Below The Fold

A while back, I opined that I didn’t really agree with the larger sentiment Mitt Romney’s signing of Romneycare in Massachusetts was necessarily going to doom his chances to win the Republican nomination in 2012. After reading this response to a Newsweek interviewer though, consider me converted:

Back in February 2007, you said you hoped the Massachusetts plan would “become a model for the nation.” Would you agree that it has?

I don’t … You’re going to have to get that quote. That’s not exactly accurate, I don’t believe.

I can tell you exactly what it says: “I’m proud of what we’ve done. If Massachusetts succeeds in implementing it, then that will be a model for the nation.”

It is a model for the states to be able to learn from. During the campaign, I was asked if I was proposing that what I did in Massachusetts I would do for the nation. And the answer was absolutely not. Our plan is a state plan. It is a model for other states—if you will, the nation—it is a model for them to look at what we’ve accomplished and to better it or to create their own plans.

The issue here isn’t so much the fact that Romney signed a bill similar to the Affordable Care Act while he was Governor of Massachusetts, it’s that he simply hasn’t learned his lesson from 2008. To be blunt, from August to November 2007, the nomination was Romney’s to lose. And lose it he did. Romney’s problem was a pretty simple one; he expeded too many resources and energy trying to appeal to all elements of the conservative movement, rather than identifying a particular base of support and charting a path to the nomination by riding those voters through a very crowded field. This manifested itself most obviously in Iowa, where the nominating caucuses are disproportionately dominated by evangelicals on the GOP side, and where Romney tried to re-invent himself as a committed social conservatives. His part positions on social issues made this unbelievable, to say the least, and at the end of the day evangelicals simply weren’t willing to vote for a Mormon either. The overall effect of this was to hand Romney a defeat in Iowa, weakening him in New Hampshire, where McCain was already surging by occupying the ground a right-ward trending Romney had vacated. Had Romney stuck to a more socially moderate, economically conservative, business candidate and written off Iowa, he could have won New Hampshire, knocking McCain out in the process, easily won Michigan and Nevada, and then knocked Giuliani out by winning Florida, setting up a head to head showdown with Huckabee on Super Tuesday, which Romney would have won handily, delivering him the nomination in basically the same fashion McCain won it.

For his current predicament, well, Romney has really stepped in it. But to put it bluntly, running away from Romneycare simply isn’t a viable strategy. It’s not like Romney can hide from it, and as you would hope he learned from his last debacle, the things he’s said in public are easily retrievable now. I suppose he’s at least trying to couch the difference between his reform and Obama’s in federalist terms, but it seems to me that only works if you imagine the conservative base is only upset that it’s the federal government implementing the policy, and would be fine with states doing it, which seems unlikely. The only chance Romney has to survive this is to own his record and defend it. That means articulating why the mandate is necessary, and basically supporting the core elements of the bill, while finding someting more peripheral, like the funding mechanisms, to attack. Is that strategy a bit of a hail mary? Absolutely, but it’s better than unconvincingly running from his own record and lying about what he’s said in the past, which will eventually just end up alienating him from everyone. At least standing by his record to some degree gives him a chance to win some supporters. And Romney has the advantage of being able to talk rings around the other likely candidates for the 2012 nomination on economic matters, plus a legitimate background in business to reinforce his capitalist credentials. The problem is that he’ll actually have to grow something of a background, and stop looking for ways to appeal to get the vote of every Republican in the country.

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney

Responding to Jill Lawrence’s observation that, despite John McCain’s claims in the 2008 Presidential campaing, it’s Barack Obama who is making decisions that are angering his party’s base, while a primary challenge from the right has McCain abandoning his previous “Mavericky” positions and toeing the GOP line, Chait writes:

Lawrence ticks off numerous examples. Now, to be sure, the difference is mostly in the positions the two men find themselves in: Obama needs to deal with a Senate where conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans hold swing votes, and McCain is fending off a right-wing primary challenge. Still, acknowledging that fact itself undermines McCain’s contention that his breaks with his party, most of them occurring from 2000-2003, were a mark of character. If they were a mark of character, then his current behavior suggests that McCain lacks character. But I think the evidence suggests that reading characterological traits into “maverick” votes is, at best, a wildly overstated exercise.

That’s true enough, if you assume the mavericky votes were honest expressions of McCain’s idiosyncracy. If, instead, you view them as votes primarily cast in opposition to George W. Bush in a fit of pique by the man Bush beat in a nasty GOP primary, then they make a lot of sense as a manifestation of characterological traits; they paint the picture of a man who is unusually petty and prone to pique, a view that makes even more sense when you consider that McCain was already abandoning his independent persona before J.D. Hayworth announced his challenge when it presented a chance to oppose the administration. And considering that McCain was a pretty down-the-line conservative Senator prior to 2001, I maintain this is the best way to understand John McCain’s professional evolution.

In other news, McCain is also claiming that even if Republicans can’t repeal the ACA because they can’t get past a Presiential veto, that’s okay, they’ll just refuse to fund it. The problem is that most of the spending is mandatory spending, not discretionary spending, which means the funding is automatically ppropriated year to year, and changing that would require passing a new law. Which serves as a nice reminder that on top of being a uniquely petty, crotchety old man, McCain also knows nothing about governanve, budgeting, or Congressional procedure, despite having spent nearly 3 decades in Congress.

Technorati Tags: John McCain

It’s a tough competition at a paper that includes Charles Krauthammer, Anne Applebaum, and Marc Thiessen in its stable, but Robert Samuelson, an original member of the Pain Caucus, can always be counted on to make a strong case for the title of Greatest Monster at The Washington Post. Here’s a section of his column today, arguing that expanding health insurance to those without access is a “self-indulgence:”

To criticisms, Obama supporters make two arguments. First, the CBO says the plan reduces the deficit by $143 billion over a decade. Second, the legislation contains measures (an expert panel to curb Medicare spending, emphasis on “comparative effectiveness research”) to control health spending. These rejoinders are self-serving and unconvincing.

Suppose the CBO estimate is correct. So? The $143 billion saving is about 1 percent of the projected $12.7 trillion deficit from 2009 to 2020. If the administration has $1 trillion or so of spending cuts and tax increases over a decade, all these monies should first cover existing deficits — not finance new spending. Obama’s behavior resembles a highly indebted family’s taking an expensive round-the-world trip because it claims to have found ways to pay for it. It’s self-indulgent and reckless.

As  brief aside, there was a point not that long ago when Samuelson couched his morally outrageous positions in much more clever arguments. But whether time is catching up with him or his position has gotten so cozy he can’t avoid the temptation to phone it in, these days Samuelson’s columns don’t even stand up to an initial skimming. In the next paragraph, for example, Samuelson argues that the CBO’s report is “misleading,” and bases this claim on a New York Times Op-Ed by Douglas Holtz-Eakin that Krugman absolutely shredded on the Times’ own website, and by invoking the “doc fix” that was going to pass regardless of the fate of healthcare reform. It’s the work of a complete hack, and not even original hack work at that.

But even leaving that aside, Samuelson’s argument, such as it is, falls apart under the weight of Samuelson’s own analogy. Samuelson would have you believe that expanding access to health insurance is akin to a family that finds some extra money in its budget opts to take a lavish vacation rather than pay down existing debt. I have a better idea, how about we compare it to a family who, rather than pay off some of their credit card debt, takes the newfound funds and…buys health insurance! Of course, that wouldn’t work for Samuelson’s point, because while people can generally agree that vacations should be sacrificed in the name of controlling your personal debt, they’d look at you like you had 3 eyes if you even remotely suggested that paying more than the minimum credit card payment should take precedence over getting your family health insurance.

It’s entirely possible that it didn’t occur to Samuelson that it would be better to compare expanding health insurance coverage to buying insurance rather than taking an extravagant vacation, but I doubt it. The omission is so egregious, and the example Samuelson chose so over the top (I mean really, how many people go on a globe-trotting vacation anyway?), that I can’t really imagine that Samuelson wasn’t deliberately trying to obscure how basic a necessity health insurance is in the modern world. Because, while a hostility to the social saftey net and social welfare spending is the animating factor of Samuelson’s existence, he’s aware enough of the larger political debate to know that most people would be appalled by his beliefs. And so, he’s left coming up with wild analogies to make giving people access to a basic necessity seem like a frivolous expenditure. Thankfully, he’s just not smart enough, nor his writing strong enough, to carry that sort of argument these days.

Technorati Tags: Robert Samuelson, Washington Post

by Brien Jackson

There’s a growing meme lately that the passage of the healthcare bill spells doom for Mitt Romney’s chance to win the Republican Presidential nomination. Basically the idea is that the Republican base has been whipped into a froth of opposition to “Obamacare,” and since Romney signed a program that’s essentally the same as the Affordable Care Act in Masachusetts, he’s not going to be able to win support in the Republican primary. The latest articulation I’ve seen came fron Ben Smith this morning, who compares the healthcae issues potential cost to Romney to the impact support for the Iraq War had on Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

For my part, I’m pretty skeptical of this. For one thing, 2012 is pretty far away. And yes, the early parts of the cycle are only a year away, but that aspect of the campaign is dominated by fundraising, which I doubt Romney will have trouble with. The Chamber of Commerce isn’t interested in fighting ove repeal of the bill, PhRMA and providers endorsed it, and non-healthcre businesses don’t really have much of a reason to care about it now that it’s passed. So I very much doubt that the economic interests who fund Republcan campaigns are going to find it much reason to cut off Romney. As far as the Republican electorate goes, I think the idea that they’re going to reject Romney 3 years ago because of his healthcare plan imputes a little too much intellectual sophistication onto the masses. For one thing, it could have been an issue in 2008 as well, when Hillary Clinton was proposing to basically take the Massachusetts system nationwide, but it never really came up, even though it’s not like Democratic plans for universal healthcare were only noticed on the right last year. Indeed, from 1993 to 2008, conservatives used “Hillarycare” as a short-hand for “Socialized medicine.” So the fact that it didn’t hurt Romney in 2008 bodes well for him in 2012. There’s also the fact that Romney can issue some mealy-mouth hedging about “states” and so forth that should buy him enough room to pivot to something else.

If anything, I think the Hillary/Iraq comparison is pretty good, but probably not for the same reason Smith does. Was her initial support for the Iraq War a drag on Clinton’s campaign? Sure. Did it cost her the nomination? Probably not. Compared to investing as much capital in Iowa as they did, even though she was at a distinct disadvantage in the state, and having absolutely no plan for a contest going past Super Tuesday or any kind of campaign presence in the contests between February 5 and March 4, I’d say it’s pretty low on the list of factors that could plausibly be said to have cost Clinton the campaign. What it did do was give her opponents particularly Obama, an early and consistent opening from which to attack her. And that’s probably about all this will do to Romney. Sarah Palin and Tim Pawlenty and John Thune or whomever is running will be able to respond to Romney’s attacks on the ACA by pointing out that he signed something similar in Massachusetts, but whether or not that proves devastating remains to be seen. For now, I don’t see any evidence that Romney is facing a backlash from the leadership of the conservative movement, which leads me to think it probably won’t hurt him much with the rubes either.

Technorati Tags: Mitt Romney

There’s been a rash of relatively small-scale poilical violence, brick throwing, verbal threats, that sort of thing, directed at supporters of healthcare reform, but now it seems someone has tried to kill Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA).

Some people have pointed out that this is the natural extention of an essentially authoritarian movement, and that’s fair enough. It’s certainly true that an element of the American conservative movement has adopted rhetoic and tactics that are boilerplate for fascist movements, and the only thing left is widespread violence against political opponents, but I think the particularly American strain of wingnutism has a more complex sense of identity that leads to this point. Essentially, as both Digby and Amanda Marcotte often write about, the conservative movement is built around the belief that everyone else’s opinion is illegitimate, and basically as been since Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” campaign. This attitude is put most starkly on display when conservatives disparage East coasters, even though a huge amount of the population is concentrated on the Eastern seaboard, or when Sarah Palin praises small-towns as the home of “Real Americans.” Implicit in the framing is the idea that non-conservatives are interlopers, that their ideas, and even their existence, is illegitimate. This is why I take claims that conservative anger is based around Obama’s blackness; they do this pretty much every time they’re out of power, even when the Democratic President is a white Southern male.  If you believe you are by definition representative of the majority at all times, and all viewpoints other than yours are fundamentally illegitimate, you can’t really process electoral or legislative defeats any way other than by assuming them to be the result of some nefarious skull-duggery, which is why Republican attacks on procedure had such resonance with the right-wing. Aside from the generic ability to oppose the other side, it gave them the rationalization they needed for loss; Democrats cheated.

Of course, central to the survival of this worldview is the assumption that they do, in fact, represent a majority of the people in the country. It’s why conservatives talk about what “the American people” want so often, and why “coast vs. heartland” culture warring is framed from the presumption that land mass is of more importance than population. If the perception that the right-wing movement is supported by a majority and that only they’re ideas are legitimate/Constitutional/whatever is punctured, their entire political argument goes up in smoke.  But in the meantime, it’s a toxic mix of self-righteousness, hate, and paranoia, the logical extension of which is to perpetuate violence against people who don’t agree with you. After all, if Democrats just ignored the will of the overwhelming majority of the population and cheated the legislative process to implement a plan to literally destroy the country, why wouldn’t you resort to violence in response?

The only questions left to ask are how many people will die before we get serious about addressing it this time, and whether or not it will take another catastrophe like this.

Technorati Tags: Tom Perriello

I didn’t blog about the teabaggers who berated a man with Parkinson’s Disease at a rally outside of Mary Jo Kilroy’s office because, well, what was there to say about it. Is a pathetic, disgusting display, made even more so by the fact that it turns out the man the teabaggers berated by throwing money at and declaring they wouldn’t give “handouts” to turns out to be a distinguished professor who almost certainly makes (or made) more money than any of the protestors. But Chait does a good job of tying the sentiment into the ethos of the larger right:

Last week I linked to a video of anti-health care reform protesters taunting a man with Parkinson’s disease, shouting their belief that they had no obligation to help him. They were expressing opposition to what many conservatives have taken to calling the “redistribution of health.” Quite possibly the man, a former professor, earned more money than the protesters. But in the realm of health, they are the winners and he is the loser. Ryan, while surely less cruel on a personal level, shares their basic belief that government should not force them to subsidize him.

By now, it’s hardly insightful to point out that a total lack of empathy is a central part of the movement conservative identity. Nor is it particularly surprising that a movement that has so accepted the ideas of Ayn Rand, a textbook sociopath who voiced admiration for a serial-killer who raped and dismembered a 12-year old girl (to say nothing of creating the character of Howard Roark as a hero), would develop sociopathic tendencies as a fundamental part of its essence. But it generally is striking to see the attitude applied to healthcare, because people don’t generally ascribe personal fault to medical misfortune these days. It’s easy enough to rationalize that people who don’t make a lot of money are in their situation due to some personal fault of their own, to completely ignore the impact blind luck plays in economic success, but it’s generally not openly believed that medical afflictions are cosmic punishment for character flaws or sin these days. Which is why, I imagine, the protestors have to assume the professor is some poor ne’er-do-well, the possibility that someone decidedly upper-middle class, making more money, than the vast majority of people in the country, could be ruined by a degenerative disease simply doesn’t compute with their assumptions about the world. Add in the fact that being able to be a total asshole and inflict suffering on other people gives them the feeling of having power they almost certainly lack in their day to day lives, and you’ve got a classic sociopathic mix, one that’s come to dominate the base of one of the two major political parties in the world’s richest nation.

Technorati Tags: Conservative Sociopathy

There’s been a small but vocal critique from some elements of the left that the healthcare bill is terribly inadequate, and a slap in the face to progressives. It’s been such that even people who enthusiastically support the bill have adopted the rhetorical posture that it’s deeply sub-optimal. Something progressives have to force themselves to swallow, rather than celebrate. I don’t necessarily want to re-open this debate, but Yglesias, by reminding us of John Edwards’ healthcare plan from the 2008 election, does a good job of illustrating how ridiculous this notion is:

Key conceptual groundwork was laid by policy thinkers. And below the surface the main issue is that the SEIU was indicating that it wanted candidates with any shot at its endorsement to unveil plans for comprehensive coverage. Repeatedly throughout his campaign, Edwards served as a useful progressive foil. He was never really up there with Clinton and Obama, but he was always close enough that they couldn’t simply ignore the possibility that his efforts to appeal to the base would work. So when Edwards unveiled is four point plan for achieving universal coverage—a plan based on exactly the pillars of ObamaCare—it made a huge difference and swiftly became the benchmark by which Clinton and Obama were judged.

[...]

The see-saw of the political expectations game is such that by the Spring of 2010 many people had convinced themselves that this approach to health care was a disappointing sellout. But back in the Spring of 2007, it was considered radical—a left-wing idea by the standards of a Democratic presidential primary.

Now obviously winning a huge electoral landslide that leaves you in control of all three branches of the legislative process, including holding 59 seats (plus Arlen Specter’s switch) in the Senate is going to affect what people see as being within the realm of political possibility. But it’s still worth pointing out just how progressive this bill s relative to what the various major candidates’ healthcare plans were in 2008 and, especially, 2004. Basically, as Yglesias notes, it represents the far-left edge of what was being proposed at the time, and there’s no reason to imagine anything to the left of it could have been enacted, given that basically no major candidates have pushed anything to its left in the past 20 years or so. Progressive activists became enamored of the idea of creating a new public insurance plans in early 2009, but the bottom line is that there was no real movement base to make that a huge issue, in part because even the activists who made it central to their efforts on reform over the past year hadn’t even really been talking about it prior to 2009. And then at some point “The Public Option” morphed into less a serious policy proposal than a tribalistic identifer, especially after Blue Dogs killed the “strong” public option last summer. After that, the policy merits of the shell of the public option simply worth expending a lot of effort over, even though some of the activists had worked themselves into a lather over the idea. So when the public option was excised altogether, some of these people convinced themselves that the underlying bill was an un-progressive sellout, even though 2 years ago the same basic idea was being viewed as a solidly progressive idea. Indeed, if a candidate had proposed it in 2004, or 2000, whomever proposed t would have been looked at as though they were a slightly more serious Dennis Kucinich.

Technorati Tags: John Edwards, Progressive Ponies, public option

I make it a point to ignore Megan McArdle, or at least not concern myself with her enough to bother writing about her. McArdle is so regularly so detached not simply from sound logical reasoning, but basic facts in evidence, that arguing with her simply isn’t worth the effort, even if she somehow manages to hold a job as editor of a magazine like The Atlantic. But her reaction to the passage of healthcare reform is such a classic, I can’t not take note of it. Her basic complaint is this:

One cannot help but admire Nancy Pelosi’s skill as a legislator.  But it’s also pretty worrying.  Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority?  Republicans and other opponents of the bill did their job on this; they persuaded the country that they didn’t want this bill.  And that mattered basically not at all.  If you don’t find that terrifying, let me suggest that you are a Democrat who has not yet contemplated what Republicans might do under similar circumstances.  Farewell, Social Security!  Au revoir, Medicare!  The reason entitlements are hard to repeal is that the Republicans care about getting re-elected.  If they didn’t–if they were willing to undertake this sort of suicide mission–then the legislative lock-in you’re counting on wouldn’t exist.  

Technorati Tags: Megan McArdle

Our long national nightmare is over, as the United States Congress has finally voted to join the advanced world. There’s plenty to say about this vote, but there’s two people I want to thank in particular. First and foremost, Nancy Pelosi, who arguably saved the entire effort at multiple points over the past year. It really isn’t a coincidence that the first female Speaker of the House will almost certainly go down as its greatest progressive leader, but it is worth repeating over and over. Secondly, but certainly not least, let us raise a toast tonight to George W. Bush. Say what you will about the guy, but it’s hard to imagine Democrats winning the sort of majorities/momentum this sort of vote required without his unique awfulness. Heckuva job Dubya.

It’s sort of sad that I was totally surprised by this piece that appeared at David Frum’s site but, well, there you have it: it’s surprising to see conservatives displaying empathy. Actually, I guess it’s technically not empathy, since the writer is describing something that’s actually happening to him, as opposed to something happening to someone else he can imagine happening to him, but hey, I might as well cut him some slack for the effort.

I do have to say though that I still find the complete absence of any empathy from the right in the healthcare debate totally bizarre. I’ve long since reconciled myself to the fact that almost no one on the right understands the issues involved in the healthcare question whatsoever, so maybe it’s simply a function of that, but still, it’s really odd that apparently no writers at any major conservative publications can imagine themselves or someone they know becoming a casualty of our dysfunctional insurance regime. Especially because they’re writers! After all, almost no conservative publications actually turn an operating profit (nor do many liberal publications, to be fair), and they all largely depend on a mix of donations from readers and rich benefactors to make up the difference. But considering the shape the economy is in, can no conservative writers really imagine that donations will drop this year, and the publication paying their check might have to downsize? Can none of them really not imagine themselves falling victim to a recession and then developing a serious medical condition while they’re between jobs? Do none of them realize that should this happen to them, or someone they know, they’ll be completely shut out of the insurance market? It’s just very odd, and makes me wonder whether American conservatives really are compltely devoid of empathy, or are just that ignorant of health insurance issues.

The Washington Post ran two columns this morning coming down somewhere between disdainful and skeptical about costs associated with healthcare reform. Chait already did a good job dealing with Fred Hiatt’s column, but I’d prefer to engage the much worse column from (surprise!) Robert Samuelson. This seems to be the key graf from the column:

On the left, President Obama and Democrats have spent the past year arguing that, despite the government’s massive deficits and overspending, they can responsibly propose even more spending. Future deficits are to be ignored (present deficits, to be sure, partially reflect the economic slump). The proposal is “responsible” because it’s “paid for” through new taxes and spending cuts. Even if these financing sources were completely believable (they aren’t), the logic is that the government can undertake new spending before dealing with the consequences of old spending. Of course, most households and businesses can’t do this.

Politicians can, because it’s all make-believe. They pretend to deal with budget deficits when they aren’t.

First of all, it seems to me that if Samuelson is going to claim that the financing mechanisms for reform aren’t “believeable,” he really ought to go to greater lengths to say why that’s the case. The CBO has scored both bills as deficit reducing, and if Samuelson has some sort of reason to believe those reports aren’t accurate, then it seems to me that his station at a major newspaper obligates him to let us know about it. If nothing else, you’d think the vaunted editors that make newspaper so wicked awesome we keep hearing about might ask their main economics columnist to explain this to their readers. It’s not like it’s trivial, after all. Secondly, there’s the rather obvious point that that last sentence rather blatantly ignores the fact that the CBO says the healthcare reform bill would lower the long-term budget deficit. Passing legislation that reduces the long-term deficit definitely strikes me as “dealing with budget deficits,” and I’d be interested to hear why Samuelson thinks it isn’t. Of course, Samuelson is a big proponent of cutting Medicare and Social Security benefits, as is the Washington Post editorial board, so I suspect it’s mostly a matter of cutting the deficit in general not being as important to Samuelson as cutting social safety net benefits in particular, but that really doesn’t give him a license to lie about the effect reform would have on the deficit. Being a Washington Post columnist, on the other hand…

Technorati Tags: Robert Samuelson, Washington Post

I think this really should have been the focal point of Krugman’s column today, and so the fact that it’s buried at the bottom is a bit disappointing, but I do think that this is the key takeaway from yesterday’s summit:

So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right.

This is basically the fundamental obstacle to getting the public to understand what’s going on with any number of issues at the moment; the Congressional minority is spinning a bunch of outright lies about the proposals, and the media isn’t interested in pointing that out. Consider this Glenn Thrush report, explaining that the summit was “a tie,” and that that means Republicans won because they spoke in complete sentences and didn’t cite Sarah Palin’s Facebook page or something. Thrush was apparently particularly impressed with the Republican decision to let Sen. Alexander take the lead:

The GOP’s smartest move, Democrats say, was picking Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, a folksy, even-keeled conservative with a moderate disposition, to lead off.

Alexander eschewed the usual GOP talking points, instead offering a barbed olive branch, disavowing South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint’s prediction that health care would be Obama’s “Waterloo” — while pressing the moral argument for passing the bill through reconciliation.

 “We want you to succeed,” said Alexander, who urged Obama to heed the lessons the senator learned back in 1979 when he was elected as a 39-year-old governor of the Volunteer State.

 “Some of the media went up to the Democratic leaders of the Legislature and asked, ‘What are you going to do with the new Republican governor?’ They said, ‘I’m going to help him because if he succeeds, our state succeeds,’” said Alexander. “But often they had to persuade me to change my direction to get our state to where it needed to go. I’d like to say the same thing to you: We want you to succeed, because if you succeed, our country succeeds. But we would like, respectfully, to change [your] direction.”

How touching. Thrush thinks (or his sources think, anyway) that it was a smart move to let Alexander lead, and that Alexander took a rhetorically wise track in his remarks. What Thrush never says, not even once, is that Alexander’s “barbed olive branch” included an awful lot of lying of the bill and the process. To the former, Alexander claimed matter of factly that the CBO report on the bill says it will cause premiums to rise. As Krugman notes in his column though, and as many people pointed out in real-time yesterday, this simply isn’t true. The CBO estimates that the bill will lower premiums, and that the lower cost and availability of subsidies will lead to some people buying more coverage. But the same unit of coverage would cost less if the bill was passed. (This, incidentally, is in line with my criticism of another POLITICO article yesterday). Relating to the latter, Alexander claimed that reconcilliation has never been used for something like this, which is an even more egregious falsehood. Reconcilliation has been used to pass TEFRA in 1982, the Balanced Budget Act of 1995 (and 1997), among other Republica priorities. As Krugman notes, both Bush tax cuts were passed using reconcilliation, at a price tag twice that of the current healthcare bill. In the realm of healthcare specifically, COBRA was passed using reconcilliation in 1985. There simply is no way to make Alexander’s statements anything other than egregious falsehoods, but not only do political journalists not point out when polticians are telling egregious lies, they actively praise them based on theater criticism.

It might sound like nit-picking or whining about the refs, but this is a serious problem. If American political journalists are going to make a habit of ignoring when politicians lie about issues, then there’s nothing keeping everyone from wildly making shit up about public debates, which means there’s basically no hope of maintaining an objectively informed populace. And if that happens, democracy itself is threatened.

Technorati Tags: Lamar Alexander, Politico

Yglesias and Greenwald both write on the idea the public option died a curious death, killed off by some unseen Congressional entity, but the more I think about the politics of passing a public option now, the more I think the obvious answer for why there’s little enthusiasm for bringing the public option back is that the House probably can’t pass a bill that includes it. As plenty of people have pointed out, while Pelosi got 220 votes for the bill in the House, 4 of those votes (Murtha, Abercrombie, Cao, and Wexler) are gone. Additionally, they’ll probably lose 5 votes, give or take, over the differences in abortion language in the Senate bill. That means that Pelosi and House leadership are going to have to do some serious lifting getting Blue Dogs who voted against the House bill to vote for the Senate/reconcilliation bill, and that’s probably much easier to do without a public option, leaving the Congresspersons room to say they can support the more moderate Senate bill, even if they couldn’t support the House bill. It’d be a line of bullshit, to be sure, but that seems the only truly plausible answer as to why Democrats are running away from a chance to pass it in the Senate.

Technorati Tags: public option

This blurb from Carrie Burdoff Brown is striking for a number of reasons.

If President Barack Obama at Thursday’s summit, like caps on malpractice awards or allowing insurers to sell across state lines. really wanted to show he’s serious about winning over Republicans on health care reform, he could offer up some key concessions

And if Republicans wanted to reciprocate, they could at least acknowledge the congressional scorekeepers are right – the Democratic plans cut the deficit in the long term and rein in health care costs.

Yglesias does a pretty thorough job pointing out the substantive ridiculousness of this; noting that Republicans agreeing not to lie, or lie less anyway, about Democratic bills isn’t a sufficient trade off for actual, substantive, concessions on policy. If Democrats are going to include Republican priorities everyone can agree to more or less in the bill, then Republicans are going to have to vote for the bill. If Republicans aren’t willing to do that, then there’s no reason Democrats should offer them anything.

For my part, I’d just like to note what this says about POLITICO. For one thing, the second paragraph just makes no sense. For one thing, Republicans aren’t claiming that “Congressional scorekeepers” are “wrong;” Lamar Alexander is not saying, “the CBO estimates that this proposal will lower premium costs, but my Republican colleagues and I don’t believe that, and have evidence to the contrary,” he’s just claiming the the CBO said premiums would go up. In other words, he’s lying. And Brown either won’t say as much, or she really just isn’t listening to what various officials are actually saying. Either way, it’s illustrative of a major problem with American political journalism that’s going to have to be fixed before we stand any real chance of ever addressing a major social problem.

Technorati Tags: Politico

Sen. Jay Rockerfeller (D-WV) is reiterating that he’s opposed to passing the public option through reconcilliation at this time. This remains odd, because to this point Rockefeller has been arguably the biggest champion of the public option in the Senate. This reinforces, I think, the idea that the major players just don’t think they have the votes for the public option, and while much of the attention on that question has been focused on the Senate, the more I think about it, the more I think the House may be the real impediment. Basically, you need to get 217 votes at the moment to pass anything, and while the healthcare bill passed with 220 votes the first time, Robert Wexler has retired, Jack Murtha died, and Jospeh Cao has joined the rest of the GOP in opposition. That leaves you with 217 before you account for Bart Stupak or anyone else who isn’t happy with the Senate’s abortion related language. So basically, any bill that passes the House right now is going to have to get a vote from a handful of Democrats who voted “no” the first time, and they might not be willing to support a public option. That seems like the most likely roadblock at the moment to me.

Technorati Tags: Jay Rockefeller, public option