After the Future

Does Obama Have What It Takes?

There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a “transformational” president — but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system. (Source: Krugman)

My beef is that he doesn't even seem to be trying, and I have to wonder why. He's too smart to think that this post-partisan thing would work, isn't he? Maybe not. Maybe he's just glad to be there, and he'll be as bland as Gerald Ford in his presidential m.o. Or maybe he doesn't really want to be a transformational president.That's the takeaway from the deals he appears to have cut with the Insurance industry this spring. I suspect, though, that there's more going on there than we can know now.

If this was March of 1861, I'm sure I would have been among those unimpressed that Lincoln had what it would take to take the country through the looming secession crisis. Lincoln believed it was still possible to reconcile with the south before Sumter forced his hand. The first inaugural is full of that kind of hope. His initial resistance to emancipation was rooted in his hope that the seceded states would come back and that emancipation would be an insuperable obstacle.  He was hoping that the saner, more moderate heads in the seceded states would grab the steering wheel. 

In retrospect, we can see that these hopes never had even the remotest chance of realization. It was either let them go or force them to stay. I think it's legitimate to ask whether it would have been better to let the South go, to ask whether the price paid was worth it, especially since anything approaching real freedom didn't come to Black Americans for another century.  But I think that we cannot underestimate how regressive and evil was the white supremacist mentality of the people who dominated southern society, the Lost Cause attempts to sugarcoat it notwithstanding.

The world benefited from the containment of the white supremacist narrative that dominated Southern society, if not its complete defeat, at Appomattox. Jefferson Davis represented an imperialist faction in the Senate before secession which wanted to annex Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. It's quite possible that if seceded states had just been allowed to leave they would have focused their resources on such conquests and would have fought for control of the western territories. It was good for the country and for the world that the South lost. Had they existed as an independent nation in the 1930s, don't we have good reason to believe that they would have aligned with the Axis powers?

Do we really believe that the North could have lived in peace with the South if it was just allowed to secede?  I doubt it. Violent conflict was going to come sooner or later, so better sooner. Lincoln didn't want the war, but the war came, and he didn't flinch. The question for me is whether Obama understands that he's in an analogous situation now, that he's dealing with the same kind of intransigent mentality. 

Once again, it's not about the ordinary people who live in the South, most of whom in any society passively accept without much thought whatever the dominant social narrative is. I know things are more complicated and nuanced on the individual level and that the individual is not wholly defined by his political beliefs. My attack here is focused on the transpersonal racist groupthink, which wherever it dominates a society leads to horrible violence and cruelty. Ordinary folks don't participate in it directly. Usually they do everything they can to deny or filter its governments crimes out so they can live more-or-less decent lives.

But the fact remains, that with those who are leaders, those who are deeply in the girp of it, there is no negotiating; there is no making peace; there is no sitting down to reason together, there is no hope for real compromise. That was true for the Northern abolitionists and unionists in the 19th Century, and it's true now for forward-looking Democrats who care about resolving contemporary injustices. We should always be ready to parley for a truce, but we should never delude ourselves into thinking that these interests will compromise on anything unless forced to. The right understands the power game in a way that reason-centered Liberals do not.

We're involved in a bare-knuckled power fight right now, and the stakes are much higher than you are ever going to hear discussed by the MSM punditocracy.  This is not just about healthcare; it's about the nation's future.  I thought Obama got that.  Maybe like Lincoln, it will take him some time.  I've not given up on him yet. 

The Tortured Mind

Can we all agree that Cheney has zero credibility and that he should not be heard from again unless subpoenaed?

Eric Holder, whether for him happily or unhappily, has got the ball rolling in his appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate torture. I think this move will develop a momentum that will shift us toward the transparency and accountability we were promised during the campaign.  

We'll see, but there should be a substantive difference between internal or congressional investigations and a special-prosecutor investigation. Unless the investigator is an ideological hack like Ken Starr, the politics is minimized. Guys like Fitzgerald, and from all reports, Durham, are pros. They do their jobs and let the chips fall where they may. He'll start with those who committed the atrocities, but I think it will be very hard for him not to follow the evidence trail wherever it leads, and that means following it up the chain of command. Peter King and his ilk are, therefore, understandably upset. This is a big blow to their m.o.

Is Government the Problem?

The myth has been getting a lot of play from conservatives in recent weeks as the debate over health care has heated up. The message, as always, is that government can't do anything right.

Where the conservative mythologists show their hand is when they use their own monumental screw-ups, committed during conservatism's long years in charge of the government, to prove that government in general is a futile proceeding, and that Democratic health-care plans, in particular, can't possibly succeed.

We heard this bizarre reasoning during last year's campaign season. "Unless you're pleased with the way the federal government has been running anything lately," Gov. Sarah Palin declared last October, when the federal government had been answering to her fellow Republican for nearly eight years, "I don't think that it's going to be real pleasing for Americans to consider health care being taken over by the feds."

. . . I've always thought that P.J. O'Rourke was only half joking when he wrote, years ago, that "Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it." Conservatives grasp the grand strategic sweep of politics better than liberals, and consequently they have always seemed to understand that what they do when they're in charge can help to reinforce the myths that put them there. (Source: Thomas Frank)

But they fear God and keep us safe. 

Quote of the Day: Winston Churchhill

That old socialist--always overreaching:

The discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all. That is clear. Disease must be attacked, whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman simply on the ground that it is the enemy; and it must be attacked just in the same way as the fire brigade will give its full assistance to the humblest cottage as readily as to the most important mansion. Our policy is to create a national health service in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available. (h/t Conason)

Why Are the Blue Dogs in the Driver's Seat?

There's been a lot written the last week that correctly asks the question: Why is the Progressive Caucus in the House considered obstructionist and the Blue Dogs not?  Four out of the five committees in congress delivered a bill with the public option, and one, which hasn't gotten around to delivering anything, apparently will not have a public option, and is rumored to be weakening other important provisions, yet that committee's work is the only one that counts in Beltway think.

Why do the Blue Dogs in Senate Finance get to call the shots here? Is it because they better represent the will of the American people? No, because polling shows that the American people strongly supports the public option. Is it because they are more reasonable? But they have no real reasons for rejecting the public option except to say that it will not get the votes, but it's their votes that are needed. So why are they so central to fortunes of this bill? Why are they allowed to obstruct the will of majority in their party  and of the majority of the American electorate? 

Quote of the Day: Digby

In response to David Gergen's comment: "We don't think like Canadians. We don't accept government the way it is. We're not deferential to authority the way Canadians are or in Western Europe."

. . . unlike the authoritarian Canadians who subserviantly submit themselves to a socialistic medical system, we individualistic Americans are more than happy to allow certain authorities great discretion. They are even allowed to torture innocent people merely if they don't like their attitude. Putting the health care system under the auspices of the police, makes all resistance to Big Government authoritariansim vanish completely.

If we simply redefine illness as a crime (which these panelists largely agreed it already was) we can incarcerate the sick people and provide them with health care without running up against our freedom loving anti-authoritarianism. In fact, the concept of an individual mandate without adequate subsidies and a public plan will automatically turn the 47 million uninsured into criminals if they don't immediately start paying the private insurance companies an expensive tribute (the coverage will be nearly non-existant, after all), so we're part way there already!

Clearly, we have no problem putting people in jail; it's government providing health care that offends our reverence for liberty. Let's "reboot" the health care debate and make getting sick a crime. In the land of the free, it's pretty much the only way to get to universal health care. I have no doubt it would be a huge bipartisan victory.

More on the Tension between Liberty and Equality

First line of Gettysburg address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Last line:

. . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

It's striking how this speech both begins and ends with an affirmation of the national values for which the War was fought and for which so many died--to preserve liberty and equality: freedom and a government of-by-for the people, not of-by-for oligarchs, whether of the royal, plantation, or corporate variety.

Lincoln does not articulate the idea I developed in my post last week concerning the necessity for maintaining a "balance" between liberty and equality, but it's there implicitly insofar as the one is not mentioned without the other. I argue that one is not more important than the other, but for the nation to flourish both must be held in a balanced tension, and that when one is dominant and the other subordinate, serious problems arise. Marxists states are problematic for exalting equality to the detriment of liberty, and capitalist states tend toward the opposite imbalance in which equality is suppressed in favor of liberty--the liberty, that is, mainly of the few who aggregate to themselves most of their society's wealth and power.

Isn't that what we're seeing being played out in this health care reform fight?

The argument of this blog for years now has been that our nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality, is in far more serious danger of perishing from the earth than most people care to think about. Since Reagan, the emphasis on liberty to the detriment of equality, and the general acceptance of the subsequent imbalance has brought us to the crisis we're currently dealing with.

The trend toward the diminution of equality is not something that easily self-corrects. The balance has to be vigilantly maintained when possessed, and vigorously fought for when lost.  And I see this healthcare fight as an important test. Given, though, the superior strength of the forces that should effect a victory for reform, it's looking more and more like the Union Army in Virginia during '61 through Chancellorsville in '63: superior force beaten time and again by superior tactics and a stronger will to win. And the result was loss after loss because no effective leadership in the field.

I blame the moderate, rational mindset of typical of Liberalism. While there is remarkable valor in the ranks, Liberal leadership just doesn't have what it takes to win. It hasn't the imagination, the energy, or the grit.  It justifies defeatism as realism, and losing becomes a habit. This leadership doesn't want to win; it just don't want to lose.  And so progressive causes are doomed to lose and lose and lose against opponents with far superior field leadership and organization. This is our future until something fundamental changes. 

Conservatives/Libertarians/Liberals

Commenter Dan H about six months ago at Will Wilkinson's "Liberaltarian Reactions":

A more fundamental rift between liberals and libertarians is that liberals believe that society and economic activity needs to be planned by a central authority. This is why they are almost always in favor of new regulations - a regulation is a plan, an attempt to control what they see as out-of-control forces. No matter how good an economy is, it can always be made better by the smart people at the top, so long as they are given the power to change things.

Libertarians, on the other hand, are okay with the notion that a modern society is an exercise in spontaneous order, and that optimal solutions are often reached if you simply let society or the economy work out the problem and adapt. Most libertarians accept that society has to work within a framework of social order and civil society, and that government has a place in maintaining the conditions which allows markets to work and people to be free to choose without coercion. This separates them from anarchists.

Conservatives get along with libertarians because they share the same fundamental beliefs when it comes to the economy, only they tend to personify it by saying that the family and local community are the drivers of social order, and they seek to protect them. Both Conservatives and libertarians have an inherent distrust of central planning, and this overrides their differences on social policy enough to allow them to work together.

Where conservatives and libertarians differ is that conservatives think the central government should be the protector of established social norms and morality, and libertarians do not. But compared to their agreement that central planning of the economy is bad, this is a much smaller area of disagreement.

I do not see how libertarians and liberals can work together so long as liberals seek to continually increase the state's power to plan society and control the market. This is a very deep, very fundamental difference in philosophy.

Focusing on this comment is a little distorting since the main thrust of Wilkinson's post was to make the opposite point--that there is significant common ground between liberals and libertarians, hence the post title, "Liberal-tarians". But as I argued in "Libertarian Takedown" a couple of weeks ago,  the more typical person  attracted to Libertarianism is closer to Dan H. 

That being said, if a "Liberal-tarian" is someone who is looking for the balance or integration point between the principles liberty and equality, then count me as one. But I think that a Libertarian is by definition someone who makes Liberty his central value, and is willing to let equality to go fend for itself. That's the thrust of my anti-Libertarian argument on the theory level, and so it would follow that Wilkinson, if he is a Liberal-tarian by this definition, is no longer really a Libertarian. If so, he recognizes that it's not either/or--either Liberty or Equality; it's living in the tension between them. And policy needs to maintain a rough balance between them and to redress severe imbalances when they occur. I think that's a common-sense position, but I don't think many people who call themselves Libertarians would be comfortable with it.

I think this balance between equality and liberty is another aspect of what it means to be a subsidiarist/integrationist, which is the position I try to articulate in this blog. There are no absolutes in the soul lives of individuals or societies. Our lives in the sublunar world are mostly shaped by our living in the tensions between forces that want to pull us in opposite directions--individual/community, inner experience/outer experience, matter/spirit, tradition/progress, yin/yang, confidence/humility, strength/vulnerability, intellect/instinct, cool/hot, to name a few that come randomly to mind. Soul life, as I at least think about it, is a web of these opposites and so many more held together by filaments that that stretch us out and define the interwoven complexity of our human nature. When these filaments snap, we have the kind of dissociated thinking and behavior that currently fuels, on both sides, the irrationality of the American culture war.

The human moral task is to be an integrating center, which is difficult. We succeed or fail as humans to the degree that we effect this integration over the course of a lifetime. It's much easier to detach and surrender to one pole or the other. And we fail, and the nature of our failure lies in all the ways we suppress one pole in the contrary pair and surrender to the other one. So to take an easy example, confidence becomes arrogance when it detaches from and suppresses humility, and humility becomes slavishness when it detaches from confidence. And liberty leads to a self-absorbed leave-me-alone-ism when it detaches from equality, and equality a rigid, flattening, conformism when detached from liberty.

Subsidiarity is about  finding the balance point in social organizations between bottom-up and top-down. Conservatives and Libertarians want 'order' within the cultural and economic spheres to develop naturally, from the bottom up, and they are inclined to see any attempt  by actors in the political sphere to impose order as a top-downism they call "tyranny". So Dan H's placeholder term for top-downers is "Liberal" as in "liberals believe that society and economic activity needs to be planned by a central authority." That assertion is, of course, mostly wrong, but I'll get to that later.

Bottom-up-ism is vital, but if it's not held in tension with a measured degree of top-downism, it leads to destructive imbalances.  The fact is that in the "state of nature", i.e, a state in which there is no law imposed from above, power tends to aggregate in the social/cultural and economic spheres in ways that benefit the few and harm the many, i.e, it causes fundamentally toxic inequalities. In other words, power aggregation increases the liberty of the few while decreasing it for the many. The story of civilization is largely the story of wealth and power oligarchies organizing their respective society to benefit themselves. In other words, liberty detached from equality leads to tyranny.

Modern democracies have been an experiment in social organization that seeks to transfer power from oligarchs at the top to a place located more in the middle--to an educated, middle class. And for democracy to flourish, one needs a well-informed, self-reliant, demagogue-resistant middle class. For it's been shown time and again that the electorate, when fearful and poorly informed can be manipulated by demagogues to give up their power to oligarchs who seek to return the society to the historical norm. That's why the ancient philosophers called democracy the second worst form of government--because it was the preliminary step leading to tyranny, which was the worst. 

That's the crisis that the U.S. is currently confronting. It's a key battle in the struggle to redress a profound imbalance in which too much power and wealth is in the hands of too few people who have come to dominate the legislative process and have created inequality imbalances that undermine the foundation for a flourishing republican form of government.

That's why we need a measure of top-downism to redress the balance. We need governmental mechanisms to keep things more equal (not perfectly equal). Government is the only tool to effect a redressing of imbalances that occur on the kind of massive scale we are currently experiencing them.These imbalances are not going to work themselves out organically. They need to be resolved by calling on the human capacity for intelligence and will to correct what is clearly an injustice.

Bigness is not just a problem for government; it's a problem everywhere, and whatever the problems associated with big government, and there are scores of them, at least government power is vulnerable to be held accountable in ways that private sector power is not. The challenge is to hold government accountable, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves for letting things get out of balance when they do, as they have done over the last thirty years since Reagan.

***

I've often presented myself as sympathetic to a Burkean Whiggishness that isn't against progress, but against socially engineered progress. And I understand and respect the arguments of principled conservatives like Deneen and Larison who understand the destructive effects of modern Liberal thinking and the policies that follow from it on living traditional values and institutions. I, too,  prefer organic growth to engineered growth, but not all natural growths are benign. Sometimes the kind of growth we're dealing with is cancerous and it needs aggressive intervention, and the cure is often painful and the recovery prolonged. The Civil War comes to mind.

We saw that kind of cancerous growth in the late 18th and early 19th century as the slave economy of the south metastasized. Such a "natural" growth  needed intervention if the nation founded on principles of equality and freedom was to flourish. After passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and then Dred Scott in the 1850s, it became clear that this cancerous growth within the body politic could not be contained.

This is a clear instance in which the liberty rights of white Southerners and equality rights of African Americans were out of balance and aggressive outside intervention was required to redress the balance. I do not believe that this problem would have just worked itself out over time, and it's clear to me that the Feds were justified to intervene to redress the balance. 

Are conservatives justified in their concern about imbalances in the other direction, when society becomes imbalanced toward an equality and the leveling conformism that abusively infringes on the liberty rights of individuals?  Of course, but for the most part this is an abstract straw-man argument in the contemporary U.S. because there are minor nuisances, and they are played out more in the cultural sphere than in the political sphere. And there are simply no egregious imbalances that come even close to the inequality imbalance suffered by Blacks in the south before the Civil War and during Jim Crow. 

For extreme Libertarians, any constraint on individual liberty, even constraints that I would describe as attempts to find a balance between liberty and equality, are considered tyrannical. So when a Libertarians like Dan H in the quote excerpted above  says, "I do not see how libertarians and liberals can work together so long as liberals seek to continually increase the state's power to plan society and control the market," he's criticizing a theoretical straw man, because there are very few Democrats or Liberals that fit the description of seeking to "plan society and control the market." There's no grand plan, that's a figment of the Libertarian imagination. Liberalism in practice has been for the most part an ad hoc process to use the government as a tool to fix problems that don't fix themselves. Name a prominent politician who advocates total government control of society and markets? Not even Bernie Sanders would advocate for that.

The New Deal was not a socialist plot, but an attempt to find a balance between free markets and a government role to mitigate the harmful effects of free markets on the lives of ordinary Americans. The New Deal introduced to the U.S. a mixed economy, not a socialist economy, and it works, despite Republican attempts to dismantle it since Reagan. It can be called socialist only by those who care not a whit about finding the balance between liberty and equality. Again, it's not either/or; it's about finding a balance. Reaganism and doctrinaire Libertarianism represent a movement in the direction of Liberty that causes severe imbalances when it comes to equality. 

And if such Libertarians were able to think objectively, they'd see, for instance, that a single-payer system, if it's set up correctly, actually increases the liberty of doctors and patients to make decisions, that it would deliver providers from the tyranny of onerous paper work and interfering insurance bureaucrats who veto physicians' decisions, and deliver patients from the tyranny of insurance companies that deny needed coverage on the flimsiest of pretexts because their goal is to minimize payments to increase shareholder returns. Single payer is an example of where a government role would increase liberty and equality significantly, especially when compared to the current arrangements.

This is another example of where the freedom of insurance companies comes into conflict with both the freedom of consumers and their right to be treated fairly. If insurance companies can't rectify their abusive m.o. on their own, and why should they if no one has forces them to, then somebody has to force them, and the only entity with power to do that is the government.

 

Bargaining 101 (Updated)

I do not think Matt [Yglesias], or Ezra Klein, or Kevin Drum, or Paul Starr are closet Blue Dogs, but I DO think, in terms of political bargaining, they DO represent well why Democrats and progressives are the worst political bargainers I have ever seen.

Look, I have negotiated civil litigation settlements for 20 years. The one thing you never can do, ever, is state beforehand what you are willing to accept as a final result of a negotiation. Advising political negotiators to do so is simply stupid. It just is.

When will we know whether a firm stand on the public option will mean no health care reform bill and what exactly the best offer will be on health care reform? Well, it sure is not now. Think of Kent Conrad as the party across the table in this negotiation. Or even Barack Obama. How do you negotiate with them? You tell them, and mean it, that you will not vote for a health care reform proposal that does not include a robust public option. You protest that you have already made the biggest concession anyone has made in the entire process - single payer. You ask for their best offer.

Source: TalkLeft

It's probably too obvious to be worth discussing, but this so-called "reasonable" approach by the people listed above is perceived as naive and weak by people who know how to play hardball. Brilliant analysis, guys: We get it; it's better to have something than nothing, so just offer us whatever, and we'll take it. Now shut up and get out of the way. Let the people who are shrewder about getting something done have center stage.

This let's- be-realistic mindset is closet defeatism at this point in the game. If the final outcome of the game is predetermined, then the whole process is a sham, and progressives should be even more outaged and determined to change the status quo.  If there's still room for debate and influencing the final outcome, we can talk about whether we'll support a Yes or No vote when we have the final bill in September or whenever.

This bill is not just about healthcare; it's about whose interests the government serves--the corporations or the broad public interest.

And please, guys,  for your own sakes, don't ever get involved in a high-stakes poker game.

***

Update: On a related note, Krugman this morning:

So there’s a growing sense among progressives that they have, as my colleague Frank Rich suggests, been punked. And that’s why the mixed signals on the public option created such an uproar.

Now, politics is the art of the possible. Mr. Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted.

But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. . . .

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.

So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.

I'm not there yet, because it's the opposite of what I've been advocating, but I'm beginning to think that Obama, too, should just shut up and get out of the way. If he isn't going to be a leader and a tough negotiator on behalf of the American people, he shouldn't get in the way of those who will be that. He and his people seem to be presenting more of an obstacle to meaningful reform than being advocates for it.

Help Congress Grow a Spine

Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake has been working hard to do this, and she deserves our support.  If you're in tune with the basic thrust of what I've been saying here about the fight for healtcare reform, please go here and help her to do what I've been arguing  has to be done.

Postscript.  See here about why we need a movement to "Dump Rahm."

People make a mistake when they think the battle for health care reform is about ideology, because it's not.  It's about who controls K Street and the cash that flows from it, which could fund a 2010 GOP resurgenece -- or not.

Read on if you want to understand what's driving policy and how little it has to do with what's good for the country and almost everything to do with keeping Dems in power no matter what the price. It's not really about Rahm it's about Rahm's world.  I'm not saying there's a reality here that Emmanuel understands and sees as essential to deal with.  It's about changing that reality.  That's priority number one.  Very little can be done so long as Rahm's world is the real world within the Beltway.

Hopeful Signs of Spine Formation

We will not make a decision to pursue reconciliation until we have exhausted efforts to produce a bipartisan bill," said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Mr. Reid. "However, patience is not unlimited, and we are determined to get something done this year by any legislative means necessary."

Privately, those involved in the talks now say there is a 60% chance the split-bill tactic will be used. Mr. Obama is huddling with aides next week, and Senate leaders are likely to review their options when Congress reconvenes after Labor Day. (Source: WSJ)

It ain't over 'til it's over. But then there's this:

President Obama's advisers acknowledged Tuesday that they were unprepared for the intraparty rift that occurred over the fate of a proposed public health insurance program, a firestorm that has left the White House searching for a way to reclaim the initiative on the president's top legislative priority. . . .

"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform."

"It's a mystifying thing," he added. "We're forgetting why we are in this."

Another top aide expressed chagrin that a single element in the president's sprawling health-care initiative has become a litmus test for whether the administration is serious about the issue.

"It took on a life of its own," he said.

Oh please. Why indeed are we in this?  In the interests of de-mystifying these clueless clowns who think their "savvy" grasp of Beltway conventional wisdom qualifies them as experts I quote Digby:

Look, the reformers put the public plan in place as a cost control measure and threw it at the left as a crumb. I personally couldn't care less about "keeping the insurance companies honest" because they are little more than a protection racket designed to make money off of people's misery without offering anything in return. But as a good little pragmatist, in the interest of doing "what works," I went along with this Rube Goldberg plan because it seemed to be the only way to insure that I wasn't going to be forced to give some godawful insurance company my money anymore. Without a public option, I feel like I've got a gun to my head telling me that I am forced by law to pay some CEO's obscene salary with no guarantee that I'm not going to get the shaft if I get sick. Regulation alone, subject to K Street influence and corporate whores in the congress, will not get the job done. Short of single payer, the only thing that even has a chance of working is making these parasites compete. So, on a policy level, I have halfheatertedly supported the only thing that was offered, and am now being told that's going to be bargained away too. Feh. 

The foundation of reform is cost control. Without a public option there is no effective method to achieve that. It's unacceptable to see this as a bargaining chip and it's disconcerting to learn that key people in the administration have are perplexed as to why some people see it as centrally important. It is centrally important both as a pragmatic tool to control costs and as a symbolic emotional issue about which people serious about reform are not willing to compromise.

Heathcare Reform Defeatism (Updated)

[Senator] Bingaman [D-New Mexico] may be the prime example of the way some Senate Democrats seem to have approached the healthcare debate this summer: count votes first, figure out what should be in the bill later. And while you're counting, take the most pessimistic view possible. Though three committees in the House and one in the Senate have all passed versions of the legislation with more muscle behind the reforms than what the Finance Committee is working up, that doesn't seem to matter to centrist Democrats, who think those other versions won't get enough support to overcome the threat of a GOP filibuster. So, in essence, they've decided not to try. . . .

Cautious by nature and up for another term next year, Bingaman seems to be reading the political tea leaves and moving toward the conservative end of the scale, rather than standing his ground and forcing opponents to find ways to compromise. Quite a few of his colleagues seem reflexively poised to do the same.

Which underscores the problem President Obama faces as he tries to get a complex piece of legislation through a Congress his own party controls by wide margins. By conceding key arguments before they've even begun, the Democrats risk becoming their own worst enemy on this legislation. After all, if even Bingaman -- the only Democrat who sits on both committees with jurisdiction over the reform bill, whose state might need a change more than any other -- isn't a reliable vote for the public option, who is? Obama's message last year was one of hope and community spirit. So far in the Senate, though, pragmatism still rules the day.

Mike Madden in Salon: "Why Senate Democrats are giving up so easily"

***

Based on those conversations, I've got some simple advice for Obama: Shut up about the death panels already. Don't keep fighting this rumor. You've lost—and the more time you spend trying to make things better, the worse off you'll be.

I understand this is hard medicine to swallow. Whatever you think about health care reform, it's hard to abide complete fabrications. There isn't a shred of evidence to support the idea that Obama's proposals create any mechanism to send old people to an early grave. Lots of other claims about the administration's health care plan are also patently false—see this roundup by the nonpartisan Politifact that thoroughly debunks a laundry list of lies that have been going around through chain e-mails. Responding to lies seems only natural. How could the White House stand by in silence while opponents make outlandish claims?

But there are two problems with trying to correct misinformation. First, once people buy into a set of facts, they're unlikely to change their minds, even if presented with evidence to the contrary. In True Enough, I describe a famous study (PDF) by psychologists Charles Lord, Lee Ross, and Mark Lepper about people who hold rigid views on the death penalty. The researchers asked both fierce supporters and opponents of capital punishment to look at a stack of empirical studies that presented a mixed picture of the death penalty—some studies indicated that capital punishment deterred crime, while others suggested it didn't. After looking at the data, a rational person would have moderated her view of the death penalty—after all, the facts seemed to indicate that it was hard to know what effect capital punishment had on crime. --Farhad Manjoo in Slate-"How To Kill Those Death Panel Rumors"

Manjoo's reasoning is precisely what leads "reasonable" people to give up so easily justifying their spinelessness with arguments for pragmatism.  But the flaw in Manjou's reasoning is that only about 25% of the electorate fits into the unreasonable category. The thrust of the Dems reform message should focus on the 75% of people who are not living in a hermetically sealed ideological bubble. 

Fighting for Healthcare Reform III

Joseph at 538 'Comments'

After 8 years of Bush the stars finally align for the Democrats, yet after less than 8 months, Democrats start running around like chicken little screaming that the sky is falling. It's no wonder Republicans call Democrats weak. We prove them correct with our panic. We also create our own self-fulfilling prophecy of doom if we give up on the public option because we "don't have the votes". Why not instead get off our asses and work like hell to get those votes?

And while you're getting the votes, we need to be telling everyone with all the confidence in the world that the Democrats are going to pass a public option and make the Republicans look like a bunch of losers and naysayers who are more interested in protecting insurance company profits than fixing the real problems of the country. The one thing Democrats could learn from the Republicans is that people prefer confidence, even cockiness, to expertise or facts.

The fight isn't now in August; it will be in September. Have pro robust public-option partisans been organizing and getting ready for it?  Nobody with any sense thought that this would be easy. It's still possible for the pro-reform forces to win on this, but it's going to require some spine. The question is whether pro-reform people can muster the forces for a fight. There is never a question about that regarding the forces of the right. This is gut-check time.

What does it say about us if we can't even get this very middle-of-the-road proposed reform done?

P.S. Maddow on Meet the Press regarding the consequences of backing away from the public option:

But ultimately, if the president decides that he's going to go with a reform effort that doesn't include a public option, what he will have done is spent a ton of political capital, riled up an incredibly angry right wing base who's been told that this is a plot to kill grandma, grandma, and he will have achieved something that doesn't change health care very much and that doesn't save us very much money and won't do very much for the American people.  It's not a very good thing to spend a lot of political capital on.

If Obama just caves without a fight for the public option, he will join a long list of weak, feckless mediocrities whose only real value is that they are not Republicans. Better he fight and lose than just cave because he has more to lose by looking like just another Democrat pansy.

Fighting for Healthcare Reform II (Updated)

Krugman:

So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.

The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream.

So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.

What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, he’s gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.

What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.

So can Mr. Obama, who can be so eloquent when delivering a message of uplift, rise to the challenge of unreasoning, unappeasable opposition? Only time will tell.

The problem isn't the lying, fearmongering that's coming from the right. That's normal procedure, and if I'm a Republican strategist, I stay with what works until it doesn't. So the real problem is not what the Republicans do. Their playbook is open for all to read. The problem lies in that after all these years, the Dems haven't figured out a way to deal with what the Republicans do, and that they persist in thinking that some kind of mature, non-partisan conversation with between people of goodwill is possible. And the result is they get played for suckers time and time and time again--and the rest of us pay the price.

Quote of the Day: Joan Walsh

I admire Obama's desire for conversation, consultation and, if possible, bipartisan support for his agenda. But it's been clear since early in his term that the GOP marching orders are to thwart him whenever possible. I didn't really think Chuck Grassley would craft a healthcare bill more palatable to me, but I thought possibly he'd help Obama get a bill that would attract some Republican support.

I never cease to amaze myself by my naiveté and unwarranted optimism. I think it's time for Obama to use his political capital to whip the Democrats, including the nippy, yippy selfish and untested Blue Dogs, into shape. If he compromises with the likes of Chuck Grassley after Grassley betrayed him, he can give up the rest of his agenda -- and maybe even a second term. But I trust Obama to know that he's been punked by Grassley, and to act accordingly. (Source)

Her last paragraph echoes my post from last week, and I hope she's right about Obama learning his lesson here, but for reasons explained in my earlier post, I doubt it.

I know Grassley has a reputation for being one of the relatively sane Republicans, but it really is flabbergasting to me how anybody could think, after all we've been through, that the Republicans in congress are reasonable people who have honest concerns. Surely there are many reasonable rank-and-file Republicans who have honest concerns, but who in congress represents them?

The Republicans and most of the Blue Dogs are problems to be managed and opponents to be outmaneuvered, not honest brokers with whom to negotiate in good faith.To proceed on the assumption of good faith at this point is abject stupidity.