Month: December 2009

Interesting Trend

Jake McIntyre has a post on Daily Kos in which he points out that parallels between supporting the Iraq war and supporting health care reform as it stands now:

Has anyone else noticed that the split in the progressive blogosphere between those who are saying “it’s a good bill in spite of everything” (Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Josh Marshall, to name a few) and those who just can’t bring themselves to support Liebercare (Markos and Digby come to mind, among bloggers who have been at it since 2003*) is eerily similar to the split between those who grudgingly backed the invasion of Iraq and those who fought against the war seven years ago?

I’m not sure that Jake is being totally fair, but the point is certainly persuasive and he makes it well.

The challenge, to me, is where the third category of people fit in. I would include myself and Chris Bowers in this group and think of it as a sober activist set (which isn’t to say that other activist bloggers are not sober, but that we see less room for any positive political outcome for progressives). Bowers writes:

If you oppose the bill at least partially because you believe it will result in negative political consequences for Democrats, well, you are probably correct in that assessment.  However, don’t delude yourself into thinking that defeating it somehow makes for a better political outcome.  It won’t, because there is no good political outcome at this point.

My main difference with Chris is that while the political outcomes may not look great, there is certainly still room for movement building through organizing around health care. This can take the form of trying to stop bad parts of the legislation, or simultaneously include efforts to strengthen the bill through improvements. The act of organizing around this high profile issue, building coalitions between advocacy groups, online progressives, and progressives in elected office is valuable and potentially something that can lead to sustainable  movement growth. This sort of movement building is what can be the breakwall that stops political damage from this fight reaching too far into the future.

It’s a complex case and the lack of clear paths to a positive outcome certainly speaks to how poorly the last year has been handled by leadership. I can’t imagine the next number of days and weeks is going to be a fun time to be a progressive activist. But maybe what comes out of this will be salvageable, either as a particular piece of policy or as the movement on whole.

Aravosis on Bush v Obama

I’m traveling for work this week and totally booked in meetings, so my blogging is going to be very light.

But I wanted to flag John Aravosis’s post from earlier today, “The GOP had at most 55 Senators during Bush’s presidency.” Aravosis is providing an important reminder that legislation, even controversial legislation or legislation relating to life and death, war and peace, can be passed in the absence of a super majority. Obama and Reid are dealing with more seats in their caucus than Bush ever had.

Aravosis  writes:

What the GOP lacked in numbers, they made up for in backbone, cunning and leadership. Say what you will about George Bush, he wasn’t afraid of a fight. If anything, the Bush administration, and the Republicans in Congress, seemed to relish taking on Democrats, and seeing just how far they could get Democratic members of Congress to cave on their promises and their principles. Hell, even Senator Barack Obama, who once famously promised to lead a filibuster against the FISA domestic eavesdropping bill, suddenly changed his mind and actually voted for the legislation. Such is the power of a president and a congressional leadership with balls and smarts.

How did they do it? Bush was willing to use his bully pulpit to create an environment in which the opposition party feared taking him on, feared challenging his agenda, lest they be seen as unpatriotic and extreme. By going public, early and often, with his beliefs, Bush was able to fracture the Democratic opposition (and any potential dissent in his own party) and forestall any effort to mount a filibuster against the most important items in his agenda.

It’s not about the votes, people. It’s about leadership. The current occupant of the White House doesn’t like to fight, and the leadership in Congress has never been as good at their jobs, at marshaling their own party, as the Republicans were when they were in the majority. The President is supposed to rally the country, effectively putting pressure on opposition members of Congress to sit down and shut up. And the congressional leadership is supposed to rally its members to hold the line, and get the 51 votes necessary for passing legislation in a climate where the minority is too afraid to use the filibuster. When you have a President who is constitutionally, or intellectually, unable to stand for anything, and a congressional leadership that, rather than disciplining its own members and forging ahead with its own agenda, cedes legislative authority to a president who refuses to lead, you have a recipe for exactly what happened last night. Weakness, chaos, and failure.

This is a pretty brutal assessment.  But the difference is stark. Bush showed unflinching conviction that his agenda was the right course and he made damned sure Congress was with him, at least during his first term. Obama has not forced or led Congress to be where he needs.

Of course, this also gets at the Democrats’ fundamental inability to use procedure to their advantage. We got whipped under Bush and now are getting beat at a game in which the same rules apply. We just never used the rules we had to strengthen the minority when we were in the minority. As a result, looking at 2000-2009, there is a real contrast to what counts in the Senate. It only takes 51 votes to pass a piece of Republican legislation, while it takes 60 votes to pass a piece of liberal legislation. Because their leaders know how to play the game and our leaders want to rise above the game in glorious, yet unattainable, post-partisan unity.

There is plenty to put at the feet of Obama and Reid in the failures of the health care fight. But many of these problems are more systemic. It’s not that Aravosis is wrong, it’s that he’s talking about a dynamic that extends to liberal Democrats going all the way back to the early 20th century efforts to pass civil rights legislation. The left has always been out-maneuvered in the Senate and now is no different.

Actually, the difference is now Democrats are in a position that should assure them victory with even the most minimally savvy legislative plan of attack. This strategy has not been found. I don’t know if it’s because it’s a simple lack of understanding of legislative procedure, a lack of understanding of the real situation in a caucus that includes Lieberman, Lincoln, Landrieu, and Ben Nelson, an absence of actual liberal beliefs by Obama, or a refusal to lead with conviction by Obama.

The result is that despite massive electoral victories in 2006 and 2008, the Democratic Party has miles upon miles to go before they will defeat the ghosts of incompetence past and the insidious damage a lack of memory inflicts upon their efforts today.

Lieberman’s Last Straw?

You know a senator has jumped the shark when Ezra Klein writes something like this:

The Huffington Post and Roll Call are both reporting that Joe Lieberman notified Harry Reid that he will filibuster health-care reform if the final bill includes an expansion of Medicare. Previously, Lieberman had been cool to the idea, saying he wanted to make sure it wouldn’t increase the deficit or harm Medicare’s solvency. That comforted some observers, as the CBO is expected to say it will do neither. Someone must have given Lieberman a heads-up on that, as he’s decided to make his move in advance of the CBO score, the better to make sure the facts of the policy couldn’t impede his opposition to it.

To put this in context, Lieberman was originally invited to participate in the process that led to the Medicare buy-in. His opposition would have killed it before liberals invested in the idea. Instead, he skipped the meetings and is forcing liberals to give up yet another compromise. Each time he does that, he increases the chances of the bill’s failure that much more. And it’s hard to imagine there’s a policy rationale here, as he decided against even bothering to wait for the CBO’s analysis before moving against this idea. At this point, Lieberman is just torturing liberals. That is to say, he’s willing to directly cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.

Well, yes. And this is something that progressives have been saying online with regard to Lieberman for a while. A great deal of outrage accompanied Congressman Alan Grayson when he said the Republican health care play was to not get sick and if you do, die quickly. Klein is effectively making the same point here. When you peel back the onion of DC patois, opposition to health care reform has real human consequences. Blocking change will have the direct result of hundreds of thousands of American dying in coming years due to a lack of insurance.

I think there is a real opening for using this to push the Overton Window on health care reform. When Alan Grayson or DFHs online say not passing reform will kill tens of thousands of Americans every year, it was a scandal. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post is now saying the same thing with regard to Lieberman’s posturing.

Maybe Democrats and liberal advocacy groups won’t be able to move Lieberman through any volume of public scolding, but such an effort should be able to increase the level of honesty and candor in the debate on health care reform. Doing so would help Democrats take, possibly for the first time, the moral high ground in this debate. It could move more support back into the column of reform and could perhaps be a means of pulling one of the moderate Republicans senators from Maine to support a cloture vote to get the bill to a final up or down vote.

I don’t like being in a place where health care reform depends on a single Republican vote. Thinking about how we got here is incredibly depressing. But this legislation needs to move and it’s time Democrats stop treating Lieberman and other conservatives in the caucus with kid gloves. Their opposition has fatal consequences of a sickening scale and they should not be allowed to get away with it.

Schrei on Obama’s Nobel Speech

Up at the Huffington Post, Josh Schrei has a provocative take on President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. Schrei writes:

Obama’s speech, in all its wandering glory, smacked of the somewhat bewildered attempts of a true American son to reconcile his deep seated idealism against an almost impossible pragmatism. Along the way, it inadvertently summarized the great tragedy of American foreign policy since World War II — the inability to rectify our lofty ideals with what it is we actually do in the world, which, often times, really isn’t that positive and certainly isn’t that clear.

With a new President — who obviously has great eloquence, a discerning mind, and admirable vision but has both inherited the gaffes of his predecessors and has an almost pathological addiction to the middle of the road — we are faced with our most muddled picture yet… in which we understand the value of the ideals we helped put forward post Second World War, but also know that we currently stand in violation of many of them; in which we eloquently stand for freedom and the individuals right to it and at the same time obtusely see war and occupation as one of our main instruments of forwarding that right; in which our leader stands on an anti-war platform while signing troop deployment orders; and, perhaps most paradoxically, in which we understand that the rise of societies who have no interest in our carefully crafted goals of freedom — like China — are a real threat to the very existence of those goals, yet choose to help them every chance we get.

This is a pretty apt summary of the internal tensions found in Obama’s speech. But Schrei makes the tension more explicit as he moves to close:

“Somewhere today, in this world, a young protester awaits the brutality of her government, but has the courage to march on.”

Generally, when men of character invoke such a scene, they do so because they actually intend to do something about it, not just because they are trying to please. And while President Obama has quoted this injustice, and made himself seem more sympathetic in doing so, and drawn out of us the emotions that make us feel that he is a person that really cares, the truth is that — as of yet — he is not doing a thing for this young protester.

Instead, his speechwriters capitalize on her suffering while simultaneously throwing accolades to her oppressors. (Again, see China)

At some point, this President will not be able to ride on the fumes of great — or in this case, not quite as great — speeches that play on the heartstrings of those of us who believe in justice, and will have to actively forge justice, if that is his road.

Now, as Josh points out, the tension is by no means limited to Obama. It has been a feature of every American president’s foreign policy since Truman. But coming from the lips of a young American president who has captured both our country’s and the world’s imagination to the point of being recognized for a Peace Prize in his first year in office, the tension grates harder than it might otherwise.

To put it a different way, Obama has to find ways to make sure that “change we can believe in” has less to do with the mechanical events of elections and more to do with actual realization of policy aspirations. It’s not enough to talk about the virtue of pro-democracy protesters in totalitarian regimes, especially when it comes (to pick one example) hand in hand with complete silence on China’s human rights abuses.  At some point, Obama has to stop being content with oration and start leading with the force of his actions.

Processing Health Care Compromises, A Strategic Look

It’s important for people who work in politics, policy, and activism to recognize what world it is they are operating in. This sober understanding should influence how strategies are formed and tactical choices are made. I think we’re approaching a point in the health care reform fight were the online progressive community needs to evaluate what world we are operating in and chart a course forward accordingly.

When Barack Obama was elected President, with a huge majority in the House and fifty-nine Democratic caucus seats in the Senate, we were told, “Now is the moment for health care reform.” There was a presumption that this was an historic time, whose existence was not only unprecedented but unlikely to ever come again. As such, passing health care reform in the first year (or so) of the Obama presidency became essential to his administration’s chances for success.

What was ignored in this evaluation, though, was an assessment of the actual landscape of the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

In the House, conservative Blue Dogs and New Democrats have not exerted the same degree of influence as their conservative Democratic counterparts in the Senate. Nonetheless, Blue Dogs have spent the better part of the last year screaming for a deficit-neutral bill with a low price tag. These efforts have effectively kept the entire discussion of health care reform costs, which experts say should be in the neighborhood of $1.2-1.3 trillion over ten years, to around $800-900 billion. More recently, conservative Democrats in this coalition forced the House to accept the repugnant Stupak Amendment, which rolls back the right to choose further than any other legislation since Roe vs Wade.

In the Senate, Democrats started with only fifty-nine members of the caucus, including perennial problem children Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Mark Pryor, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd began 2009 fighting life-threatening illnesses and were almost exclusively not in attendance. Arlen Specter switched parties, temporarily giving the Democrats a 60 seat caucus on paper, pending Al Franken taking his seat. But Al Franken wasn’t seated until July of 2009, only weeks before Ted Kennedy passed away.  In the final months of his life, Kennedy was rarely on the floor of the Senate and could not be counted on to vote outside of extraordinary situations.

Illness, death, and delayed seating has prevented Democrats from actually having 60 members of the caucus, effectively from Day One of the Obama administration until late September, 2009, wiping out nine months where health care reform was truly possible within the confines of a Democratic caucus alone (on paper). The result was for every piece of legislation in the Senate up until September, the Democratic leadership had to count on at least some number of Republican votes to move forward. That is, the landscape was not what everyone had been told.

From Employee Free Choice to health care, moderate Republicans like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins became the real arbiters of what legislation might look like. Even with sixty votes in the caucus, conservatives like Lieberman, Ben Nelson, and Lincoln have effectively had veto power over what the contents of reform legislation are. To anyone following this process closely, it should be clear that having sixty seats is not the same as having sixty votes. A super majority is no magic tonic that will ensure the passage of a liberal Democratic agenda like the one President Obama was elected to enact.

Or, to put it a different way, the Conventional Wisdom which said 2009 was the critical moment never to be found again to pass national health care reform legislation was fundamentally wrong. The cohort of conservative Democrats in Congress – in the House, but most especially in the Senate – is simply too large for this moment to be realized as it had been envisioned.

But the responsibility for where we are does not lie solely with the conservative Democrats in Congress. The administration and the Senate leadership has either not been able to or has refused to create caucus discipline on procedural votes on health care reform. No conservative Democrat has been punished for their public opposition to progressive policies. No force has been exerted to bend Lieberman, Lincoln, Landrieu, or Nelson to the will of the caucus. The conservative Democratic senators have grabbed the veto pen and no one has taken it back from them. This is a very large contributing factor to the unwinding of the idea of this being the time to get health care reform done.

What’s troubling is that the continued slowness of reform makes Democratic electoral successes less likely. While it looks like conservative Democrats are in trouble, with progressives in good shape, electoral fear is clearly influencing people in DC to continue to frame health care reform as something that must get done, regardless of policy content.  From a realization of good policy standpoint, the defeat of conservative Democrats should make progressives  in both chambers stronger relative to the size of the caucus, which is a good thing. But if there isn’t a path to sixty votes in the Senate to get cloture on procedural votes, then policy implementation hits a wall, especially as long as the Democratic leaders of the Senate, White House and particularly the progressive bloc in the Senate are so strategically inept.

Taken all together, it’s hard to see that this is in fact the time that health care reform must happen, or even can happen.  At least not how so many progressives expected it to happen, let alone how President Obama campaigned on changing health care in America. That is not to say that I don’t think reform legislation should be moved now, but the range of what is actually possible to achieve seems to be getting smaller and smaller, a reality that needs to be recognized so strategies could be adjusted accordingly. Single payer is long gone. A meaningful, robust public option seems almost equally as far from achievable. The various compromises being discussed won’t get the job done, but they will be better than the current scenario, in most likelihood.

There’s no reason Democrats need have been so weak this year.  But they are. And it has horrible consequences, both in terms of the quality of health care reform that is achievable and the chances for future growth of the Democratic majority.

Now is a time for activists online to recognize that what we thought we bought in 2008 — and in the elections of 2004 and 2006 — was not what was advertised. A sixty seat majority does not equal sixty votes. The possession of large political mandates for change requires agents who are willing to strategically and forcefully use accrued political capital to marginalize and disempower conservative elements of the Democratic Party. These things are possible, but they are not possible with the selection of officials we have currently placed in office. Expectations must be adapted and so too must the strategies and tactics we use to try to influence these officials.

What does this mean for where we are today? Well, as I said the other day, it means we have to find new ways to be effective at moving the positive progressive agenda.  I’m not certain that becoming obstructionist or trying to tear down the watered-down legislation that is moving is a good move, as it is not likely to garner support from progressives in Congress. Instead, I think campaigns like the Progressive Bloc strategy orchestrated by Jane Hamsher and Chris Bowers to try to hold a line in the sand on the public option is best. It involved elected officials from the left becoming more strategic, while simultaneously building close relationships between politicians and the activist base. Perhaps that means selecting a number of specific policy comments of substantially smaller grade than the public option and seeking to hold lines there, as Stupak and Nelson have done on rolling back choice rights. The value of this method is that it involves slowly helping to redefine the political landscape within which we are operating.

It’s not news to say that the large majorities in Congress and control of the White House are not the promised land progressives hoped for.  There’s certainly a lot of desire to throw up our hands now and say, “Screw these Democrats.” But that won’t help this country. Finding ways to continue to gradually build strength, build relationships, and build playbooks for effective advocacy strategy, on the other hand, allows us to change the reality we’re working in. Keeping hope after the year we have seen is hard, unto fundamentally challenging the ability for dedicated progressives to have any faith in Democratic elected officials. But the consequence of not continuing to work for real, progressive policy change is too dire to drop our hands. In the words of Al Gore, our disappointment must be overcome by our love of country.

Sirota on Bernanke

David Sirota has a very good post on the interesting coalition of votes that is emerging against the re-confirmation of Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve Chairman on the Senate Banking Committee. He thinks Chairman Chris Dodd “shouldn’t be impossibly movable to “no,” but probably is,” citing Dodd’s historic ties to the banking and finance industry when it comes to fundraising.

It’s very hard to properly capture Dodd’s place on the Wall St vs Main St spectrum. While he’s from Connecticut and has clearly had close ties to banking when it comes to campaign support, he also was the strongest opponent of the Bankruptcy Bill in the Senate and created the Family and Medical Leave Act, the most important piece of social policy since LBJ. Many people presume that because he is from Connecticut and on this committee,  he must be in the pocket of the finance industry. But it just doesn’t stand up. Dodd has shown an incredible ability to take money from this industry and still vote his conscience and author progressive legislation.

I don’t know that his recent legislation on credit cards, debit cards, and housing is so easy to pigeonhole as coming from electoral vulnerability as Sirota says it is. It certainly is an easy story to tell. But it has never struck me as true, given what I know about Chris Dodd and his voting history on these issues.

Feeling Things Out

I think there’s a problem with the progressive online movement today. We came into existence under a bad Republican president and a strong Republican majority in Congress. The Democratic Party was in electoral decline. No Democratic message was effectively resonating in the face of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, deregulation of markets, and a massive housing bubble that would later crush the American economy.

In an environment with very little oxygen, the best ideas began to flourish through the netroots.

People supported proud Democrats who didn’t shy from their principles when attacked from the right. Candidates ran as fighting Dems. The blogs truth-squaded the media and organizations like Media Matters, ThinkProgress, Democracy for America, True Majority, and Credo Action became key points of power for the left to influence politics and policy.

Additionally, elected Democrats had incentive for being strong advocates against the policies of the Bush/Cheney Republican Party. Strong, principled stands were rewarded. No one — with the possible exception of Joe Lieberman — was looking to get into bed with the GOP. There was a real space for activists in the progressive base to find timely partnerships with politicians who would be there advocates.

These forces combined to help give Democrats huge electoral victories in 2006 and 2008, including control of the White House and historic margins in both the House and the Senate.

That’s when the trouble started.

With a Democrat in the Oval Office and Democrats running the legislative agenda, the online progressive movement, which came into being precisely because our representatives lacked power, now had the people we’ve worked with over the last 8 years in control. Instead of being opponents, groups and individuals are forced to be proponents. But there’s something about this which hasn’t been a good fit: namely, imperfection of the people we put into office.

If Bush and the Republicans offered a bad bill on domestic surveillance, the response was easy. Oppose it. If it’s made marginally better, the response was easy: don’t give in, keep opposing it.

But now the tables have been turned. Legislation that doesn’t look so good is being offered by Democrats. Progressive groups can’t easily come out against things on whole, so there’s a focus on making small parts of legislation better. But even with these efforts, the Congress and the White House seem fundamentally inclined for less progressive legislation and caving to the requests from a few conservative Democrats. In essentially no cases are conservaDems being bullied to make room for more progressive legislation.

Groups, bloggers, unions, everyone it seems is having a hard time figuring out how to react. Do you put intense pressure unto opposition on key legislative initiatives? Do you only fund challenger candidates? Where is the right balance at a time when opposition to the President’s agenda is not a label anyone seems content to wear with pride?

My take is that this first year under Obama is part of the learning curve. There must be space for progressive groups, bloggers, and activists to stand by their principles, regardless of who is in office. There must be a way to effectively pressure those in power, regardless of their party. And there must be a balance that allows pressure campaigns on the ruling Democrats to be effective while simultaneously ensuring that the GOP doesn’t spend the next two to four cycles sopping up Democratic seats in government.

I don’t know what this sort of activism looks like. Experimentation must take place and risks must be taken. And in reality, while the hostile environment of the ascendant Republican Party from 2000-2008 was a natural environment for progressive activism to emerge, so to is the current environment a hostile one that must also breed a new wave of effective progressive activism.