WHY THE BILL IS HARD TO KILL

I know you'll say there's no reason to pay attention to an Ezra Klein podcast, especially when his guest is Matthew Yglesias, but I've read the transcript of this one and it got me thinking about the Democrats' failure to stir up more anger about the Republicans' big bill. (To be fair, I think Democrats have stirred up a great deal of anger, though clearly not enough to kill the bill altogether.)

Klein thinks it's been hard to get Americans to focus on the bill because it's complicated. He compares it to some of President Biden's bills. Yglesias agrees -- and I think they have a point. (Klein is in bold below.)

I have this view that these massive omnibus bills have become harder for people to talk about because there’s just too much going on in them. I think this is actually a problem for Build Back Better, which Democrats had trouble messaging and getting people to think about because it just did 80 different things. I think it was a little bit true with the Inflation Reduction Act....

I think the analogy to the Biden-era megabills is a good one.

At the time, Democrats were claiming to believe that if people were paying a lot of attention to the contents of Build Back Better, they would love it and that there would be this outpouring of public enthusiasm. They were struggling to get attention for a bill that was a very miscellaneous hodgepodge of things.

I would say that’s probably working in Trump’s favor right now. People are having trouble getting their minds around an initiative that’s not very popular.

Eight years ago, Democrats were able to focus the country on Obamacare repeal in a way they haven't been able to focus the country on this bill. Yglesias thinks that's partly because Trump made Obamacare repeal personal, and isn't doing the same thing now.

During the A.C.A. repeal fight, Trump really pivoted his messaging — talking a lot about the need to get it done and staging big, splashy events with House Republicans. He believed, as presidents tend to ... that if a president talks a lot about something, it will make people want to do what the president is saying. But all the evidence shows that’s not true.

I think Trump is wisely not talking about this....

Trump is "wisely" not talking about this in the sense of "It's wise for him to shut up if he wants to win." That makes sense to me.

But Democrats could focus voters if they tried. Klein says:

... I’ve been thinking about how unbelievably uninspired the Democratic messaging is on this. When I was preparing for this conversation, I was watching Chuck Schumer — or Hakeem Jeffries on the House floor, holding up an Elmo puppet.

Whether or not the C-SPAN messaging is good or bad, it’s just not the kind of thing that breaks through. Democrats have a lot of money in their campaign accounts.

You could imagine really slick videos where you’re doing the man-on-the-street thing with people who use Medicaid in very Trumpy districts: talking about what Medicaid means to them, what it’s done for them and how they would feel if it were slashed to the bone or at these rural hospitals.

I’m not saying everything would break through. But it doesn’t seem impossible to me that, if you had millions of dollars to message things, you could come up with something that would dramatize what is happening here in ways that might get some attention.

Yglesias says:

I think a big problem is that the Democratic Party is leaderless at the moment. The leadership they have is held in low regard by their own voters.

But the immigration messaging that's broken through hasn't come from leaders. Chris Van Hollen isn't a leader -- he's just a little-known senator who changed the conversation by demanding to see a constituent in El Salvador. The Democrats who've been arrested or detained aren't in leadership. They're just people who stepped up and did something galvanizing.

Yglesias and Klein have the absurd idea that Zohran Mamdani should lead the charge against the bill. Yglesias says:

I think a great thing for Zohran Mamdani to do would be to spend some time talking about a big consensus issue.

It's a "consensus issue" because the entire Democratic Party opposes the bill. Klein thinks this is a great idea:

... it’s obvious to both of us that it would be more meaningful for the 33-year-old assembly member who won a New York mayoral primary to really engage on this Medicaid bill than for all of the Democratic politicians who actually hold office and might have a vote. [Laughs.]

There’s something about the way attention does not accrue to power that’s really interesting. Hakeem Jefferies can’t get people to pay attention to this, and he’s the minority leader in the House.

I agree with you: Zohran Mamdani could.

Why should Mamdani do this? He's not in Congress. He's not running for Congress. He is running for an office he's likely but not guaranteed to win. He's busy right now! Someone else in the Democratic Party needs to fight this fight.

It doesn't have to be the most charismatic person in the party. Senator Van Hollen isn't charismatic. Nor is Senator Alex Padilla, who was manhandled and handcuffed at a Kristi Noem press conference. Brad Lander, who was arrested in New York, is famous for not being charismatic like Mamdani.

But the immigration protests are inherently more compelling because they're responses to cruel acts happening now, not in the future. I don't know what would be analogous in this situation. And if the specific way people will lose Medicaid coverage is their failure to keep up with onerous paperwork requirements, it's hard to identify obvious future victims, the way we could with Obamacare repeal -- after all, in theory every Medicaid recipient could dot all the i's and cross all the t's every month.

It's hard to fight Trump this time around. Everything he's doing is awful, so it's understandable that Democrats want to fight it all. Yglesias says:

We had these nationwide “No Kings” protests that were very successful and well organized. It got attention, and there were good visuals. Those could have been “No Medicaid Cuts” protests, but they weren’t.

There was plenty of anger about the Medicaid cuts at the No Kings protests, and at every other big demonstration I've attended. But there's so much else to be angry about.

Trump's people aren't doing all the other things as "distractions." They're evil, and they want to do many, many evil things. They've recognized that doing many of them all at once makes each of them harder to fight.

We need a creative Democrat or two able to craft a response to the Medicaid cuts that focuses America's attention. This doesn't have to be done by leaders or stars. But it's hard. And maybe the public simply won't be able to focus until the cuts are real.