Wednesday, November 20, 2013

THREE REASONS WHY I'M NOT FULLY INCLINED TO SNICKER AT THE RIGHT-WING COCAINE CONGRESSMAN
(and a couple of reasons why I am)

(I'm fairly nice to Trey Radel in this post. I regret that now that he's gotten away with something that would have ruined a less privileged person's life -- see the update at the end of the post.)

You probably know about this:
Rep. Trey Radel, R-Fla., was caught buying drugs as part of a federal investigation into a Washington, D.C., drug ring last month and is being charged with cocaine possession, according to a senior Drug Enforcement Administration official....

Radel is a former radio host, TV reporter and newspaper owner who was swept into office with Tea Party support....
I'd be happy to drink a big, tall glass of schadenfreude right now, but there are a few things about Radel that make me think he's not a completely bad guy, even if he is a teabagger.

* He once smacked down a homophobe on Twitter, in defense of Rachel Maddow. Late last month, according to Twitchy, Radel sent the following tweet:



He got this response:



His reply?



He also tweeted this to his fellow right-winger: "It's u that gives us a bad name. Ur an idiot."

Maybe it was just the booze talking (after his arrest was made public, Radel said, "I struggle with the disease of alcoholism"), but, tea party voter base or not, Radel treats Maddow better here than Liz Cheney treats her sister.


* He doesn't just claim to love rap music, he actually makes beats. And they're not terrible. You may have seen Radel described as a "rap-loving GOP congressman" and assumed that this is just the new thing for Republicans trying to seem as hip as President Obama, a la Marco Rubio name-checking Tupac. Maybe you've even seen Radel's post "Why I'm a Hip Hop Conservative," either at BuzzFeed or at Rap Genius, and thought it was mere posturing.

But Esquire found out that he makes his own beats sometimes -- and while he's no RZA, his work isn't bad. I can't embed them, but you can listen to three of them here -- "Hoochie Coochie Man" by Muddy Waters with hip-hop backup, a track based on a vocal sample from Smokey Robinson's "Cruisin'," and a remix of Public Enemy's "Bring the Noise."
Some quick background: He does not have a DJ name. He has a hard-drive full of mostly GarageBand tracks. He's been influenced by Eric B., Massive Attack, Daft Punk, and Dr. Dre (his communications director, Amanda Nuñez, said they call his music "Beats by Trey" around his D.C. office). He doesn't have time to make beats much anymore ("I have not done anything musically inclined in about a year-and-a-half or so, except to pick up the acoustic guitar and play to my young boy"). He doesn't know of any other Congressional beat-makers.

He also says he's not very good (which, if you listen, especially to the middle part of his "Hoochie Coochie Man" remix, is actually debatable): "I'm a rookie. I mean, my stuff is just some things I put together as a hobby. I'm not really good. I really enjoy making it. And If I have some cheesy tune where I'm remixing Public Enemy and people like it, hey, it puts a smile on my face."
* On the subject of drug policy, he's not a complete hypocrite. Think Progress reports:
Radel cosponsored a law that seeks to end mandatory minimum sentencing requirements that often send people to jail with a conviction no worse than drug possession. He has also spoken extensively about the need to reform the way the United States copes with its drug problems, repeating that a "war on drugs" is not the way to tackle drug issues. Here are just a couple of his comments on the topic:
"The war on guns is as naive as the war on drugs," Radel said. "Nothing will disappear.” [The News-Press, January 30, 2013]
"But I do think beyond just security assistance programs, there needs to be a much more engaged and focused, targeted approach by the United States.... And that’s where we get back to institutional support versus just, gee, how many kilos of cocaine have we seized today?" ]Congressional Hearing, June 19, 2013]...

****

On the other hand, Think Progress also notes:
Radel's views aren't all about dealing with drug issues comprehensively, though. He reportedly said he opposed legalizing marijuana in a debate back in April.
And Raw Story adds:
Radel voted in September to require SNAP [food stamp] recipients to undergo drug testing as a condition of their assistance.
So:

A guy with some redeeming features. But still a hypocrite.

****

UPDATE: Radel has pleaded guilty to cocaine possession and been sentenced to ... a year's probation. Writes Dan Amira:
"I can't believe the white congressman received a light sentence," said nobody.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:54 AM 3 comments

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

MAINSTREAM PRESS ABOUT TO DEVELOP AN ADOLESCENT CRUSH ON PAUL RYAN ALL OVER AGAIN

I'm really grateful that David Brooks is on book leave, because -- well, obviouslt because he's not writing awful columns, but also because he's not around to gush like a hormonal adolescent at the rollout of Paul Ryan V2.0, which is taking place right now. Unfortunately, it's a slow rollout, which means Brooks will be back at his post in time to swoon, along with the rest of the centrist press, at this grubby little go-getter's attempt to rebrand himself. For now, we have a long story in The Washington Post, as well as a shorter post at Business Insider, which serve as a sort of warning shot:

From the Post:
Paul Ryan is ready to move beyond last year's failed presidential campaign and the budget committee chairmanship that has defined him to embark on an ambitious new project: Steering Republicans away from the angry, nativist inclinations of the tea party movement and toward the more inclusive vision of his mentor, the late Jack Kemp.

Since February, Ryan (R-Wis.) has been quietly visiting inner-city neighborhoods with another old Kemp ally, Bob Woodson, the 76-year-old civil rights activist and anti-poverty crusader, to talk to ex-convicts and recovering addicts about the means of their salvation.

Ryan's staff, meanwhile, has been trolling center-right think tanks and intellectuals for ideas to replace the "bureaucratic, top-down anti-poverty programs" that Ryan blames for "wrecking families and communities" since Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty in 1964....
As far as I can tell, nothing Ryan and his crew are likely to come up with will conflict with his budgets, which gut programs for the needy. As Jonathan Chait notes, the message appears to be that government programs are bad and Jesus is good:
Ryan's new line seems similar to the old one:
"Paul wants people to dream again," Holloway said of Ryan. "You don’t dream when you’ve got food stamps."
In fact, lots of people who survived on food stamps -- like J.K. Rowling -- went on to achieve great things.

The other emerging element of Ryan's anti-poverty agenda is Jesus:
"You cure poverty eye to eye, soul to soul," he said last week at the Heritage forum. "Spiritual redemption: That’s what saves people."
David Brooks is squirming with delight already.

The Post story mentions one Ryan ally: Bob Woodson, founder and president of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise -- a man who attacks black leaders for making a cause celebre of Trayvon Martin, accuses the Democratic Party of caring too much about those damn gays and women ("Everybody has come in front of [blacks and poor people] on the bus -- gays, immigrants, women, environmentalists"), and has friendly chats like this with Bill O'Reilly:
O'REILLY: ... So as you know we've been reporting on this for about a month. And I believe it's a collapse of the traditional African-American family that's leading to the violence, the bad education and chaos in general. Am I wrong?

BOB WOODSON, CEO, CENTER FOR NEIGHBORHOOD ENTERPRISE: No you're right, Bill. But there has always been a great divide in the black community over this issue. Unfortunately, the civil rights movement of which I was a part in the 60s has declined and morphed into a race grievance industry.

It was Booker T. Washington at the turn of the century said there are groups of blacks who thrive off the grievance of their fellow blacks. If blacks lose their grievance they lose their income. And unfortunately that's what we have today.

O'REILLY: Now do you believe that extends all the way down to the folks or is it just centered in the -- look, we established last night very, very vividly and nobody has challenged it that last Saturday's march in Washington was funded by the teacher's unions very heavily and that the money went into organizations like Al Sharpton's action committee and other civil rights concerns and there is big money involved.

But do the rank-and-file African-American folks in your opinion want the government money to continue to flow and, therefore get behind the grievance industry?

WOODSON: As I said, Bill, in 1965, Bill Raspberry, a banner headline on the front page of the "The Washington Post" and has said "Poor Negroes are not benefiting from the gains of the civil rights movement." And so even from back then until today, the interests of the so-called leadership has -- has often been at odds with the rank-and-file. And this is true on this issue. If you were to take polls, for instance most low income blacks support vouchers for education. The civil rights leadership opposes it....

And the same thing is occurring in New York where Stop-and-Frisk is threatened which means that if they are successful, that you'll see a tick in the murder rate....
So that's one of the inspirations for Ryan's new endeavor. Another, as Business Insider's Danny Vinik explains, is Scott Winship:
To help [Ryan] develop new ideas, the Manhattan Institute's Scott Winship has been working with Ryan in recent months. Winship has worked for liberals organizations like the Democratic Strategist and Third Way before switching over to moderate ones in the Pew Charitable Trust and Brookings Institute. This past September, he joined the conservative Manhattan Institute as a senior fellow.

... In particular, [Winship] wants the government to play a role in advising and teaching young people to act responsibly to reduce early pregnancies and abortions.
Yeah, that's the idea I expect Ryan to glom onto most readily, to the delight of Brooks and other centrists -- that if those people would just keep their damn knees together, we wouldn't need all this welfare. (Brooks will write of "values" and "virtue.")

We're also told that Winship doesn't think poor people suffer as much as we think from inequality "once you account for the value of health insurance and taxes." (Medicaid -- it's what's for dinner!) And he's also a fan, naturally, of school vouchers.

I told you this morning that Paul Ryan was the only politician invited to speak at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council annual meeting this week, apart from President Obama and Governor Chris Christie. I suspect Ryan is seen as the guy who can bring "serious" back to the GOP. This, I guess is supposed to be how. Never mind that his proposal will be a slap in the fact to the people it's supposed to help, while probably alienating the GOP base Ryan wants to retain for a possible 2016 presidential campaign. The press will still swoon. And maybe that will be enough for Young Paul.

Posted by Steve M. at 6:41 PM 9 comments
YUP, AND IN 2006 BUSH WOULD HAVE LOST TO BOTH GORE AND KERRY

Politico is telling me this, so surely it must be meaningful:
As more bad poll numbers continue to pour in for President Barack Obama, a new survey finds that if the 2012 election matchup were held this month, Mitt Romney would hold the edge with the voters.

Romney topped Obama 49 percent to 45 percent among registered voters in the Washington Post-ABC News poll released Tuesday. Among all Americans, the 2012 rivals would be tied, at 47 percent....
You want a do-over on that, right-wingers? Fine -- if we get a do-over on the previous presidency, all eight years of it. From August 2006:
According to a survey by Scripps Howard News Service released by Ohio University which asked 1,010 "Americans to ponder their options in every U.S. presidential election held since 1964," two term President George W. Bush would lose to both Senator John Kerry and former Vice President Al Gore.

"46 per cent of respondents would support Democrat John Kerry in a repeat of the 2004 ballot, while 40 per cent would vote for Republican George W. Bush," according to Scripps Howard News Service / Ohio University poll....

In a "rerun" of 2000, the poll suggests that Gore would beat Bush with 46 to 38 percent. Gore did win a slightly larger percentage of the popular vote in the 2000 election (48.4% to 47.9%), but after a month-long battle that reached the Supreme Court Bush was awarded a majority of the electoral college vote....
The link in that excerpt is dead, but the Wayback Machine has it archived.

Oh, and History's Greatest Monster, George McGovern, beat Nixon, too.

Charlie Pierce is not impressed by Romney's numbers in the WaPo/ABC poll:
... "if the election were held today," the nation would get another look at the actual Mitt Romney -- smug, entitled, unlikable, and a truly remarkable liar -- and, I suspect, a lot of those numbers, especially the drop in liberal support and the president's support among low-income voters, would be back up to where it was in about 11 minutes. Are there really people outside the Romney clan who cling to the fiction that he actually won? Are these people living in my neighborhood? Are they properly medicated?
Yes, this is nostalgia for a Mitt Romney who's mostly disappeared into the woodwork, with only infrequent appearances in public. By contrast, John Kerry stayed visible in the Senate, while Al Gore returned to the public eye a couple of months before the Scripps Howard poll was taken when An Inconvenient Truth was released. (The right looks back on that movie as the most abhorrent piece of cinema since Triumph of the Will, yet you'll notice that it didn't seem to hurt Gore in this poll.)

None of this matters. Yeah, President Obama is looking bad right now, but we don't have do-overs in this country. When George W. Bush declined in popularity, he continued to rule in a way that reminded us he didn't give a crap what his critics thought. When 2006 midterm voters voted for an Iraq withdrawal, he responded with a middle-finger gesture known as the surge. That's how Republicans roll in these situations.
Posted by Steve M. at 12:24 PM 4 comments
WHEN TEABAGGERS TRY TO TAKE DOWN CHRISTIE IN 2016, WILL MURDOCH DENY THEM CLOSE AIR SUPPORT?

Saw this at Libby Spencer's place last night:



And today we have breathless stories on Christie from Murdoch's media colleagues/rivals at CNN, ABC, and the publication Fox Nation refers to as "left-wing Politico." From the CNN story, which reads like a Christie press release (they all read like Christie press releases):
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, fresh off a landslide reelection victory earlier this month, says if being himself "is not good enough in any other election I might someday pursue," he will just find another job.

Republican Christie, who won reelection in blue New Jersey by garnering a broad coalition of support, said he didn't feel like he had to do any further outreach to his fellow party members who see him as a moderate unable to tap into the conservative base.

"I don't feel like I have any fence-mending to do or anything like that," he said during a public interview on Monday at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council in Washington. "I am going to be me. And if I ever decide to run for anything again, if being me isn't good enough, then fine, I will go home. This isn't my whole life."
Yes, all these non-Murdoch media outlets covered a speech Christie gave to the annual meeting of The Wall Street Journal CEO Council, which, according to its press release, gathers more than a hundred CEOs this week to hear President Obama and other speakers. Now, it seems to me that if you attract Obama to your confab, any other U.S. pol who's on the speakers' list is effectively elevated to the president's level. So I note that I don't see Hillary Clinton on the list (or Joe Biden, for that matter, much less Elizabeth Warren). I don't see Ted Cruz or Rand Paul or Scott Walker or Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. The only other pol are Paul Ryan and Chris Christie. (Although it should be noted that Murdoch met with Rand Paul earlier this month.)

We know from news reports in the summer of 2012 that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes wanted Chris Christie to run for president that year:
Along with Roger Ailes, chairman of Fox News, Mr. Murdoch urged Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey to run. Both men admire Mr. Christie's gusto and toughness -- a sharp edge they have themselves. "He really wanted Christie," said one of Mr. Murdoch's friends. Mr. Ailes, a former campaign strategist for Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, shares Mr. Murdoch's disdain of how the Romney campaign is being run, telling people privately that it is too soft.
The reports of Christie's speech at the Journal confab say that he criticized the Republicans who shut down the government and praised compromise and outreach to Democrats. It's as if he's daring crazy-base voters to try to deny him the 2016 nomination.

That's going to be their top priority. For a long time, I was certain they'd succeed. But I wonder if Fox is going to sell them out and cheerlead for Christie, or at least refuse to be a platform for his haters. The teabaggers are used to backing from the right-wing media and rich conservative billionaires and well-heeled 501(c)3s and 4s; some of these will go after Christie, but I think Fox (and the Kochs) won't.

Then again, we read in 2011 that Fox wanted to dial down the extremism a wee bit in order to get a president elected, but Fox couldn't stop being Fox, and just kept promoting the likes of Donald Trump and Herman Cain, while giving short shrift to Mitt Romney. But that may just have been because Murdoch thought Romney was a wuss. He clearly doesn't feel that way about Christie.

I think this would be an excellent moment for the emergence of a new cable channel that out-Foxes Fox. Maybe CBS News should stop trying to be Fox Lite and should set up Lara Logan and Sharyl Attkisson, along with a motley crew of birthers, impeachers, and Benghazi obsessives (Allen West? Andrew McCarthy?), at an all-news outpost that would basically be Fox Extreme. As the primaries heat up, that could become the refuge for wingnut Christie-phobes.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:26 AM 3 comments

Monday, November 18, 2013

MARTIN BASHIR'S APOLOGY SEEMS SINCERE AND HEARTFELT, BUT COMPLETELY MISSES THE POINT

In a speech in Iowa on November 9, Sarah Palin said that the consequences of our national debt are probably going to be "like slavery." Last Friday on MSNBC, Martin Bashir tried to make the point that the full horror of slavery was far worse than our debt by quoting passages from the diary of an American slaveholder named Thomas Thistlewood describing brutal punishments slaves actually endured:
"In 1756, he records that a slave named Darby 'catched eating kanes had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector, another slave, s-h-i-t in his mouth.'"

"This became known as 'Darby’s Dose,' a punishment invented by Thistlewood that spoke only of inhumanity. And he mentions a similar incident in 1756, his time in relation to a man he refers to as Punch. 'Flogged punch well, and then washed and rubbed salt pickle, lime juice and bird pepper, made Negro Joe piss in his eyes and mouth,'" Bashir recited.
Bashir then went on to conjure up the image of Palin undergoing these punishments:
"When Mrs. Palin invokes slavery, she doesn't just prove her rank ignorance," he said. "She confirms if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, she would be the outstanding candidate."
Today he's apologized -- for the wrong thing:





... In the battle of ideas, America leads the world in whole-hearted discussions and disagreements and these arguments can be heard on a daily basis. But what I did on Friday had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with that great tradition and I am deeply sorry.

Upon reflection, I so wish that I had been more thoughtful, more considerate, more compassionate, but I was not and what I said is now a matter of public record. But if I could add something to the public record, it would be this: that I deeply regret what I said, and that I have learned a sober lesson in these last few days. That the politics of vitriol and destruction is a miserable place to be, and a miserable person to become. And I promise that I will take the opportunity to learn from this experience.

My hope is that it will renew in me a spirit of humility and humanity, that looks for the good and that builds upon the great things that this country has to offer to all of us, regardless of our political persuasion. This will be my guiding light and compass in the days ahead....
No, Martin -- the problem with what you said isn't that it was "vitriol," or that you weren't "considerate" or "compassionate." The problem wasn't that you went failed to be a person who "looks for the good." It's perfectly OK to go negative. It's fine if Palin's words lead you to express anger and disgust.

The problem is that your response to Palin turned into a fantasy in which she was personally brutalized. Angry political talk is fine, but it ought to be limited in scope to what people argue and advocate. Palin is an idiot who said an idiotic thing. You could have said so and been as vitriolic as you wanted to be. That would have been fine. Where your remarks stopped being fine was not the point at which you became angry, but the point at which you became a sadist pornographer.

I agree with Wonkette's Doktor Zoom: if you'd read from the diary and left it at that, you "could have stopped and asked exactly how any aspect of national debt resembles these realities of slavery," and the point would have been made. But no -- you had to give us a word picture of this women being physically degraded.

Now you've issued an apology that plays into all the self-righteous narratives of pious centrists -- that what's wrong with our political discourse is anger.

Anger is a perfectly appropriate emotion to express at a right wing that won't accept the legitimacy of Democratic and liberal politicians and that describes liberals and Democrats as inhuman monsters bent on America's destruction.

But it needs to be political anger. That's not what this was. It was perverse and personal. The anger line is not the line it went over.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:32 PM 5 comments
YOU TELL YOURSELF YOU'RE NOT MY KIND, BUT YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW YOUR MIND

In a sane world, this report from BuzzFeed's Ruby Cramer would quell the Clinton/Warren catfight rumors that have pulses races throughout the Beltway:
Elizabeth Warren's former national finance chair, Paul Egerman, has told several inquiring donors this month that, despite runaway speculation and a burning desire from the party's left wing, the freshman senator will not run for president in 2016.

Egerman, close to both Warren and to the heavy-hitting liberal base of funders who helped her raise $42 million last year, has been approached by donors in the last two weeks and told them that, no, Warren is not planning to run, according to two major players in Democratic financial circles who spoke with Egerman directly.

One Democratic fundraiser said he spoke with Egerman roughly two weeks ago, after articles by Peter Beinart in the Daily Beast and Noam Scheiber in the New Republic heightened fervor amongst the progressives over whether Warren would challenge Hillary Clinton, already the presumed frontrunner, from the left.

Egerman, the fundraiser said, quickly threw cold water on the theory.

"It's not gonna happen," the source said....
There's more at the link, and it all points to a no answer from Warren.

But the believers just won't stop:



This links to a Hendrik Hertzberg post at The New Yorker's site, which offers no evidence that Warren is uncertain about her own plans, merely an assertion that the future is (seemingly) unknowable:
Will she challenge Hillary? No one knows, probably including Warren herself....

(... even she probably doesn't know what she'll do)....
Hertzberg goes on to speculate that "leaving the possibility tantalizingly open is the best way to keep [Warren's] ideas about taming the plutocracy in the public eye -- and to encourage (or force) Clinton to move in her direction." Bill Scher has similar thoughts:




So does she simply not know what her plans are (at a time when every other candidate is already laying groundwork)? Is she faking, in part to keep Hillary Clinton on a short leash?

That last notion annoys me -- it suggests that her prime target is a fellow Democrat. It seems to me that Warren is mature enough to know that the prime target in her war on fat-cat excess is, um, fat cats. To put it in Python terms, she's a People's Front of Judea member who's actually angrier at the Romans than she is at the Judean People's Front:





I've never seen any evidence that she thinks policing her party for signs of ideological impurity is a good use of her time. She's not Jim DeMint, nor is she an emoprog. She's in this to take on the powerful, not to take on the people who won't take on the powerful. And good for her.
Posted by Steve M. at 3:00 PM 5 comments
OBAMACARE AND THE BALKANIZATION OF AMERICA

Well, here's the start of a pro-Obamacare pushback campaign: a Washington Post op-ed, by the governors of Kentucky, Connecticut, and Washington State, titled "How We Got Obamacare to Work."
... People keep asking us why our states have been successful. Here's a hint: It’s not about our Web sites.

... The Affordable Care Act has been successful in our states because our political and community leaders grasped the importance of expanding health-care coverage and have avoided the temptation to use health-care reform as a political football.

In Washington, the legislature authorized Medicaid expansion with overwhelmingly bipartisan votes in the House and Senate this summer because legislators understood that it could help create more than 10,000 jobs, save more than $300 million for the state in the first 18 months, and, most important, provide several hundred thousand uninsured Washingtonians with health coverage.

In Kentucky, two independent studies showed that the Bluegrass State couldn't afford not to expand Medicaid. Expansion offered huge savings in the state budget and is expected to create 17,000 jobs.

In Connecticut, more than 50 percent of enrollment in the state exchange, Access Health CT, is for private health insurance. The Connecticut exchange has a customer satisfaction level of 96.5 percent, according to a survey of users in October, with more than 82 percent of enrollees either "extremely likely" or "very likely" to recommend the exchange to a colleague or friend....
That's great. I hope it helps change the narrative from "Obamacare sucks" to "Obamacare's problems are primarily matters of implementation, and they can be solved." But this is a reminder that, because states were allowed not to implement Obamacare in a uniform way, and because the rollout at the federal level was so poor, the program is part of a balkanization trend in America.

I know that a lot of gay marriage supporters think marriage equality is eventually going to be recognized as a fundamental American right, like the right to interracial marriage, but I find it unimaginable that the reddest states are going to accept gay marriage via legislation or referendum anytime in the foreseeable future, and if it comes via the courts, especially the Supreme Court, I think there's simply going to be noncompliance -- which could turn ugly if the federal government tries to do anything about it. Consider the number of states where, right now, the feds are unable to get the same-sex marriages of National Guard members recognized, even though the state National Guards ultimately report to the president.)

Abortion is readily available in some states and all but illegal in others. There's gun control in the bluest states and a gun free-for-all in most of the others. They're fracking the bejeezus out of Pennsylvania while New York holds out, at least so far, just across the border. On hot-button issue after hot-button issue, a national consensus is not evolving.

Many of the smart people who laughed at Republican attempts to repeal Obamacare now think it's on life support, quite possibly subject to repeal in the near future by veto-proof majorities that include terrified Democrats. Yeah, possibly -- possibly the Republicans whining about policy cancellations are willing to throw all the people who can now get insurance for the first time off the rolls, because those people are, y'know, the wrong kind of people.

But I wonder if ways will be found to sustain some form of the Obamacare system in states where it's working and is not politically toxic. If that happens, it's probably a better fit with what America has become than a nationwide system. Because we really are two nations now, irreconcilable and divisible.

****

UPDATE: I seem to have set off a serious discussion at BooMan's place.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:51 AM 5 comments

Sunday, November 17, 2013

"THE LEAST POLITICAL EXPERIENCE"

I really hope political insiders interpret the special election conducted yesterday in Louisiana's Fifth Congressional District this way:
Louisiana voters elected Republican Vance McAllister in a runoff to fill the state’s vacant Fifth District U.S. House seat on Saturday. McAllister, a businessman who embraced the expansion of Medicaid available to the state under the Affordable Care Act, defeated a Republican party favorite who called for full Obamacare repeal.
Yup -- full-on hatred of Obamacare did not prevail. Here's how that played out during the campaign (though please note that it's a stretch to say McAllister won by being pro-Obamacare):
Although McAllister pledged to vote to repeal Obamacare if he had the chance, he said there's no way the Democratic-controlled Senate and President Obama would ever sign on to the idea.

"I would love to take an eraser and repeal it, but we can't," McAllister said, according to The News-Star. "It's a nightmare, and we're here living with it. People all over this district are losing their insurance every day that were lied to by the president of the United States, but I'm not going to stand here and lie to you and tell you we can repeal it."

But Riser insists the law can still be repealed if Republicans continue to fight it.

"Yes, it can be repealed," Riser countered. "It's been a complete failure to start with — a complete train wreck. If we can put a man on the moon, we can repeal Obamacare."

The two have also parted on another key component of the health care law: Medicaid expansion. Gov. Bobby Jindal has refused to expand the state's Medicaid program, a move Riser agrees with. He argues expanding the program would be too costly.

However, McAllister is in favor of expansion, saying the state would not be able to cover the costs of the Affordable Care Act without money from the federal government, which would ultimately lead to more cuts in health care and education.

... Roy Fletcher, a veteran Louisiana Republican political consultant who's also not affiliated with either campaign, ... [said] that McAllister may be trying to position himself slightly to the left of Riser in a district where African-Americans make up about a third of the population.
Perhaps. And it seems to have worked. But there was also this:
Running in an impoverished part of the state, McAllister competed aggressively for blue-collar voters. During the closing days of the race he aired a TV ad spotlighting an endorsement from Willie Robertson, a star in the popular A&E reality series "Duck Dynasty," which is about a family-run duck-call business.
So maybe McAllister got some of the blue-collar white vote. And who knows -- maybe some of that vote is pro-Obamacare. (Apparently, it isn't as virulently anti-Obmacare as we thought.)

A key factor seems to have been the perception that McAllister was an outsider and Riser an insider:
Riser doubles as both the establishment candidate and the tea party favorite, promoting his experience but promising strident opposition to President Barack Obama, who is unpopular in the district.

McAllister, meanwhile, has embraced his outsider status.... McAllister is running as the more measured pragmatist, criticizing Washington gridlock and hyper-partisanship, particularly on Obama's health care law.

[Riser is an] ally of Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal....

McAllister counters eagerly with his newcomer status.

"I am not part of the establishment; I'm just part of the district," said McAllister....
So there are a few lessons to be learned from this:

* Yes, there's a significant bloc of voters who'd like Obamacare to work.

* Also, being able to portray yourself as an outsider can be a very, very good thing for your candidacy. (Maybe a few non-career-politician Democrats ought to try running against entrenched incumbents in seemingly hopeless Republican-leaning districts.)

* And finally: Maybe the GOP establishment ought to get behind non-partisan or "jungle" primaries, especially in red districts and states. The result, in many cases, is likely to be what it was here: two Republicans emerging from the primary field, one of whom is marginally less crazy, and is therefore the more appealing candidate to moderates and liberals, while possibly being conservative enough to win plenty of conservative votes as well. Partisan House primaries in red districts, by contrast, often leave an extreme Republican running against a (boo! hiss!) Democrat, and that extreme Republican then wins and becomes another Crazy Caucus member who seeks shutdowns and default. In Senate races in red states, an extremist Republican who wins a partisan primary sometimes loses to the Democrat. The right-wing establishment ought to embrace non-partisan primaries as a way of minimizing the likelihood of both these outcomes.
Posted by Steve M. at 2:27 PM 3 comments
I'M SO GLAD WE HAVE FRANK BRUNI TO EXPLAIN THAT BILL CLINTON DOES THINGS ON HILLARY'S BEHALF

After all the recent cutbacks in the newspaper business, thank goodness we still have Frank Bruni in The New York Times to offer expert analysis -- like this brilliant parsing of Bill Clinton's call for a restoration of canceled insurance policies under Obamacare:
You can alternately view what he said as payback.... It was more vinegar than honey, with just the slightest trace of arsenic.

Or you can view what happened last week in grandly strategic and utterly gallant terms, which is where things really get interesting and which may be the most accurate appraisal of all. Clinton is looking to 2016, and he's helping Hillary.
No! Really? You think Bill might be trying to help his wife become president? (Smacks forehead.) Gosh, that never occurred to me!

There's also this:
But the calculus for [Bill Clinton] over the coming years is much, much more complicated. If Obama doesn't recover, if there are more fumbles and if Hillary formally decides that she'd like to carry the ball next, Bill's best approach may be cheerleading mingled with fault finding....
Fault finding? You mean, if Obamacare continues to struggle, and Hillary runs for president, Bill might try to help her distance himself from the health care program? Amazingly subtle plan! Tip of the hat to Bruni for ferreting it out!

Bruni also reveals his astute grasp of recent history:
In his animation and expansiveness, [Bill Clinton is] a sustained retort to Obama's style....

As I watched Obama's stiff apology on Thursday -- "I completely get how upsetting this can be for a lot of Americans," he said, with a listlessness that suggested that he completely wanted to get far away from the podium -- I couldn't help imagining Clinton's hypothetical performance in a similar spot and bind. He would have been lavish with empathy, promiscuous with it. He would have bled and he would have gushed.
Which would have been brilliant, right? The perfect response to the moment!

Except that Bill Clinton was the same emotional guy he is now during his own health care crisis, in 1993 and 1994 -- and what good did it do him? His proposed overhaul failed. His poll numbers suffered. His party was wiped out in the '94 midterms. "I feel your pain" was a punch line.

In this compare-and-contrast, Bruni is, of course, Maureen Dowd without the pop-culture references to Mr. Spock or TV robots. The Times still values Dowd, too. Isn't that wonderful?
Posted by Steve M. at 10:48 AM 2 comments

Saturday, November 16, 2013

WE'D RATHER POST BATKID LINKS ON FACEBOOK THAN PONY UP SO ALL HIS PEERS HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE

You probably assumed that if I wrote about Batkid I'd write a snarly and curmudgeonly post, and, well, I'm not going to disappoint you. But I'm not curmudgeonly about Batkid, the five-year-old with leukemia in remission who got to play Batman in San Francisco, with the help of the city government and a large number of volunteers, whose efforts help make the kid's fantasy amazingly elaborate. I'm curmudgeonly about a country that does things like this, and becomes captivated by things like this, at the same time it grumbles and moans about a certain percentage of Americans having to pay somewhat more for health insurance in order that other five-year-olds, some of whom have or may soon have equally dire medical conditions, can be guaranteed insurance coverage themselves.

Now, I realize that volunteering to help Batkid live out his dream was an act of generosity. I realize that a lot of people who clicked Batkid links on their computers at work also make donations to the Make-A-Wish Foundation and other charities for sick kids and cancer sufferers. I see that 12-12-12, a film of last year's Hurricane Sandy charity concert, is opening this weekend, and I know that a lot of people gave a lot of money during the original broadcast of that concert.

So we're generous and compassionate and empathetic when we get entertainment value in return. Well, how about having a little empathy when no one is putting on a show for our amusement? Can we manage that?

I'm thinking about an email Josh Marshall posted yesterday -- just about when the Batkid story was unfolding. It was from a reader who's been buying insurance in the individual market, and who's probably going to have to pay more under Obamacare, which, he's been told, makes him an Obamacare "loser," a la recent complainants such as Dylan Ratigan and Lori Gottlieb:
... Having insurance, even crappy insurance, in the individual market means we are almost by definition, healthy and relatively young. If we were not, we wouldn't be able to get coverage of any kind in the non-group market. If our ACA-compliant replacement policy costs us more, it's likely because we’re too affluent to qualify for subsidies.

It takes a remarkable degree of self-absorption and sense of self-entitlement to be healthy, young(ish) and affluent—and yet consider oneself a "loser." ...

I live in Louisiana where 400,000 working poor people will continue to go without health care because one man, Gov. Bobby Jindal, decided letting them have Medicaid wouldn't be good for his future ambitions. Those 400,000 are the losers. And while my healthcare.gov application has been stuck for a month now at the "View Eligibility Results" stage, where instead of my results I see a blank screen when I click the button, I know I will get better health insurance than the bare-bones individual policy I have now, even if I end up having to pick up the phone, or heaven forbid, send in paper. I will pay significantly more, but after years of being one serious illness from financial ruin, I will finally have security. And not only that; every time I pay my new premium, I am paying into a system that makes it possible for my fellow Americans who have not been as lucky as me --people who really have been losers pre-ACA -- to finally get affordable health care....
Even when the Obamacare site is fixed, it's not going to provide free entertainment -- no Batkid, no Bon Jovi. Sorry if that's inadequate for you, if you've been a "winner" in the inividual market up till now. Sorry if just being part of a process by which America takes care of its own isn't enough for you.
Posted by Steve M. at 11:18 AM 9 comments

Friday, November 15, 2013

DEAR RONALD BROWNSTEIN: WHITE PEOPLE ARE HOPELESS

Ronald Brownstein tells us today that "Obamacare's Problems Could Haunt Democrats for Years." The reason? It's upsetting white people:
President Obama’s health care law is now compounding a political problem it was meant to solve: the generation-long loss of faith in government activism, particularly among the white middle class.

For decades, Democratic strategists have viewed universal health care as their best opportunity to reverse the doubt among many voters, especially whites, that government programs can tangibly benefit their families. Now the catastrophic rollout of the health law threatens instead to reinforce those doubts. That outcome could threaten Democratic priorities for years.
But, as Brownstein notes, white people didn't wait for the rollout to write off Obamacare:
Even before its disastrous launch, the health care law faced anxiety about its goals. On the plan's best days, polls found Americans split almost evenly on whether reform would benefit the country overall. But even then, nothing approaching a majority ever said the law would help their own families; among whites, fewer than one-third said they expected to personally benefit. Far more whites said the law would help the poor or uninsured. That meant, as the law debuted, most whites viewed health care more like food stamps than Social Security.
In that case, why would a successful rollout have ever mollified whites? Are they pleased because the food stamp program is run competently?
... In fairness, the health care law, which reported modest but not horrific first-month enrollment numbers, is not the first social program to stumble out of the gate. Social Security initially faced what one historian called "grave administrative difficulties." Although the Children's Health Insurance Program passed under Bill Clinton is now widely praised, enrollment grew slowly, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted this week.
Yup -- Social Security is running fine now. So is the Children's Health Insurance Program. So, for that matter, are Medicare and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, and a lot of other programs.

And white people still distrust government. Even white people who are beneficiaries of these programs, or whose parents and friends and neighbors are beneficiaries, distrust government. That's because, when it comes to government programs, there's no pleasing white people.

When I say "white people," I don't mean the subset of white people who see the point in having a social safety net, either because they themselves need it or because they're capable of empathy, and of grasping that the wealthiest nation on earth shouldn't be leaving tens of millions of people by the wayside. But, alas, I'm describing a minority of my race.

Obamacare was never going to get the majority of whites to embrace activist government. Nothing will accomplish that, at least not with the current white voter pool. Yes, the rollout, if it continues to be a failure, will worsen whites' already low opinion of government. But success won't win most whites over.

Oh, and the long-run import of all this is what exactly, Ron?
...If most Americans conclude Republicans are right about the health care law, that judgment would inevitably deepen doubts about other government initiatives. In this world, Democrats could still hold the White House in 2016 around cultural affinity, but they would likely struggle to achieve much if they do.
I have news for you, Ron: Unless Democrats win back the House and gain a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate, even President Hillary Clinton (or President Biden or Warren or O'Malley, for that matter) will "struggle to achieve much," for the simple reason that Republicans want to destroy America if they can't rule it, and will never allow a Democratic agenda to take root. (That would have been true, by the way, even if the Obamacare rollout had been flawless.)

And you know who thinks the way the GOP operates is just fine? You know who gets much more upset about the existence of the social safety net than about the fact that Republican have made representative democracy impossible in this country?

White people. Republicans have effectively destroyed our system of government, and white people keep voting them back in.

So as far as I'm concerned, my race is a problem to be contained, not a voting bloc that can be won back with one policy success. The majority of us are hopeless. Don't even bother trying to change our minds.
Posted by Steve M. at 4:49 PM 7 comments
THE CANONICAL LIST OF OBAMA'S KATRINAS

The disastrous rollout of [President Obama's] health care law ... raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration's botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.
--Michael Shear in The New York Times today

Well, we've been here before:

Obama's 'Katrina moment'

It has been a rough week or so for the Obama administration. From Benghazi to the tapping of reporters' phones to the IRS admitting that it targeted conservative groups for extra scrutiny, the press is in a frenzy, and many are questioning President Barack Obama's future.
--Todd Eberly, Baltimore Sun, 5/17/13

Sexual Assault in the Military: Scandals Represent Obama's "Katrina Moment"
--Darryl Watson, PolicyMic, 5/16/13

SANDY IS OBAMA'S KATRINA
--Breitbart's Big Government, 11/4/12

Obama's "Katrina Moment?"

... On August 30, 2012, Obama held a campaign rally at the University of Virginia. At that same time "people in Louisiana were dealing with what the National Hurricane Center called "life-threatening hazards" caused by Hurricane Isaac." ...

Let's see now. Bush caught hell from Obama and the MSM for not landing in New Orleans, but the MSM gave Obama a pass when he didn't land....

Are we beginning to see a double standard here?
--Conservative Daily News blog, 8/31/12

The Washington DC power outage should be Obama's Katrina.
--americantopicsonline.com, 7/9/12

MF Global Financial Collapse is Obama's Hurricane Katrina
--The Market Oracle blog, 3/25/12

The S&P Downgrade: Obama's Katrina Moment?
--Patrick Ruffini, 8/24/11

My friend Andy in Nebraska City says that city is expecting the flood waters to rise to a point where it will cover 1st and 2nd street.

My friend Brian in Council Bluffs already has his truck packed up in case he and his wife have to leave quickly....

The only national news coverage, at all, is concerning Ft. Calhoun Nuclear Plant....

Why is the media silent? Why is the national media refusing to cover this story fully, and point out what is going on?

Because, this is Obama's Katrina moment, and he has blown it.
--For God and Liberty blog, 6/27/11

As Obama departs to tour the Alabama tornado zone, the question must be asked: Will *this* be Obama's Katrina?
--poster at Fark.com, 4/29/11

CableGate is Obama's Katrina times ten.
--The American Thinker, 11/30/10 (the reference is to revelations in cables published by WikiLeaks)

Is BP's oil spill becoming this president's Katrina?
--USA Today, 5/27/10

Expect unemployment to remain over 9% through the midterm elections -- compared to a rate of just 6.9% in November 2008, when Obama was elected. It's that number, rather than anything going on right now in the Gulf of Mexico, which is really "Obama’s Katrina".
--Felix Salmon, 6/4/10

Haiti: Obama's Katrina
--Wall Street Journal op-ed, 1/25/10

Is the Undiebomber Obama's Katrina?
--Ed Driscoll, PJ Media, 12/29/09

Fort Hood Could Be Obama's Katrina
--Lynne Wooley at Human Events, 11/11/2009

Is the Stimulus Obama’s Katrina?
--Bill Dupray, American Conservative, True/Slant, 11/17/09

OBAMA’S KATRINA: Obama Parties While Georgia Floods
--The Pink Flamingo blog, 9/22/09

Coming epidemic of swine flu could be Obama's Katrina
--Martin Schram, Scripps Howard News Service, 8/28/09

Make no mistake, the economic crisis and Obama's failure to create real jobs with his stimulus package means we're looking at this president's Katrina.
--James Pinkerton, Fox News, 7/6/09

Republicans hope General Motors is President Obama's Hurricane Katrina
--Politico, 6/28/09

Obama's "Katrina on Ice"

More than 700,000 homes are still without power in Kentucky due to a massive ice storm that struck the state six days ago, forcing Gov. Steve Beshear to mobilize his entire state's Army and Air National Guard, a total of 4,600 men and the largest call-out in Kentucky's history....

Our Hawaiian-borne President, basking in the glow of an overheated Oval Office and dining on $100/lb steak, has been utterly disinterested....
--Confederate Yankee blog, 2/1/09

Obama's Katrina: The most damaging article about Barack Obama I've read. ...

P.S: A friend emails: "Obama's KATRINA. A little dramatic?" Maybe. Obama's record on "affordable housing," as described in the Globe story, isn't a case of gross ineptitude in a catastrophic regional emergency. It's not even a symbol of endemic governmental dysfunction. (Although: Is there a bigger Petri dish for corrupt incompetence than the "public-private partnership"? Think cable TV franchises.) But the Globe account does seem to capture what's most likely to be wrong with an Obama administration.
--Mickey Kaus at Slate, 6/30/08

Check the date on that last one. I love it -- Obama is such a terrible president that he had his first Katrina even before he officially became his party's nominee.

But yes -- the health care rollout may seem worse than other Obama crises, but we have definitely heard this kind of talkbefore.

(Hat tip to Media Matters for its original list.)
Posted by Steve M. at 1:24 PM 8 comments
DEMS: WHEN OUR PRESIDENT IS DROWNING, WE THROW HIM AN ANVIL

From a Politico story about White House attempts to reassure restive House Democrats on Obamacare:
"I don't know how he f—-ed this up so badly," said one House Democrat who has been very supportive of Obama in the past.
This was apparently said in a closed-door meeting between House Democrats and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough. What the hell is it doing in the press? I'm seeing the Obamacare rollout being compared in The New York Times to George W. Bush's mismanagement of Katrina. Were there Republicans pissing and moaning to the press about that? Or a more apt comparison: How many Republicans were pissing and moaning to the press about Bush's ineptitude in Iraq when there was looting just after the fall of Baghdad, or during the insurgency, or when the Abu Ghraib revelations emerged, or when WMDs weren't found?

I said on Twitter this morning that Republicans don't attack one another this way. A lot of people told me that Republicans did a hell of a lot of sniping at one another during the shutdown. That's true. But they're much less inclined to do it to a president. I don't care how many Cruzites are attacking Mitch McConnell or undermining John Boehner -- Republicans know that that's not the same thing as undermining a president of their own party.

Even in the 2008 presidential race, with Iraq as the metaphor for everything wrong with Bush, no one apart from Ron Paul would break with Bush. That's how Republicans do it. Their presidents are their figureheads. They know they weaken themselves when they weaken the one person everyone in America regards as the embodiment of the party. (Sorry, political insiders -- if you spoke to some normal Americans once in a while, you'd know how many of them don't regard Boehner or McConnell as the GOP analogue to Obama, because they barely know Boehner and McConnell at all.)

White House self-abasement is not helping, either. Bush never did any mea culpas on Iraq, and he got through the '04 elections just fine. I've always assumed that the slow drip of bad Iraq news is what really destroyed the Bush presidency, but I find myself wondering if the decline in his popularity in the second term actually became irreversible when he acted contrite over Katrina.

In a sensible world, reluctance to admit error would be a liability, not an advantage, for a leader or a party. But Bill Clinton, alas, was right when he said that people would "rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right."
Posted by Steve M. at 8:25 AM 9 comments

Thursday, November 14, 2013

INSURANCE INDUSTRY APPARENTLY DIDN'T THINK OBAMA HEALTH CARE FIX WAS AN ABOMINATION WHEN IT WAS THE GOP HEALTH CARE FIX

Look, I understand the Republicans' reaction to President Obama's health care fix:

But where was all this insurance industry outrage when the Republicans first proposed reinstating canceled plans? '

Is being pro-GOP so knee-jerk for industry that that didn't inspire howls of outrage? If Obama had stood his ground, and the GOP had demagogued this until even the Senate passed it by veto-proof majorities, were the insurance companies going to whine this way? Or is this just a terrible idea, according to the industry, when a Democrat does it?

I'm confused.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:07 PM 2 comments
HANNITY AND HIS CREW CAREFULLY TEE UP HEALTHCARE.GOV MODEL SO COULTER CAN SLUT-BAIT HER

The Daily Caller informs me of this:
Ann Coulter thinks the woman who formerly served as the face of the Obamacare website is going to have to "make a sex tape" to recover her reputation.

On Wednesday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel's "Hannity,"the conservative columnist ... discussed the various pitfalls of the Obamacare rollout.

Coulter referred specifically to the woman who had previously been the face of the Obamacare website known as "Adriana," who in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America" on Wednesday morning revealed herself as an immigrant from Colombia and offered some details about her life.

HANNITY: All right. What's your reaction to that?
COULTER: I feel sorry for this poor woman.
HANNITY: Me, too.
COULTER: Adriana's going to have to make a sex tape next week to get her reputation back.
HANNITY: Oh, stop....




You need to watch the clip if you want to understand where the blame lies here. Yes, it lies with Coulter, who's as vile as always. But watch the way the segment is structured. The "sex tape" line isn't just one in a flurry of Coulter one-liners -- Hannity and his staff clearly built the segment around it. Hannity begins the segment by talking about the website model. He then plays a clip from the Good Morning America segment that goes on for nearly a minute.

All to set up that joke. (And a subsequent two-part joke about the woman's immigrant status: "Obama was giving -- giving a job that should have gone to an American to an immigrant, except she wasn’t paid. So he’s just exploiting an immigrant laborer and blew an opportunity to create at least one job." After that, Coulter and Hannity drop the subject of the model.)

Oh, but I forgot: Obamacare is so horrible that it's perfectly fair to go on national television and tell two million viewers that a woman who had nothing to do with its creation or implementation ought to try making a porno, just because she has a tangential connection to the law.
Posted by Steve M. at 2:29 PM 7 comments
OMIGOD! SOON OBAMA MAY NOT BE ABLE TO ADVANCE HIS LEGACY AS EFFORTLESSLY AS HE CAN NOW!

I was going to write a long response to handwringing articles like Chris Cillizza's "Why President Obama's Sinking Job Approval Numbers Matter. A Lot," but an exchange on Twitter pretty much summed up my entire point:




Here's what Cillizza writes:
Take a look back at the election results from the second midterm elections of presidents, which is what 2014 will be. From the end of World War II until the 1986 election, the president's party lost an average of 48 seats in the House and seven seats in the Senate, according to the indispensable congressional analyst Norm Ornstein. That "six-year itch" trend has slowed in more recent second-term midterm elections -- the average losses for the president's party in the 1986, 1998 and 2006 midterms is 10 seats in the House and four seats in the Senate -- but the pattern of losses remains.

... It's impossible to separate out how a president is doing in the eyes of the public from how voters will judge his party -- even, and maybe especially, in an election in which his name is not actually on the ballot. The relatively minor losses incurred by Ronald Reagan in 1986 and Bill Clinton's history-making gains in 1998 came as both men were remarkably well-liked by the general electorate. In 2006, a deeply unpopular George W. Bush watched his party lose 30 seats and control of the House.
I'll be sorry for the loss of Democratic seats in the House -- but Republicans manage legislative bodies they control exactly the same way whether they have a one-seat majority or a fifty-seat majority. Democrats were highly unlikely to get the House back in any case, given the extraordinary vote imbalance they need just to break even thanks to gerrymandering, so what's the effective difference?

And the Senate? If the worst case happens and the Senate is lost, well, the Democrats need 60 seats to have effective control of that body in any case, so how much does it really matter?

I think there's a good chance that a GOP-controlled Senate in 2015 won't include its leader, Mitch McConnell. (Even if Obamacare rights itself and proves to be acceptable or even popular to most people, I'm guessing McConnell will lose his primary and his primary opponent will in the general, because, well, it's Kentucky.) So what do you think? Are we looking at Senate Majority Leader Ted Cruz? I imagine there are enough old bulls to prevent that, but I assume that any leader who replaces McConnell is going to be wingnuttier.

But we may all be jumping the gun. I don't know if the president is ever going to be truly popular again, but I still believe that Obamacare is going to settle in and seem like a reasonable program, and that we're going to have a number of very different moments between now and 2014 that are going to seem like this changes everything!! moments. Don't forget, we're going to have more budget brinkmanship in January and February. With Republicans smelling Obamacare blood now, do you think the crazies are going to be restrained at that moment? I know that Boehner and McConnell intend to herd their cats more effectively, but if there are still a few website glitches and signup shortfalls, don't you think the Cruzites are going to be out for blood?

Generally speaking, I see a lot of GOP overreach on the horizon. I think we'll be on the verge of a government shutdown at least once more next year. I think if there's a Supreme Court vacancy we'll see an attempt to prevent the president from appointing a successor. And there's always Benghazi! And impeachment! (Here comes the effort to impeach Eric Holder, though it does appear as if John Boehner is not an enthusiast.) I think the message most voters are going to take to the polls in November is not "Obamacare sucks, therefore Democrats suck," but, rather, "I hate every single officeholder in Washington."

This is a year when I expect third-party candidates to come out of the woodwork. Most are going to serve as spoilers (or as ignorable nuisances), but I think some might change the conventional wisdom a tiny bit. I'm seeing a Socialist on the verge of upsetting an incumbent Democrat in a Seattle city council race and, yes, I'm thinking, "Well, that's Seattle" -- but I wonder what would happen in congressional districts where Democrats have given up if a few progressives talking pure kitchen-table economics ran third-party. If a handful of candidates with that profile, and not shackled with the label of a hated major party -- and probably not calling themselves "socialists" -- talked about a higher minimum wage and breaking up the big banks and ditching Obamacare in favor of Medicare for all, could a few scares be put into complacent Republican incumbents? I think maybe. I think it could be that kind of crazy year.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:32 AM 11 comments

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

PEGGY NOONAN: STILL NUTS

It has come to Peggy Noonan's attention that people in politics occasionally talk about something other than Obamacare, and she wants everyone to know that that is simply not acceptable!
Republicans should stop taking the boob bait of the press. The story of the day is ObamaCare and the pain it is causing the Democrats. That story is not being fully explored....

The focus of political journalism now should be on what's happening on the Democratic side, because ObamaCare is a Democratic program. They bought it, they built it, what now? ...

What are we seeing on the Republican side? Nonstop taking of the press's boob bait. "Potential Christie Rival Says He's Not Conservative," "GOP Readies for 2016 Battle Reflecting Party Divisions," "GOPer: 'Moderation the Path,'" "GOPer: Why Do Women Hate Us?" "Establishment Hates Grass Roots," "Grass Roots Hates Establishment," "Libertarians Hate Everyone," "Everyone Hates Them," "Republican: Even I Hate Me."

Someone should tell Republicans that the story now, next week and this winter is ObamaCare, not 2016. It is what to do about ObamaCare. 2016 is not the subject now, it is a changing of the subject.
This is rather an odd thing for Peggy Noonan to say, given the fact that four days ago she published a 1,200-word column entirely about Chris Christie. A week ago she essentially handed her column over to Mitch McConnell so he could tell the tea party and the Senate Conservatives Fund to kiss his ass (OK, admittedly that's about 2014, not 2016); a couple of weeks before that, she held a seance with Robert Taft, in which (she claimed) Taft told her that the tea party and the GOP establishment should just don love beads and sing "Kumbaya" together.

The woman now yelling at people for not having a monomaniacal focus on Obamacare was telling us two weeks ago that the national security state "is actually the big thing our country should be talking about now, needs to be talking about and would be talking about if only our president had not decided, a few years ago, to blow up the U.S. health-care system." Six months ago, she was telling us that Benghazi was bad, but "nothing can damage us more as a nation than what is happening at the Internal Revenue Service." For the love of God, which is it, Peggy? Which thing is the one thing we absolutely need to focus on, to the exclusion of all else? We're confused!

There are, of course, some some very effective psychopharmaceuticals for this sort of ADHD. Someone really needs to write a script for Noonan.

*****

Noonan suspends her rage at people thinking about 2016 just long enough to, um, think about 2016. The person she's thinking about, naturally, is Hillary Clinton:
Is the press beginning to focus on the Democrats and 2016? To a small degree. Mostly they're fixed on Hillary Clinton. Someone said on cable this morning that there's the Elizabeth Warren story, she's being mentioned. Somebody else said Sen. Warren's in the news as a possible contender because the press needs a 2016 story on the Democratic side, it's no fun to cover a coronation. True enough. But even truer is this: Hillary needs a fight. She has to prove she can win, not glide. She needs someone to defeat. Democrats understand Mrs. Clinton's eventual future primary win will be tarnished, even clouded, if no one serious gets in to do battle with her. She has to appear to have fought for it. So they're in search of a few interesting contenders who can fight hard and lose well.
Do you think Hillary needs a fight in 2016? Do you know anyone who thinks that? Me either. It seems to me Hillary's had enough fights for one lifetime, thank you very much, and as the nominee she'll do plenty of fighting against the GOP.

You know who needs Hillary Clinton to have a primary fight in 2016? Peggy Noonan. Noonan needs there to be a Hillary Clinton primary fight so she can despise Hillary for the way she fights. That's the only need here.

****

And then Noonan writes this:
More than four years ago, in July 2009, I wrote a column in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt offered President Obama some wisdom on health care. Obama's newly proposed plan -- the Affordable Care Act -- wouldn't work, said FDR....

But FDR had an idea -- a sly one, as his ideas usually were. First, he told Obama, drop your current bill. Second, take everyone aback by talking constantly about the national medical program that already exists, Medicare. Show your love for it, insistently -- but also admit very freely what isn't quite perfect about it....

The sly fox was telling the young president to show good faith to Republicans by admitting problems, and reassure Democrats by showing his heart and commitment to federal solutions. "Then, at the end," said FDR, "get your Democratic majorities to make one little change in the program -- it's now open to all. You don't have to be 65. The uninsured can enroll....”

"Voila. You now have the single-payer system you wanted." "Everybody wins. You get expansion, Republicans get cost control, the system is made more secure, and the public for once isn’t terrified."

... I still believe FDR was more or less right....
OK: what's crazier about this? The fact that Noonan believes Obama could have gotten single payer past the Republicans if he'd just thought to call it Medicare reform? Or the fact that she thinks an FDR she made up is incredibly wise because he's the real FDR?

Nuts. Nuts.
Posted by Steve M. at 6:12 PM 7 comments
MARK HALPERIN THINKS BILL CLINTON IS PLAYING 11-DIMENSIONAL CHESS, IN A WAY THAT HELPS OBAMA

Most of us have come to the logical conclusion that Bill Clinton is distancing his wife from President Obama by calling for the grandfathering of current health plans. But Mark Halperin thinks there's something subtler going on -- and I have to say that Halperin's theory is not completely crazy:





Translation: Clinton got Republicans to say "Oh, listen to Bill Clinton" when he praised Mitt Romney's record at Bain as "sterling" -- which gave Clinton extra credibility among swing voters when he pounded on Romney and the Republicans after that, particularly at the Democratic convention.

I can't rule Halperin's theory out. I don't completely buy what he seems to be implying -- that the "sterling" line was a pure feint and the Obamacare criticism is another feint; obviously, both "sterling" and the Obamacare criticism hurt the president in the short run. And maybe that's the point for Clinton. He's like the kid you grew up with who would pretend to shove you down a flight of stairs and simultaneously seem to pull you back, saying, "Saved your life!"

In any case, I agree that Clinton will come around, at least if Obamacare is patched and presentable soon. That will be bad for Republicans, good for Bill's ego, good for Hillary's 2016 campaign -- and good for Obama.

****

Meanwhile, it's possible that Senate Democrats are playing a little 11-dimensional chess of their own. The Democratic bill sponsored by Mary Landrieu and now backed by Dianne Feinstein and Jeff Merkley is different in a number of ways from the bill put forth by House Republican Fred Upton, as Joan McCarter explains:
Upton's bill would allow insurance companies to continue to offer the existing, crappy policies that were in effect as of January 1, 2013. Upton's bill also allows insurance companies to cancel those policies at will, and try to push people into more expensive ones....

Landrieu's bill would let people who have policies in the individual market keep their current policy as long as they keep paying their premiums. The bill applies both to the plans fail to meet the law's standard, and to the good policies that fail to meet the law's standard for "grandfathered" policies.
But note the key difference -- Upton's GOP bill allows insurance companies to keep selling these policies and Landrieu's Democratic bill requires them to, as long as they're selling any policies in that particular market at all. Also:
What Landrieu's bill would do would be to force insurance companies to annually (at renewal time) inform customers: the reason their policy is substandard -- why it doesn't meet the requirements of the new law; the enrollee's right to keep this policy; and that "the enrollee has the right to enroll in a qualified health plan offered through an Exchange and instruction on how to access such Exchange." Additionally, if the insurance company is canceling a policy, they have to provide an explanation as to why it's being canceled, including "a reference to any provision of this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) that such issuer relied upon in making the determination to cancel such coverage." In other words, they can't just say "because Obamacare."
Also, the Republican bill preserves plans in existence up to January 1, 2013. The Democratic bill covers plans in existence up to the end of 2013.

It may be a terrible idea to undermine the health care law this way, but if you're going to do it, Landrieu's Democratic bill offers far more to the insured -- which is why Kos writes this:

So some Democrats will support the Democratic bill, Republicans will support the Republican bill, and we'll have a stalemate, which will give Democrats in Congress cover and buy the White House time -- we hope -- to develop some proposals of its own. And, we hope, get the damn site functioning smoothly.

****

UPDATE: At Ballon Juice Richard Mayhew calls the Landrieu bill "an elegant kludge" because, significantly, it grandfathers old health plans for the individuals who had them only, without letting any new customers buy them. Thus, he says, "this is not serious damage to the risk pooling mechanism." If that's true, it gets us over the immediate hump and preserves the core of Obamacare. So I assume it has a snowball's chance in hell of passing.
Posted by Steve M. at 2:17 PM 7 comments
OF COURSE THEY'D THROW MILLIONS OF PEOPLE UNDER THE BUS -- THEY'RE THE WRONG KIND OF PEOPLE

Salon's Brian Beutler thinks Republicans are about to make a big mistake. He thinks if they succeed in enacting their latest Obamacare ploy -- the Keep Your Health Plan Act, which would reverse cancellations of existing policies -- it would eventually be recognized as the cause of the cancellation of many other policies:
Like many other Republican attacks on Obamacare, this one is subterfuge -- a proposal that sounds great but in reality would plant the seeds of the law's destruction. The real goal is to deny Obamacare marketplaces across the country the critical mass and demographic balance they’ll need to function properly.
Allow certain people, mostly upscale and healthy, to opt out of the system, and eventually the ability to provide health insurance to those who struggled to get it (or keep it) before Obamacare will be lost.

But, of course, it isn't just Republicans who are seeking to do this -- many Democrats are now backing this approach, goaded on, in part, by Bill Clinton. And -- accurately or not -- we're hearing this from CNN's Dana Bash:
CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Dana Bash told her network's anchors on Tuesday that the end of the week is the "de facto deadline" at which point the White House needs to have settled on a series of fixes to address the crisis of Americans losing their health coverage. After Friday, Bash reported, House Democrats are going to be backing GOP proposed fixes to the Affordable Care Act against the wishes of President Barack Obama's administration.
Meanwhile, it's looking as if the White House's best counterargument -- stay the course because we're getting the website fixed -- is not going to hold up. The Washington Post reports:
Software problems with the federal online health insurance marketplace, especially in handling high volumes, are proving so stubborn that the system is unlikely to work fully by the end of the month as the White House has promised, according to an official with knowledge of the project.
So if all this is true, the White House needs a plausible set of kludges to get us over this hump and save Obamacare. Otherwise, a lot of Democrats are going to jump ship.

On Monday, Steven Hayward of Forbes predicted with a cackle that Obamacare will be repealed before 2014, with Democrats joining Republicans in the hope of saving their own political necks:
... if the website continues to fail, the push for repeal -- from endangered Democrats -- will occur very rapidly. The website is a sideshow: the real action is the number of people and businesses who are losing their health plans or having to pay a lot more. Fixing the website will only delay the inevitable....

Senate Democrats endangered for re-election will lead the charge for repeal perhaps as soon as January, after they get an earful over the Christmas break. They'll call it "reform," and clothe it in calls for delaying the individual mandate and allowing people and businesses to keep their existing health insurance policies. But it is probably too late to go back in many cases. With the political damage guaranteed to continue, the momentum toward repeal will be unstoppable. Democrats will not want to face the voters next November with the albatross of Obamacare.
But Jonathan Bernstein continues to insist that even if Obamacare is modified, it will still be the basis for what emerges, because we can't possibly go back, can we?
But regardless: the law is here, it's being implemented, half a million people have signed up for Medicaid, young adults are on their parents' plans, the donut hole is disappearing and other Medicare benefits have begun, lifetime and yearly caps and rescissions are gone...all of that is going to be very, very, difficult to displace.... Repeal? No, we're never going back to the status quo ante.
Why does he believe that? Republicans don't care about these people -- to Republican officeholders and voters, people availing themselves of most of these benefits are "takers." (This is true even of Republican voters who are beneficiaries themselves.) And it's not as if the beneficiaries themselves are going to take to the streets or airways or op-ed pages in effectively large numbers to demand the preservation of these benefits -- if there's anything we should have learned in the 33 years since Ronald Reagan's election, it's that America's have-nots simply don't have the inclination or ability to fight on behalf of their own economic self-interest. And even if they do fight, the wired-for-Republicans Beltway establishment will be much less inclined to highlight these victims than it has been in recent weeks to highlight the Dylan Ratigans and Lori Gottliebs whose Obamacare sticker-shock complaints advance the message of the right-wing noise machine.

And besides: if benefits are lost and voters are upset, Republicans will just blame it on the Democrats. They will have signed on to the changes, after all. Republicans would love to have Democrats' fingerprints on this, the same way they want Democrats' fingerprints on a budget "grand bargain" that guts Social Security and Medicare, because it would really undermine the perception that Democrats care for ordinary people.

All of this is a long way of saying: this thing needs to be saved or it really might be completely lost.

Would we ever repeal a health benefit program that's been enacted? Hayward reminds us that, in the not-so-distant past, we did:
This wouldn't be the first time that a health care entitlement was repealed. The same thing happened in the late 1980s with catastrophic coverage for seniors. Because seniors were made to pay for their benefits under that scheme, the uproar forced Congress to repeal the measure barely a year after it went into effect.
Ordinary people aren't like the rich. We don't treat everything we get from government as a birthright. We won't fight to save Obamacare's benefits. So it's up to the White House and congressional Democrats to save them -- right now.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:31 AM 5 comments
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