Category: Democrats

Loyalty vs. Loyal Opposition

When an official in the White House says, “It’s “stunning that he would ignore the wishes not just of his president, but of his constituents and the country,” you know someone has fundamentally confused the distinction between loyalty and loyal opposition.

Glenn Greenwald states the obvious while discussing this somewhat perverse and anti-democratic quote from an anonymous administration official regarding Lloyd Doggett’s views on the Waxman-Markey energy bill: “The duty of Congress is not to obey the wishes of the President.”

Congress has their own priorities as a co-equal branch of government. Individual members have a constitutionally-mandated responsibility to stand up for those priorities. How a Congressman chooses to do so may vary based on what they think their constituents want or what is best for the country, but there is zero obligation that a legislator do something  because of the wishes of the President. It just doesn’t work that way.

Of course, both Greenwald and Jane Hamsher point out that this sort of loyalty oath is only being applied to progressives in the House, not Blue Dogs. Likewise it is only being applied to progressives when the White House is trying to push through more moderate legislation. The tactic doesn’t seem to be applicable when the opposition to the President is regarding progressive legislation and coming from conservative Democrats.

The fundamental problem with the protestations of this anonymous White House official isn’t so much that this person seems to think that we are living in some sort of autocracy, with an egotistical but hypersensitive dictator running things – someone who is so fundamentally demanding of loyalty that even publicly debating taking a position other than his own causes him fits. What’s more troubling is that this attitude is being specifically targeted at the progressive wing of the Democratic party that first created the situation that enabled strong majorities of Democratic and now represents the place where the majority of Americans stand on most policy issues. It’s an attitude that is used to marginalize the real voices for change and replacing them with more of the same. The civics are wrong. The politics are wrong. And it has to stop.

Exactly

Congesswoman Lynn Woolsey and liberals in the House seem to get it on healthcare reform. Roll Call reports:

House liberals are warning the Senate, Democratic leaders and President Barack Obama that a government-run insurance option must be included in any health reform bill, or else the powerful bloc will vote it down.

“Usually, we work behind the scenes to strengthen legislation,” said Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), co-chairwoman of the 80-member Congressional Progressive Caucus. “We’re careful not to take on our party’s leadership, or President Obama.

“This time, however, is different.”

Woolsey made it clear that she and many of her colleagues will vote to kill a health care plan if it leaves patients at the mercy of private health insurance companies.

“No one in this building wants health care reform as much as we do. However, if reform legislation comes to the floor, and it does not include a real and robust public option that lives up to our criteria, then we will fight it with everything that we have,” she said.

Woolsey was speaking at an event with the Progressive Caucus, Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. This bloc could ensure that either we get a public health insurance option or we don’t get anything until there’s the political will in the White House and the Senate to fight for it. This strikes me as the right course of action.

Hindsight & Political Physics

The New York Times profile of Senator Max Baucus and his role leading the Finance Committee towards a healthcare reform bill contains an infuriating nugget of strategic hindsight.

He conceded that it was a mistake to rule out a fully government-run health system, or a “single-payer plan,” not because he supports it but because doing so alienated a large, vocal constituency and left Mr. Obama’s proposal of a public health plan to compete with private insurers as the most liberal position.

God God, man!  It’s like Baucus had never heard of physics before he fell down.

Seriously, the lack of strategic understanding by Democratic elected officials is mind-boggling. That Baucus is only now realizing the strategic value of keeping a single-payer system on the table from Day One, even only as a means to provide political space for something like a political option, is simply stunning. Of course Baucus, and likely the whole country, willpay for his strategic error as the public health insurance option doesn’t survive the Finance Committee’s draft process. After all, while Baucus may be making noises about not being able to keep the Obama-backed public health insurance option on the table because of this error in strategy, he is also conceding it as a means of winning the support of at least one Republican on his committee. Not because he needs the vote to pass legislation out of the Finance Committee, but because he thinks bipartisanship is more important than providing working Americans with universal health care.

Baucus’s statement about the strategic error he made (though in fairness this is a mistake that every Democrat in the Senate save Bernie Sanders has made, as well as most members of the House caucus and Presidnet Obama) is a rare admission by a senior Democrat that there is political value in the party maintaining strong liberal positions. The simple fact is that if the Democrats want to achieve their moderate goals for quasi-liberal, pro-business policy, they can’t have quasi-liberal policies as the left flank. This leaves them coming to the table with only one direction to move: away from their goals and towards the Republican position. This amounts to making concessions before you even start negotiating, by the simple fact that you have no margin for concession short of not getting what you want.

A strong liberal flank of the Democratic Party enables more moderate, but still Democratic, policies to be enacted. Even if the left exists to provide political space for compromises towards the more moderate, it would still enable more Democratic legislation to pass with fewer concessions to Republican positions. That, in itself, would amount to moving the country to the left, even without seeing hardline progressive legislation coming through.

Everything we know about Democratic elected officials is that they are ready to concede their values if its politically and legislatively expedient. There needs to be space for this behavior to take place without hurting actual Democratic policy efforts. The best way to create this space is by fostering the Democratic left and treating it as a serious policy option, worthy of consideration. In this case, having a vibrant discussion of a single-payer healthcare system in the Finance and HELP committees of the Senate could have facilitated moving conservative Democrats and even some moderate Republicans to support a public health insurance option. Single-payer would have created the space for the public option. It would have given Obama, Kennedy, and Dodd a left flank to lean into and eventually give up, while making the public option appear what it truly is: a moderate position that is widely appealing to the American public.

The one question that merits consideration in the discussion of how single-payer could have been used to facilitate the public option becoming law is why would progressive activists allow themselves to work tirelessly for a policy that will only, in the end, be conceded? I say for the same reason we work tirelessly to support Democratic candidates, largely regardless of their specific policy positions. It’s the only best way to get anything close to progressive policies enacted into law.

Creating space on the left for Democrats to work could have enabled something great on healthcare reform. It’s nice to see Baucus recognize the error of his ways (after it’s likely cost us the public health insurance option), but how will this mistake inform his future legislative strategies? Will he embrace the role of strong liberal policy pushes in the future, in recognition of how they enable other Democratic legislation to pass? Or will he just move along and keep looking for that bipartisan sweet spot that makes him sleep comfortably at night, regardless of how policy concessions made before he even begins negotiation hurt working Americans?

Healthcare Failure & Accountability

Per Joe Sudbay, Paul Krugman’s column hitting conservative Democrats for failing to advance a massively popular policy initiative that the public voted for this past election, it’s deeply troubling that a handful of Democratic senators are the ones standing in the way of needed reform. Sudbay writes, “The American people actually expect elected officials to deliver on campaign promises.” But I think it’s something beyond this.

Promises were made and voters decided accordingly, but this is less about the specific voters in states like Nebraska, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Montana (to name a few) whose conservative Democratic senators are causing problems with the positive agenda in the Senate, but more about the agenda promised from the White House downward. Implicit in the agenda Obama put forward during the election was that Democrats would support his policy plan. Voters were told that if they supported Obama, change would come. Obama has made some clear statements about what he wants to see in healthcare reform, namely, a public health insurance option. It was part of his policy plan on the campaign and received major attention from voters during both the primary and the general election. He still supports it. So where are the Democrats? Where do the Landrieus, Liebermans, Baucuses, and Hagans of the world get the license to steal the change the people voted for in Barack Obama from them?

What seems fundamental is that the conservative Democrats of the Senate do not feel accountable to either the public or the President. How they got to that point can be debated. But I find it hard to imagine a scenario where these politicians escape the ire of the electorate for standing in the way of the change they were promised on the national campaign trail. Because I highly doubt that the voting public will hold President Obama at fault for the actions of Hagan, Baucus, Landrieu, and Lieberman. Senators assuming otherwise are making a dangerous gamble and one that will actually hurt working families, and not just curren office holders.

Who’s Responsible?

Reading Peter Daou’s post at his new project, Consider This News, on the bipartisan repudiation of the left wing of American politics, I caught this line:

I challenge anyone to envision a President Barack Obama without the unrelenting defiance of the netroots during the Bush years.

While I personally agree 100% with Daou’s sentiment that the defiance of proud progressives in the netroots, especially in the period of 2004-2008, lead to the conditions that allowed Obama to win, I think there are many people – especially here in DC – that would disagree with it.  For example, I can imagine any number of campaign operatives I’ve worked with in professional politics who could recast that sentence as such:

I challenge anyone to envision a President Barack Obama without the unrelenting efforts to defeat Republican incumbents with centrist candidates by Chuck Schumer of the DSCC and Rahm Emanuel of the DCCC.

Do I agree with this statement? Certainly not as much as I agree with Daou’s postulation on the importance of the netroots, but it sort of makes clear that looking at politics in absolutes as if in a vacuum is very difficult.

More importantly, while Daou may well be able to issue his challenge, the fact that there would so readily be a cement block of Conventional Wisdom standing in the way of it being accepted proves his point that both Republicans and Democrats have worked efficiently to marginalize voices from the Democratic left in accepted political discourse. Were we in an environment where the massive contributions the online progressive community has made to electing Democrats — often regardless of where they fit on the Democratic political spectrum —  I would expect to see a far greater appreciation of the concerns and critiques of activists online. That appreciation simply doesn’t exist now and as a result the netroots is treated by Democratic politicians at best like a demanding ATM machine and at worst like a group of whack-jobs who should be marginalized to show your friends in DC how Serious you are.

Making Sense

Alan Grayson is probably the freshman Congressman who has most impressed me. The man works his ass off and takes his position seriously. He’s conducted some of the most grueling examinations of the administrators bailouts at Treasury and recipients of bailout money. Now, in an interview in Vanity Fair, Grayson is making sense on Iraq. He had previously made a statement to the New York Times about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that raised eyebrows:

“There is no need in the 21st century to do this, to make us safe. This is a 19th-century strategy being played out at great expense in both money and blood in the 21st century, in the wrong time at the wrong place.”

Vanity Fair started their interview on this subject.

Alan Grayson: The reason why I said what I said is because the fundamental goal of our endeavors in Iraq and Afghanistan is supposed to be to protect us. That’s why we call the Defense Department the Defense Department, because it’s supposed to defend America. And whatever the perceived threat may be, whether it’s al-Qaeda or the Taliban or otherwise, only by the most incredibly convoluted Bushian logic could you possibly get to the point where you conclude that as a result of that threat we should spend $100 billion a year and send over 100,000 of our young men and women abroad, 8,000 miles away, and that that is an effective way to accomplish that goal. It doesn’t make any sense.

Life does not consist of a Risk board game, where you try to occupy every space on the planet. There’s no other country that does this, there’s no other country that seeks to occupy foreign countries 8,000 miles from their own border, and believe that that somehow accomplishes anything useful. It doesn’t. If in fact it’s important to our national security to keep al-Qaeda or the Taliban under control, there are far more effective ways of accomplishing that goal, if that is in fact the goal, than to extend this kind of money and this kind of blood.

This is something that Democrats said when they were in the opposition repeatedly, and that truth hasn’t changed at all just because we elected a president. You can always find some kind of excuse to do what you want to do anyway, but I have to wonder why a new Democratic president wants to do something like this. This is a president who has recognized the immorality of torture, and I’m waiting for him to recognize the immorality of war and foreign occupation.

It’s clear that two things Grayson possess in spades is moral clarity and the courage of his convictions. These are bold words for a Congressman who’s part of a caucus that has consistently voted to continue to fund both wars. Grayson is seriously trying to move the Overton Window on both Iraq and Afghanistan. Even in this interview, though, you can see the journalist from Vanity Fair, Christopher Bateman, taking a confrontational position against Grayson, lobbying repeated pieces of the Beltway’s ever-evolving Conventional Wisdom on the whys and hows of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Grayson’s rebuttals to Bateman’s premises are truly powerful and worthy of a detailed reading.

Deep Thought

The Democratic agenda, including but not limited to nominations to key executive branch posts, is so dangerous and controversial that it takes 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate. By contrast, the Republican agenda under Bush and Cheney was so harmless and uncontroversial that a simple majority was enough for the Senate to approve any action.

Green Union Pressure Politics

This strikes me as the straightforward solution to the dilly-dallying of conservative Arkansas senators Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor on issues affecting working Americans. Arkansas has a  uniquely strong Green Party, bred as a byproduct of the Republican and Democratic Party machines divvying up political districts to avoid competitive elections. While there may not be a deep bench for labor to look to in Arkansas to primary Lincoln or Pryor, there is the Green Party.

Blanche Lincoln is up for reelection in 2010 and has been one of the most problematic senators in the Democratic caucus when it comes to the Employee Free Choice Act. To say that she is owned, in part or in full, by Wal-Mart would begin to get at the problems that arise when working Americans and Arkansans lobby her to support Free Choice. However there is little avenue for pressuring Senate Democrats, other than at the ballot box. While labor is having an easy time of exerting leftward pressure on Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania because of the deep pro-labor, liberal Democratic bench, there isn’t a similarly large bench in Arkansas. As a result, if labor is going to try to move Blanche Lincoln back to the side of working Americans by exerting political pressure, it will have to be by threatening to — and if necessary carrying out the threat to — put major resources by a Green Party candidate to run for Senate in the general election against Blanche Lincoln.

Lincoln is the archetype of how the labor movement has been undercut by Senate Democrats this year. If pols like Lincoln know that they will not face any consequences when they stab working Americans in the back, they will never change their behavior. Since Dems like Lincoln only understand threats to their tenure in office, the natural course for pressure for unions to pursue is a political challenge. In the case of Arkansas, it seems that the Green Party would offer the best possible opportunity to run a meaningful challenge to Lincoln on behalf of working Americans.

Agenda Management

Greg Sargent’s take on Arlen Specter’s Meet the Press denial that he had promised President Obama that he would be a “loyal Democrat” is a spot-on analysis of what Democrats need to take away from this first week with Arlen and how his behavior relates to their need to manage a successful agenda.

So Specter wants us to believe that this story is false — even though he and his office stayed quiet about it and didn’t dispute it for a full five days after it appeared. If Specter privately fibbed to Obama in vowing loyalty to him and the Dems, and is now publicly fibbing about having ever said this, it seems like something Dems might want to keep in mind about their newly-minted Senator.

Specter will be a useful member of the Democratic caucus insofar as he deems it politically expedient for him to be a “loyal Democrat,” regardless of promises to the President.  This obviously isn’t a problem limited to Specter, but what we also see from conservative Democrats like Lincoln, Landrieu, Ben Nelson, and a couple others. Managing these Senators will almost certainly determine how successful the Obama agenda is in the early going.

Personally I think these people should be put on a short leash and threatened electorally by the party institution if they stand in the way of the agenda the American public overwhelmingly voted to put in place last November. But I’m just a DFH…