We're effed

Well: health care reform is dead. Coakley's loss means that the Democrats have one vote short of a filibuster-proof majority, which is giving centrist Democrats an excuse to run for cover. Democratic support for the bill is caving as speak, as Jim Webb volunteers that there will be no more votes on heath care until Scott Brown is seated, and no less a Massachusettes liberal than Barney Frank rules out this possibility as well. Senator Evan Bayh is already acknowledging the election as a rebuke to the Democratic agenda.

But this whole experience proves something more than a failed attempt by Democrats to reform health care insurance: it shows that the United States government is incapable of passing major legislation that will solve our biggest problems. Health care needs to be reformed, one way or another: its costs are spiraling out of control, and the ranks of the uninsured keep growing. If costs continue growing apace, the federal government will go broke paying for Medicare in the next fifty years.

Of course, broadening health care insurance isn't the only way to solve the looming budget problem; you could go the Republican route, and cut entitlements. The problem is: no Republicans are seriously advocating this. Scott Brown ran on a platform of not reducing a penny of Medicare spending, and he supports Massachusettes' own universal health care program. Indeed, the fact that the Dem's reform package would have resulted in Medicare spending cuts was used by Republicans as a talking point against the legislation. And of course, it was a Republican President and Congress that last decade passed Medicare Part D, the largest expansion of entitlements since the passage of Medicare itself--all of it funded with deficit spending (which is to say, none of it was funded at all).

Now, ultimately this failure is attributable to the rules of the Senate--specifically, the recently adopted practice of requiring a 60 vote supermajority to pass any legislation whatsoever. If a simple majority was all that was needed to get something through, the legislation would have passed in the middle of last year. But so long as this supermajority requirement remains, it will be impossible for either party to pass any legislation that is capable of solving our nation's biggest problems. I think it would behoove the leadership in both parties to agree to abolish the filibuster in a set period of time from now (6 years, say, when it is unknown which party will be in power). Otherwise crucial legislation--whether it is coming from the left or the right--will continue to crash on the shoals of arcane procedural votes in the Senate.

Congress created the unpersons

Paul Krugman wonders why those who were in favor of a bigger stimulus package were considered "out of the mainstream" and left on the fringes of the debate:

One of the mysteries of the way issues are covered in much of the news media is how certain views get ruled “out of the mainstream” and just don’t get covered — even when many well-informed people hold those views.

...

...[T]he voices calling for stronger stimulus are, may I say, sorta kinda respectable — several Nobelists in the bunch, plus a large fraction of the prominent economists who predicted the housing crash before it happened.

But somehow, the pro-stimulus people are unpersons. Who makes these decisions?

I think this can pretty easily be explained by the fact that Democrats didn't do a good job of framing the debate.

The thing is, the mainstream media is not only very worried about keeping a nonpartisan reputation, but also very intellectually lazy. Thus, when an issue like the simulus package comes up, they wait and see what the Republicans propose and what the Democrats propose, and use those proposals as the right and left goalposts for the debate. Anything outside the goalposts counts as "fringe".

If the Democrats had boldly demanded say $1.8 trillion in stimulus, then this would have been seen as a "legitimate" (albeit very liberal) position, and Krugman and his ilk would be welcomed into the fold as representatives of the "respectable left". But as it happened, the Democrats misjudged and decided to lowball the figure (expecting it to go up), proposing under a trillion dollars of stimulus. The debate thus ended up being framed between those who wanted just under a trillion in stimulus versus those who wanted less (or none).

And, as others have pointed out, this same thing happened with healthcare reform: the Democrats didn't seriously propose a single-payer plan. Although obviously this never would have passed, it still would have set the left goalpost further out, giving Obama's public option plan some centrist cover. As it is, the public option is now framed as the most liberal plan on the table, which the mainstream media is unlikely to embrace.

(Photo "Goalposts-2" by huvisian)

Getting used to it

Man, it's almost jarring to hear this coming out of the mouth of the President of the United States:

“Starting today,” Mr. Obama said, “every agency and department should know that this administration stands on the side not of those who seek to withhold information, but those who seek to make it known.”

This is going to take some getting used to.

I've been thinking for a while now that never in my life has the US government actually been on my side: even during the Clinton years, Newt controlled the agenda, and anyway, Clinton was busy reinventing the Democratic Party (which meant granting lots of concessions to the Republicans). But now we have a genuine liberal Democratic majority in Congress and a liberal in the White House, and the Reagan era is definitely over. So it's nice to finally see what the US government looks, acts, and sounds like when it's being run by my guys from top to bottom.

The Senate race stays hot

It looks as though there will be a run-off in the Senate race in Georgia, which could get crazy if the Democrats can muster 59 seats:

If Franken holds on, if Jeff Merkley in Oregon can win (Multnomah is the big Portland Democratic engine and is largely outstanding), then it is increasingly likely that the Dems will converge on Georgia for the next four weeks to try to win the 60th Senate seat.

A lot has been made of the fact that two of the "Democrats" in that would-be filibuster-proof 60-seat majority would be Independents, and one of those Independents--Joe Lieberman--actively campaigned for the Republican side. However, despite his move rightward, Lieberman remains a centrist Democrat on domestic issues. Thus, I think we could count on him to block a filibuster on something like a big energy or healthcare bill.

Push polls in Florida

From Phil, evidence of push polling in Florida. He also points out the irony of McCain benefiting from the same nefarious tactics that were used against him the Republican primary in 2000.

To be clear, though, nobody knows who is behind the Florida operation--in all likelihood it is the work of some organization that is independent of the McCain campaign. And it is certainly the case that Democrats have benefited from the same kinds of underhanded campaign tactics in the past.

However, I think it goes beyond normal campaign sleaze to make a blatant appeal to the electorate's racist or prejudiced inclinations--and certainly, implying that Barack Obama is a Muslim--or that he seeks the support of Hamas--fits into this category.

Tact

There's been a bit of a dust-up recently over some comments that Hillary Clinton has made about Iran:

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran (if it attacks Israel)," Clinton said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."

"In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them," she said.

"That's a terrible thing to say but those people who run Iran need to understand that because that perhaps will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish and tragic," Clinton said.

The thing is, though what she is saying is correct--any policy of deterrence entails the sort of massive retaliation that she is talking about--the way that she says it makes her sound unnecessarily aggressive.

In the first place, the question itself was a fairly outlandish hypothetical--there is absolutely no one who seriously believes that Iran would launch a direct attack against Israel. In fact, the reason this is the case is precisely because Iran and everyone else already knows that the United States would retaliate in such a situation (in addition to the retaliation that would be carried out by Israel itself). Therefore, Clinton's first reaction should have been to give a careful preface to her answer to make it clear that this was a purely hypothetical question with no immediate relevance to the current situation with Iran.

Next, rather than use colorfully bellicose language like "totally obliterate", she should have couched her answer in the most boring technocratic terms possible. I mean, you don't want to sound like you relish the idea of having to retaliate. Non-emotional, bureaucratic, mechanistic--this is how you want to express a policy of deterrence, because it gets the substantive point across without making anyone nervous or sending any confusing rhetorical messages. Moreover, she could have even avoided singling out Iran altogether, instead choosing to give her answer in terms of what the US generally does to protect close allies, Israel being one of them.

Obama, I think, is perceptive in seeing the potential trouble that remarks like Clinton's are likely to cause down the road:

"When Iran is able to go to the United Nations complaining about the statements made and get some sympathy, that's a sign that we are taking the wrong approach," Obama said.

Moreover, he seems to know how to give the more careful answer that I think is better to give:

"We have had a foreign policy of bluster and saber-rattling and tough talk, and in the meantime have made a series of strategic decisions that have actually strengthened Iran."

Israel is "the most important ally" the United States has in the Middle East, and that Washington would respond "forcefully and appropriately" to any attack, Obama said Sunday.

"But it is important that we use language that sends a signal to the world community that we're shifting from the sort of cowboy diplomacy, or lack of diplomacy, that we've seen out of George Bush," he said. "And this kind of language is not helpful."

It is not as if the sort of cowboy-diplomacy sloppiness of Clinton's remarks can be attributed to hers being off-the-cuff comments--she had already said earlier that Iran would undergo "massive retaliation" for an attack on Israel, and so she should have had her wording on this issue down pat.

In the end I think it comes down to a sort of fearfulness on the part of Democrats that has been ingrained in them by Republicans on national security issues, especially since the Republicans rose to dominance in the 90s: they don't want to look weak, and so they protect themselves from this perception by mimicking the Republicans, in style if not in actual policy. The result has been the dangerous lack of a counterweight to the sort of macho, with-us-or-against-us Bush foreign policy--an imbalance that expressed itself most painfully in the Democrats' non-existent opposition to the Iraq War resolution in 2003.

One thing I like about Obama is that he doesn't seem to have this fear. I greatly look forward to him taking on McCain on foreign policy in the general election.

Responding to Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman has an op-ed today that makes a couple of points defending Hillary Clinton and a couple of points questioning Barack Obama. As a dutiful Obama supporter, I'll try to make arguments against some of his points.

Mr. Obama was supposed to be a transformational figure, with an almost magical ability to transcend partisan differences and unify the nation.

This is the common misunderstanding of Obama's rhetoric when content is confused with process. When Obama talks about "transcending" partisan differences, it does not mean that somehow everyone will hew to the same ideological line, or that ideological differences will go away. Rather, it means that the process of politics will be executed in good faith, and that the opposition will have its voice be heard and not be shut out of the process, encouraging pragmatic resolutions to the immense problems our nation faces: the Iraq War, the upcoming recession, health care affordability, rising energy prices, global warming, terrorism, etc. There is nothing "magical" about any of this, and there is no rule that says that only Obama is capable of achieving it. Clinton could have chosen this route of conciliary and empathetic politics, but instead has opted for 90s-style ultra-partisan warfare politics and its incessant "fighting" of the "Republican machine". This difference in political methodologies between the candidates is a substantive one. As Clinton herself demonstrated in the early 1990s with the 'Hillarycare' debacle, the wrong political strategy can doom even the most well-thought-out policy.

Once voters got to know him — and once he had eliminated Hillary Clinton’s initial financial and organizational advantage — he was supposed to sweep easily to the nomination, then march on to a huge victory in November.

If the implication is that this was the Obama campaign's prediction of how things would go, then it is wrong. In fact, the Obama campaign has for a long time been soberly predicting that Obama's margin of victory would not be large and that there would be absolutely nothing easy about toppling the Clinton machine. So there is more humility to the Obama campaign, I think, than Krugman lets on.

Well, now he has an overwhelming money advantage and the support of much of the Democratic establishment — yet he still can’t seem to win over large blocs of Democratic voters, especially among the white working class.

As a result, he keeps losing big states.

It has always been predicted that Obama would lose big states such as Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (at around Super Tuesday, the Obama campaign itself predicted losses in these states by 4, 7, and 5 percent, respectively). This is part of the reason why Obama's campaign strategy has been to capitalize on lopsided margins in smaller states and/or caucus states where superior organization pays off.

And general election polls suggest that he might well lose to John McCain.

Tellingly, no citation. In the helpful metapoll over at RealClearPolitics, it shows that Obama is polling on average 1.5 points ahead of McCain, and Clinton is polling 0.6 ahead. In other words, even though the Democrats are currently campaigning against each other, they are both essentially in a dead heat with McCain (good news for Democrats). So I don't know where Krugman is getting his polling data from.

According to many Obama supporters, it’s all Hillary’s fault. If she hadn’t launched all those vile, negative attacks on their hero — if she had just gone away — his aura would be intact, and his mission of unifying America still on track.

But how negative has the Clinton campaign been, really? Yes, it ran an ad that included Osama bin Laden in a montage of crisis images that also included the Great Depression and Hurricane Katrina. To listen to some pundits, you’d think that ad was practically the same as the famous G.O.P. ad accusing Max Cleland of being weak on national security.

It wasn’t. The attacks from the Clinton campaign have been badminton compared with the hardball Republicans will play this fall. If the relatively mild rough and tumble of the Democratic fight has been enough to knock Mr. Obama off his pedestal, what hope did he ever have of staying on it through the general election?

I agree with Krugman that many Obama supporters overstate the damage done by Clinton's attacks, and tend to exaggerate the actual negativity of the ads themselves. At the same time, though, I don't think it makes sense to judge the negativity of Clinton's ads by using Republican attacks as a yardstick. Even if a Clinton attack is substantively less negative than a Republican one, the fact that it is uttered by a fellow Democrat can make it far more damaging. For example, the suggestion that Obama is less prepared to be President than John McCain is very damaging coming from the mouth of a leading Democrat, but is par for the course coming from a Republican.

Moreover, I think Krugman and Clinton supporters in general should be on guard against facile arguments of the type "what Clinton did was justified in the primary because Republicans will do the same thing in the general". To a certain extent it's fair--and in fact desired--for primary candidates to take off the gloves a little bit and go after each other's weak spots, especially the ones that will likely be exploited in the general election. Hillary's prevarications, Obama's preacher--bring it on. However, as I argue above, there are some attacks that cannot be made by Republicans, that can only inflict pain because they are uttered by Democrats. It doesn't make sense to say of these Democrat-on-Democrat attacks that they are some kind of precursor of what is to come in the general election, and therefore fair game.

[M]aybe his transformational campaign isn’t winning over working-class voters because transformation isn’t what they’re looking for.

From the beginning, I wondered what Mr. Obama’s soaring rhetoric, his talk of a new politics and declarations that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” (waiting for to do what, exactly?) would mean to families troubled by lagging wages, insecure jobs and fear of losing health coverage. The answer, from Ohio and Pennsylvania, seems pretty clear: not much. Mrs. Clinton has been able to stay in the race, against heavy odds, largely because her no-nonsense style, her obvious interest in the wonkish details of policy, resonate with many voters in a way that Mr. Obama’s eloquence does not.

I agree absolutely with Krugman: the majority of the sorts of "troubled" working-class families described above are going to favor Clinton's no-nonsense wonkish approach over Obama's admittedly airy-fairy rhetoric of "change" and "transcendence". No one's saying that Clinton doesn't have strengths--indeed, I think Obama has learned from Clinton that often times conveying wonkish competence and mastery of details can be more comforting than high-flying oratory. However, just because these voters prefer Clinton to Obama does not mean that they will prefer McCain to Obama. If these voters are really as policy and detail minded as Krugman suggests, then they will certainly choose any Democrat over any Republican in the general, come what may. The same is not necessarily true, however, for many Independents and new voters who do respond to Obama's soaring oratory--which is why I think Obama is better positioned than Clinton to win the general election in November.

Tellingly, the Obama campaign has put far more energy into attacking Mrs. Clinton’s health care proposals than it has into promoting the idea of universal coverage.

During the closing days of the Pennsylvania primary fight, the Obama campaign ran a TV ad repeating the dishonest charge that the Clinton plan would force people to buy health insurance they can’t afford. It was as negative as any ad that Mrs. Clinton has run — but perhaps more important, it was fear-mongering aimed at people who don’t think they need insurance, rather than reassurance for families who are trying to get coverage or are afraid of losing it.

To say that Obama "has put far more energy" into attacking Clinton than promoting universal coverage is, I think, an obvious exaggeration. But I do agree that the particular attack ad that Krugman refers to was an inexcusable misrepresentation of Clinton's health care proposals, and should never have been run.

The question Democrats, both inside and outside the Obama campaign, should be asking themselves is this: now that the magic has dissipated, what is the campaign about? More generally, what are the Democrats for in this election?

That should be an easy question to answer. Democrats can justly portray themselves as the party of economic security, the party that created Social Security and Medicare and defended those programs against Republican attacks — and the party that can bring assured health coverage to all Americans.

They can also portray themselves as the party of prosperity: the contrast between the Clinton economy and the Bush economy is the best free advertisement that Democrats have had since Herbert Hoover.

But the message that Democrats are ready to continue and build on a grand tradition doesn’t mesh well with claims to be bringing a “new politics” and rhetoric that places blame for our current state equally on both parties.

I think the Democratic candidate will be able to portray him or herself and the party in all the ways Krugman wants them to be portrayed, whether it's Obama or Clinton. What we're seeing here is the kind of myopia and cognitive dissonance that the long and bitter primary tends to cause amongst Democrats: we tend to lose sight of the fact that both candidates--though different in their political styles and what they emphasize--are overwhelmingly more the same than different, with almost no significant policy differences between them. Moreover, there is no tension between Obama's project of a "new politics" and the idea of building on "a grand tradition" of the Democratic Party, so long as we remember to distinguish between the content of policy proposals (which build on tradition) and the process of getting those policies passed into law (which requires "new politics").

So I think Krugman's criticisms of Obama are overblown. On the other hand, I'm also sympathetic to the article in general: with Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, and even David Brooks cheerleading for Obama week in and week out and bashing Clinton, a Clinton supporter like Krugman must feel obligated to balance out the scales a little bit on the NYT op-ed pages.

Eschewing pork versus merely chewing it

Even Robert Novak seems to acknowledge that the GOP can no longer claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility, suggesting that the Democrats may well be the ones to clamp down on earmark spending:

The GOP may be falling behind the Democrats, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moving toward a moratorium. In the Senate, courageous freshman Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri supports the DeMint amendment. She could be joined by her choice for president, Barack Obama. These developments encouraged Flake to say: "If Democrats actually move ahead with an earmark moratorium before Republicans, the Democrats will get the credit for eliminating earmarks, and, frankly, they'll deserve it."