Apples and Oranges

Nelson W. Polsby used to be very upset at the cliche about apples and oranges: Of course you can compare them! They're both fruit!

Which is pretty much how I feel about liberal outrage about comparisons between Healthcare.gov and Bush-era fiascos including Iraq and Katrina that have been making the rounds this week -- here's Oliver Willis tweeting a graph showing deaths from the three while saying "why you shouldnt compare obamacare to katrina or iraq, in one chart. cc: all pundits"

Well, no, not really. And not just because, in fact, this is a self-refusing argument; posting the graph is in fact making the comparison -- just that it's basing the comparison on one particular variable. An important one, to be sure, and one where the launch of Healthcare.gov looks good. But a comparison, nonetheless. (And a silly one: was Iraq really a much better policy than WWII? Were Watergate and various Red Scares no big deal?)

Regardless: my real point here is that of course you can and should compare presidential decisions, and government execution of policy, with other presidential decisions and government execution of policy.

Now, there's also a lot of foolish talk among Republicans about how Barack Obama's popularity is going to be destroyed by Healthcare.gov, just as Bush's was destroyed by Iraq and Katrina. That's probably wrong, but it's not a wrong question to ask. Just as it isn't wrong to question whether as policy implementation Healthcare.gov could turn out to be similar to other fiascoes, even if failure in this case won't (directly at least) lead to death.

In other words: yeah, there's a lot of junk out there. But "people died" is no reason to shut down careful thought. For the most part liberals seem to be handling this fairly well, but just remember: The antidote for junk analysis is better analysis. Not more junk.

Sunday Question for Liberals

We're doing the flip side of last week: what politician(s) are you most embarrassed that you supported?

As I explained in the conservative question, I'm not talking about, say, support for Reagan or Bush before you became a liberal. I'm looking for either politicians you supported who turned out to be other than what you thought at the time, or politicians you had to hold your nose to support (yeah, I know, some of you went to this in last week's flip side, but I was already planning to do it as this week's question...).

Sunday Question for Liberals

Same question as the one for conservatives, also leaning on the 4th of July week and my Salon column yesterday about the importance of elections:

What politicians are you most proud of having supported?

Sunday Question for Liberals

Since I think I'm writing about this soon: holding spending the same, which do you prefer: higher taxes (written, let's say, by liberals, so making taxes more progressive) or taxes where they are and a larger deficit?

Catch of the Day

Ezra Klein asks one of my favorite questions today: what ever happened to the public option?

Regular readers will know that I've been dead wrong on this one, at least so far. I thought it would be an extremely popular position for Democratic politicians, especially those running in competitive primaries. In fact, I thought it would be virtually required for such candidates. But it wasn't, really, in 2010, and it was only rarely mentioned in 2012. That was even true in Senate primaries, for example, in New Mexico and Hawaii, in which one would have expected the candidates to try to score points with Democratic activists.

And yet? Virtually nothing.

So I don't understand it, either.

Great catch!

Sunday Question for Liberals

A sort of follow-up to the question for conservatives...I think I've asked this one before, but not for a while. Do you hope for the GOP to become crazier, so that Democrats have a better chance of winning elections -- or less crazy, so that when Republicans win they'll govern better?

Sunday Question for Liberals

This is going to be the same one that I set for conservatives; as I said there, I don't think I've done it for a while. Which liberal columnists, bloggers, radio hosts and TV pundits are overrated and overexposed? Which ones should get more attention?

(And meanwhile -- this is the second time in a week that I forgot to hit the final button for a post to go live. Argghh!).

Sunday Question for Liberals

What's your big (and preferably at least somewhat realistic) hope for the New Year?

Sunday Question for Liberals

Same one as for conservatives: what ballot measures are you particularly interested in during this election cycle?

Sunday Question for Liberals

Same question as the one for conservatives: I'm looking for liberals in history, especially the second half of the twentieth century, who are overlooked, underappreciated or underrated. Politicians especially, but of course you're free to include anyone you like.

Liberal and Conservative Impulses

I think I'd classify this one as amateur ideological interpretation; I don't want to claim much for it, only that it seems to come in handy for me when I try to make sense of things.

Anyway, I wrote over at Greg's place yesterday about the liberal impulse:

[I]f the liberal impulse is “we can do better,” and the liberal danger is a hubris that trying to do better is always an unambiguously good idea, the threat to liberals is a cynicism that we really can’t do better. That trying to do something difficult is inherently something to be mocked. And the truth is that anti-liberal cynicism isn’t without some merit at times, and it certainly isn’t without some political appeal.

So I'd want to extend that a bit, and to say that if the liberal impulse is "we can do better," then the conservative impulse is "don't make it worse." The conservative danger is allowing injustice to go unchallenged, and the threat to conservatives is the suspicion that caution and prudence are really masks for indifference.

Or something like that. The basic idea is that both of these impulses are valuable and necessary in any polity, and perhaps especially in democracies. And I guess I'd also say that both those impulses don't always map easily onto public policy positions that we associate with those who call themselves liberals and conservatives.

And the problem with American politics is that the "conservative" party post-Reagan really doesn't seem to possess the conservative impulse. The party of Paul Ryan, George W. Bush, and Newt Gingrich is a party of neither the conservative nor the liberal impulse, but a radical one. They are the party who not only embraces, as Ronald Reagan did, Thomas Paine's claim that "We have it in our power to begin the world anew," but that often doesn't seem to temper that grandiose attitude with any of Reagan's FDR-worshiping liberalism that ground their idealism in the real world (okay, Reagan's version of the real world, which caused all sorts of problems, but it was real to him at any rate and therefore imposed limits). Anyway, it leads them to absolutes, which everyone from Andrew Sullivan to Hannah Arendt could tell you aren't very healthy when it comes to politics.

Again, this is all sort of doodling; if you really want to know about ideology, you'll want to read Hans Noel. Just saying that it helps me sort things out when I think about it this way.

Sunday Question for Liberals

So, the Republican convention: ignore it? If so, deliberate counterprogramming, or just whatever you normally watch? Or: Watch and get depressed? Watch and get angry? Watch and laugh? Decide not to watch any of it, but usually find yourself drifting back to it?

Sunday Question for Liberals

Same question: just for speaking ability, who are you looking forward to hearing at the Democratic Convention this year?

Sunday Question for Liberals

The Occupy folks: any lasting effect?

Sunday Question for Liberals

This is all because I have Eleanor on my mind today...

Who are the neglected, underrated, or underappreciated liberal heroes?

Sunday Question for Liberals

Same question as the one for conservatives: what liberal bloggers, reporters, or columnists should more people be reading?

The New Liberal Position on the Court and Health Care

As I understand it, the new liberal position on the Supreme Court and health care is going to be: the Roberts Court is unscrupulous, unprincipled, and nakedly partisan, and are going after the ACA for purely partisan reasons. So if only we passed single-payer, everything would be fine.

No, it doesn't make sense to me, either.

Sunday Question for Liberals

How do you think Barack Obama has done with regard to the uprisings and revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa over the last year plus?

More on the Future of the Public Option

David Dayen has an interesting response to my post from last week about the future of the public option, in which I noted that it's very early, but so far there doesn't seem to be much visible support for adding a health insurance public option to ACA among 2012 Democratic Senate candidates.

Dayen argues that the public option fight "fundamentally transformed the tactics and strategies of whatever is left of a progressive movement." He continues:

[T]he trust of the base to use the normal mechanisms of politics to advance goals simply crumbled. That’s why you’re seeing a dearth of promises from candidates about the public option. Base voters have become increasingly cynical that those promises mean anything. So why bother making the promise in the first place? The progressive movement is undergoing a transformation where they no longer see engagement with candidates as the best or only strategy to advance goals. Those not hopelessly alienated by the entire political process prefer outsider strategies that force political pressure from the bottom up, rather than relying on the promises of those politicians to carry the day. That’s the new reality...

Is Dayen right about what "the progressive movement" believes? I don't know. It's easy to forget that most liberals supported ACA and support Barack Obama, but I'm not aware of any solid evidence about what activists believe or how they're acting. I'm sure he's correct about some, but I have no idea how significant that is in practice.

If he's right, however, than that's too bad for liberals, and it's a fundamental misreading of the 2009-2010 ACA battle. After all, the truth back then was that Democratic candidates in 2008, and certainly Barack Obama, placed very little emphasis on the public option as a key campaign promise. It was certainly mentioned, but it was presented as a minor component during the campaign. So in view, it's a major misreading of the ACA fight to read it as showing that liberal politicians can't be trusted to keep their promises. Instead, what ACA showed that promises matter a lot, but that there's a lot of complexity involved -- higher profile promises matter more than those on which the candidate places less emphasis, and sometimes it's Members of Congress who matter as much or more than the president.

That doesn't mean, by the way, that political action outside of basic electoral politics is pointless. My general guess is that people gravitate and should gravitate to where they're most comfortable. But in purely instrumental terms, one of the best investments that I can think of in politics is in getting politicians who want to be seen as sympathetic to your point of view to actually support the issues you care most about.

My prediction had been that activists would make it clear to liberal candidates that the public option was now a high priority, which would translate into quick action whenever the next chance happens for fulfilling the liberal agenda (just as family leave passed quickly in 1993 and the Lilly Ledbetter Act passed quickly in 2009. For liberals to react to ACA passage instead as fundamentally a betrayal would be a mistake; for them to react by giving up on forcing politicians to make future promises would basically be an excellent way for liberals to lose all influence in Washington.

Sunday Question for Liberals

Prediction time for the new year: who are we all going to be talking about in 2012? Someone, that is, who we were not talking about in 2011?