Steadfast

Hunter brings the shrill:

Thank goodness we’ve kept our powder dry, that’s all I’ve got to say. Thank goodness we didn’t make a big deal over warrantless wiretapping, corporate immunity, the politicization of the Department of Justice, the Blackwater murders, torture, extraordinary rendition, fraudulent rewriting of scientific reports, or blanket false public statements in an effort to sell the nation on a ruinous war — all so we could store up enough political capital for this moment. Thank goodness we didn’t sully ourselves with indictments or investigations; thank goodness we’ve kept the camaraderie of the Senate intact and not flown off, willy-nilly, and gotten angry with Senators who claim we are instituting “Death Panels” to weed out veterans and the elderly, or pushed too hard when members of the past administration flatly denied the ability of the Congress to so much as require their presence for questioning. Thank goodness we have not pressed to hard on whether Abu Ghraib abuses resulted from explicit direction of the highest figures in the Department of Defense, and that when we found out the waterboarding of a prisoner in order to come up with supposed “links” between Iraq and Al Qaeda was suggested specifically by the office of the Vice President, we knew well enough to let bygones be bygones, because we knew we would not want to expend our political capital on such trivial matters, when we were about to take on one of the most urgent domestic issues facing the nation.

Now, if we play our cards right, and with the help of our 60-seat Senate majority, we can boldly reinvigorate the collapsed American healthcare system by passing a “reform” bill that mandates everyone in America purchase underregulated products of record-profitable insurance companies that have proven unable to provide basic services to millions of Americans or even perform competent administration of their own products, but which provides only token efforts at reining in the worst of the worst abuses of the public by those companies. We need not provide any measure of “socialized” insurance, as most of the rest of the civilized world does. And we need not particularly worry about the poor and uninsured, because this is a recession, and it wouldn’t be cost effective.

I think we should count ourselves lucky that the Democrats have sat motionless with their thumbs up their asses for the last decade in order to steadfastly prepare themselves for this day.

As Hunter goes on to point out, there is still value in Democrats keeping the powder dry even longer. Obama’s political capital, after all, could be used by another incredibly important (but yet to be decided) issue down the line. Granted, it won’t be comprehensive immigration reform, ending the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, putting through public financing for all federal elections or  universal access to high-speed internet connections…but it will certainly be big.

It’s situations like this one that make me profoundly question my long term commitment to staying in politics. If we can’t get our party to act with conviction in a fight like healthcare, what  can we ever expect them to do correctly?

Missing Leadership

John Aravosis at AmericaBlog raises a point that nails home something I’ve been thinking a lot lately – that the White House is failing to provide the leadership necessary to ensure a good piece of healthcare reform legislation passes both chambers of Congress.

The president still doesn’t realize that he’s now the president. He apparently thinks, according to White House officials, that he has no role in influencing the public debate on health care reform. It’s all Congress. This is the same argument the White House is using to justify its inaction on Obama’s gay rights promises – it’s Congress’ domain, not his.

Privately, White House aides have communicated to the House leadership that the onus on changing minds about the public plan is on Congress, not on the president. [Quoting a Marc Ambinder post]

Why is that? Why is the onus on Congress to change the public’s mind on health care reform when we’re doing health care reform because it was Obama’s top priority for his entire presidency? The president has the bully pulpit, not Congress. Since when does the president abdicate responsibility on leading the nation towards specific policy goals? We are now seeing a trend whereby this White House refuses to take a position, refuses to take the lead, on issue after issue that during the campaign the president claimed he would fiercely advocate. The White House has decided that it’s not worth sticking the president’s neck out, using his political capital, on the number one priority of his entire presidency. (We saw some of this already yesterday.) That should give everyone pause.

It’s hard to overstate how dangerous this line of behavior is for the chances of healthcare reform, let alone the longer term success of the Obama administration. Healthcare was and is the paramount issue of Barack Obama’s presidency. He campaigned on it, Democrats in Congress campaigned on it, and since the election this first year in office has been described, rightly or wrongly, as “the moment” for healthcare reform.

It is an utter failure of leadership that Obama and his staff think he can avoid using political capital in this fight. There has been plenty said about Obama’s falling poll numbers. What does the White House think political capital is made of? What sort of shelf life do they expect their massive electoral mandate of November 2008 has, particularly after Wall Street bailouts and failures in energy and healthcare legislation?

Most of all, how can Obama remain neutral on “changing minds about the public plan”? This is the central piece of healthcare reform that he himself introduced to the national debate during the presidential campaign. It would not have prominence without his insistence on it. And now, as its fate hangs in the balance, he is washing his hands of responsibility for getting it through, while his advisers savage the left for thinking it’s a good idea?

We are where we are today in the healthcare fight because there has been an absolute lack of leadership coming from the White House. Ambinder’s line, quoted above, shows the reason. The White House thinks it is solely up to Congress to pass legislation that does what the President has said is important for years.  Obama, Rahm, et alia just don’t think the President’s job is to lead on his signature issue.

The cost of this leadership vacuum could likely be the public option, though it’s certainly possible that it will lead to there being no healthcare reform legislation this year at all. For while getting 60 votes in the Senate has been the most critical hurdle for politicians and commentators to obsess about in Washington DC, there also need to be 218 votes in the House. Right now something with a public option cannot pass the Senate and something without one cannot pass the House. One way or the other, the White House is going to have to put its foot down and force Democrats in one chamber to accept something they currently do not want. The question will be, does Obama want to fight 10 conservative Democratic votes in the Senate or 100 progressive votes in House for their votes. And which group is most likely to budge under the pressure of an as-of-now popular Democratic president?

If I were a betting man, I would wager that Obama and Rahm will put pressure on House progressives to drop their insistence on the public option and will, through threats and moral pleading, get the House to accept significantly worse legislation than all three House committees have already created. But I hope that I am wrong.

Alive in Afghanistan

Just in time for tomorrow’s presidential election in Afghanistan, Brian Conley and friends have launched Alive in Afghanistan, a site that allows distributed reporting of incidents in the political process such as problems voting, illegal campaigning, vote tampering, and threats of violence. They collect data via SMS, email, and the web.

It’s a great project built on incredible technology and and the firm belief in transparency as a means of strengthening the civic process.

O’Reilly To Hit Netroots Nation Tonight

So sayeth his Twitter feed.

Of course, O’Reilly has tried to demonize Netroots Nation before. Back in 2007, when it was still called Yearly Kos and there was to be a Democratic presidential candidates forum at the event, BillO went on a weeklong campaign against Daily Kos and the convention. It was effectively put to a stop when Chris Dodd went on The O’Reilly Factor and whipped O’Reilly’s ass on the issue.

Losing Blue Dogs

Digby:

Charlie Cook just said something very profound (which is unusual.) Chris Matthews asked whether or not the Democrats would lose the House next year and he said he didn’t think so, but that they might lose 20 seats. And then he said this:

But arguably the people they would lose would be the Blue Dogs who aren’t voting with [the president] anyway.

I would love to hear anyone tell me why I shouldn’t be cheering for that outcome.

Cook said it would “reflect on” the president, but from my perspective it would reflect well on him. And if it happens because he rammed through meaningful health care reform instead of some watered down bucket of warm spit and the administration managed to get unemployment down, I think he will very likely have Morning in America in 2012.

The strength of a caucus is determined more by discipline than margin. By any reasonably measure, Blue Dog Democrats are defined primarily by their willingness to disrupt party discipline for their own self-interest.

There are two ways it will be possible for the Democratic leadership, particularly President Obama, to overcome Blue Dog disloyalty: (1) Expand the Democratic majority in the House with more reliable Democratic votes to the point of making the 52 Blue Dogs unable to swing the outcome on votes; or, (2) Lose 20 or so Blue Dogs at midterms to reduce the power of the caucus. While generally unified, Blue Dogs don’t have total caucus discipline on all issues and reducing their size by 40% would reduce their efficacy, even if they still maintained the ability to swing votes to the Republican position.

More to the point, the Blue Dogs in the House and a handful of conservative Democrats in the Senate have been the primary obstacles to reform during the Obama administration. Obama’s problem hasn’t been Republicans – it’s been conservative Democrats who seem to feel no vulnerability to being branded as obstructionists to the change their constituents voted for in 2008. Reducing their influence within the Democratic Party through electoral loses is just fine by me…and I agree with Digby that this outcome should be driven by forcing them to support meaningful healthcare reform.

What Level of Change Is Good Enough?

Over at Open Left, Chris Bowers lays out the system through which progressive Democrats in Congress are being squeezed by Democratic elites out of support for the public option in healthcare reform. Bowers’ understanding of the forces at play is about as comprehensive as any written analysis of legislative wrangling I’ve seen on this issue. Sadly, the path we are headed on doesn’t seem to favor the progressive block holding together and thus the public option and a high-quality piece of reform legislation does not seem very likely.

I was at Netroots Nation this past week (hence the lack of posting). On Thursday night President Bill Clinton spoke to the gathering. One of his strongest points was that change takes time; he views progress in government policies and legislation as the work of decades and does not think using political power to expedite the process or help more people sooner is advisable. As such, he advocated that the progressive online community stop criticizing Obama and Democrats for their work on healthcare reform, even if it ends up not being exactly what we’d like to see. Clinton urged the outright celebration of anything being passed, regardless of its content. This sort of attitude, Clinton proposed, would enable Obama to retain political strength and help Democrats electorally, thereby ensuring the continued opportunity to achieve more meaningful reform.

I’ve had many conversations with political friends – operatives, activists, and bloggers – that have included defenses of doing something regardless of its quality. The argument often goes, “Well what if we can’t get the public option or strong affordability or employer responsibility, but we can get a piece of legislation that will cover 15 or 20 million more Americans than today. Can we not help those people because the bill wasn’t what we really wanted?” This is, at best, an only marginally persuasive argument. The reason we may not be able to do more is a political one – we lack the votes to achieve everything liberal Democrats want to achieve. And passing reform now is likely to preclude us from pursuing healthcare reform again in the Obama administration. After all, he is going to take anything that passes, call it “landmark reform” and not touch the issue again — how could he after running for reelection on his “landmark reform” of healthcare? Thus, further reform of healthcare will be forestalled for at least another eight years when we can only hope the political climate will be better suited for liberal reforms.

What happens next in this fight is going to be a question of what the President and leaders of the Democratic Party believe. Are they willing to lead now to get the best possible reform today and not delay meaningful change for decades? Or will the President’s support for the public option, which has really become a stand-in for real progressive reform and not a solitary issue, be translated into fighting for it, as David Sirota asks on Twitter? These are questions that connect the political landscape to policy beliefs about what is best for the country. At a certain level, Obama must answer Clinton’s challenge. Will he lead to make sure change happens now, or will he pass the buck to future presidents and hope that the situation becomes so dire that the bunk Sarah Palin and Chuck Grassley spit out about death panels has no effect on the media nor the public.

Maybe reform will be easier in another fifteen or twenty years. Maybe there will be something marginally better than our current system, which may add some percentage of the uninsured to the rolls of the insured. But whatever reform comes out is almost certainly going to be a huge boon to the bottom lines of the health insurance industry, thereby making change down the line even less likely. Leadership may be hard, but the cost of not pursuing the most aggressive path for reform now is even more frightening. Hopefully complacency will not win out and what is possible is redefined through leadership, as opposed to being determinative of where leadership dare not go.

Righteous Anger

Latoya Peterson of Jezebel gives us some real, righteous anger at the direction teabaggers are taking the healthcare debate in this country.

The question isn’t health care or freedom! Where the fuck are you getting this shit from? The question is health care or more dead people!

…

No one here is actually interested in having a conversation about health care. They just want to scream. And this is unfortunate because instead of having an actual conversation about what this health care bill will actually provide (which is still murky) and how it will be paid (murkier still) or what is actually in this 1,018 page document, we’re still on a bunch of bullshit about socialism.

I have been wondering what the teabagger set who are going to congressional town hall events, grabbing mics and shouting their representatives down think is happening with healthcare reform. More to the point, I wonder what they think has happened since January 21st, 2009 and today that has caused them to believe the Constitution has been destroyed and now things have to change. Because, frankly, there hasn’t been a damned thing that has happened yet in this administration – certainly not anything pertaining to the Constitution. And certainly not yet with healthcare.

Why does the idea of free health insurance scare them? Likely because this is an outlet for tribal rage. The radical Republican base simply cannot handle the fact that they lost and now a Democrat (let alone an African-American with a foreign-sounding name) is President. Add in that the teabagger cohort is one that has tended to blindly support a legislative agenda that benefits corporations first and foremost and the confusion around the healthcare bill is even more bizarre. None of their “concerns”, from death panels to rationed care, are real. Most industry supports major reform. And the health insurance industry, by the looks of things, is going to profit remarkably from any reform legislation. So in the face of a legislative course of action that is going to greatly benefit the people they support (the wealthy and corporations), the opposition lacks coherence beyond tribal hatred for anything Democratic. As a result, you end up in situations where the people protesting the loudest are often the ones that stand to benefit the most from reform, a reality that is painfully depressing in its assessment of the state of affairs in American political discourse and dynamics.

Update:

Hunter at Daily Kos gets at a similar point that I’m trying to make here, citing a quote from today’s NY Times.

Standing two feet from the senator, Craig Anthony Miller, 59, shouted into his face, “You are trampling on our Constitution!”

You might ask yourself why, of all possibilities, reforming America’s healthcare system is the thing that “tramples on the Constitution” or “leaves the existence of the Republic at risk.” You might ask this, because you’re probably not insane. But again, this matches what we’ve been seeing in every “deather” protest so far –people angrily denouncing government intervention and “socialized medicine” — but they all love Medicare. They don’t want government to supposedly decide who’s too expensive to keep alive, with visions of “death panels” and the like — but insurance companies are doing that now, all the time, and there’s nary a peep about that. The opposition, in other words, doesn’t know the first damn thing about the thing they’re supposedly protesting.

The Palin Way: Making Things Up

This hardly counts as news, at least not to anyone who paid attention to Sarah Palin’s antics as Governor of Alaska and even less so for those of us who watched her as John McCain’s running mate, but Sarah Palin has a remarkable tendency to just make shit up. Palin posted a much-touted statement on Facebook, her first foray into the public spotlight since quitting as Alaska’s Governor.

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Of course that would be evil. So evil that it would only exist in some sort of work of dystopian fiction or a horror scifi flick. It has zero basis in, you know, reality.

I think it’s worthwhile to post a rebuttal to such a blatantly false and absurd statement, simply because the person issuing the rebuttal in this case is the ultra-conservative Senator from Georgia, Johnny Isakson. Isakson smacks down Palin’s fear-mongering in an interview with Ezra Klein:

How did this become a question of euthanasia?

I have no idea. I understand — and you have to check this out — I just had a phone call where someone said Sarah Palin’s web site had talked about the House bill having death panels on it where people would be euthanized. How someone could take an end of life directive or a living will as that is nuts. You’re putting the authority in the individual rather than the government. I don’t know how that got so mixed up.

You’re saying that this is not a question of government. It’s for individuals.

It empowers you to be able to make decisions at a difficult time rather than having the government making them for you.

I think the answer of how this got so mixed up is that Sarah Palin, once again, threw out facts in an effort to drive her divisive brand of Us-vs-Them politics straight onto the fairway of the healthcare debate. She has a stated desire to be a bigger player in national politics and her strategy seems to be to rush towards the Glenn Beck-Michelle Bachmann segment of the Republican base and play towards their worst fears. How long before Palin starts posting her objections to Obama’s efforts to institute one world currency or a North American superhighway? When will Palin post a straight-to-camera plea for Americans to just say no to the Democrats’ plan to make all fire arms and purity balls illegal?

Nothing coming from the Palin-Beck-Bachmann wing of the Republican Party should be taken as grounded in any semblance of reality other than the one fabricated within the confines of their delusional sense of persecution. Comments like this about fake “death panels” should immediately preclude Palin from ever being given a platform to speak to the country again. Sadly, I think this is just the first of what will be many efforts to rile up her supporters in the lead-up to a run for the Oval Office.

Update:

I think Josh Marshall is right here:

I don’t think the Democrats have lost the message war because I see no evidence that even close to a majority of Americans believe completely preposterous things like this. But journalists have no capacity to deal with this stuff. In any sane civic discourse Sarah Palin’s comments about ‘death panels’ would have permanently written her out of any public debate about anything. But even though very few people actually believe this stuff, the entire debate gets knocked off the rails by this sort of freak show which allows the organized interests who want to prevent reform to gain the upper hand.

This is why the divisive work of the radical right, particularly through astroturfing that brings out high levels Palin/Beck craziness to public light, is so effective. That the people speaking out are often times lower-income people who stand to benefit the most from massive healthcare reform is only a sad coincidence that falls in line with the work of the Republican Party for years. While the low wage workers support conservative policies, the Republican corporate elite is the cohort that actually stands to benefit. Oh well, it shows that at least for the GOP elite, Palin, Beck, and Bachmann are useful idiots.