Politics as Usual 2

Is there something new, different, and scary going on right now in American politics?

I don't know about scary, but I do think there is something different right now. Andrew asks if the center will hold (well, he can't help himself; he actually says "the center isn't holding," but I think that's just Andrew-speak for asking). I answered in part one of this post that the center is holding just fine. If that's so, why is everyone so jumpy?

The center is holding just fine...but the Republican party and the conservative movement have mostly abandoned it. That's really new and different.

Conservative ideas aren't dead; a set of ideas going back (at least) a few hundred years doesn't die just because the people who champion those ideas have a few policy setbacks. And the odds are good that Republicans will revive themselves at some point in the not too distant future. It could, for all we know, happen very rapidly; it's not at all hard to imagine a strong GOP presidential nominee in 2012 who divorces the party from Glenn Beck and the rest of the gang without giving up conservative ideas. He or she wouldn't even need to give up the support of the radio yakkers and Fox News hosts; having a few loudmouths doesn't make a party crazy.

No, what causes problems for a party is when it's leaders start believing their own propaganda. Perhaps it's apocryphal, but the anecdote that David Alexrod told today is what I'm talking about:

Axelrod said he spoke recently to a "very significant figure" on the right who told him that Obama "wanted to start a national police force." "What are you talking about," Axelrod asked. The GOPer sent him a 21-second clip from a speech Obama made in Colorado last year -- a speech on national service -- and in it, Obama said he wanted to create a civillian force that could go into countries and provide humanitarian services.... Obama used the word "civil force" -- "They took that 21-second bite .... and it has been taken as an article of faith that the president wants to create a national police force."

Yes, some Democrats believed crazy things about George W. Bush...but John Kerry didn't run for president in 2004 on a platform of accusing Bush of conspiring with the Saudis to attack New York, and none of the 2008 contenders filled their campaign rhetoric with diatribes about Diebold (an almost perfect left comp for ACORN). But it's not just about using over-the-top rhetoric, which the Dems certainly are capable of just as much as Republicans; it's that GOP leaders, politicians and not, act as if they really believe what Rush says and what they see on Fox News. Whether it's just an act or not is hard to tell, but the actions that flow from it -- from acting as if all was well in Iraq from 2003 well into 2006, to the Terri Schiavo thing, to the Palin fiasco -- indicate a party that really has seriously lost its way.

Right now, there really is a large difference between the parties: the Democrats play to the middle even if it annoys their base, while the Republicans, for almost a decade now, seem to have no interest in appealing to anyone who doesn't already attend the right churches or listen to the right radio program. They're stuck with a dynamic that involves revving up through influence over communication channels, but at the same time the people controlling those information channels have economic incentives to take more and more extreme positions, which in turn leaves party leaders with a larger and larger gap between what their base believes and what voters at the margins believe. All in all, the result is that the center is holding just fine, but it's holding well within the Democratic Party.

As I said, odds are that sooner or later this will change. It could happen very quickly. But I also wouldn't be surprised to see a few election cycles in which the Republicans really underperform, thanks to difficulties in nominating candidates that can appeal to the middle. And, if the GOP does wind up back in control of a House of Congress or the presidency before it changes, I think they'll find it next-to-impossible to govern, which I think describes what they went through during the Bush/DeLay years. Not because conservative ideas can't work, but because the Republican party isn't functioning very well.

Politics as Usual

Thomas Friedman's scare piece -- "I have actually been to this play before and it is really disturbing" certainly has everyone talking. No one does excitable better than Andrew Sullivan, who says:

It's impossible to watch the vast ignorance, hate and extremism in this country right now and not almost despair. At a time of extraordinary challenges, the center is not holding.

Nonsense. I'll stick with Andrew's Dissent of the Day, who has the excellent taste to cite B-1 Bob Dornan as an older comp for Michelle Bachmann. Seth Masket nails it:

We've always had our Joe Wilsons, Kanye Wests, and Serena Williamses. George W. Bush was regularly compared to Hitler by anti-war demonstrators. Bill Clinton was vilified as a murderous tyrant by the likes of Jerry Falwell. FDR was accused of stabbing America's soldiers in the back through his concessions to Stalin at Yalta. John McEnroe was a strutting ass on the tennis court long before it was fashionable.

Seth (and others) cite the multiplicity of outlets for information today compared to fifty years ago; as he says, "this is a relatively good time to be a jackass if you like attention." Exactly.

And the center? It's doing just fine. This isn't 1968, or anything even remotely like it. There are no riots; there are no huge protests. The president isn't wildly popular, but he's hanging steady with approval a bit over 50%. Moreover, unlike 1968, what anger there is out there isn't directed against real government policies that really divide the nation (such as overthrowing almost a century of segregation, or prosecuting a pointless war that was killing thousands of Americans), but about mirages and hyped-up gibberish. Read anything from that older era (I'd suggest Updike's Rabbit Redux and Garry Wills, Nixon Agonisties), and you really do get a sense that people of the time couldn't see their way out of things. If Updike had lived to capture 2009, and I for one really am missing his decade update, I don't think he would have seen things that way at all.

Hey, I think a lot of us share Thomas Friedman's nightmare that all the crazy rhetoric out there might push a nut or two over the edge, and we'll have something horrific staring back at us, just as we did in 1963 and 1968, and then in Oklahoma City during the Clinton years. We fear that -- but it's worth remembering that two nuts tried to shoot Jerry Ford, of all people, and that terrorists attacked the United States Congress in 1954, which isn't exactly a year one would pick as the height of conflict.

Now, all that said, I do think there's something interesting going on. Stay tuned for the next post.

Liberals: Still Not Losing 2

I'm comfortable describing what's happening with health care as a liberal victory in the making (assuming that it doesn't implode), but for a somewhat different perspective, see this post from Matt Yglesias. I don't necessarily agree with everything Matt says here, but he shows that you can be pleased that a bill will pass while still being disappointed in exactly what the bill looks like -- and without falling into the traps I talked about earlier.

Searching for analogies...I'd say that the likely bill will be a lot more like the original passage of Social Security (substantively important, very incomplete, relatively easy to build on later) than it is like the Eisenhower-era Civil Rights bill that Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson got through the Senate (basically symbolic, didn't do a whole lot more than show that it was possible to pass something). I can understand, as I said before, a lot of frustration at getting a lot less than liberals would consider ideal, but I think it's a big mistake to turn that frustration into a circular firing squad.

Liberals: Still Not Losing

I think this is becoming a continuing item...

Liberals are up in arms because the public option lost in committee. They're ready to dump Harry Reid if he doesn't deliver what they want; they're raising money to attack Baucus.

Why? Well, I can understand being upset about the committee vote, and being frustrated that even after two good election cycles Democrats still don't have the votes for major health care reform with a strong public option. Attacking Reid and Baucus (both of whom support a public option, but are more committed to passing a bill), however, is mostly just shooting the messenger...and attacking marginal Dems from swing states such as Lincoln or Ben Nelson is counterproductive, since most plausible replacements for those Senators would be to the right, and probably severely to the right, of those Democrats. Indeed, that's the case for Reid and Baucus as well, especially since they are both well within the mainstream of the party in the Senate. So, what's going on?

First, and repeating what I said in the last post, I think we have some Vietnam Syndrome Liberals: progressives who have become so obsessed with toughness and "guts" that they have come to act as if the entire point of politics is to Stand Tall and Not Compromise, rather than actually winning.

Second, I think liberals haven't quite accepted that their preferred bill, single-payer, was a non-starter this year because it got buried in the presidential primaries last year. For example, Nick Beaudrot has an otherwise very sensible post about the Carper propoal which he inexplicably titles "The Carper Compromise of a Compromise of a Compromise." That only makes sense if one considers a strong public option a compromise -- presumably, between a single-payer bill and a plan like the Baucus version of the bill. But single-payer wasn't bargained away; it lost, long before November 2008.

Now, as it happens, liberals are winning. While the wheels could still fall off, it looks to me as if Congress will enact and the president will sign major, historic health care reform. The new law almost certainly won't have a strong public option -- but it will have some compromise, whether it's the Carper federalist plan, the Snowe trigger, the Schumer weak public option, or the Conrad co-ops. And there's still a lot of fight remaining over which of these will be adopted, and how exactly the winning option will be defined; as I read the analyses (like this one), there's far too much variation in the possible details for anyone yet to know how much "weaker" the compromise will be than a strong public option. The key point, however, is that any version that's on the table would be a terrific victory for the long-term liberal agenda.

Granted, liberals would be happier if they had the votes for something else. The way to do that, however, is to try to win in New Hampshire, Missouri, and Ohio in 2010 -- not to dump seats in Nevada and Arkansas.

Party of Grayson?

"Guts" is the most overrated variable in sports and politics. There's something about us that wants outcomes to be explained by determination: that's why sports broadcasters ask "who wants it the most," with the implication that the answer to that question -- and not talent, skill, strategy, or luck -- will decide outcomes. But, in sports, that's mostly just nonsense.

And in politics, it's nonsense as well. It is, however, a popular explanation, especially in the last few years from liberals. Their story goes like this: our policies are both correct and popular, and so the only explanation for defeat is that our leaders are gutless wonders. Alan Grayson, who taps into that feeling, is about to be very popular among the Olbermann crowd. Drum quotes Jon Stewart making basically the same point: "Why are Democrats so lame?" Here's Drum:

They have a huge majority in the Senate, the public is strongly in favor of a public option, and yet....for some reason they can't round up the votes to pass it. Hell, they can't even round up a normal majority to pass it out of the Finance Committee, let alone a supermajority to overcome an eventual filibuster...

If they don't pass a healthcare bill at all, they'll be viewed as terminally lame. If they pass a bill, but it doesn't contain popular features that people want — like the public option — they'll be viewed as terminally lame.

Well, I do think that the Democrats are going to pass a health care bill. But it's not because they have the guts to do it -- it's because they have the votes, thanks to victories by Franken and Shaheen and Hagan and Warner, all of whom won because they went out and ran good races. For some of them, however, running a good race meant taking moderate positions on issues. Yes, Democrats can produce polling evidence that a public option is popular...but that evidence can be easily contradicted by other polling results, because most people have no idea what "public option" means. Deciding what to do in the face of such mixed evidence is hard for Democrats representing Arkansas, Louisiana, Virginia, Indiana, Montana, or the Dakotas. It's hardly surprising that those Senators would be looking for something that would be widely seen as a responsible compromise.

Meanwhile, the "no guts" Democrats dominated the 2006 elections, dominated the 2008 elections, passed several agenda items already, and are thisclose to finally, after sixty years of futility, passing (with or without the public option) a major health reform law.

Democrats of this type remind me, I guess, of Vietnam syndrome neoconservatives, who are convinced that America needs to demonstrate to the world that it can take casualties in a war and keep fighting...to the extent that proving a willingness to take casualties (which, of course, requires ever-increasing numbers of casualties) is more important than any other goal. Similarly, Democrats obsessed with "guts" seem to think being tough is more important than actually achieving any particular substantive goal.

Democrats could, of course, prove their toughness by taking a strong public option plan to the floor of the Senate and losing. Or, to really show guts, progressives could insist on a single-payer plan or nothing, and exile the Lincolns and Landrieus from the party when they oppose it. Then, when they get back to a nice comfortable minority, they can congratulate themselves for their ferocity.

(By the way: I didn't have similar problems with Grayson's original cheap shot on the House floor; I thought that was a perfectly fine cheap shot, and a normal part of debate. My problem isn't with those kinds of attacks; it's with those who believe that such attacks are rare coming from the Democratic side -- not true -- and who believe that toughness is all that's needed in politics).

Getting There...

Baucus just started things off today by announcing that he thinks they're going to finish today, or if not today then tomorrow. He also says this is the longest markup in days (7) for the last fifteen years. Seems right to me -- this is probably the most important bill they've considered in a long time.

You may be wondering, as I was, what happened to Snowe's trigger. Politico (via Ezra) reports that the trigger, the federalist compromise that Carper is working on, and some other remaining significant possibilities won't be offered in committee -- they'll be subject to the negotiations at the next stage, which is merging the Finance Committee bill and the HELP bill. It's not clear from the reporting which things still might come up in committee today, but I guess we'll see; so far, they're on a Crapo grandstanding amendment about taxes.

Meanwhile, the breakout star of the markup was certainly Debbie Stabenow. It'll be interesting to see whether she winds up with a major role in the floor debate, and how she builds on it in the next couple of years.

Pawlenty's Charge

Tim Pawlenty is kicking his presidential campaign into high gear today.

It's worth noting just how rare a Pawlenty nomination would be. Here are the results of open GOP nominations (leaving out, that is, nominations of sitting presidents):

1968 Nixon 2nd try (former nominee and VP)
1980 Reagan 3rd try
1988 Bush 2nd try (and VP)
1996 Dole 3rd try (and VP nominee)
2000 Bush 1st try
2008 McCain 2nd try

McCain, Dole, G. H.W. Bush, and Reagan had all been not only candidates, but runners-up, in the previous open nomination.

The big exception, of course, is George W. Bush, but just as obviously he was the son of a Republican president (and governor of a much bigger state). Bush defeated one previous VP (Quayle) and one previous candidate (Forbes) on his way to the nomination.

That's not to say that Pawlenty can't do it; it's a pattern, but there's been no study showing a causal connection between previous candidacy and nominations on the GOP side. That is, we don't know why it happens, including the possibility that it's a chance result, so I'd be very cautious about using the pattern to make predictions. And Democrats nominate first-time candidates frequently (Obama, Kerry, Clinton, Dukakis, Carter). It's tempting to think that there's something different about the two parties that allows Obama to defeat Clinton, Edwards, and Biden on the one hand, but that results in McCain prevailing over Huckabee and Romney on the other side -- but we don't actually know that.

Remember, it's only 27 months to the Iowa Caucuses. Ready yet?