than a generation without any reform at all. A desire for perfection, he came to see, should never be allowed to become the enemy of the good. Take the best deal you can get, and then work like hell to make it better every day of the rest of your life. That's how change happens in this country. As you remember the man, keep that lesson in mind.

Quote of the Day II

Doug J at Balloon Juice:

A guy at AEI has a piece about how younger voters feel about health care. He begins with a relatively accurate description of how he thinks younger people today function, calling them “generation choice”. Then he posits three reasons why younger voters might be better disposed towards health care reform than older voters: (1) they haven’t analyzed the bill, (2) they care more about the fairness of expanded coverage, and (3) they don’t care much about health care because they’re young and healthy. There’s an obvious fourth reason: they know that our system costs nearly twice as much as anyone else’s and is consistently ranked at the bottom in quality among western countries. Hence, they would choose a different system if possible.

It’s always important to remember that many, if not most, beliefs and customs in our society exist because of the widespread propagation of falsehoods. It’s why some people believe we have a great health care system. It’s also why some American League managers continue to use the sacrifice bunt.

For whatever reason, the internet has curbed the spread of these falsehoods among (the mostly younger) people who are able to navigate the internet without using AOL key words (though it may well have hastened the spread among people who are not). And that may well mark a sea change in American politics.

I think we need to be a careful not to push this too far, but by and large I think he's right. The question is... how on earth would I build a research design to study this?

Today's Health Care Must Read

Michael Tomasky:

If Obama serves two terms, we are a mere 8% of the way into his tenure. That strikes me as a little early for people to be throwing in the towel. So the interesting question of the near future will be: can the Obama movement go from the euphoric phase, in which everything seemed possible, into a more realist phase in which people come to terms with the very difficult and far less exhilarating tasks associated with governing, and the often dissatisfying victories that result from the legislative process?

Liberals... tend to have a deeply romantic view of political movements. When we think of the civil rights movement, we think of the highlights, the stirring moments. Memory tricks us, and the media, which speak in such shorthand, help perpetuate the trick. So we tend to think that Rosa Parks sat on a bus, Martin Luther King gave some great speeches, decent Americans recoiled at racist violence on the nightly news, and boom, change happened. The reality was that nine long years passed from Parks's act of civil disobedience until Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill – nine years of often mundane and inglorious work. And even then, the civil rights bill didn't really fix the problem of African Americans being denied the vote, so Congress had to go back the next year and pass the voting rights act.

Ditto with Franklin Roosevelt, to whom Obama is often unflatteringly compared. FDR, the comparers say, fought the right tooth and nail, took no prisoners and was unapologetically liberal, even leftwing by today's standards. Many very important points are left out of this comparison. Roosevelt made lots of mistakes – the bill he'd intended as the landmark legislation of his first year, the national industrial recovery act, was an abysmal failure, eventually struck down as unconstitutional by the supreme court. Unlike Obama, he didn't have to worry about Senate filibusters, which weren't really invoked in those days but which are a constant threat today. And while the right wing he faced was real, it wasn't nearly as well-financed and orchestrated as today's version, which even has its own national disinformation "news" network.

It's been a rocky month or six weeks, no denying it. The White House has made its share of errors. At the same time, I don't think anyone could have anticipated the rightwing response to the healthcare proposals. Forceful opposition and lies here and there, sure. But death panels and armed citizens coming to presidential rallies and comparisons to Hitler and polls showing that more than half of Republicans aren't convinced Obama is even an American citizen? No one saw this coming.

So now, liberals have to fight hard for something they're not terribly excited about. A health bill will likely have a very weak public option or it won't have one at all. But liberals will have to battle for that bill as if it's life and death (which in fact it will be for thousands of Americans), because its defeat would constitute a historic victory for the birthers and the gun-toters and the Hitler analogists. In the coming weeks, building toward a possible congressional vote in November, progressives will have to get out in force to show middle America that there's support for reform as well as opposition, even though they may find the final bill disappointing.

This is what movements do – they do the hard, slow work of winning political battles and changing public opinion over time. It isn't fun. It isn't something Will.i.am is going to make a clever and moving video about, and it offers precious few moments for YouTube. It takes years, which is a bummer, in a political culture that measures success and failure by the hour. The end of euphoria should lead not to disillusionment, but to seriousness of purpose.

To which Ezra adds:

I'd go a step further than Tomasky: The upside of health-care reform is not that it's a defeat for the reactionaries. Rather, the upside of health-care reform is health-care reform. Four years ago, when the public option didn't exist as a popular policy concept, liberals would have been thrilled with the legislation we're seeing today. It's better than anything the major Democrats proposed in the primary, much less anything that passed four committees in Congress...

Obviously, there are a hundred ways that reform is going to fall short of not only perfection, but sufficiency. And the political compromises required to pass anything will dispiriting and inane. But it's worth keeping in mind that this bill is going to help a lot of people. Tens of millions. Hundreds of millions over the course of a few decades. It will mean that some of the very worst things that can happen to someone -- medical bankruptcy, or a cancer that strikes when someone is uninsured -- will, by and large, simply stop happening. That's worth being excited about.

This reform is a beginning, not an ending. Take what we can get, then keep fighting to make it better. That's how change happens. It's how the New Deal happened. It's how the Civil Rights movement happened. It's how women's suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and even the formation of this nation happened. It's how all movements happen.

The stories told on teevee are repacked versions of reality, and not reality itself. Don't ever confuse the two.

Now the GOP Loves Medicare? Of Course!

If there has been one constant in Republican politics over the past 50 years, its been their party's insistence that Medicare is the leading edge of socialism. Given that, their opposition to any heath care reform that includes new forms of government regulation or talk of a public plan makes perfect sense.

Except, of course, now they are standing four square behind Medicare.

Why?

Because they don't actually stand for anything. Other than opposing whatever it is that Democrats want, of course.

6 months ago Medicare was socialism and needed to be cut. Now it is as American as apple pie.

1 year ago they were for torturing people in the name of preventing terrorism. Now they are running around proudly calling themselves right wing terrorists determined to use any means necessary to stop Obama's brownshirts.

18 months ago, massive domestic surveillance programs with no legal or congressional oversight were necessary to protect the republic. Today, when the White House asks citizens to send in email examples of health care misinformation, it is the beginning of a totalitarian state.

2 years ago, speeches by politicians that were delivered overseas and even vaguely hinted at opposition to Bush administration foreign policy were a threat to national security. Now they are a sign of patriotism and leadership.

I could go on, but I think you get the point: These people do not stand for anything other than their own political power. Which shouldn't surprise anyone, because they have been admitting it for years.

So should Obama stop negotiating with them? Absolutely not. Why? Because only by attempting to negotiate can you demonstrate just how hollow your opponents ideas and rhetoric really are. Negotiate. Expose. Ignore. Repeat.

Reform isn't supposed to be easy. Realignments are supposed to be hard. And the election of 2008 was the beginning of the fight, not the end.

UPDATE: More like this, please!!!

Obama On Health Care

Does this sound like a man who doesn't have a long range plan? Really? Really?

"Well, look, I guarantee you, Joe, we are going to get health care reform done. And I know that there are a lot of people out there who have been hand-wringing, and folks in the press are following every little twist and turn of the legislative process. You know, passing a big bill like this is always messy. FDR was called a socialist when he passed Social Security. JFK and Lyndon Johnson, they were both accused of a government takeover of health care when they passed Medicare. This is the process that we go through -- because, understandably, the American people have a long tradition of being suspicious of government, until the government actually does something that helps them, and then they don't want anybody messing with whatever gets set up.

"And I'm confident we're going to get it done, and as far as negotiations with Republicans, my attitude has always been, let's see if we can get this done with some consensus. I would love to have more Republicans engaged and involved in this process. I think early on a decision was made by the Republican leadership that said, 'Look, let's not give them a victory and maybe we can have a replay of 1993-94 when Clinton came in; he failed on health care and then we won in the midterm elections and we got the majority.' And I think there's some folks who are taking a page out of that playbook.

"But this shouldn't be a political issue. This is a issue for the American people. There are a bunch of Republicans out there who have been working very constructively. One of them, Olympia Snowe in Maine, she's been dedicated on this. Chuck Grassley, Mike Enzi, others -- they've been meeting in the Senate Finance Committee. I want to give them a chance to work through these processes.

"And we're happy to make sensible compromises. What we're not willing to do is give up on the core principle that Americans who don't have health insurance should get it; that Americans who do have health insurance should get a better deal from insurance companies and have consumer protections. We've got to reduce health care inflation so that everybody can keep the health care that they have. That's going to be my priorities, and I think we can get it done."

Bits + Bobs

Lots of things this past week that I could have posted on. Here are the short versions of a bunch of them:

+ On Bipartisanship: You can't prove that your opponents aren't negotiating in good faith if you don't negotiate with them first. Had Obama ignored the Republicans and tried to simply do thing "his way," he would undermined every narrative he built about himself during he 2008 election, thus playing right into his opponents hands. By calling their bluff, he can now run against them as obstructionists in 2010, 2012, and 2014.

+ On the Public Option: It doesn't matter if it is in the Senate Finance Bill. It doesn't even really matter if it is in the final version that comes out of the full Senate. All that matters is that it survives the conference committee process. And there's nothing that has been said by anyone in the administration that should make anyone think that Team Obama isn't going to do everything they can to make sure it comes out of conference.

+ On Sebelius' Sunday Misspeak: For nearly two weeks the media had been focused obsessively on the non-existent death panels. Then Sebelius goes on one of the Sunday talk shows and "accidentally" says that the public option isn't "essential." Then progressive bloggers and politicians go nuts, and the media shifts their focus on to them. Then, nearly two full days later, the White House clarifies that she made a mistake. To believe that this wasn't a planned event designed to refocus the debate, you would need to a) believe that no one on Rahm Emmanuel's staff or in the entire White House watched her appearance and understood how important her statement was until a full day later, and b) believe that Sebelius, one of the most stereotypically quiet and guarded politicians to come out of the Great Plains in a long time, misspoke and then refused to correct herself on the single most important political issue facing the country today. And before you answer, remember that these people are skilled enough political operatives to have made it all the way to the top of a very tough game. So yes, I'm with Noam Scheiber on this one: these guys aren't idiots, and they knew what they were doing.

+ Guns and Town Halls: I made this point once before, but I feel like I should make it again. If the Second Amendment stands for anything, it is the right of the people to take up arms against politicians they believe have become tyrannical. Thus, if there is anywhere people should have a right to openly carry guns, it is at town hall meetings. Don't like that? Think its crazy? Amend the constitution.

+ Don't Tread On Me: Every time I see a picture of some protestor holding a Gadsden Flag at a town hall meeting (you know, the flag with the don't tread on me snake?), I can't help but wonder if they have any idea what the flag actually means. It's origin? It came out of Franklin's "Join or Die" campaign during the French + Indian War, and thus was originally used as a call for political unity. A bit later, it was adopted by the US Navy during the Revolutionary War, serving as a standard flown during the fight to interdict British ships carrying war supplies. Once again, a call for national strength and unity. Eventually, however, some historically illiterate people picked it up and started waving it around as some sort of symbol of patriotism, and then.... then it turned into something American citizens use against one another? That's about as stupid as using the Stars and Bars as a sign of American patriotism. Oh, wait.....

+ On Thousand Page Bills: Many people, including some supposedly very smart ones, complain that the bills coming out of Congress are "too big." I do not understand this. We live in a nation of 300+ million people who produce more than $14 trillion in economic activity each year. The diversity and complexity of the problems and issues facing a nation of that size are almost unimaginably complex. Unless you either plan to adopt an "every man for himself" attitude towards society (i.e. reject the idea of a nation entirely) or intend to push for a dissolution of the union (i.e. reject the idea of this nation in favor of many smaller ones), you are going to have to get used to the idea of very large bills. In the meantime, can we please stop assuming that big round base 10 numbers have some sort of special meaning? 1000 only appears to be important because our system of counting is rooted in the fact that we have ten fingers, and last time I checked, the number of fingers on the human hand has no bearing whatsoever on what makes legislation "good."

+ On Super-Super Majorities: Sen Chuck Grassley, among other Republicans, has recently demanded that any health care reform must meet a new, 70-80 vote threshold before it can be considered either legitimate or bipartisan. Because yes, if there is one thing the patriots at Lexington and Concord were fighting for, it was the idea that nothing should ever happen unless and until a super-majority of well heeled elites achieve near-universal agreement on the most contentious issues facing their country. Or something. But seriously... this is what passes for serious argument among Republicans these days? That votes don't count unless some of their people get what they want? What are they all, 8 years old?

+ On Government Surveillance: This one was totally predictable. When Bush was president, conservatives thought that the domestic surveillance system couldn't be big or powerful enough. Now that a Democrat is in the White House, they are terrified that he might use the White House web site to collect email addresses of people engaged in dissent. So for the record: I was opposed to domestic surveillance then. I am opposed to it now. But collecting email anti-reform emails in an effort to rebut some of the nonsensical criticism that's out there? If the White House really wanted to round up dissenters, it wouldn't have to use such an inelegant model. It could just use the system Bush built. You know, the one that collects every email and phone call that travels across our nation's telecomm networks? The one that you guys said was both necessary and harmless? That's the system you should be afraid of. And its the one you conservatives built.

+ On Polling Data: There is a fairly extensive and well-establishd literature within political science that shows that policy-specific opinion poll data is likely to be, well... more than a bit unreliable on most issues. When asked, people will not only frequently contradict themselves and offer opinions on things they have no prior knowledge about, they will offer firm opinions about programs and proposals that don't even exist! Nevertheless, politicians, pundits, and all heads on my teevee treat tiny fluctuations in policy-related polls as if they actually tell us something. But... they don't. So please: stop reading them! They might work for gauging electoral support, but when it comes to policy, they are only slightly better than useless.

+ On LaRouchies: The point isn't whether they want to be Democrats or Republicans. The point is that they have always been deemed nutty, and yet their rhetoric on health care is literally indistinguishable from all of the leaders of the GOP. Generally speaking, if you find all of the crazy people lining up behind you because they firmly believe in your ideas, well...

+ On Color-Coded Terror Alerts: Former DHS Secretary Ridge is finally telling us what we in the Netroots already knew - that the Bush Administration manipulated the terrorism threat level system in an effort to scare the crap out of people in the months prior to the 2004 election. As many, many other bloggers have pointed out today, all of the Very Serious People in the Village that is DC saw the widespread acceptance of this idea among the Netroots as a sign of how "crazy" and "fringe" we all were. Only - gasp! - for the 5,427th time, we were right. And no, Mr. Ambinder, we weren't driven to say the things we said because we hated Bush. We hated Bush because of the things he did. Because among other things, as Atrios points out, "using the threat of terrorism to try to achieve political goals is, you know, what terrorists do

+ On Fiji Water: Please don't drink it. Please.

Frank v. Table

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Barney Frank Refuses to Talk to Dining Room Table
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Protests

Back Tomorrow...

...both with my long-promised Madisonian take on the health care debate, and a bunch more too. Until then, well... After spending the last two weeks, a) Driving from Boston to DC, b) driving from DC to Pittsburgh, c) attending a near endless series of panels and speeches at Netroots Nation, d) driving from Pittsburgh to Boson, and e) working like crazy at my tutoring gig this week... I'm totally spent!

Until I come back, watch this:

Bye Bye Whole Foods...

Forget the threatening part. I wasn't a big fan of Whole Foods labor policies before, but after reading this nonsense from its CEO, I'm done with the company.

Hey Mr. Mackey: Congratulations! You just turned me into a loyal Trader Joe's customer. Well done, sir!

Lyndon LaRouche and the GOP, Sitting In A Tree...

As town hall meetings across the country continue to get out of hand, it appears that the messages of conservative Republicans and supporters of Lyndon LaRouche are growing increasingly similar.

Orly Taitz, the nominal head of the Birther movement, is growing increasingly insane.

Leaked emails from the Tea Party Patriots, one of the many groups organizing anti-reform protests, show conservative media outlet CNBC putting in a direct request for the creation of events that show "lots of energy and lots of anger."

Josh Marshall gets it just right:

I don't think the Democrats have lost the message war because I see no evidence that even close to a majority of Americans believe completely preposterous things like this. But journalists have no capacity to deal with this stuff. In any sane civic discourse Sarah Palin's comments about 'death panels' would have permanently written her out of any public debate about anything. But even though very few people actually believe this stuff, the entire debate gets knocked off the rails by this sort of freak show which allows the organized interests who want to prevent reform to gain the upper hand.

Not that I'm necessarily pessimistic. I see some signs that this latest outburst of freakery may be starting to backfire on the GOP. We'll have to watch and see.

Don't see the signs Josh is talking about? Look here. And here. And here.

And then consider this piece from Ambinder written yesterday morning:

President Obama is on his way to Portsmouth, New Hampshire at this hour for a town hall meeting on health care. At this same hour last week, several of the President's top political advisers were meeting in a White House conference room to discuss the appearance, over the first weekend in August, of a coordinated effort to scare Democratic lawmakers who planned to attend town hall meetings into a state of panic. A week later, and the Atlantic's tricorder readings are picking up much calmer electromagnetic energy from the White House. Getting Democrats to attend the town hall meetings was really an intermediate goal. But Democrats are beginning to notice that opponents of health care reform have discredited themselves. They ramped up much too quickly. When smaller, conservative groups Astroturfed, they inevitably brought to the meetings the type of Republican activist who was itching for a fight and who would use the format to vent frustrations at President Obama himself. There were plenty of activists who really wanted to know about health care, and some who were probably misinformed -- scared out of their chairs -- to some degree, but the loudest voices tended to be the craziest, the most extreme, the least sensible, and the most easy to mock.

They didn't just bring out Republican activists. They brought out the LaRouchies. And as any of my BU students can tell you - for some reason, LaRouche's people love to hand out pamphlets to BU students - those people are nuts! Nothing good can come from aligning yourself, accidentally or otherwise, with those people. Nothing.

Forget the news cycles. Marc is right. Over time, they are discrediting themselves. They might be feeding the cable teevee beast, but that's just a sideshow. Cable teevee is entertainment, not politics. Don't ever forget that.

Today's Health Care Update

Dan Froomkin has started his new column over at HuffPo, and his first piece gets right at what matters most:

One possibility is that Obama, to everyone's surprise, will come out with a strong bill much like the one he promised his supporters during the campaign. It is conceivable, after all, that the reason Obama hasn't publicly issued ultimatums and twisted arms and busted heads is that he believes it's best to do those things in private -- and only when the time is truly ripe. In this scenario, which I call the Obama-as-community-organizer scenario, the community's needs are finally met, but in a way such that even those who had thwarted the people's will are allowed to save face.

The other possibility -- well, I call that one the Obama-as-pushover scenario. In this one, Obama will come out of it having given away the store -- having neither significantly improved the health-care system nor lowered its costs, but rather having created a new entitlement that primarily benefits the health insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries.

So far, the glimpses we've seen from behind all those closed doors suggest the latter scenario.

If you want to bet against the first scenario, be my guest. And if you want to put some money down against it, let me know, because I'll be happy to take your bet.

Only in very rare circumstances have presidents been able to do their arm twisting of individual members of congress in public. And almost never have those circumstances been even remotely related to large-scale efforts at reform. Obama knows this. Rahm knows this. Pelosi knows this. (I don't think Reid knows much of anything, so who cares?) Much more often than not, public arm twisting polarizes and shuts down debate. It is, in short, counter-productive.

So Conference Committee is everything. For Obama, it is the only thing that really matters. And since he's has always understood this, he's explicitly built his long game around Conference. Here, for example, is Sen Durbin describing Obama's strategy:

So we are trying to walk this tightrope to get this bill through. The House [of Representatives] is likely to include it. The Senate may not. Then we go into conference committee and President Obama has to roll up his sleeves and see if he can bring us all together. And when I've spoken to him about this a couple times, all he's said is: 'Get me to a conference committee. Let me bring these folks into a room, and let me work and get it done.'"

Might he fail? Of course! He's human, and our political system is a mess. But I wouldn't bet against him. Aside from my experience with Obama in the 2008 election, there are some specific features of conference committee that increases the President's leverage. Only in conference do you get all of the relevant lawmakers in the same place at the same time. Only in conference do you get them all focused on creating a single piece of legislation. And as a result, only in conference does the opportunity emerge for the creation of a single overarching narrative. And if at that moment you have a president who is skilled at engaging the American people directly through the media, then and only then does the president have a real opportunity to get the bill he wants.

FDR is rightly remembered for being a master communication, but never forget that during his 3+ terms in office he only held 30 Fireside Chats. That's roughly one every 4 months, a strategy of scarcity explicitly designed to avoid overexposure and increase the impact of each event.

From what I can tell, Obama's strategy is built around a similar understanding. He knows what his strengths are, and he's waiting to deploy them at the point of maximum advantage. Prior to conference committee, individual members of Congress still have considerable leverage. At conference committee, individual members stand little chance against a popular president, particularly when he has congressional leadership on his side.

And that's why I don't understand the final sentence I quoted from Froomkin above. So far, Obama and his team haven't really been directly involved in the process. Congress has almost exclusively been driving things, which quite frankly is how our system is supposed to work. We have multiple bills coming out of multiple committees in both the Senate and the House. Conference Committee exists to resolve these differences. And although there are very significant distinctions between the bills, on the basics they are in fact quite similar, with the outlier positions usually representing a minority position within Congress. Call me crazy, but I don't see any reason to believe that most of these outliers will survive conference, particularly if the president uses his bully pulpit to weigh in directly on the debate.

And should Obama pull this off, well.. if even Froomkin considers it a "surprise," then the media coverage of the "unexpected victory" is going to drive his approval rating back into the stratosphere.

Narrative, not news cycles. Think long, not short.

Cut The Crap And Get To Work!

Ill Doc preach!

Maddow At It Again

Not one segment, but three, including one of the toughest interviews I've seen on tv in years. Check these out:

Girl come swingin'!

Health Care Narratives, Not News Cycles

Remember how a few days ago Marc Ambinder was defending the CW, that these protests are real Americans showing real anger that represents a real problem for the Democratic Party and the Obama Administration? Check out this string of Twitter updates:

Anxieties over Obama, country, magnified by astroturfing seem to have turned these twn hall mtngs into over-the-top theatre. If there was...

... a concerted effort to scare Dem lawmakers and fool the press, it ain't working. Local News coverage is of outrageous stuff.

...I think GOPers are of 2 minds about these protests. Or, they shld be. Even though this trend favors the left, I don't know if they will...

....slow down and take a deep breathe and turn off MSNBC to notice it.

Bottom line: turning h/c town hall meetings into anti-Obama venting sessions won't convince Blue Dog Dems. to vote against h/c. I think.

Un, Marc? I've been making this argument since this started. And I've been watching MSNBC. Because I, like many of my fellow human beings, can do more than one thing at the same time.

Day by day, these protests are getting more and more out of control, in part because leaders on the right continue to escalate their rhetoric. Today, for example, Rush Limbaugh and a number of other commentators were directly comparing reform efforts to Hitler's Third Reich, including the ridiculous comparisons of the Obama health care logo, which features a caduceus - the staff with two intertwining snakes used around the world to represent the medical profession - atop the OFA logo. Somehow this reminds them of Hitler's reichsadler, the eagle clutching a wreath with a Naziu logo.

Yes, you read that correctly: Limbaugh and others are comparing Obama's use of the world famous symbol for doctors in the debate over health care with Hitler's use of a medieval symbol for the Roman Empire during his rule of Nazi Germany.

Now to be as clear as I possibly can: these sorts of comparisons, when combined with all the rest of the bullshit being shoveled by people like Limbaugh, are responsible for creating the atmosphere in which members of congress are finding their town hall meetings attacked by mobs, or worse, their district offices on the receiving end of death threats.

If an active effort is not made to deescalate the rhetoric, this is not going to end well. This needs to stop, and it needs to stop now. This isn't a game. It's not a teevee show. It needs to stop.

Even assuming it does, as Marc is finally beginning to notice, all of this nonsense is not going to help the right win this debate. They may think they are scoring points - look! our people are on teevee! we're winning the day! we're shouting the loudest! People see us! They know we are here! - but they are doing it in ways that, should this continue, virtually guarantee they will lose. And not just this fight, but many more to come.

But here's my question: Why is it taking so long for the elite media, and particularly for the talking heads on my teevee, to notice all this? Remember when some random MoveOn member posted a video as part of a contest that compared Bush to Hitler? Do you remember the outrage that ensued? The endless calls for prominent Democrats to distance themselves from the group? Where's all the handwringing now? Because this is far, far worse than what we saw then.

Steve Benen, riffing off Atrios:

Some unknown person put together an ad comparing Bush to Hitler, and put it on the MoveOn.org site without the group's knowledge. MoveOn pulled the submission, but not before conservatives shouted, "See? MoveOn.org is so extreme, it compares Bush and Hitler."

Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, at the time called the anonymously submitted video "the worst and most vile form of political hate speech."

Traditional news outlets ran with this, charactering MoveOn as being extremists, and Democratic officials/candidates were pressured to distance themselves from the group. Some Dems did just that.

These days, everyone from Republican senators to talk-radio hosts to conservative writers make the comparison with such frequency, it hardly registers as interesting anymore. Whereas the fake ad MoveOn had nothing to do with was considered scandalous, prominent Republican voices compare Obama to Hilter/Nazis with a routine casualness. It's just one of the standard conservative talking points, and no effort is made to keep Republican officeholders away from the extremists who use the line regularly.

No one thinks Limbaugh, Beck, and their ilk are engaging in "the worst and most vile form of political hate speech," because we've all just become accustomed to their irresponsible rhetoric.

Its yet another example of one of the worst flaws in our political media system: if it isn't novel or unexpected, it isn't covered. Talking heads expect Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck to say crazy things, so when they do, no matter how crazy it is or how similar it is to things that have driven past feeding frenzies, it just isn't "news." Because "news" isn't things people need to know; "news" is things people would be surprised to find out. Or something.

Our political media shouldn't operate as an endless novelty generating exercise. No one benefits from that: not the public, not the advertisers, not the networks. No one.

There's only one thing that gives me hope, really. The longer they keep this up, the sooner they will die off. Our media institutions and political parties may seem like permeant fixtures, but I promise you, a review of our nation's history very clearly shows that they are not. Technological revolutions always upend our media system, producing an entirely new set of winners and losers each and every time. Its never an overnight process - right now my best guess is that it usually takes 10 years, although as the pace of innovation increases the transition time decreases; more on that in my dissertation, of course! - but it always happens. In fact, its happening right now.

Ask yourself: What are you doing right now? Reading a newspaper? Watching cable news? Listening to talk radio? Now do you see the change that's happening all around you?

(Updated to correct multiple ridiculous typos.)

Building Backlash

I'm telling you... All of this corporate-sponsored mobishness isn't going to end well.

Local conservative newspapers are turning against the tactics.

Swing voters are getting pushed over to our side of the fence.

Bloggers are starting to notice that there is an amazing level of coordination going on by the corporate sponsors of these movements.

Rachel Maddow, as I mentioned last night, is all over this.

Even Fox News is starting to figure out that a lot of these people are traveling from other districts to break up the town halls.

And even worse? Not only are members of Congress getting assaulted, but some are even getting death threats.

They may be winning news cycles right now, but they aren't going to win with this narrative. Astroturfing used to work, primarily because it was very difficult to find out who was behind the mobilization. But not anymore. The Internet has changed that. And although its true that it may make it easier for both sides to organize, over the long run it also makes it far easier to expose which movements are backed by average citizens and which are backed by corporate America.

These tactics, backed by these sponsors, might dominate the headlines in the short run, but they will not win the debate. Remember 2008? Its narratives, not news cycles, that are what matter. Don't ever forget that.

The Post Office, Medicare, And Health Care

ThinkProgress catches Arthur Laffer, the conservative economist responsible for REpublicans endless fascination with tax cuts, making a ridiculous mistake:

LAFFER: I mean, if you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they’re run well, just wait until you see Medicare, Medicaid, and health care done by the government

Two thoughts:

1. What's up with all the Post Office bashing? Yes, on the rare occassion when I have to go to a physical Post Office, I often have to stand in a long line. But the rest of the time? The rest of the time the Post Office gets shit done. When was the last time they lost a piece of your mail? And those blue boxes on every other street corner? Those are kind of convenient, aren't they? And really.... 44 cents to send a piece of mail anywhere in the country? When a cup of coffee costs $2? I don't understand what the problem is.

2. Medicare is a government program. If one of the most influential conservative economists of the last 25 years doesn't know this.....

Will Everyone Please Calm Down?

A Member of Congress gets physically assaulted by a protester at a town hall event.

Look, this needs to stop. Protest the policies all you want. If you can't come up with a coherent argument, then go ahead and yell and scream gibberish if it makes you feel better. It's not exactly protected speech, but if it keeps you from actually attacking someone, I'm OK with it. But for god's sake, people... we're talking about health care reform here, not the end of civilization as we know it.

Maddow Does Her Part. Will You?

The opening segment tonight on The Rachel Maddow Show is without a doubt the best segment her show has ever produced. Absolutely essential teevee:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

She's done her part. Will you? Send the video to your friends and family. Sign up to attend an OFA health care event. Attend town hall meetings being held by your members of Congress. Stop sitting there, acting like politics is a spectator sport. Remember 2008? Remember how that happened? Get up. Do something. Don't let crazy people and corporate shills hold the political process hostage. 

Breeding Backlash (A.K.A. Narrative, Not News Cycles)

Marc Ambinder has been arguing all day today - he's on my teevee! in my twitter! on the blogs! - that the astroturfed health care protests by crazy rightwing activists present a real problem for Obama and the left because they represent "real" anger. Here are just a few of his Tweets from earlier today:

H/c protesters are mix of artificial and real. Point is: they're THERE.

Protests and rallies can be organized and still reflect valid concerns. Liberals don't complain when their groups successfully organize.

I posit that there is no meaningful distinction b/w grassroots, organized and spontaneous gatherings in the modern world.

Liberals might not think the anger is legitimate, but that's the question to be argued, not to be assumed.

Basic point: liberals ignore the _reality_ of these protests (even when they're contrived) at their peril.

I responded with a series of Tweets myself, but since you can find them on Twitter, I'll summarize them by saying: Yes, they exist. No, there's no proof that the content of these protests are any more real (in the sense that they are generalizable to the wider population of voters) than the birthers (more on that later). And most importantly, never ever forget that not all protests are created equal. Tactics matter.

On that last point, Ben Smith is dead on

Yes, there is now much energy on the right.

But much like those angry crowds that populated McCain and Palin rallies last fall (recall "he's an Arab"), there is danger in such raw passion.

See, as one Dem points out, the much-watched Lloyd Doggett video today. Go to about a the 2:00 minute mark and you'll find a guy carrying a kid on his shoulders and hoisting a sign with the Nazi "SS" lettering.

Recall also the hanging in effigy of another Dem congressman last week at an anti-health care rally.

These are the sort of excessive displays that breed a backlash. 

I think its actually worse than that. So far, these protesters are almost universally acting in ways designed to disrupt town hall meetings. They show up and start shouting, with the hope of shutting the entire event down. Among other things, that's extremely rude. And Americans don't like rudeness. Throw in the Nazi imagery, the graphic anti-abortin literature, the birth certificates, and everything else, and you've got a mess almost perfectly designed to create a backlash.

Will the mess succeed in shutting down some town halls? Of course? Is there any way to prevent this? In a country that protects free speech, it is and should be extremely difficult. Will these tactics help the protestors and their backers accomplish their political goals? Its very difficult for me to image how that would happen.

The right is making the same mistake that the left made back in the 1970s and 1980s. As a rule, shouting down your opponents might work for a day or a week, but they are almost certain to be a miserable failure beyond that. When protests are carefully targeted, on message, and innovative, they work. When they are not, they fail. When they come across as disorganized, they hurt their own movement. And when they come across as needlessly obnoxious, they create a backlash.

Now, to be clear: I am not suggesting that the left simply sit back and wait for the right to make fools out of themselves. The backlash won't create itself. Get out there and start filming town hall meetings. Show the world just how insane these people really are. At the top, the leaders need to start proactively framing these protests in language that focuses on their tactics. Town Hall meetings are supposed to be a discussion about the issues. If they want to argue about health care, great! But by shouting, they are preventing themselves and their fellow citizens from having that discussion.And don't scold. Get angry on behalf of the people you represent. You know, the ones who are sitting their silently, watching the whole thing unfold around them.

Silent maj.... Silent major.... I swear that's a parallel for this in out recent past. If only I could think of what it was. Silent majori..... Hmm....

UPDATE: Steve Benen nails it:

This is not to say all opponents of reform are radical extremists. The point, though, is that conservatives run a risk of convincing the American mainstream that the only people worked up in opposition to health care reform are nutjobs.

That's as perfect a description of Nixon's Silent Majority strategy as you can get.

In our media saturated world, the crazies are always in danger of discrediting the movement. One or two nutters isn't a problem. But once you start seeing them all over the place, they very quickly become the face of the movement.

Think, for example, of the Weathermen. Or the Yuppies. In each case, they don't represent a majority of either the wider public or the movements of which they were a part. But because they were good at getting noticed, they are remembered as leaders. And not because historians have paid too much attention to them, but because people alive at the time considered them as such.

Bottom line: Crazy people can't help build a movement. They can't lead a movement. They can't strengthen a movement. They can do nothing but discredit a movement. Assuming, of course, that the world comes to understand them as crazy.

UPDATE II: More like this, please!

A key part of the developing strategy: ridicule the opposition -- and portray those who disrupt meetings with loud chants and signs as part of the same ilk of people who showed up at campaign rallies for John McCain and Sarah Palin right after the 2008 Republican National Convention. At those rallies, some supporters hurled racist remarks and displayed objectionable signs; McCain himself was forced to respond to a questioner who called Obama a "Muslim," to the applause of others in the crowd. To this day, McCain aides maintain that the media inflated the number of reactionairies reactionaries in the crowd, abetted by an Obama campaign that was all too happy to point them out.

A party strategist e-mailed around a clip from Rep. Lloyd Doggett's town hall meeting. At one point, a sign featuring Nazi lettering can be seen. Another strategist with ties to the White House made sure to point out that a popular sign at these rallies features Obama, in Shepherd Fairy-esque ink, as the Joker (although it's not clear how many signs have been seen at actual rallies.) . A White House official pointed to press secretary Robert Gibbs's comparison to the 2000 "protest" at Miami-Dade county election headquarters organized and peopled with young conservative lawyers.

Patronizing opponents is a tried and true tradition in Washington, and Democrats have used the tactic with success. They ridiculed the hundreds of thousands of conservatives who protested the stimulus package as "tea baggers."

But Republicans are just as responsible for the perception. The folks who tend to show up at protest events tend to be to the right of the mean in the party. And, as the spread of the birther movement demonstrates, not a small chunk of these Republicans are reactionaries. The challenge for the White House and Democrats is that they find a way to separate genuinely anxious conservatives who ask good questions -- even if those questions are provided by conservative groups -- and the crazies who tend to pack town hall meetings.

Except that last part makes no sense. These people aren't showing up to ask questions. They are showing up to scream and shout, and if necessary, shut the whole event down. Like this:

There is no need to separate the two, because as Ambinder points out, they are already separated. And the second group, the "crazies who tend to pack town hall meetings," will discredit the first. If we play this right, they will dominate the news cycle, become the narrative, and discredit the opposition.

Want more?

Jon Cohn: The Mob Is Not The Majority
Bill Scher: A Right-Wing Mob Is Not a Majority
Ruy Teixeira: Public Opinion Snapshot: Health Care Reform Still Popular
Glenn Thrush: Doggett calls protesters a 'mob'
Greg Sargent: Anti-Reform Group Takes Credit For Helping Gin Up Town Hall Rallies
Jon Cohn: Don't Whine. Organize.
Steve Benen: Gibbs Notices The Brooks Brothers Brigade At Work
Steve Benen: The Force Behind The Harassment Strategy