Tribute in Light

tributeinlight

I took this photo three years ago on September 11th.  It’s of the Tribute in Light, a few blocks from Ground Zero. Despite the fact that the construction on structures to replace the World Trade Center will go on for years and years to come, the Tribute in Light has always been the most fitting memorial of the September 11th attacks, in my view.

Generals Denounce Cheney

In an op-ed in the Miami Herald General Charles C. Krulak, the former Commandant of the Marine Corps, and Joseph P. Hoar, the former Commander in Chief of the United States Central Command, repudiate former Vice President Dick Cheney and his anti-American stance on torture. It is, quite simply, powerful stuff:

[W]e never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas — and his scare tactics.

We have seen how ill-conceived policies that ignored military law on the treatment of enemy prisoners hindered our ability to defeat al Qaeda. We have seen American troops die at the hands of foreign fighters recruited with stories about tortured Muslim detainees at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. And yet Cheney and others who orchestrated America’s disastrous trip to “the dark side” continue to assert — against all evidence — that torture “worked” and that our country is better off for having gone there.

…

To argue that honorable conduct is only required against an honorable enemy degrades the Americans who must carry out the orders. As military professionals, we know that complex situational ethics cannot be applied during the stress of combat. The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality. Moral equivocation about abuse at the top of the chain of command travels through the ranks at warp speed.

Krulak and Hoar close with this hard truth: “Repudiating torture and other cruelty helps keep us from being sent on fools’ errands by bad intelligence. And in the end, that makes us all safer.”

It’s been clear throughout the tenure of the Bush/Cheney administration and in the early months of the Obama administration that the leadership of the US military has, by and large, been one of the biggest opponents to the torture regime instituted under Bush. Retired military leaders in many cases have made strong moral and practical arguments in public against torture.

Unfortunately we can only expect that Krulak and Hoar will be savaged on right-wing blogs for being unpatriotic and disagreeing with the words and deeds of a man who had five deferments during his generation’s war.

Absolute Bunk

There’s really no other way to describe this post from Chuck Todd of NBC.

*** Fixing the public option fetish: But the speech also will be a failure if progressives — Obama’s second audience tonight — are still obsessing over the public option a week from now. We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: Obama never made the public option the focus of his health-care ideas, in the primaries or in general election. In fact, he never uttered the words “public option” or “public plan” in his big campaign speeches on health care. But there is no doubt that the public option has fired up the left, and how he sells them near-universal coverage and lower costs — even if it means no public plan — could very well be the trickiest part of tonight’s speech. Indeed, that the White House allowed this to become the be-all, end-all on the left (“Public option or die!”) remains a mystery. On TODAY this morning, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that “there can be no reform without adequate choice and competition,” but didn’t say that choice and competition had to come from a public option.

First, I don’t know of anyone on the left who is campaigning for the public option in a “Public option or die!” context. There is no “die”, merely the desire by a very large number of House progressives to have health care legislation that includes a public health insurance option, something that the President spent seven paragraphs of his speech last night arguing in support of.

Second, Todd is clearly trying to set up a metric in which a week from now he can turn around and the President’s speech was a failure because progressives still want the legislation to include a public health insurance option. There are two things fundamentally wrong with this. To start, Obama never, ever said that the goal of the speech was to stop progressives from supporting the public option as a priority in the bill. To the contrary, the content of the speech clearly shows that he was doing no such thing. He spoke eloquently in support of a public option, though he stopped short of making it a required element.

But perhaps more importantly, it is not Todd’s job to score the process based on whether or not a a particular contingent of the Democratic Party continues to have a specific policy goal. This speech was not an argument against progressives nor was it an argument against the public option. It wasn’t even a plea by Obama to progressives to stop arguing passionately for the public option. Or at least, the speech I’ve watched and read twice wasn’t. Maybe Todd had a different “First Read Only” edition of it that was delivered directly from the floor of the House to Todd’s noggin.

Progressives are not standing in the way of change. Progressives are not blocking the President’s plan for health care. Conservative Democrats and pretty much all Republicans are. Is it possible that the progressive bloc in the House will decide that what is moving forward is unacceptable (eg for its lack of a public option) and as a result will oppose it? Of course. But that is not the scenario now. And, in fact, up to this point the press, the Senate, and the White House all seem to be acting with great certitude that the House is incapable of stopping whatever legislation comes out of the Senate, even if it does not have a public option.

Todd’s bizarre and offensive post does a number of things that no one has done before: cast progressives as key roadblocks to change, set the speech up as Obama’s moment to beat down progressive policy goals, and make clear Obama’s opposition to the public option. Nothing preceding the speech nor during the speech gives Todd any ground to stand on. He’s just making things up and, conveniently, every single bit of his fictional analysis is either a slur on progressives or something that can be used to undermine Obama’s political capital in coming days. What more do you need to know about Chuck Todd and his allegiances?

Krugman vs The Anti-Public Option Crowd

Paul Krugman has a must-read blog post pushing back on the self-described liberals, namely Joe and Ezra Klein,  who are criticizing the continued inclusion of the public option as an essential piece of healthcare reform. His entire post is important, but his conclusion is particularly apt in the relevance of supporting the public option as a mark for support for liberal political philosophies writ large.

Let me add a sort of larger point: aside from the essentially circular political arguments — centrist Democrats insisting that the public option must be dropped to get the votes of centrist Democrats — the argument against the public option boils down to the fact that it’s bad because it is, horrors, a government program. And sooner or later Democrats have to take a stand against Reaganism — against the presumption that if the government does it, it’s bad.

Indeed.

As Duncan Black pointed out yesterday, there is no chance “centrists” in American politics today would support the creation of Social Security, let alone public education or the US Postal Service.

The point is we’ve moved away from “there are just certain things government does well and should do” and over to “maybe government should do some stuff for the poor but that’s about it.” It’s a problem, both from a policy perspective, as there are certain things the government should do, and from a political perspective, as benefits-for-other-people never gets wide support.

Yet if we look around, there is no question that government is the best way to ensure a firm social safety net and communal services are efficiently delivered. To think otherwise is to ignore what has worked over the history of our country in favor of the very recent Republican dogma that reached its persuasive pinnacle from the mouth of Reagan.  It was then embraced by the Democratic Leadership Council and Democrats were told that in order to win, they had to sound like Republicans. This is a dynamic that the progressive blogosphere has been working against as a central narrative strain since its earliest days.

Opposing the public option is opposing the compromise that it represents – that in order to get something done, liberals had to surrender their pursuit of a Medicare for All-type system. More to the point, opposing the public option is tantamount to opposing the pursuit of what liberals believe in. That is a central point both Krugman and Black are making. It’s not just that the public health insurance option is a good idea from a policy standpoint, it is an idea that arises from a purely liberal political basis.

Now there may be political arguments against the public option. We don’t have the votes in the Senate. The administration won’t spend political capital to get these votes. There are risks to Democrats in red districts for supporting a government health insurance program. Et cetera. But these are temporary postulations that could easily be challenged and redefined, especially through principled leadership that showed a commitment to the efficacy of liberal ideas.

Looking forward to tonight’s speech by President Obama to a joint session of Congress, the question at hand is whether Obama will exert leadership in support of meaningful reform that includes the public option. I don’t know what he will say, but I hope he takes the largest microphone in the world and proudly stands up for both what he believes in and the intellectual history from which he comes.

Not To Be Mistaken for Leadership

Matt Yglesias has a sober post about the Baucus proposal for healthcare reform legislation. While much of the blogosphere has been furious about its timidity, Yglesias sees value in that it would move the ball forward and improve the healthcare system in the United States. He justifies this, in part, by saying that while Massachusetts and Switzerland aren’t ideal models we should use to shape reform policies, they are notably better than the healthcare system elsewhere in America.

Sure. Fine. Whatever. No one who has been has an active advocate for massive reform (be it single payer or a public option) has ever said that it wasn’t possible to put together some package of changes that would constitute an incremental improvement of the healthcare system in America. It’s not surprising that the Baucus proposal would reduce the number of uninsured America and do some things to provide a higher degree of regulation of the insurance industry than we currently have. But this is not to be mistaken for leadership and therein lies the real critique of Baucus as I see it.

The challenge wasn’t for Baucus to take his position as chair of the Senate Finance Committee and create legislation that produces marginal change. The challenge to Baucus, and in reality to all members of Congress and the President, was to produce legislation that essentially solves the crises of the healthcare system: coverage, affordability, access, and quality care.  The needs for reform exceeds the benefit of incremental change.

So when I look at the Baucus compromise, which I would concede is better than I thought it would be and has a likely price tag of a couple hundred billion more than DC conservatives want, I am stunned by the refusal of Baucus to attempt to solve the healthcare problem by showing, at minimum, a comparable level of leadership to Chris Dodd and the three House committee chairs. Yglesias is right that the Finance proposal would make the healthcare system in the US a bit better than it currently is. But we need leadership, not incrementalism. And right now it will take leadership to overcome incrementalism put forward by Baucus.

Update:

There’s also the question of while conceding that the Baucus plan is an incremental step, it may not be a step in the right direction.  That seems to be Chris Bowers’ take. Obviously there is danger in pushing a piece of legislation that lowers the quality of coverage, increases risk, and is a handout to insurance companies. Whether or not this incrementalism is positive or negative, it is clear that it is nonetheless not leadership.

Jane Hamsher Does Comedy

Or at least she does a pretty good job of conceding what every dyed-in-the-wool single payer activist who is unable to get behind a campaign for the public health insurance option would want her to concede. Naturally, sarcasm explodes the single payer assumptions and what’s left is clear: the public option is our last, best option for reform that keeps government involved in providing care on a non-profit basis.

The simple fact is that at this point in time the energy of the single payer community could help ensure that Congress passes legislation that includes a public health insurance option. Is it a bitter pill for single payer advocates to swallow? Sure it is, but it’s one driven by political reality to the extent that this community can still take action to determine the outcome of healthcare reform in 2009.

It’s hard for me to imagine that the single payer community would sit out any legislative fight that isn’t for a single payer solution. Imagine if the anti-war community who filled the streets in 2002 and early 2003 had, after Bush sent troops to Iraq, stopped advocating in support of legislation that would put a strict timeline for troop withdrawals as a requirement for interim funding (the positions of Ned Lamont in 2006 and the Feingold-Dodd language of spring 2007 come to mind). It is simply would have been absurd to presume that anti-war activists would not support anything short of instantaneous withdrawal, but that is the situation we are in now as single payer advocates threaten to walk away from progressive efforts to pass a public option.

Politics must take place in the world we are in and not the world we wish we were in. That is not to say that you should be “realistic” in the sense that most Beltway pundits and Conventional Wisdom worshippers take it. It is possible to change how the political community thinks about discourse and policy norms (again, see Ned Lamont in 2006 as a perfect example).  Change that can be achieved requires organizing, persuasion, and support; in fact, the work done by Jane Hamsher and Chris Bowers, among others, to hold the line on the public option is a definitive of example of how we can change the political reality to conform to the better world we wish to achieve. The extent to which single payer activists grasp this and choose to take part in the outcome of the public option will likely be determinative of the effort’s success.