Deficit (Commission) Politics

Matt Yglesias today is back to bashing Evan Bayh and his group of deficit fetishists, as Bayh continues to push for a Deficit Commission.

I like Matt's idea: Bayh should be forced to be chair of his own commission, since the commission is an exercise in ducking responsibility (Bayh doesn't mention what large spending cuts and/or tax increases he himself is in favor of). The important thing to remember is that Bayh's plan is a transparent joke. There's simply no way that a commission that cared only about deficits would avoid tax increases; there's no way that more than a handful of Congressional Republicans in the foreseeable future are going to vote for a package of tax increases and spending cuts similar to those that G.H.W. Bush and Clinton supported in 1989 and 1993; and there's no way that Democrats are going to enact such a commission-authored package with only a handful of GOP votes. (I can imagine a scenario in which Democrats decide, as they did in 1993, to pass a deficit-shrinking combination of tax increases on rich folks and some spending cuts, but they would have to do it alone, and it would have to come from the president, not a neutral commission).

Meanwhile, as far as the commission is concerned, I'll stick with my first answer: give Bayh a commission, set it up so that commission Republicans can block a deal, and make sure that Grover Norquist can choose the Republicans on the commission. So Bayh gets his p.r. hit, and there's no chance at all of anything damaging actually happening.

And I'll also repeat that Bayh is dead wrong when he claims that:

Some of my colleagues in Congress believe that efforts to reduce the deficit should go through the regular committee system, but the national debt has doubled this decade. The existing process has not only failed to respond to this problem, it has made it worse.

The regular committee system worked fine as long as Republicans and Democrats both wanted to reduce the deficit, as both parties did from 1989 through 2000. It worked poorly only when the majority party chose a dessert-only governing strategy in 2001-2006 (the large deficits now are a combination of structural deficits dating from 2001-2006 and short-term deficits run deliberately in reaction to the recession). There's absolutely no evidence that the regular committee process doesn't work.

Record Comeback!

I know it's Sunday, and a holiday weekend, and all, but I think it's still worth noting that....

Guess what? Obama's back over 50. Gallup today has the president at 51% approval. He wound up (for now) spending a bit over a week at either 49 or 48%. I believe this is technically a record for Gallup (fasted recovery over 50% after first time dropping below), but as I said last week such records are meaningless, because Gallup has never before done daily tracking.

It's worth noting that in the old days (before Obama), there have been plenty of periods longer than ten days that Gallup did no presidential polling. If it turns out that Obama sticks above 50% for a while, then had Gallup only polled on November 1 and December 1, they never would have caught the "under 50" period.

On the other hand, Gallup could easily have registered a sub-50 number as early as August; it's probably just luck that he never slid below that mark for a three-month stretch in which he repeatedly came close.

As always, the best place to go for approval ratings is the pollster.com trend line, and as always, use caution even with that number, because it will change as new data show up (and the approval number is pushed pretty hard by two daily tracks, the Gallup and Rassmussen polls).

You Cut Taxes, Remember?

Via Greg Sargent, an excellent example of exactly what I was talking about the other day: Democrats are strangely hesitent to claim credit for a large tax cut, which after all they actually did enact earlier this year as a major part of the stimulus.

The Democrats are taking delight, according to this Politico article, in pointing out the hypocrisy involved in GOP Members of Congress bragging about stimulus dollars back home, despite having opposed the bill that made those dollars possible. Fair enough. But the article, which describes the lines of attack each party is readying for the 2010 elections, says nothing at all about tax cuts. If the Dems want to play gotcha, it seems to me that Republican claims that the stimulus failed are far more vulnerable on the tax issue than on the spending side. After all, odds are that Republicans will run on a tax cut in 2010 -- and so it makes sense, doesn't it, to remind everyone at every possible point that Republicans unanimously (except for Maine) opposed a large tax cut in 2009, and then spent the rest of the year saying (in effect) that tax cuts don't work? Democratic tax cuts, that is?

The usual caveats -- spin only goes so far, etc. etc. But still, if they're spinning, well, they should get it right. If I were advising the Dems, I'd tell them that they want reporters primed to question Republicans about exactly that point all next year -- why should anyone believe that the promised GOP tax cut will work when the actual Democratic tax cut, according to Republicans, didn't work? Does anyone think that reporters are primed to ask that question right now?

Rejectionism 2

More now on the issue of the Republican strategy of opposing Obama's initiatives full-out, including the use of filibusters in the Senate over everything.

I agree with Kevin Drum that this is "something new under the sun." Well, at least it was new in 1993-1994, when the GOP used a more modest version of the strategy to attempt to derail Bill Clinton's presidency.

So, why is it back, and this time even more intense? (The number of filibusters is way up, especially against both judicial and executive branch nominees, but also against legislation). I think there are two basic reasons:

1. Republicans believe it worked in 1993-1994. Remember that politicians and political operatives don't, generally, think statistically -- they're more likely to just assume causal relationships between anything that happened in Time 1 and whatever happened in Time 2. Since Republicans perceive 1993-1994 as a triumph for them, they were extremely likely to emulate whatever they remember happening in those years...really, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they're wearing the same color socks. That means we're going to get a new version of the Contract with America next year (even though the 1994 version had pretty much nothing to do with the results of the 1994 elections), and it means taking Bob Dole's filibuster-basd rejectionist strategy up three or four notches.

2. The other side of it is different than the 1993 situation, but it pushes in the same direction. I suspect that if the GOP had 45 or 47 Senators that they might try to use their votes for bargaining. I think they would filibuster health care in any event (if the Dems had only 55 Senators, then they would have gone the reconciliation route from the beginning, but probably jettisoned lots of things they wanted, including the public option, long ago). With only 40, the Repubicans are pretty free to misbehave as much as they want, because there's no way that Washingtonians are going to blame things on a party that has a minority in the House, only 40 Senators, and has lost the White House. The Broders of the world will blame Obama if he gets "only" 59 of 60 Democrats (all the Dems but the increasingly right-leaning Lieberman, in other words); they aren't going to blame things on Republican obstructionism. Moreover, because the Democrats can do things without the Republicans, they are going to try to do that. Yes, Obama has made what I consider sincere attempts to include Republicans, but the incentives all run the other way.

Of course, there remains the question of whether rejectionism is a good strategy for the GOP, but I'll look at that later.

Rejectionism

Catching up: hope everyone is enjoying their holiday weekend...

I've already touched a bit on the filibuster discussion from earlier this week, but I have a few more points to hit. One of the interesting questions is the Bush record. Why was Bush able to pass so many things when Republicans never came close to having 60 Senators?

Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum argue that Bush succeeded because Dems just didn't try to obstruct everything on principle -- rejectionism is purely Republican strategy. Here's Matt:

A big part of the difference here is that the post-1994 Republican Party appears
to believe that, as a matter of political strategy, it makes sense to try to
deal demoralizing defeats to the Democrats.

And Kevin adds:

The point is that Dems, for better or worse, never tried to make every single
bill a destruction test of the opposing party's governance.

Ezra Klein, however, argues that the key to why Democrats didn't choose a rejectionist strategy was that Bush didn't push overly conservative policies. He lists the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, McCain-Feingold, Sarbanes-Oxley, the Iraq War and the 2001 war resolution, and the Medicare and bancruptcy bills, and concludes:

To make a bit of a heretical point, most of those cases prove that Bush's
domestic agenda was a capitulation to liberalism, not that Democrats were
spineless wimps...on the whole, Bush's domestic record is more a tale of
co-opting liberal ideas and adding money for corporations than it is a tale of
achieving longtime conservative ends.
By contrast, Barack Obama really is pursuing longtime progressive agenda items.

Well, yes and no. What I think really distinguishes Bush's domestic record is a policy of all dessert, all the time. Spend more and tax less! Invade lots of countries, but then pretend you're not at war -- well, pretend that being at war is limited to talking about suppporting the troops and singing God Bless America a lot of times. That's not conservative in any traditional sense, and Ezra is correct about that as far as it goes. But it's not liberal, either. It's just irresponsible.

And on the larger point, I think Matt and Kevin are really correct. Yes, Ezra is right that Obama is seeking to achieve longtime liberal goals, and liberals should appreciate it. But Matt and Kevin are correct: it doesn't matter. Republicans are choosing a rejectionist strategy because they think it will work, not because Obama is a radical liberal, just as Republicans chose a rejectionist strategy in 1993-1994. The most obvious case is that stimulus bill. Really, the key political fact of the year is that Republicans opposed -- filibustered -- a stimulus bill that contained a huge tax cut. Republicans don't believe (in the abstract) that such a bill will hurt the economy, but the rejectionist strategy means they have to argue that way, even if it doesn't make any sense at all.

Liberal Spin Fail

OK, once again I don't understand the Democrats. This time, it's on the recovery plan and their inept spin on it. And no, I'm not talking about the screw ups with the jobs reports. If I were advising Democrats, I'd tell them:

Stop whining about conservative spin that the stimulus plan didn't work, and start spinning back.

How?

By first and foremost remembering that the stimulus plan contained Massive Tax Cuts. Republicans certainly have every right to oppose the spending portions of the stimulus bill, and to ignore mainstream economists who say that it's working just fine, but I have no idea under what theory Republicans could possibly justify saying that a $288B tax cut won't help the economy, or that the $84B in tax cuts so far aren't working.

Of course, Republicans are free to make that claim anyway, but Democrats are nuts not to call them on it. Democrats should be pounding on it every day: Democrats cut people's taxes, and the Republicans seem to think it's a bad idea. Republicans apparently think only Republican tax cuts help the economy. If Republicans believe that the stimulus has failed, why don't Republicans think that tax cuts work? Why are Republicans for raising people's taxes?

(Frankly, I'd hit on the deficit thing, too. Republicans only care about the deficit -- Democrats care about people. That's why Democrats cut people's taxes. Republicans only seem to care Washington's budget; Democrats care about people, and that's why Democrats cut taxes, so that people could balance their own budgets. YMMV).

I'd love to see some polling about what has happened to taxes so far this year. The Dems seem to be doing a pretty good job of calling attention to the spending side of the stimulus, but not nearly as good a job on the other portions of the stimulus, which after all were probably put in there for political reasons as much as for economic reasons.

Democrats: you passed a major tax cut. Republicans opposed it, and claim it isn't working. Shouldn't that be a major talking point?

Filibusters Unconstitutional? No.

I'm more-or-less on a holiday blogging schedule beginning today, which stinks because everyone is all worked up about the filibuster, and I definitely have things to say about it.

I should remind everyone, by the way, about Greg Koger's series of posts at the Monkey Cage a while back. Meanwhile...

Kevin Drum is once again pushing his theory that the filibuster is unconstitutional. Anti-filibusterer Matt Yglesias points out that the Supremes wouldn't rule on it under the political question doctrine, but I don't think it matters anyway; I think the case is pretty weak. Here's his argument:

The fact that certain types of legislation (treaties, constitutional amendments, veto overrides, etc.) specifically require supermajority votes is evidence that the framers assumed that ordinary legislation should be passed by majority vote. Assumed it so strongly, in fact, that they never seriously considered the possibility that they had to spell it out.

The problem is that against that -- even if true -- is the basic Constitutional language:

Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings (Article 1, Section 5).

That sounds pretty absolute to me: Congress can set any rules it likes. Well, any rules it likes other than those (such as the supermajority requirements cited above) that are specifically mandated by the Constitution.

It seems pretty hard to argue a "they must have meant" against a "they said explicitly." I'm open to a more complex argument, but I'm really not seeing it.

(Does anyone know if Parliament had any supermajority rules that the Framers would have known about? I'm certainly not familiar with that history, and I suppose that it would shed a little light here, although I just can't see anything overriding what I read as a flat-out grant to Congress of control over its own rules).

Majorities 1

Ezra Klein takes to the filibuster wars again today. It's a good post; Ezra is an honest filibuster opponent (i.e. not a liberal apologist). He and Matt Yglesias have been carrying on this fight for a long time, and they make their case well.

I have mixed feelings about the 60 vote Senate, but I have stronger feelings about majoritarian democracy. I'll just note for now that the two are certainly not equivalent; there are lots and lots of anti-majoritarian institutions within the overall political system, so one can oppose the 60 vote Senate without supporting pure majoritarianism. So in this post, I'm mainly talking about majority rule, and not the filibuster per se. And I'm going to focus on just one issue within the general topic of majority rule. More, perhaps, later.

So: majorities. Ezra writes:

If the Democrats pass health-care reform, but an angry populace throws 12 Democratic senators and 35 Democratic congresspeople out of office, and then impeaches Barack Obama and replaces him with Haley Barbour, nothing will happen to health-care reform. At least, not if the remaining Democrats don't want anything to happen to health-care reform. That is, on some level, insane: A landslide election is not likely to result in anything close to a ratification of the public's will.

Here's the problem: there's just no reason for us to suppose that a "landslide election" such as the one that Ezra posits says much of anything about the "public's will."

In Ezra's scenario, people get upset about health care reform and toss out the incumbent party. That could happen. Much more likely, however, is that electoral landslides are effects of other forces, such as the economy. That's certainly what is endangering the Democrats right now. It's also what put Barack Obama in office in the first place. Well, that, and general discontent with Bush and the Republicans, which had to do with lots of things -- Iraq, Katrina, and then lots of secondary issues. Not to mention things that aren't even "issues." Some voted for Obama because, all issues to the side, they just liked him more than they liked John McCain. Or they didn't want Sarah Palin to be Vice President. Or they wanted to vote for an African American president. Or they were worried that McCain was too old.

That's the problem. No election is over one issue, and so it just isn't correct to say that the position of the majority party, the party that won the most recent election, is the "public's will."

And even if the public supported Democrats because they favored health care reform, that still doesn't get us much of anything. Remember, the Dems right now do have a filibuster-proof majority (if they want it) for the Senate Finance bill. Is the public's will for the HELP bill, but not Senate Finance? Of course not; the public doesn't pay anywhere close to enough attention to know the difference between those two.

Majoritarian democracy seems to Ezra and Matt as if it puts more power into the hands of the electorate, because it means that elections will yield results in a more straightforward cause & effect way. But it does that by creating the illusion that the individual voters are expressing their views on each and every issue by casting their votes. If that's not true -- and we know that it isn't -- then it's hard to make the case that empowering electoral majorities is really a better form of democracy.

Indeed, the best case for that sort of majority-rule system is based on a very thin idea of democracy. If we suppose that most people are almost entirely disengaged from politics, and capable of little more than a simple "things are good/things are bad" judgment, then two-party competitive elections are a solution not because they allow the electorate to transmit their views on issues, but because elections at least give the parties an incentive to keep people from getting upset. If you think that's all that democracy is capable of, then majoritarian institutions are a reasonable solution, although even then there are all sorts of complications (for example, it puts a huge amount of weight on the opinions of swing voters, who are the least engaged; also, and I think more seriously, people's reward/punish instincts can be pretty screwy, as seen by the people blaming Obama for the current recession).

Most arguments for democracy, however, include a stronger voice for ordinary people. What that requires, I think, is some separation of electoral results from policy outcomes -- not to exclude the public, but to encourage them to be engaged in additional ways. Elections are important, but they are a very blunt instrument. Asking them to do much more than register "things are good/things are bad" judgments is, I would argue, overly optimistic about the nature of elections. (I'm trying to streamline this, but I should point out that elections do lots of things beyond registering choices between candidates (or parties), and they do some of those things quite well; among other things, they are critical to the process of representation). That necessary separation, in the Madisonian system, requires something more than simple majoritarian institutions.

Again, that doesn't necessarily mean the 60 vote Senate. With or without the current filibuster, we have bicameralism; balance of powers between president, Congress, and courts; federalism; and a wide variety of other anti-majoritarian devices. It does mean, however, that it is deeply problematic to argue that the filibuster is unjustified simply because it thwarts majority rule.

Read Stuff, You Should

As always, I begin with something you don't need to read: in this case, it's Chris Good at the Atlantic telling us "What Giuliani 2012 Would Look Like." Since he didn't say "about like Giuliani 2008, except he probably won't even run for Senate, let alone the White House," I think it's fair to answer: "No It Wouldn't." Actually, a blanket don't read: any articles about pro-choice Republicans or pro-life Democrats running for president. Until they flip, and are certified by the relevant groups to be certified correct on the issue, there's no need to pay any attention to them.

Now, what's worth looking at in the last couple of weeks:

1. For liberals who are trying to figure out where to put their campaign dollars and/or energies, and are thinking purge, here are two must-reads: Mark Kleiman explains why it's foolish to purge Members of the House for voting against the health care bill on the floor, and Nick Beaudrot shows that it's not always obvious which Members are the ones worth gunning for.

2. Also on health care, if you don't understand the logic of the individual mandate, Ezra Klein can help. And, yes, he's an award-winning journalist and all, but I don't think David S. Bernstein is the funny one in the family. You may disagree.

3. A double dose of Fred Kaplan (yup, I'm a fan). First, the Berlin Wall; next, Obama and Afghanistan. On Berlin, I think Kaplan tells the story well, but I'd put more emphasis on what an excellent pragmatic solution the Wall was for both sides. No one wanted war over Berlin, and the Wall allowed history to proceed. Pre-Wall, there's nothing but crisis; after the Wall is up, Berlin -- and Europe in general -- recede from war, waiting until Truman, Kennan, Marshall, and the rest are proven correct in 1989.

4. Oh, those wacky Republicans. Here's Amanda Marcotte on the GOP's (lack of) female candidates. Speaking of purges, Charles Johnson has been the victim of one -- he's the conservative blogger who just couldn't swallow things like pretending that a 70K crowd was really over a million people. He's interviewed here. Oh, and instead of my babbling on about the Sage of Wasilla, all you really need is this item: a nice, neat, paragraph from Marc Ambinder about her prospects, quoted by Sullivan under the header: "Palin Could Win If She Were Someone Else." Perfect.

5. Gotta have some TNC.

6. Sorry, this one has to be blind...it's just too good to summarize, or even tease. Reporting by Lydia DePillis. Brilliant.

Enjoy!

At Least It's Not Term Limits

The House Republicans have a new idea: transparency in government, with five initiatives designed to make the House of Representatives more open.

Yes, that would be the same House Republicans that only three years ago were running the House in such a secretive and manipulative way that Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein, two of the most centrist political scientists one can imagine, wrote a sky-is-falling book about it.

My impression is that the Democrats have certainly been exercising the rights of the majority pretty forcefully, but nowhere near as brazenly as the DeLay GOP did during their twelve years in power. Nothing remotely like the Medicare prescription drug bill disgrace has happened since Pelosi became Speaker.

This stuff is pathetic. At least the Republicans could pretend to have a little humility about their own history, but of course the people they are talking to probably don't know or care about it, so why should they?

Can Any Bill Get 60?

I think Ed Kilgore is right that liberals are going to eventually decide whether a public option is more important than the rest of the bill (see Josh Marshall's post earlier today). But I don't understand what he's talking about here:

If, indeed, wavering Democrats who voted for the motion to proceed nonetheless conclude that they have no obligation to vote for cloture on passage of the bill unless their substantive demands are met, then we might as well start rediscussing the reconciliation strategy, because there is no version of health reform, now or at any point in recent history, that could command 60 votes in the Senate. To get to 60 on cloture (even granting that a Republican or two might still be lured across the line), it will be necessary to convert those who basically said "I hate this bill but I don't want to prevent the debate" to a position of "I hate this bill but I don't want to prevent a vote." And that will require not just moral suasion but pressure and maybe serious threats of reprisals from the Senate leadership, supplemented by a robust public campaign over the next few weeks to demonize the de facto 60-vote requirement, which much of the public knows nothing about.

First of all, it wouldn't be at all surprising if Lincoln, Landrieu, Nelson, and Lieberman turn out to be willing to be yes/no votes after all (yes on cloture, no on the bill), despite all their bluster now -- they may simply be using their position to extort whatever they can get.

But, more obviously, of course there's a health care bill that can get 60 votes: the Senate Finance bill, as long as liberal Senators are willing to stick with it.

In fact, it seems very likely that the only thing that is preventing the holdouts from voting for the bill is the public option. Now, it's possible that there's still a compromise available to secure 60 for some version of a public option, but if not, it's not as if there isn't any possible fall-back position.

Remember what the voting in Senate Finance told us: a strong public option does not have fifty votes in the Senate; a weak public option probably has fifty, but just barely, and perhaps not through reconciliation; a bill without a public option certainly has sixty votes; and some compromise between weak public option and no public option at all might or might not be possible.

How to Treat Palin

How should the press treat Sarah Palin right now?

There seem to be two schools of thought. Some believe that she's basically a joke, a celebrity who has no chance of ever winning the Republican presidential nomination, let alone winding up in the White House. Among those are Isaac Chotiner, Ezra Klein, and Damon Linker:

Even ridicule can be a form of flattery. Better to bow out, to decline the provocation, since responding to her perpetuates and legitimates the illusion that she’s a serious player in our nation’s politics.

Then there's the other side, who believe that she is a likely presidential nominee, and therefore should be covered seriously and held to the same standards as other potential presidents. Andrew Sullivan is the leader of this group, I suppose (no need to link to any particular post, is there? Here's something recent). Here's Mark Kleiman, who believes that Palin is close to an inevitable nominee. Frank Rich wants it both ways: for him, Palin is both dominant ("far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid") and can't win the White House ("there's no way the math of her fan base adds up to an Electoral College victory").

So, Kevin Drum asks, "Sarah Palin: joke or serious threat?"

The most sensible thing I've seen is Matt Yglesias's comment:

I think we should take the probability of her becoming president at least somewhat seriously. She probably won’t win the GOP nomination (the odds of any particular individual winning are <>does get the nomination and the economic fundamentals aren’t good then I don’t think anyone should count on her absurd persona bailing the Democrats out.

There's a bit more to say than that. First, the idea that it doesn't matter whether or not she impresses party elites is nonsense. Party leaders have enormous influence in nominations, including presidential nominations. That's why Douthat is correct to characterize Palin's choices since the election (resigning her office, carrying on petty feuds instead of pretending to be a Serious Policy Person) as "wrong moves if [she] wanted to become president someday." They aren't, however, disqualifications. She can't win the Republican nomination against the solid opposition of Republican leaders, but she can win with their neutrality or moderate support, and she still has plenty of time to do something about that -- but she actually has to do it. Whether she does that or not is both important (because she could be nominated) and interesting (because, I think almost everyone agrees, it's a fascinating story). Bottom line: she's currently running for president. If she continues to run, she has a good chance at being either a serious contender for the nomination or a Jesse Jackson style rump candidate. Either way, that's someone who should be covered by the national press.

What if she does get the nomination? Well, first of all, it would likely mean that she did some of the things that Douthat wants her to do. The idea that her image has been forever fixed is silly; candidates as diverse as Joe Biden, Bob Dole, and of course Richard Nixon have managed to reinvent themselves and redraw their images. I do agree that it's unlikely that she'd be a strong candidate in the general election. Bottom line there is that Matt is basically correct that neither ideological extremism or what he calls her "absurd persona" would prevent her from winning, especially since both would probably be modified by the time she reached her convention. They would, however, despite those modifications, tend to hurt her; it's not hard to see her winding up as a Goldwater/McGovern style loser.

To me, the most important evidence that we have so far isn't her inability to discuss public policy issues coherently; almost anyone can learn to do that if they put the effort in to do it. What's interesting, however, is that she doesn't seem willing to put in very much effort, on that or on anything else. Nor does she appear to have the candidate skills needed to head a national campaign (which requires things such as message discipline and working well with staff). Both of those would be almost certainly necessary if she is to have a serious chance for the nomination. I'll be watching to see whether she actually has, or is acquiring, those skills.

But, beyond that, I don't think it's up to media elites to decide which candidates are serious and which are not; reporters, editors, and producers should take their cues from party elites (and, to a lesser extent, public opinion polling). And so far the cues mainly say that Palin is a real candidate for president, and therefore she should be covered as one.

Annals of Spin

I'm not sure how many noticed this, but the Large Hadron Collider is up and working again...those who have followed the story will be aware that it originally was supposed to be ready to go a year ago, but had to be shut down for all sorts of repairs.

I do note that the restart took place late Friday night. Obviously, the physics types in charge of things were engaging in media management: if they accidentally opened up a black hole that swallowed the world and ended human existence, they wanted it to happen on Friday night to reduce press coverage.

Return of Triggers

Josh Marshall goes there and asks whether the public option -- as it actually exists in the current bills, as opposed to some ideal public option that isn't going to happen this year -- is worth sinking the entire health care bill. I think the general mood among the blogs after the Saturday night cloture vote is pretty down on the prospects of the public option passing (or, if current versions pass, actually doing anything useful). The logjam of Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Lincoln and Landrieu doesn't really seem to be breakable, or so goes the conventional wisdom today.

To some extent, this is a consequence of the decision by liberals to draw a firm line between weak-public-option-with-opt-out (OK) and triggered (weak) public option (with opt out). I understand why liberals would prefer the former, but I really haven't seen a good argument for that particular distinction as a dealbreaker -- although I guess part of the problem is that I also don't think liberals have a decent argument for a public option of any kind as a dealbreaker, and so it does make some sense for them to set a line, even if it's a bluff. If, however, the liberals drop that line, it still appears to me that a triggered public option might be available. We'll see.

At any rate, a few weeks ago I wrote a mostly facetious post speculating that the winning bill would need to contain co-ops (for Conrad), an opt-out (for Carper), a trigger (for Snowe), and an opt-in, for good measure. I thought it was facetious, but perhaps that's how it's going to work -- not trigger or co-ops or opt-out, but all of those things.

On the serious side, it seems to me that the question is whether there's some formula that could give Snowe her trigger while also giving liberals some assurance of some sort of public option. Perhaps allow some subset of states (possibly strong liberal states including CA and NY) to immediately enter a public plan, but trigger other states down the line, preserving an opt-out if that's what they want. And then the other half of the question is whether the formula that Snowe likes would satisfy Lincoln, Landrieu, Lieberman, and the Benator, and perhaps also bring in Collins, Voinovich, and Lugar.

Alas, on the (I hope) less serious side, here's how I concluded my speculation last time:

(Unfortunately, if that doesn't get 60 votes, step six involves bombing Iran. But it's a start).

Stand and Deliver!

Dennis Moore, Democratic Member of the House from Kansas, won't be running for re-election in 2010. It's a competitive district, but leans GOP...my guess is that this immediately swings the district from about a 60% chance of a Democratic win to a 75% chance for a Republican pickup.

Up to this point, the Democrats had done a really good job of avoiding retirements -- Moore is the first one to announce (that's retirements, as opposed to Members seeking higher office). We'll see, over the next months, whether Moore will be an aberration or the beginning of a trend. These sorts of decisions are quite important. A big part of the 1994 landslide was a wave of Democratic retirements; it's a whole lot harder to beat incumbents than it is to pick up open seats. So with today's news, increase the GOP's likely pickups in 2010 from the immediate effect, but also increase the odds of further retirements. Good news for the Republicans.

Oh, and it's a very good day for those traveling with flower lupins...here's the clip.

Public Plan and the 2008 Campaign

Liberals are up in arms, and with some reason, because Joe Lieberman is insisting that the Democrats running for president last year, including Barack Obama, did not include a public option in their heath care reform proposals at the time.

Lieberman is wrong.

But he's not the only one rewriting history, and his version is, as much as I hate to say it, a lot closer to reality than the idea that Democratic fraidy-cats abandoned a single-payer system after the election. That's a version of history that some liberals are pushing; it's the version of history that, for example, Robert Reich seems to be pushing in this post. Here's Reich:

First there was Medicare for all 300 million of us. But that was a non-starter because private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn't hear of it, and Republicans and "centrists" thought it was too much like what they have up in Canada -- which, by the way, cost Canadians only 10 percent of their GDP and covers every Canadian. (Our current system of private for-profit insurers costs 16 percent of GDP and leaves out 45 million people.)

OK, let's stop right there. Medicare for all might be a great idea, but it wasn't defeated by private insurers, Big Pharma, Republicans, and centrists. It was defeated by the Democratic voters of the Iowa caucuses, who supported three candidates who opposed that plan.

OK, let him continue:

So the compromise was to give all Americans the option of buying into a "Medicare-like plan" that competed with private insurers.

Yes...and no. Yes, Obama (and Clinton, and Edwards) supported a public plan...as a relatively minor component of their health care reform plans. The idea that the public plan was in any way, shape or form central to the Democrat's health care reform ideas in the 2008 campaign is just not true.

Evidence?

The Democratic Party platform devotes about three and a half pages to health care reform. It mentions a public plan. Once. At the end of a sentence about increasing choice, after the part about increasing choices among private plans. No one could honestly read the Democrat's platform and walk away thinking that a public plan is a key component of health care reform.

There's one paragraph about health care in Obama's acceptance speech from the Democratic convention. It doesn't mention a public plan.

Remember the debate between Obama and Clinton right after Edwards dropped out? It was in Los Angeles, with Wolf Blitzer moderating? They spent plenty of time on health care. They focused on their differences (the individual mandate was the big thing), but they each got a chance to roll out their talking points. Obama did talk about a public plan, right at the beginning, but he hardly talked about it as the centerpiece of his plan. Clinton, for her part, didn't mention a public plan; she stressed letting Americans into the "congressional plan," but that's more about the exchanges than it is about new government-run insurance. Again, while both candidates certainly supported a public plan, it was peripheral at best to the discussion.

One more example. The second Obama/McCain debate was over domestic programs, and contained a lengthy discussion of health care. By now, Obama had dropped talking about a government option, and had adopted Clinton's "congressional plan" rhetoric. In fact, McCain didn't even attack Obama on the public option; he attacked him over employer and individual mandates.

So, just to be clear, there's no question that Joe Lieberman is wrong: Obama did in fact include a public plan as part of his reform proposal during the campaign.

But liberals are also wrong to think that Democrats campaigned mainly on a public option, and that compromising it down to a smaller size or even (should it happen) moving ahead with out it is some sort of inexplicable betrayal. I want to get back to Reich. He says:

Our private, for-profit health insurance system, designed to fatten the profits of private health insurers and Big Pharma, is about to be turned over to ... our private, for-profit health care system. Except that now private health insurers and Big Pharma will be getting some 30 million additional customers, paid for by the rest of us.

Upbeat policy wonks and political spinners who tend to see only portions of cups that are full will point out some good things: no pre-existing conditions, insurance exchanges, 30 million more Americans covered. But in reality, the cup is 90 percent empty. Most of us will remain stuck with little or no choice -- dependent on private insurers who care only about the bottom line, who deny our claims, who charge us more and more for co-payments and deductibles, who bury us in forms, who don't take our calls.

To which I think the only possible reply is: of course that's what's going to happen! That's what the Democrats -- not just Obama, but all the presidential candidates -- campaigned on.

The truth of this is that Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Ted Kennedy campaign for universal care, not public insurance. It's outrageous that a supposed liberal could consider coverage for 30 million Americans a minor point, less than ten percent of the goal. Certainly, liberals should be fighting for the best bill they can get, and if in their judgment a public option is critical to that, they should fight for it. But the idea that the public option trumps anything else isn't about fighting for the things that Ted Kennedy fought for; it's about seeing the world through ideological blinders.

One more thing. Reich concludes by insisting that the Senate vote on a single-payer system, and on a robust public option. Senators will be glad to do so; I don't know what small fraction of the Senate would support the former, and it's clear that the latter would draw somewhere south of fifty votes. Everyone on both sides would be happy to cast those votes. In fact, I think every Senator has declared positions on those policies, although I don't know that they'll bother to vote because the outcome is clear. Now, a weak public option probably could clear fifty if that were enough, and the Reid public option (weak with opt out) seems to have close to fifty-five votes, so liberals have a reasonable complaint there about the rules of the Senate and majorities. (I'm not saying I agree, but it's clearly reasonable).

But complaining because Harry Reid can't get single-payer?

Take it up with Democrats in Iowa.

Lincoln

I'm paying some attention to Blanche Lincoln for good reasons (because she might wind up being the 60th vote) and bad (because I have a prediction out that she'll be with the Dems). So, I watched her floor speech earlier today. As some noted, she of course said that she wasn't committing to anything later, but she also singled out the public option. Here's Jonathan Cohn:

She went on to note that, when it comes time to move a bill off the floor--that is, to end debate in order to have an actual up-or-down vote on the proposal--she would not support a government-run plan. She was pretty emphatic about that point, too.

I think that's right, but I also think the position she took was quite interesting. First of all, outside of the public option, her statement was basically indistinguishable, as far as I could tell, from those of the (other?) pro-reform Dems today. She did talk a bit about a few items that differed in the Senate Finance bill (which, of course, she voted for) and the merged bill, but most of her statement was standard pro-reform rhetoric. That certainly sounds like someone who is preparing to vote yes at the end of the day.

OK: the public option. Lincoln certainly, as Cohn says, came down pretty forcefully against. But again, the grounds on which she did so were interesting. Lincoln did talk a little about general growth of government concerns with regard to the public option, but her primary complaint was cost; she floated the possibility that some future Congress would be forced to bail out a failing public option. Now, that sounds to me like something that can be compromised with some sort of language "preventing" future spending.

In other words, I think Lincoln is probably looking for some sort of visible concession that she can bring back home in an effort to show that she made the bill more moderate, but I'm not at all convinced that the concession will have be wind up being substantive.

Meanwhile, I continue to believe that the logic of her position (already voted for the Senate Finance bill, will now vote for cloture on the motion to proceed) will wind up pushing her to stcik with the Democrats on the final cloture vote. And I think, in her statement, she provided wiggle room to either accept a non-substantive amendment to protect the government from the supposed threat of a future public option bailout, or to eventually go yes/no on cloture and final passage.

By the way, I thought the statement itself was unusually weak. Don't know if that means she needs to get herself a better writer on her staff, or if it means it was hashed out at the very last minute because she didn't commit until then.

Breaking News!

How should the 24-hour news cycle press cover stories in which something totally predictable and expected happens?

Not a rhetorical question; I'm really not sure what the answer is.

What brings this to mind, of course, is the breathless coverage of the cloture vote on the motion to proceed today in the Senate. At the beginning of the day, here's what we knew: 58 Democrats intended to vote for cloture, and two -- Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln -- had not announced their decisions. Both had been reported to have met repeatedly with Harry Reid over the week.

Now, pretty much everyone knew that Landrieu and Lincoln were going to vote for cloture. Not just because of the logic of the situation from their perspective, but because Harry Reid would have to be nuts to keep the Senate in session today unless he was certain that he had the votes on this one.

So, when Landrieu took to the Senate floor to announce her vote, it wasn't really "news" in the sense of a surprise; it was confirmation of something everyone already knew was going to happen (as I write this, Lincoln has not yet spoken). Yet the New York Times ran a "Breaking News" banner about her statement and currently is running "A Holdout Will Support Democrats' Health Bill" as their top story at nytimes.com.

(It's a terrible headline more generally, because Landrieu hasn't committed to anything beyond today's vote, but that's a different subject).

Anyway, this sort of thing happens all the time, and I really don't know what the correct answer is. In the old days, the Times could run a story tomorrow telling everyone that (presumably) all sixty Dems broke a GOP filibuster; that Lincoln and Landrieu were the final two to announce their votes would be, perhaps, a detail within that story, but certainly not the main point. But that's not available to the online Times or the 24-hour cable news networks. The fact that Landrieu broke her silence is news of a sort...as are stories such as thoroughly predictable votes on the House and Senate floor, or in another arena candidates winning elections that polling had indicated would be landslides. It's certainly proper that they get covered; in fact, thoroughly predictable news can still be far more important than surprising news. So I don't think it's wrong for the Times to be paying a lot of attention to what's happening on the Senate floor today.

I don't have any answer here. It just struck me as odd -- not necessarily wrong, but odd -- for the Times to be giving Landrieu's statement such prominent coverage. I guess my real sense is that almost thirty years into the 24 hour (TV) news cycle, and a good decade or so into the 24 hour newspaper news cycle, these things haven't been resolved very well at all.

Friday Baseball Post

Back-to-Back Cy Young Awards! Woo Hoo!

I'll just add without any comment that Tim Lincecum's HOF Monitor score now stands at 36.

Barack Houdini No More

After flirting with it for months, Obama's approval rating, per Gallup, finally fell below 50% today. He's at 49%.

The Gallup story about it is, I'm afraid, massively irresponsible. Gallup's Jeffrey Jones compares Obama to previous presidents based on how quickly they fell below 50%, and how quickly they recovered from that landmark. What he completely ignores, however, is that the frequency of Gallup polling is not constant over the period he discusses. Obama is the first president for whom Gallup is running a daily tracking poll. Over time, Gallup has gradually accelerated its readings from once a month or fewer to today's daily track. So we don't really know whether Reagan, Carter, or even Nixon might have had a reading below 50% if they had been tracked daily. At the same time, we'll see whether Obama stays below 50% for a while, but it's certainly possible that today's reading will turn out to be a low -- a low that might never have been recorded if Gallup was polling once a month or so.

The other side of it, the recovery time, is even worse. There's every possibility that Obama will "recover" to 50% or higher as early as tomorrow, which will set a completely meaningless record for the fastest such recovery -- since no previous president would have had the opportunity to rebound the next day.

And that's not to mention that all such polling is imprecise. In reality, Obama's true approval rating probably fell below 50% before this (he's hit exactly 50 several times over a few months). But this particular low spike might turn out to be just a fluke, and not a real change at all. Gallup's story pretends that Obama's approval rating is a lot more real than they have reason to believe.

The obvious cure, by the way, for those who want to know Obama's actual approval rating is to go over to pollster.com, where their trend line has Obama right now at exactly 50.0%. Just be cautious: the pollster.com folks are constructing a trend line, rather than a static average, and it changes as new data emerges. They've had Obama dip below 50% a few times only to revise it upwards as new, higher, numbers come in that reveal the previous most recent polls were flukes, not predictions of a new direction.

Oh, and I should mention somewhere in here that there's no practical difference between a president at 49%, 50%, or 51% approval level. But you knew that.

Tough Call Ahead for Palin

Speaking of Arizona...

Sarah Palin must not be pleased at all with the latest developments in the Grand Canyon State, as a poll out has John McCain tied in a potential primary contest with blowhard former Member of the House J.D. Hayworth. Yikes! The Sage of Wasilla should be rooting hard for Hayworth to pass on the race. Otherwise, what is she to do? Support McCain, and she risks losing the one big asset she has, the full and enthusiastic embrace of the Beck/Tea Party/crazy wing of the Republican Party, which will certainly be gung-ho for Hayworth. But support the challenger, and not only does she appear ungrateful to McCain (I think it's a little late for that worry), but more importantly she loosens any restraint that the McCain and his staff have shown in ratting out her antics during the campaign.

What should she do? Well, only she knows to what extent there's more to spill than the McCain crew have already dished to the national press. She may decide it can't get much worse from that side (putting aside whether she's capable of objective judgment about that sort of thing). At the very least, McCain himself has been nice to her in public, and that would likely end if she actively opposes him. Meanwhile, would her fans give her a pass for opposing Hayworth? I don't know; I guess that's when we find out if they are Palin fans or movement conservatives.

If the race happens, she couldn't just ignore it; she's clearly going to be involved in other primaries just as she was in the NY-23 fight. She could issue a neutral statement, but that might annoy everyone.

She really should be hoping that Hayworth passes.

Tantrum-Based Politics

Several recent items on the continuing purge in the GOP. Lindsay Graham (not up for reelection yet) is, perhaps, in trouble with conservatives in South Carolina for a number of slights. Charlie Crist's lead in the GOP primary in Florida is narrowing. John McCain is apparently vulnerable in the Republican primary in Arizona this year.

OK, a few things. First, Graham, Crist, and McCain are all solid conservatives. We're certainly not talking about a Lincoln Chafee here, or even an Arlen Specter; we're talking about people who would (and do) fall far to the right of Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson.

Second, we're seeing evidence that purge talk is being transmitted pretty successfully from GOP elites and activists to rank-and-file voters.

Third, there was some speculation before the results of NY-23 were in about the consequences of a Hoffman win or loss; some believed that a Hoffman loss would stem purge talk. They were wrong.

Fourth...well, a little caveat. Each of these cases may not be all it seems. The item on Graham I linked to (and others have linked to as well) refers to unnamed polling, and Graham isn't up for election for a while. Crist is a sitting governor, and it's a bad time to be a governor. As for McCain, it's certainly conventional wisdom (I don't know whether it's true, but it may well be) that presidential candidates are often punished by their home constituencies for neglecting first duties. I seem to recall that Mo Udall had a close fight for reelection after 1976...again, it's conventional wisdom.

Still, if I were advising Republicans, I'd be very, very worried. In addition to Florida and Arizona --two states that should be pretty safe for the GOP next year -- Republicans may wind up with Senate nominees in New Hampshire, Kentucky, Connecticut, and Illinois who are unelectable, or at least press up against the edge of being unelectable. Republicans do seem to be doing a very good job of recruiting this cycle, and they are certainly doing a good job of establishing expectations of a strong GOP year in 2010. However, this sort of politics, if it's adopted by more and more GOP primary voters, has every chance of undermining them.

That ACORN poll

Today's fun news is that over half of all Republicans are willing to tell a pollster (well, a robopolling call) that they believe that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Barack Obama. John Sides has several good points about the poll, and about not reading too much into it.

I can add two things. First, the analogy John makes (as does Eric Kleefeld at TPM) to the 2000 election isn't the right one to work from. While Democrats could spin conspiracy theories about 2000, they didn't have to; in that contested election there were plenty of real evidence that people could turn to if they thought the wrong candidate had been installed in office. The correct comparison is to 2004, and the conspiracy theories most notoriously advanced in this article that Diebold stole the election for George W. Bush in Ohio. I don't know if there's polling on 2004, but I think that's a lot more relevant comparison than 2000.

The second is just to highlight that when conservatives attack ACORN, they believe (or at least conservative rank-and-file voters believe) that they're actually attacking a very, very, important organization. Again, I think this is almost totally identical in content to liberal attacks on Diebold during the Bush years. Democrats who want to understand anti-ACORN rhetoric should see it as similar to the Diebold story, as opposed to seeing it as similar to attacks on, say, Planned Parenthood.

Politics of Health Care, 2010 and 2012

Politically, I've argued that the big tests for liberals in the final health care bill should be: 1. does it make anything worse? 2. Can it be built on? And, 3. What are the short-run political effects?

The big issue for liberals with "make it worse" is about Stupak; it looks to me as if this will be compromised away. The big issues for liberals with "built on" is, I think, establishing the public option; looks like that's going to happen, although of course the votes haven't been taken in the Senate quite yet. That leaves the short-run effects. Those following the bill(s) closely will know that the main provisions don't actually go into effect until 2013 (House-passed bill) or 2014 (Reid's bill), but other things will take effect earlier.

On the plus side, Ezra Klein has a quick list of the things that will happen right away. Unfortunately for Democrats, several of these items (such as eliminating lifetime caps) are things that will not be identifiable benefits for most citizens. For example, on lifetime caps, healthy people won't receive any benefit, and my guess is that people who unexpectedly find that they need very expensive care won't realize that they wouldn't have received full benefits if not for the law. Only those currently worrying about reaching lifetime caps will notice. Same with rescissions; this is a major reform that will affect quite a few people, but virtually none of them will realize that they've been helped by the bill (the whole idea of rescissions is that people lose benefits they thought they had once they put in a claim). It is true that Democrats running in 2010 and 2012 can make ads contrasting the Bad Old Days vs. Reform!, but very few people, as far as I can see, will actually have the experience of these changes helping them and connecting it to Democratic action.

Some items, however, will be both helpful and noticeable. At the top of the list, in my view, is that young adults can stay on their parents' health care through age 26. I think the same is true of the early retirees provision, and possibly the temporary help for pre-existing conditions (pending it really working; I'm not sure whether that's the case or not). All three groups are currently aware of their insurance problems, and would be aware that policy changes helped them get insured. It's possible that some of the other things would be helpful and noticeable, but those strike me as the big ones. It's also worth noting that all three are situations that matter a lot in recessions by making job loss not as terrible, and by encouraging retirement.

Now, the down side for the Democrats is that as soon as the bill finally is signed into law, Republicans will immediately attack Obama and the Democrats for, well, every preventable death in America. No, really -- the attacks are going to be both vicious and incoherent. Someone has to wait for a specialist? It's Obama's fault. A rural area doesn't have enough doctors? Obama's fault. Medical error? Obama's fault. Health care bureaucracy gone wild? Obama's fault. Never mind whether these things are in any way at all connected to provisions of the bill that haven't yet been implemented; the attacks are coming, and the attacks will be magnified by Fox News and the rest of the gang. And that's just the stuff that will have happened; the sky is the limit as far as claims about what's going to happen any minute now.

Bottom line is that Democrats should continue placing a high priority on having some very concrete things to show for health care reform by 2010 and 2012, to balance out all the junk they're going to receive (attacks they can do virtually nothing to stop, by the way). Just as a guess, and based on nothing but speculation, I think the Senate bill does enough in that direction, but I do think thta Democrats in conference should place a very high priority on those short term effects.

Iron Laws of Politics

I'd toot my own horn on this one, but it was so obvious I don't think I deserve much credit: Rudy Giuliani isn't running for Governor, after all.

Repeat after me: Mayor of New York City is a dead-end job. The two things that can be counted on are the NYC Mayors will not go on to higher office, and that the press (where are many of them located?) will spend way too much time speculating on the future plans of NYC Mayors. Lindsay, Koch, Giuliani...the ones who are foolish enough to believe the hype just wind up making fools of themselves. Having already achieved that distinction in the 2008 Republican primary in Florida, it didn't seem in the cards for Giuliani to try again. Especially since, as the Times says, he'd be losing money on the deal -- and since it's obvious that his national megaphone on terrorism is undamaged by his years out of office or the presidential campaign debacle.

Granted, I should be careful here -- he apparently hasn't ruled out a Senate bid -- but I'll be surprised if he does that, either.

I don't know that the New York Mayor iron law is as firm as the one that Larry Sabato touts about VA Governor elections (the party of the White House gets punished; credit to Sabato for a good call this time around), or the impossibility of winning a presidential nomination from a House seat, but I'm willing to trust in it until proven wrong. And, alas, I'm equally willing to trust that reporters will continue to ignore that law and spend way too much time on implausible stories such as the Bloomberg-for-President boomlet from the last cycle.

UPDATE: Not so fast! Apparently he's in...at least for now, at least according to one story...for the Senate race. Can't win 'em all; of course, the Iron Law is intact until and unless he actually wins something. We'll see, including whether he actually makes the Senate contest.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: I should have known better; first update above only shows that the last sentence of the original post was correct. My fault for paying any attention to it.

Update: 18 1/2 Minute Gap

TPM has an AP story that the National Archives is moving ahead with attempts to use state-of-the-art technology to recover missing notes from Bob Haldeman that correspond to the famous 18 1/2 minute gap in a Watergate tape. This appears to be a follow-up to the initiative described in this MJ article from David Corn. Corn's article is good for the technical stuff.

As for what's at stake, I'm just going to recycle what I said about it back in July. The question is: what was in the tape that caused Nixon to destroy it? (It's overwhelmingly likely that it was deliberately destroyed, probably by Nixon, although Haldeman did have custody of some of the tapes at one point, and it now appears that Haldeman destroyed his own notes -- the notes that the Archives are trying to recover). There are three broad categories of things that Nixon would have wanted to destroy:

1. Evidence of the cover-up. Most of the last year of Watergate was about the cover-up of the cover-up, and Nixon may have wanted to destroy evidence of the cover-up. We know pretty much the whole story on this, although extra details are always welcome.

2. Prior knowledge of the break-in. There is no direct evidence that Nixon had prior knowledge, and for that matter Haldeman always denied prior knowledge (the evidence is that he certainly knew about the general program at the Committee to Re-Elect, but IIRC there's no specific finding that he clearly knew about the break-in in advance). This would be a major bombshell.

3. Other stuff. There are all kinds of wacky conspiracy theories out there, none of which are of great interest to me, but what I do think is possible is that there may be additional operations of the Plumbers that have never come out -- after the break-in, a lot of people destroyed a lot of evidence (although they also failed to destroy some stuff), and it's by no means clear that the Plumbers ever decided to tell all. As with #1, new details won't change the story in any important ways, but might be way fun anyway.

The AP story says we should hear more in a few months. I'll just add that the contents of the 18 1/2 minute gap is probably the most important known unknown about Watergate, but there could be other things that were successfully covered up that we won't ever know that we don't know, unless Liddy, Colson, Krogh, or Young have remaining unspilled beans they decide to let us in on.

Translated, From the Palin

One thing that you learn when you grade a lot of undergraduate papers is how to understand people who have...how should I say it...less than a complete grasp of the English language. Reporting on high government officials and policy is less likely to teach that lesson.

It seems that liberal bloggers -- Benen, Yglesias are confused by the latest (at least so far) mini-flap from Sarah Palin. Palin is explaining her "death panels" remark by claiming (here and here) that "death panels" isn't literal, just as Reagan's term "evil empire" wasn't literal.

Here's David Weigel:

I can’t make heads or tails of Sarah Palin’s analysis of her “death panels” remark in the lengthy, friendly Q&A she gave to National Review yesterday...Which part of “evil empire” was not literal? This seems like an instance of Palin’s incessant references to Ronald Reagan leading her astray.

No; if a student gave me a paper with that sort of wording, I'd let her know that "literal" doesn't mean what she thinks it does. Palin apparently believes that "literal" means something like "formally titled." Palin: "...had [Reagan] been criticized and, and mocked, and, and condemned for ever using a term that wasn't actually there on a map, or in documents..."

Palin either believes or is pretending to believe that the criticisms of "death panels" are just that those specific words do not appear in the health care bill, just as the only possible criticism of "evil empire" would have been that the nation was formally called the USSR. It does not seem to have occurred to her (or she is pretending that she doesn't realize) that anyone could doubt that the health care bill will have the effect of "committees, bureaucrats -- deciding who, ultimately, will receive government-run health care... based on somebody's subjective judgment of productivity, of somebody's life." It does not seems to have occurred to her that what was discredited was that underlying description, not the question over the title of a proposed government agency.

Granted, this interpretation isn't exactly generous to Palin, but at least it allows the statement (which is clearly part of her prepared talking points, since she's used it at least twice) to be moderately coherent.

E - GOP, continued

I'm still convinced that Republicans are making a mistake in forcing a cloture vote on the motion to proceed.

Everyone is acting as if this is a necessary first step, but it isn't. Regular Senate procedure is actually to consider bills under unanimous consent agreements, which can set up rules for the entire consideration of the bill, or just get things started. Forcing a motion to proceed is only necessary if the minority won't agree to things such as which amendments will be considered, for how long, and in which order. A partial UC agreement is the normal solution to a situation in which the minority intends to eventually filibuster. The key is that the minority loses nothing by allowing the bill to reach the floor -- except for the chance to kill it before that point.

And, as I argued before, voting against cloture on the motion to proceed is a far tougher sell to marginal Democrats than cloture on the final bill. Right now, Ben Nelson and friends would have to argue that the bill is so bad that it shouldn't even be considered -- or, they would have to argue that allowing the bill to come to the floor is the same as voting to pass it. Of course, pols can make whatever arguments they want, no matter how illogical or implausible, but I can't imagine that marginal Democrats, trying to show that they are non-ideological and reasonable, would be comfortable with either of those arguments. After all, Nelson, Lincoln, and the others say that they're for health care reform, just not liberal versions of health care reform. That's hard to square with blocking all debate on the bill.

A much better set of arguments will be available to marginal Dems who want to oppose (final) cloture on the bill, down the road. At that point, they don't have to say that they're trying to kill the bill; they can just say that they don't want to rush anything, and that all amendments should be considered carefully (there are always more amendments!). Or, they can at that point say that the bill is turning out to be just too liberal, if that's how they want to position themselves.

Republicans, however, are warning that such vote patterns will be attacked as flip-flops. Now, it makes sense for Republicans to attack those who vote for final cloture but against the bill; that's a combination that passes the bill. But it makes a lot less sense, if their goal is to kill the bill, to signal that cloture on the motion to proceed will be treated as a vote or against the bill. By doing so, they are fighting on their weakest, not their strongest group. The problem for Republicans is that if marginal Dems will wind up supporting moving the bill to the floor -- and if those Dems know that they will consequently be attacked as if they voted for final passage, whatever else they do -- then the incentives for voting against final cloture disappear. At that point, having earned the maximum opposition from Republicans, marginal Dems will have all the electoral incentives pointing to voting yes on final cloture.

Let me put it another way. The fight over marginal Democrats in the Senate has, from the beginning, been all about the incentives those Democrats have to appear to be reasonable centrists. The more that Republicans show that they are against any type of health care reform, the more that center recedes, and marginal Dems are left with little incentive to oppose mainstream Democrats. Forcing a vote on the motion to proceed (and stunts such as forcing a full reading of the bill) only show that Republicans are uninterested in compromise; their only goal is to defeat and delay the bill. It may be a good way to get marginal Dems to cast votes that can be portrayed as liberal, but it's a lousy way to stop the bill.

Public Opinion on the Filibuster?

Hey Pollsters! Shouldn't we be seeing some work being done on public opinion of the filibuster? Right now, the fact of the filibuster, and Senate anti-majoritarian procedures in general, is a highly important issue, and yet as I look at pollingreport.com, the most recent polling on filibusters is from the "nuclear option" debate over judicial nominees in 2005 -- and those questions were specifically about the claim that those nominees should be exempt from normal Senate rules.

Granted, this is mostly Barack Obama's fault for not elevating the issue enough, but still: let's go, pollsters! Are Americans OK with the idea that 41 Senators can stop everything?


UPDATE: CNN has 56% in favor; John Sides at the Monkey Cage has details.

Palin = Quayle? Maybe Palin = Nixon

David Greenberg in Slate argues that Sarah Palin has no chance to be president. It's a sucker's bet to take the side that someone will be president -- only a very small handful of current politicians will ever be president, and so there are obviously lots of pols who "could" be president that, for various reasons, never achieve the brass ring. Still, I think Greenberg is mostly wrong in his approach, so I think it's worth taking another, somewhat different, look at the history. I should warn everyone: this is a long post, and I'm not going to have anything brilliant to say at the end, just the same speculation about Palin I've been speculating all week.

Greenberg says that:

Running and losing for vice president has never been a promising route to the Oval Office. Yet Sarah Palin, even before this week's book tour mediathon, has been touted by some as the heir apparent of the Republican Party, if not its de facto leader. Right-wing devotees cheer her on, liberals writhe in fear lest she come within 3,000 miles of the White House, and the news media lavish her with attention that's out of proportion to her actual chances of a political future. In fact, only one defeated vice presidential candidate ever achieved the feat that Palin would like to duplicate, and to date she shows no signs of resembling Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Furthermore, Greenberg concludes:

[O]f defeated vice presidential nominees, only Bob Dole did so (in 1996), and it took him 20 years (his emphasis).

OK, let's think about that. First, I think it's a mistake to really think about pre-1972 nomination contests; both the Vice-Presidency and the nomination process are just very different, so I don't think it tells us anything much. If we further restrict ourselves to defeated VP candidates, we're down to a fairly small group. Let's see what happened to them (in each case, only after the VP nomination):

Got nominated: Dole
Serious candidate, didn't get nominated: Muskie, Edwards
Washout presidential campaign: Shriver, Lieberman
Never ran for president: Ferraro, Bentsen, Kemp

Wait, that's not so bad! Three of eight were serious contenders. Greenberg is dismissive of the other five, but I think that's too strong. Yes, Shriver was an accidental VP candidate, and Lieberman was seriously out of step with his party (neither of which applies to Palin). Is it impossible to imagine Kemp running a serious campaign in 2000, or Bentsen in 1992? I don't see why not. (Looking a bit further, it looks like Kemp thought about running in '00, but didn't really take the race seriously. I don't remember him as a candidate, although I could be forgetting). Overall, I'm not seeing a VP nomination & defeat as a negative, at all.

Of course, we need something to compare it with. Greenberg starts by repeating the anecdote that John Kennedy believed that he would not have won the 1960 presidential nomination had he been successful in contesting for the 1956 VP nomination. What about our group here?

Bob Dole was set onto the national candidacy path in 1976, but by the time he finally captured the nomination he had been Republican Senate leader for several years; that was his main credential. On the other hand, without 1976 Dole probably does not run in 1980; without both, he might not have run (or done as well as he did) in 1988, and without that he doesn't get the nomination in 1996. I think it's hard to see 1976 as a negative.

Ed Muskie was elevated to frontrunner after 1968, but he was a national figure before that, and its certainly possible that he would have run in 1972 either way. In my opinion, it's hard to see 1968 hurting him in 1972, but one could argue that it didn't help, either. John Edwards was the runner-up in 2004; he certainly would have been a similar candidate in 2008 without the VP nod. It's worth mentioning here that had these men not been VP candidates, someone else would have, and that someone might have been a strong contender in 1972 and 2008, hurting the chances of Muskie and Edwards (and, of course, the same applies to Dole).

Of the five who did not come close to the nomination, it's hard to see how the VP campaign hurt. Lieberman was never going to be the Democratic nominee for president. Would Shriver run without it? I don't think so. If Bentsen didn't run in 1992 after performing well in 1988, it's hard to see him running (let alone winning) that year without 1988. Kemp's VP campaign didn't go as well; perhaps one could argue that 1996 took a little of the shine off him, but I think it's a hard case to make. And one can imagine a very different and more successful electoral career for Ferraro without 1984, but I think it's hard to imagine the White House in that career.

I think it's hard to go through the list without thinking of the VP nod as a net plus.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that "losing VP candidates" is the right category for Palin. Instead, I think we need to look at similar VP candidates -- those who were plucked out of obscurity, had rough campaigns, and were widely perceived as unqualified for the presidency. That list is pretty easy to compile: Dan Quayle; Gerry Ferraro; Spiro Agnew; and, breaking my post-reform rules, Richard Milhous Nixon. Why are they the relevant group? Palin already has enthusiastic supporters; what she doesn't have is the confidence, from those who are less partisan, that she's qualified to be president. So the question about Sarah Palin, it seems to me, is whether it's possible to change people's minds about whether a candidate reaches the threshhold, and I think those four are good cases.

First, Dan Quayle. Quayle was 41 when he was nominated for the presidency; he had served two terms in the House, and eight years in the Senate (very young, but a normal amount of experience). His campaign in 1988 was a disaster, beginning to end, and little he did in four years of the Vice Presidency changed that. After sitting out the 1996 race, he ran for president in 2000, but washed out early, and has apparently retired from politics. Quayle never overcame his poor start...had Bush won reelection in 1992, however, it's certainly plausible that Quayle could have won the 1996 nomination and been elected. As far as I know, Quayle did practically nothing in the 1990s after leaving office to enhance his reputation; he wrote a couple of books, but that's about it, as far as I know (and Wikipedia has nothing for that period). Dan Quayle certainly didn't change his reputation, but it doesn't look, to me at least, like he tried very hard.

OK, next up: Gerry Ferraro. Ferraro was 49 on election day 1984, and was in her third House term (not so young, but very little experience). The campaign went badly, mainly because of family legal troubles, which would also harm her future political career. Ferraro twice ran for the United States Senate, in 1992 and 1998, but failed to get the nomination in both cases. Unlike Quayle, it seems Ferraro tried pretty hard to improve her reputation, but it's fair to say that she never came remotely close to becoming a serious presidential candidate.

Spiro Agnew. Well, we'll never know, will we? Agnew was 50 when nominated. He, like Palin, was two years into the first term of a governorship. Before that, he had served four years as Baltimore County Executive, which is a bigger deal than Mayor of Wasilla, but not exactly close to the presidency. So, what can we say about Agnew? Had he and Nixon not been crooks, he would have presumably been a serious candidate for the Republican nomination in 1976. Nixon had no respect for Agnew (he wanted John Connally, but Connally had his own legal troubles in 1975), and Ronald Reagan would definitely have been a formidable candidate. Could Agnew have won? Hard to say. It's possible he would have washed out quickly; it's also possible that a popular Richard Nixon would have swallowed hard and supported Agnew to enhance Nixon's legacy.

And that leaves us...

Richard Nixon. Nixon was 39 when he was nominated. He had served two terms in House, and was in only his second year in the Senate (so his second year after winning statewide, same as Palin and Agnew). Like Quayle and Ferraro, Nixon had such a rough campaign that people thought he might get dumped from the ticket, but of the three Nixon came closest to being dumped. And like Quayle and Agnew, Nixon was no sure thing to stay on the ticket the second time around, although the logic of the situation (the president can't admit to the mistake) saved all three. Eight years of the Vice Presidency helped Nixon; so did a respectable campaign in 1960; so did good use made of the next eight years, especially after the failed bid for CA Governor in 1962. I think it's fair to say that by 1968, Nixon may have still been hated by liberals, but no one thought he was dramatically unqualified to be president.

OK, those are the comps. What do they tell us?

First, I think it's fair to say that none of these politicians would have been anywhere near the Oval Office without first being selected as Vice Presidential nominees. The one with the best case would be Nixon, but remember: someone was going to be Ike's VP, and whoever it was would have probably been perceived as more successful at it than Nixon, and would likely have had the nomination easily in 1960. It's really hard to construct an alternate history after that. Nixon certainly would have been a senior Senator from the nation's largest state had he continued to win reelection. Could he have remained as acceptable to both wings of the party if he had been casting votes in the Senate over the years? Would he have eventually seemed sufficiently presidential? I think it's safe to say that Agnew and Quayle would not have achieved that on their own, but harder to tell with Nixon.

However, the question we're asking about Palin isn't whether she would have had a chance without the VP pick; it's whether she has a chance with it. And as I look through the cases of similar candidates and the cases of other defeated VP choices, I can't find any of them who had presidential careers derailed by their VP candidacies -- including the ones who didn't do well on the national ticket.

I think the cases of Nixon and Quayle are the most helpful for thinking about Sarah Palin. We can imagine Richard Nixon reaching the presidency with or without the VP pick, because we know that Nixon had qualities -- smarts, work ethic, perseverance -- that would have served him well in politics one way or another. Dan Quayle wasn't a bad Senator, but he never showed those traits after the 1988 selection.

So, and I guess this is anticlimactic after all that, what I think all of this history shows is that there's nothing at all about being a losing VP candidate that disqualifies Sarah Palin from getting a nomination, or even hurts Sarah Palin's chances of being nominated. What hurts her chances is that right now, very few people beyond her intense supporters think she has any business being a national candidate. That can change, Nixon shows us, but so far she's not exactly off to a good start; in particular, resigning her office appears to be either an indication that she's not really interested in the presidency or a tremendous blunder. If I had to guess, I'd say that she is what she appears to be, and if that's the case her political career has already peaked, and the best she can hope for (as a politician) is a Jesse Jackson like factional campaign for a presidential nomination, although she certainly can have a lucrative career making money from her fans, if that's what she wants. I always caution people that we don't really know much from how a pol talks in public. Would it shock me if Palin puts together a serious political career? It would surprise me -- I don't see any indications of that in her record to date -- but stranger things have happened. What I am confident about is that had Tim Pawlenty been John McCain's choice for VP, we wouldn't be thinking about Sarah Palin right now, and the odds are strong that we would never, in the future, be thinking about Sarah Palin and the national ticket. She has a chance, but she just hasn't shown that she has, as Richard Ben Cramer said, what it takes to do it.

Can We Handle Crises?

Via Ezra, Brad DeLong is concerned that if another economic crisis comes along, the political system may be unable to react. Here's a bit of it:

We could cushion the impact of another big downward shock by a lot more deficit spending...But the centrist Democratic legislative caucus has now dug in its heels behind the position that we cannot undertake more deficit spending right now because we have a dire structural health-care financing proble afrer 2030. The Republican legislative causes has now dug in its heels behind the position that the fact that unemployment is 10% shows not that policy earlier this year was too cautious but rather that it was ineffective. And the Obama administration has not been able or has not tried to move either of those groups out of their current entrenchments.

Well, I'm certainly not going to argue with DeLong about the economic analysis, but I think he's wrong about the politics of it. Yes, Democrats have been making a lot of noises about deficits lately, and I agree with DeLong (and with Matt Yglesias, who correctly in my view harps on this quite a bit) that it's fairly nuts to be worried about deficits given current conditions.

On the other hand...Democrats are making noises about deficits, but they're also talking about moving a jobs bill through Congress. And cap-and-trade, and an immigration bill, and of course health care. So I wouldn't be too concerned that Democrats have suddenly decided to make deficit fetishism their new main goal; it seem more likely to me that they've decided to extend plenty of lip service, and keep their options open as far as actual policy is concerned.

Meanwhile, stepping back and looking at actual government action, it seems to me that the key facts over the last fifteen months is that the political system did implement significant, quick, non-incremental action in the face of crisis. First, Congress passed and Treasury implemented the bailout bill last fall (despite divided government, an imminent presidential and Congressional election, and and an apparently disengaged president). Then, Congress passed a heretofore unheard of massive stimulus bill. Yes, GOP rabble-rousers tried to sink the bailout bill, but they failed; yes, deficit fetishist Members of Congress reduced the size (and presumably the effectiveness) of the stimulus, but only at the margins. It's hardly surprising that there's a bit of buyer's remorse...especially since the powerless GOP rump is throwing everything they have at both policies. But the bottom line is in the crisis (and I'll go with Nelson W. Polsby's definition of crisis: when everyone things something has to be done), Congress and the Executive Branch acted.

Mind you, I'm not claiming that government will get any of the details right. I'm just saying that, while government intervention is a blunt instrument, I see no reason to think that gridlock or misguided policy preferences would prevent the Obama administration and the Congress from using that instrument in a future critical period -- and every reason to count previous action as evidence for, not against, the prospects for future action.

I'm less optimistic about some of Ezra Klein's concerns:

The biggest danger America faces is not rising health-care costs or global warming or the budget deficit. It's the political system's inability to act on these issues, even though the solutions are generally quite clear. As any uninsured person will tell you, the fact that medicine exists doesn't do you much good if you can't get any of it.

No question that problems structured like the (long-term) deficit and climate change -- issues with long-term costs that require short-term action -- are difficult for most democracies. Still, this very same political system was able to mostly solve the deficit problem only a few years ago, and it does look as if a pretty significant health care reform bill will, at long last, pass into law. So I can't really share Ezra's pessimism either.

On the economy, by the way, that makes me much more concerned about something similar to the Japan "lost decade" problem, rather than DeLong's Depression fears.

Dobbs, Palin, and the Master of Resentment

One thing to add (working from Justin Miller's very nice comment about Dobbs and Palin)...the greatest candidate of resentment, Richard M. Nixon, was far more of a Palin than a Dobbs. Nixon was far better at it than Palin, but then again by 1968, even by 1960, he had far more practice on the national stage.

Nixon's entire political persona was about being a little guy who got no respect from American elites. That's what the Checkers speech (in 1952, which he was running for Vice President) was about; that's what Nixon's book after losing a campaign, Six Crises, was about. Nixon's political gift, like Palin's, was to be resentment personified. Just as it is with Palin, you were supposed to like Nixon because he didn't go to Harvard, and he didn't have any advantages in life, and because the liberals just hated him (all true for Nixon, for what's it's worth).

I think that's a very, very valuable asset among Republicans. Unfortunately for Palin, she hasn't shown that she has the other traits that helped Nixon get to the White House -- hard work, perseverance, and, well, intelligence. If it turns out that she does have those traits, she has plenty of time to recover from her disastrous national introduction and wind up a formidable national figure.

Dobbs

Justin Miller has a great take this morning on Lou Dobbs as the anti-Palin. Excellent call. They both traffic in resentment, but Palin's is all personalized, while Dobbs has no interest, apparently, in that side of things.

There's a lot of talk now about Dobbs as a potential candidate for something, but whether he eventually runs or not, it's apt to be lots of bark and very little bite. He missed his ideal candidate and issue landscape for a third-party run last year; it's very unlikely that the next Republican nominee will be as immigrant-friendly as John McCain was, and for that matter I suspect that the next GOP nominee will be less of a free trader, at least in pre-election rhetoric. By 2012, either bailouts will be gone as an issue, or the Republican nominee will be stridently anti-bailout.

Had Dobbs run in 2008, he would have attracted a lot of attention, although the logic of the American electoral system means he would ultimately have received a relatively small number of votes -- almost certainly under 10%. His issue profile is a pretty good match for Ross Perot's 1992 and 1996 campaigns, right down to the flirtation with nutty conspiracy theories, although again he doesn't (as far as I know, and up to this point) personalize his conspiracies. That said, he's missing one of Perot's issues -- a long-standing commitment to veterans -- and more importantly he's missing the massive amounts of money that convinced the press to take Perot seriously.

Dobbs could choose to take advantage of the New York Republican Party's weakness and run for the Senate or for governor there, probably as a third-party candidate, but while it's possible to imagine him doing very well for an outsider, he wouldn't win, and the effort isn't likely to help him get whatever he's after (money? influence? fame?). So, if I had to guess, he'll flirt with that, and then flirt with running for president in 2012, but ultimately just wind up with book contracts and a show on Fox News (or Fox Business). If he does wind up running for president in 2012, he's apt to do about as well as Pat Buchanan in 2000. Hmmm...given that he's not going to be president regardless of what he does, his best bet for drawing maximum attention without seeming overly pathetic might be to enter the Democratic primaries; assuming unemployment is still high, I could see him getting 10-15% in a few states, and that would generate a fair amount of buzz.