GOP Floor Strategy: Have They Conceded Defeat?

Have Republicans given up on blocking health care in the Senate?

I continue to be baffled by the Senate Republicans' strategy on the health care bill.

The GOP has embarked on a double filibuster strategy. Strategy #1 is a 60 vote strategy: Republicans have been expected all year to force the Democrats to seek cloture on the bill, which will require sixty votes -- votes that the Dems may or may not have at this point.

Strategy #2, however, is also a filibuster strategy, but it isn't about getting forty-one votes to defeat the bill; it's about using Senate rules to drag the debate out indefinitely. So far, the two tactics used are forcing cloture on the motion to proceed (three days of floor time) and blocking votes on amendments (the first votes are beginning now on the fourth day of that one, although it's harder to score the amount of delay on that, since there certainly would have been some debate before votes). And we have the Gregg memo, advising Republicans about various obscure ways they can further delay things, such as raising bogus points of order and then filibustering a debate over the chair's ruling.

I continue to believe that strategy #2 undermines strategy #1. Not that Republicans should rush through the debate to get to the final (cloture) vote, but that even without deliberate delay the bill was likely to take at least two weeks of floor time, and that could easily run over four weeks just from normal debate over germane amendments.

Strategy #2, the delay-for-delay's-sake strategy, seems to me to have two major disadvantages for the Republicans. First, every time the GOP forces a procedural vote (such as cloture on the motion to proceed) that aligns all sixty Democrats (counting Lieberman as a Dem) against all forty Republicans, it pushes marginal Democrats in the direction of ultimately siding with the Dems in the final (strategy #1) procedural vote. It's easier to explain an "always vote for cloture" voting pattern, I think, than a more complex pattern; what's more, marginal Dems have already cast a vote (on cloture on the motion to proceed) that will be used against them from one side, so it may be easier to just take that hit and avoid the double hit from the left involved in opposing final passage (and cloture on final passage).

Second, strategy #2 undermines the ability of Republicans to argue that they are working in good faith towards a bipartisan compromise. That's not going to affect partisans, but it could affect neutral observers; I'm not sure the Broders of the world are going to applaud drag-it-out-forever tactics. And if Republicans lose that crowd, that hurts their chances of winning the Democratic Senators who want to be seen as moderates. Again, a couple weeks of delay through introducing germane amendments would not have that effect, but that doesn't seem to be the Republican strategy.

So, why are they doing it? Surely they don't think that keeping the bill on the floor a few more weeks will kill it; this is clearly the top Democratic priority, and Dems won't just quit and go home if they have to drag the debate into January or even February. It's possible they believe that public opinion will turn sharply against the bill over time, but again the particular delaying tactics used threaten to undermine the chances of that happening (they'd be far better off with nice-sounding amendments, not foot-dragging). What's their game?

One possible explanation is that Republicans have concluded that they have no real chance of winning the final cloture vote.

If that's the case, then strategy #2 may not really be about stopping the bill at all. It may just be about pleasing GOP primary -- and, in the minds of some Senators, presidential primary -- voters. Those voters are apt to love this sort of thing, and certainly won't be put off by "party of no" accusations, even if swing voters might.

Granted, it's also possible that Republicans just calculate the situation differently than I do. If my logic is correct, however, it suggests that things look pretty good for the bill getting done.

Stapling machine, Mr Clarke

Gotta wonder how less successful presidential candidates feel about the continued prominence of buffoonish former candidates Howard Dean and John McCain. Both are back in the news this week. Dean is pushing an utterly preposterous argument on the public option. McCain...well, where to start. There's his leadership in the "don't cut Medicare because we need to cut Medicare" drive -- this article assumes that he and the GOP were merely being hypocritical and opportunistic by switching from supporting cuts in Medicare to opposing them, but the floor debate made clear that the GOP hasn't flip-flopped: they're actually arguing that Medicare will go broke unless cuts are made, and that cuts can't be made because they'll hurt beneficiaries. Confused? John McCain isn't; his brain is made for that sort of thing. But that's not all! There's also Afghanistan...I think this one is just garden variety flip-flopping, but this one shows McCain in all his Mrs. Zambesi glory.

I hadn't previously thought of Dean and McCain together, but I think it makes a lot of sense; both of them seem to feel that their certainty overrides not only the facts, but even any need to bother learning about the facts (or at least speaking as if they knew the facts). Dean was guaranteed to produce at least one whopper per debate when he was running for the nomination in 2004, and McCain, you know about. And yet both seem to keep their reputations as somewhat serious policy-makers.

Kudos and thanks to Yglesias for staying on top of McCain's latest foibles.

Ezra's 7 (7/7): No One Is Reading This?

Intro to this series here; Ezra Klein's post is here.

Ezra says:

7) What you emphasize is a lot more important than what you report. People don't read you closely.

Twenty years ago, I know what my wiseass comment here would have been: Read? Huh?

So, video didn't conquer all, at least for now. But beyond that, I have not much to say about that one; it's true, and probably good advice to journalists, but other than confirming that people don't read thoroughly I have little to add.

So, since I've reached the last of the series, I'll ask readers for their suggestions. Are there other stories out there that Politico should fear? Things that academics know that, if reporters accepted them, would make lots of Very Important Stories turn out to be ephemera and trivia (not that there's anything wrong with that...) Put your ideas in comments or email me, and if I get a few I'll put a post together.

Ezra's 7 (6/7): Ignore Cable News?

Intro to this series here; Ezra Klein's post is here.

Ezra says:

6) Pretty much no one watches cable news.

I have little to add to this one...I guess there are a couple of things, one about mass publics and one about political elites. About mass publics, what we can say is that the handful of people who do watch cable news are the most highly informed -- and therefore the most partisan and most highly ideological -- of all Americans (highly informed means they receive a lot of information, not that they necessarily get it right!). So the things they learn from watching cable news are not apt to change their minds about anything. At best, it gives them a vocabulary and some talking points with which to talk about issues of public policy.

About political elites...well, they do watch cable news, and are very tempted to design public relations strategies around "winning" news cycles there. This, as Obama has shown, is mostly a big waste of time. If they go farther and actually design policies around that goal, it's apt to be counterproductive. But, for those of us who are just observers, it's worth knowing that those impulses are real and sometimes drive action, foolish or not. In other words, ignore the yakkers, and you'll find some actions of politicians difficult to understand.

(Click through Ezra's link above to very sensible comments by Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias on the same subject. I should also note that Kevin Drum is, I think, talking mainly about daytime cable news, but it's not as if prime time cable news is doing much, either).

Bottom line is that Ezra is right about this one, but it only took him seven words.

Ezra's 7 (5/7): Are the Press Neutral?

Intro to this series here; Ezra Klein's post is here.

Ezra says:

5) The media is a political actor, not an observer.

Well, yes.

It seems to me that the useful thing to know about the media has to do with media biases. Americans overwhelmingly believe that the press has a liberal bias, but that's because Republicans have used it as a talking point for forty years. In fact, while it's true that reporters are overwhelmingly liberal, it turns out that studies looking for liberal (or conservative) bias mostly turn up nothing. Now, one has to be careful defining terms here. If one believes that gays and lesbians are deviants, then one will judge it media bias if gays and lesbians are treated as normal, ordinary Americans. If one believes that capitalism is evil, then one will judge it media bias if capitalism is treated as normal, or even as good. What the media bias studies show isn't that there's no (ideological) bias; it's just that the media tend to treat as normal things that most Americans view as normal. Sometimes, what most Americans believe is wrong or goofy, and in those cases the press will tend to reflect the beliefs of most Americans, for better or worse. There are some exceptions to that generalization, but overall it's probably pretty accurate.

That doesn't mean that the press isn't biased. In fact, researchers have found lots of biases, but they tend to run along the lines of two things: biases in the press's self interest (they like things that sell more papers or get higher ratings), and biases produced by the way that reporters do their jobs. The first part of produces things like a tendency to feature sex and violence, a tendency to prefer good stories to important stories, and a tendency to personalize things (which also yields the tendency to focus on presidents and not Congress, since the former is less abstract). The second part produces things such as pack journalism, an emphasis on breaking stories, and far more coverage of those things with established beats (and areas with news bureaus) than those things and places without those advantages.

All of that is about the "objective" press -- not that it's perfectly objective, but that it strives to be neutral between political actors. In the heyday of the objective press in the middle of the twentieth century, the paragraph above would cover most everything but a handful of tiny, mostly inconsequential magazines and a handful of op-ed columnists. Obviously, the world has changed and is changing, and we don't know yet what will come out the other side. What it looks like so far is the revival of a partisan press, which includes things such as Fox News, the prime time talk shows at MSNBC, and on-line sites such as Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo. These outlets are clearly biased in favor of a party or an ideology, and in fact are probably best thought of as part of their party networks.

Back to Ezra: he's absolutely right that reporters are political actors, whether they are part of the nineteenth century partisan press, the twenty century objective press, or today's mixed group.

Ezra's 7 (4/7): What Do Polls Mean?

Intro to this series here; Ezra Klein's post is here.

Ezra says:

4) Polls are useful for measuring impressions but very bad for measuring beliefs.

Sounds fine to me.

What I'd encourage reporters to know about polling is to always keep in mind that most Americans don't pay very much attention to politics and don't know very much about public policy issues. At the same time, Americans, or at least enough Americans for the math to work, are willing to answer questions from pollsters.

What that means is that what we're getting with a lot of public opinion polling are not "opinions" as we normally think of them. They're reactions to poll questions, which can be a much different thing. Now, the closer a question gets to reporting on real actions, the better the chances that the answers will be meaningful. Thus questions about voting intentions in October of an election year can be pretty accurate predictors of what will happen in a few weeks. Ask someone what they think of the public option or of health care reform generally, and you'll wind up with a mishmash of stuff that often can't really be figured out, especially from just the raw, single-number results.

It helps when we have consistent questions over time. We may not know exactly what it means for people to say they approve of the president's job performance, but we can look at identically worded questions over many decades, and sensibly say that Obama has, say, higher approval ratings than Clinton but lower than Kennedy over his first ten months, or that Bush's approval ratings dwindled steadily from the September 11 spike on, until he had unusually low ratings in his last two years. Or, we may not know exactly what to make of the abortion data, but at least we can say that attitudes seem to be fairly steady over time.

Beyond that, I'd ask reporters to look at more of the data (numerous polls from all pollsters, not just proprietary polls from their own outlet); to learn a basic understanding of probability (two point "swings" between polls are probably noise, nothing else; and to reconcile poll finding about issues with the things that academic specialists on public opinion have learned, since those specialists generally have much more careful studies to work from.

Ezra's 7 (3/7): Presidents Don't Affect Legislation?

Intro to this series here; Ezra Klein's post is here.

Ezra says:

3) Nor does the executive's legislative strategy [matter very much], come to think of it. Politics is much more interesting when it's told as the story of the executive, but in fact, the rules and composition of the Congress decide 80 percent of everything -- including the president's legislative priorities and strategy.

Actually, this one I think needs rephrasing. I think Ezra is very much correct in pointing to the importance of Congress, and recognizing that a lot of press coverage is far too focused on the presidency (and I don't have a citation here, but some of the other policy bloggers are good on this too, including Matt Yglesias). However, that "80 percent" sets off my a detector that I learned not from political science graduate school, but from years of reading Bill James...80 percent? Really?

That can't be correct. After all, a similar House and fairly similar Senate in 2007-2008 didn't enact S-CHIP expansion or the Ledbetter law, didn't reform Pentagon procurement, and didn't change credit card regulation or public lands management, and passed a small and (very) tax-heavy stimulus, not a large stimulus balanced between tax cuts and spending. Those actions aren't, however, primarily about presidential strategy; they're about the fact of a Democratic president.

A better way to put this one, then, would be:

Nor does any legislative strategy determine outcomes, come to think of it. Politics is much more interesting when it's told as the story of individual decisions, but in fact, the rules and composition of the president and Congress are very important -- they even affect things we sometimes take to be individual decisions, such as the president's legislative priorities and strategy.

No question: if Grassley, Gregg, Burr and Lieberman were replaced by Senators who voted like Harkin, Shaheen, Hagan and Dodd, the Senate health care bill would be far closer to what liberals want; conversely, if Harkin Shaheen, Hagan and Dodd were replaced by Senators who voted like Grassley, Gregg, Burr, and Lieberman, the odds of passing anything would be dramatically lower, and anything that did pass would be much farther from what liberals want. Congressional rules really do matter, and cannot be wished away.

But keeping those fundamental factors in mind does not mean that legislative priorities and strategies don't matter. Obama could have chosen to place a higher priority on climate legislation than health care; I think that would have been a mistake given the composition and rules of Congress, but presidents made mistakes of that kind all the time. Obama's decision to co-opt relevant interest groups, as opposed to Clinton's decision not to do so, mattered as well, both to the prospects of the bill's passage and to the substance of the bills. It's not just presidential tactics that matter; had Max Baucus pushed a bill through Senate Finance quickly, he might have failed entirely, and very likely would have lost two votes in committee, at least one of which he's going to need on the Senate floor. Had Nancy Pelosi pushed for a floor vote before the August recess, Democratic Members of the House might have been hit harder by the August mess, and might have revolted in all sorts of messy ways. And there are many, many stories like that throughout American history: think of Jimmy Carter's failed legislative strategy (despite large Congressional majorities), or Newt Gingrich's disastrous train-wreck strategy in the 1995-1996 budget battle.

Once again: the basic point, that Congressional procedures and the party affiliation and ideological disposition of Members of Congress are very important, is an excellent point, and one that is far too often overlooked by reporters. On this one, however, I'd say that in general it's a problem of the wrong emphasis: legislative strategy is important, too. In fact, what we often need is better reporting so that we can figure out which is which, reporting that we often don't get because reporters are so fixated on White House legislative strategy.