Category: The Opinionsphere

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Barack Obama Criticism Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Draw Your Own Conclusions

Matthew Continetti:

Scott Brown’s victory exposes NY-23 as a fluke. The trend is clear. Independents have moved sharply right over the course of President Obama’s first year in office, even in Massachusetts.

Matt Bai:

The most prevalent ideology of the era seems to be not liberalism nor conservatism so much as anti-incumbency, a reflexive distrust of whoever has power and a constant rallying cry for systemic reform.

Mike Allen:

By these lights, impatience with the status quo — rather than any rightward turn in the mood of the electorate — is what would fuel a Brown victory.

Jonathan Chait:

But political analysts are more like drama critics. They follow the ins and outs of the tactical maneuverings of the players, and when the results come in, their job is to explain how the one led to the other. If you suggested to them that they should instead explain the public mood as a predictable consequence of economic conditions, rather than the outcome of one party’s strategic choices, they would look at you like you were crazy. They spend their time following every utterance and gesture of powerful politicians. Naturally, it must be those things that have the decisive effect…

Barack Obama:

Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country: the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.

David Leonhardt:

The current versions of health reform are the product of decades of debate between Republicans and Democrats. The bills are more conservative than Bill Clinton’s 1993 proposal. For that matter, they’re more conservative than Richard Nixon’s 1971 plan, which would have had the federal government provide insurance to people who didn’t get it through their job.

Today’s Congressional Republicans have made the strategically reasonable decision to describe President Obama’s health care plan, like almost every other part of his agenda, as radical and left wing. And the message seems to be at least partly working, based on polls and the Massachusetts surprise. But a smart political strategy isn’t the same thing as accurate policy analysis.

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Barack Obama Politics The Opinionsphere

Why Scott Brown’s Election is Good for the Nation and the Democratic Party

[digg-reddit-me]I would have written this post on Tuesday night (before seeing what had become the inevitable results) – but I was busy. And I would have written this post on Wednesday, except my blog had some issues once again, and I was left blog-less.

Now, having the advantage of reading the many responses to Scott Brown’s upset victory from around the opinionshere, let me venture mine:

Brown’s election is a good thing for the Democrats politically. (On a policy level, it makes it less likely a health care bill will pass at all, certainly undermines the chances of a better health care bill, and makes every other policy goal harder to achieve in the short term.) But politically, it works for the Democrats on almost every level.

  • Scott Brown will be faced with choice to either split from the Republican Party on significant issues creating discord within the party or losing the seat in 2012.  If Brown moderates his views so, it’s hard to see him maintaining his credibility with the Tea Party right – but it he does, he will represent a person with credibility on the right compromising with Obama rather than the unified front today. After all, this is a guy who supports the idea behind Obama’s health care plan – and voted for the Massachusetts plan which is similar. His grounds for opposing national health care is that Massachusetts residents would be penalized because they already have near universal coverage which he supports.
  • Though the Democrats had a filibuster-proof Senate caucusing with them, there were a handful of members who consistently were willing to hold the Democratic agenda hostage, and the Democrats were only able to muster this filibuster-proof majority on one significant occasion: to pass the health reform bill. Taking this 60th vote away removes the illusion that the Democrats can get what they want done. The Democrats were never organized enough to pull that off. (They only merely have the largest majority in thirty years.)
  • It forces Republicans to take some responsibility as the minority party. The Democrats will still set the agenda – but Republicans and progressives can no longer complain that Democrats just need to get their act together to pass something. If the Republicans continue to vote as a solid bloc against any Democratic proposal in a cynical attempt to win back power through obstructionism, they can block almost everything. But then the focus won’t be on the preening Democrats competing to leverage their individual power to get what they want – but on the Republicans for blocking the passage of legislation and confirmation of nominees.
  • The inchoate anger at the status quo didn’t stop with the election of Barack Obama. Instead, his election radicalized the right wing – those who felt they were “losing their country.” Brown’s election – and the growing anger at the Democrats – doesn’t suggest the country is moving right. Rather, it is a symptom of an anti-incumbent bias. By running as the man who will stop health care reform – and being embraced by the Tea Party crowd – Brown is placing himself, the Republican Party, and the Tea Partiers as defenders of the status quo.
  • Carl Hulse in the New York Times offers an additional reason: “Even Republicans privately acknowledged that the redrawn Congressional landscape could hold benefits for the most vulnerable Democrats in November by easing pressure on them to vote as part of a united 60-member Democratic bloc and sparing them from providing decisive votes on contentious issues.”

Scott Brown and the Republicans will face a choice in the coming months before the midterms: They can either offer to work with the Democrats to actually govern or they can obstruct everything in order to make the Democrats look ineffective and weak. Either way, the 2010 midterms will be a referendum not only on Obama’s agenda but on how the Republicans have handled themselves.

[Image by Rob Weir licensed under Creative Commons.]

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China The Opinionsphere The Web and Technology

The Limits of China’s Economic Model

Daniel Gross in Slate sees Google’s decision to stop acquiescing to the Chinese government as a portent of troubles for the nation – as a sign of a problem that will undermine China’s global economic position going forward, pointing out that the political decision to censor and even alter history as it was, has consequences:

Yes, Shanghai feels a lot like New York. But don’t presume that just because Americans and Chinese share a consuming culture that they also share a political one. As I stood in Tiananmen Square on a chilly November day, I turned to my guide. “That was really something, what happened here 20 years ago,” I said. “Yes,” he responded in his near-fluent English. “Those terrorists really killed a lot of soldiers.”

Gross sees the strength of China’s model:

For the last 30 years, China has been testing a new, inverted model: breakneck economic development while retaining strict limits on personal liberty. The Communist Party has wrenched the nation into the 21st century. The hardware is certainly impressive—the maglev trains, shiny new airports, and modern skyscrapers.

But he believes that manufacturing can only go so far – agreeing to some degree with David Brooks who describes the economic innovations of the future as being the result of a “protocol economy.” Gross explains:

And that’s the rub. Any type of political system can produce excellent hardware. The Soviet Union, which ruled Russia when Google co-founder Sergey Brin was born there in 1973, managed to produce nuclear weapons and satellites. Likewise, China has built truly impressive hardware: some 67 bridges now spanning the Yangtze River, a superfast supercomputer assembled entirely from parts made in China, high-speed trains. But in the 21st century, a country needs great software in order to thrive. It has to have a culture that facilitates the flow of information, not just goods.

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Barack Obama Politics The Opinionsphere

The Future of the Tea Party (cont.)

Markos Moulitsas sees echoes of the rise of the progressive netroots in the Tea Party’s money bomb for Scott Brown (H/t Sullivan) – though he also sees its demand for ideological purity as different from the approach taken by Daily Kos and much of the rest of the progressive netroots. He seems to share with David Brooks the sense that the Tea Party Movement is here to stay.

I’m still not certain. This group seems so similar to the flare-up of similar sentiments from 1992 to 1994 – which was quashed finally by Bill Clinton’s fiscally responsible governance. The Obama administration – if the economy doesn’t enter into a double-dip recession – will try to steer a similar path.

My bet is that the Tea Party will only gain momentum – and have any relevance beyond 2010 if the economy doesn’t rebound.

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Criticism Domestic issues Health care History Politics The Opinionsphere

The Continued Failure of Right Wing Social Engineering

[digg-reddit-me]At some point it became part of the standard Republican playbook to criticize liberals for engaging in “social engineering.” Liberals – in this telling – see humans as perfectible creatures who just need the guidance of the a centralized state with scientific-minded engineers to become better. With proper planning and direction longstanding human problems could be taken care of and humankind would exist in a socialist utopia. This view was always a caricature – indeed an appropriation of a term created to describe the early efforts at deliberate manipulation of large populations through marketing and propaganda – from the Nazis to American corporations. But Republicans co-opted this term to describe the grand government projects taken on at the apex of mid-20th century liberalism, as in our hubris we sought to “engineer” enormous changes to the benefit of all society.

This story – this narrative framework – was influential because it struck a note of truth. Mid-2oth century American liberalism saw an exceedingly confident America which believed in the nearly limitless potential of American government action. After all, America – led by its government – had defeated a seemingly unstoppable enemy, pulled the nation and world out of a Great Depression, learned how to split atoms and create enormous destructive and productive power, finally begun to deal with the legacy of slavery, begun providing generous benefits to the elderly, and even sent a man to the moon. The declarations of American liberals of this time were bold and utopian. FDR declared that America must ensure that every individual in the world must have “freedom from want,” a sort of economic right. Lyndon Johnson declared War on Poverty! Richard Nixon (a realist in a liberal era) declared War on Cancer, War on Crime, and War on Drugs! Today this hopefulness seems painfully naive as we learned that every massive government “war” has had massive side-effects while not, as yet, achieving its desired result.

As confidence in government declined in the 1970s, the more thoughtful critics of this liberal tendency saw its core failing as hubris. They suggested a more modest approach in which government would act more as a gardener “cultivat[ing] a growth by providing the appropriate environment” rather than as some craftsman or engineer creating society anew through government coercion and radical changes.

But the Republicans who eventually took power on the wave of disgust, disappointment, resentment, and anger at liberalism’s excesses did not adopt this epistemologically modest approach. Reagan and his ilk replaced liberals’ confidence in the good government could do with the insistence that government was just getting in the way. Their conclusion was simple: Government wasn’t the solution to these problems – it was the problem! Rather than seeing the hubris of liberals as the problem, they thought liberals simply were certain about the wrong things. Their shorthand for this moral lesson was to accuse liberals of attempting “social engineering.” The solution was to cut taxes, to prune government, and to hold out the promise of slashing it eventually (to starve the beast.)

Politics though is about creating and shaping a society that we want to live in. It is less a matter of ideology and policy positions, and more about values. Right wingers saw that the problems they had identified as resulting from liberalism’s excesses did not cease as Republicans cut taxes and regulations and pulled the government back from involvement in the economy. Blaming liberal government action for upsetting the “natural” balance, right wingers yearned to shape society themselves in order to recreate what they had lost. They branded themselves as individualists even as they promoted the tyrannical, collectivist organizations commonly called corporations. From a complex web of ideological positions taken by the Republican Party to build their political coalition came a hodge-podge of goals which (though perhaps not cohering immediately) have solidified into an agenda of right wing social engineering. The Republicans began to use government to encourage the traditional nuclear family of a man, woman and 2 and 1/2 children; to promote and encourage a christianist lifestyle and increase the role and funding of religious institutions; to encouraged a particular brand of “rugged” individualism; and to aid the rise of American corporations at home and abroad.

The logical culmination of this new big government conservatism, this right wing social engineering, was the presidency of George W. Bush, as he increased the size of government mainly by outsourcing work and responsibilities to corporations, as he began 2 wars leading to 2 massive social engineering projects in the Middle East, as he allowed and encouraged government funding of faith-based charities, and most dramatically through his Ownership Society as he sought to transform America into a nation of homeowners with 401Ks and Health Care Savings Accounts instead of Social Security and Medicare and rentals. The right wing’s social engineering agenda extended past Bush though. The main right wing health care alternative adopted in some measure by Milton Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, and John McCain seeks to transform American society to make its citizens more individualistic. This alternative begins by eliminating tax credits for employer-sponsored health insurance and the encouragement of Health Savings Accounts and the evisceration of all regulations on the insurance industry (by allowing competition across state lines where most regulations exist thus creating a “race to the bottom” as states attempt to attract the health insurance industry.) It would culminate in the elimination of Medicare and Medicaid. Many on the right have also made clear their goal remains to obstruct any liberal attempt to solve the fiscal problem they have engineered to give them the opportunity to re-write the social contract.

Looking at current Republican agenda – you see a similar hubris to what they decried as liberals’ “social engineering” – as they seek to remake the entire health care sector and the economy.

Meanwhile, it is the Democrats who had adopted an epistemologically modest approach – of tinkering with our current system to try to save it rather than to provoke a crisis to remake society, tearing apart the social bargain between citizen and government.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

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Criticism Politics Scandal-mongering The Media The Opinionsphere

What passes for journalism today is faux-outrage presented without any perspective.

[digg-reddit-me]Reading the New York Times over the weekend, I came across a story that neatly symbolized one way the mainstream media perverts the news:

Mark Leibovich has an almost self-reflectively parodic digression in his article on the Peter Orszag “scandal”:

“Everyone feels the need to say, ‘I’m really sorry I have to ask you about this’ and ‘I’m only carrying out orders from my boss,’ ” Mr. Baer said. (For the record: this reporter was only acting on orders from his boss.) And, of course, the Very Serious Media are not writing the Orszag Love-Child Story, they are merely writing about the media frenzy surrounding it.

The race to cover the scandal-of-the-day is one of the worst aspects of contemporary journalism – but the Orszag scandal is perhaps a fluffy variation of this dangerous habit. Where the danger lies is in how it affects political fortunes and policy. I am all for scandal-mongering about public officials – and invading their personal lives but only – as I wrote before in defense of indiscretion: “If the media wants to report on some lewd scandal, they can at least do their audience the favor of avoiding the hypocritical moral posturing and just revel in the tawdriness of it. It would at least be honest.” This faux-outrage – this sense that we must hold public officials to some imagined moral standard that has little to do with their actual job – is merely a crude excuse to allow “journalists” to cover tabloid gossip. Tabloid gossip is fun and interesting – but when it is always framed as a serious judgment on some public figure or policy – it disfigures the political conversation. You get the insanity of people claiming Bill Clinton is a bad president because he was an unfaithful husband. You get people trying to claim Tiger Woods held himself up as some moral role model when in fact, he just claimed he was a really good golfer. You get outrage over any statement deemed “insensitive” – from Harry Reid to Sonia Sotomayor to Trent Lott.

And much worse, when it comes to judging policies and legislation, journalists follow the same mentality – picking out scandalous elements at the expense of understanding what is going on. Death panels! Stimulus money going to “imaginary” (i.e. mistyped) districts! Emails from climate change scientists that “prove” it is a hoax! Bailouts to health insurance companies! Giant vampire squids searching for cash!

These stories are presented to the public as the story when in fact they are mere sideshows – hence the name given to the media-political atmosphere that arose under Bill Clinton and has remained until today: The Freak Show. This scandal-mongering creates reporting on policy that is entertaining but conveys a fundamentally limited view of what is actually being done and proposed. As Ezra Klein has pointed out:

[N]ewspapers work very hard to report things that are true, but they are less concerned with whether the overall impression from their reporting is a true impression.

The end result that we read day after day is faux-outrage presented without any perspective – with the citizenry being blocked from actually knowing what is going on behind the billowing smoke of scandal.

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Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

The Rhetorical Phantoms of Their Own Making

Timothy Egan discusses Mitt Romney’s health care hypocrisy, and slams the Republican party with this comment that summarizes the Republican approach to Obama this year:

[T]he [Republican] party’s voice has been dominated by people who make things up, and then condemn the rhetorical phantoms of their making.

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Barack Obama Domestic issues Politics The Opinionsphere

The Future of the Tea Party

As soon as I write about all the great columns David Brooks has been producing recently, he goes ahead and writes this one.

Now, it isn’t bad – and it is certainly interesting. But in predicting the rise of the tea party conservative movement, Brooks is extrapolating too much from a short term trend. Brooks himself should be able to see this, as he writes:

A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.

Which is why I would be wary of extrapolating some broad tea party movement sweeping through Congress a year hence – and even more of listing the tea party movement in the litany of defining influential groups of the decade beginning with the hippies defining the 60s, the feminists the 70s, and the Christian conservatives the 80s. (Especially given how similar the Contract with America/Ross Perot crowd was to the tea party – and how that simply fizzled in the 90s.) The tea party crowd may define the coming era – but I would be extremely wary about prognosticating that given our rapidly shifting political environment. I would even be wary of presuming they will help the Republicans win many seats back in the 2010 midterms.

But this observation does strike me as potentially prescient – and I’d like to see Brooks explore the idea more fully:

The Obama administration is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country’s problems. Many Americans do not have faith in that sort of centralized expertise or in the political class generally.

I’ve argued in the past – rather vaguely and putting the matter in starker terms – that this is a potential problem. But to the extent the approach favored by the Obama administration is “tinkering,” as I believe the current evidence seems to show, I think they avoid the worst of this policy trap. The tinkering approach manages to both be technocratic and epistemologically modest – at its best capturing the best aspects of a conservative reticence and a liberal desire to innovate. What it isn’t is especially democratic – which I still believe is problematic.

The tinkering approach also creates a political problem as it does not yet have a compelling story associated with it – as FDR’s New Deal did, as JFK’s New Frontier did, as LBJ’s Great Society, as Reagan’s focus on cutting back government to release individual initiative – to renew Morning in America did, as Clinton’s triangulation did, as the Contract With America did, as Bush’s War on Terror and Ownership Society and Compassionate Conservatism all did, as Obama’s campaign for Change We Can Believe In did, as the tea party’s hyperbolic screams of protest against Nazi-Communist policies has already, as the left’s chants of “Sellout!” have already. Without this compelling story, this mythic goal, the tinkering approach has been portrayed as centralizing, big government, 1980s-style liberalism – or the embrace of Bush-era policies and the selling of Washington to special interests. The tea party has been able to get traction largely because the Obama administration hasn’t found a compelling story to explain its tinkering approach. If the administration is able to find this story, anchoring it in some series of news events, it could entirely shift the momentum and defang the tea party just as Clinton was able to do with his triangulation in the 90s.

Side note: Brooks is able to describe the tea party’s position in a far more compelling way than I have heard any supporter of the movement (of which Brooks is not.) But I think he gives the movement too much credit:

The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.

If the movement evolves in this direction, it would be able to gain more traction – but at the moment all I see are howls of rage.

[Image by Rberteig licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Politics The Opinionsphere

Ressentiment Redux

Julian Sanchez:

But national-level political communities really are communities now, in a fairly robust sense. Between dedicated cable and radio channels and the Internet, you really can live in them in a pretty literal and immersive way… What’s really pernicious about a politics of ressentiment is that it cuts that tether—it enables a political identity that’s generated and defined by political conflict itself…

Part of the problem is that politics is no longer seen as a narrow tool for addressing some well-defined set of problems, but a kind of all-purpose machine for the satisfaction of human desires…

We don’t need to do some kind of probing psychoanalysis, because this stuff isn’t subtext; it’s text.  Remember Palin’s infamous “death panels” post? It wasn’t just a claim that the government would deny care; the fear was that this was Obama’s “death panels” getting to decide how worthy you are. Liberals treated it as a generic argument about “rationing,” but by its own terms it was an argument about being judged. Conservatives’ favorite photo of Obama has him with his nose in the air looking down on the hoi polloi, testifying to his purported arrogance. Then the outrage over a strained reading of an Obama remark about “putting lipstick on a pig”: He’s calling Sarah (and therefore you!) a pig! The message is pretty insistent: They think they’re better than you. It’s not, again, that I’m asking why people hold certain policy views and concluding that it’s really about this kind of cultural resentment. I’m asking why the political coalition organized around this set of views is putting so much emphasis on this frame, and whether it isn’t ultimately a bad idea to.

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

In Praise of Tinkering: Health Care Reform

[digg-reddit-me]Critics of the health care reforms before Congress can be divided into two camps:

  • those who claim that the legislation would simply be a “government takeover” of one sixth of the economy – which is simply nonsense; and
  • those who claim the bill doesn’t do enough, that it doesn’t have an overarching theory, that it merely “tinkers” with the problems with health care.

I won’t be dealing with the nonsense claim today. As to the second claim, I concede that the bill merely tinkers with solutions to our problems – but that is the main reason I am optimistic about its success.

Not everyone feels this way: Opponents use this perception to attack the bill from both the left and right, some on each side seeking to make the case for more radical changes and some for leaving things as they are. The Iowa State Senate Democrats wrote, “As a nation we can not continue to tinker with health care reform.  We must make major transformations.” Donna Edwards warned that the health care reforms being debated without a public option were “just tinkering around the edges.” Then from the right, there are those pressing the radical measure of ending Medicare and Medicaid and every other government involvement in health care – and those who favor allowing insurance to be sold across state lines which would eradicate most regulations as states raced to the bottom to attract the insurance industry. Others say that the bill’s modesty is a reason to give up, lest by trying to fix things we mess things up more. A conservative editorial claimed that “tinkering with a mess only makes a prettier mess.” Chairman of the RNC Michael Steele meanwhile made it his mantra to claim that the Obama administration is “conducting a dangerous experiment” and a “risky experiment with health care.”

Even many of those defending the bill seem disappointed but resigned to its modesty. They often blame Obama for deferring to Congress rather than proposing his own legislation, presuming that if the Obama administration took a stronger hand in shaping the bill it would have a grand logic, a coherent and fully formed strategy for universalizing health insurance and curbing health care costs. (Though the bills now under consideration are almost exactly what Obama proposed during his campaign.)

This perception of mere tinkering rather than some grand social engineering project has been the bill’s political weakness. Without a coherent big idea or story to sell the plan, it created an opportunity for Republicans to take each individual part and make it a bogey-man for some big idea that they would claim was the real reason for the reform: rationing! euthanasia! government-mandated abortion! socialist indoctrination of your children! &tc. Later, progressives, feeling betrayed at the demise of the public option which many had considered the real reason for the reform, and similarly unable to find the big idea behind the plan, quickly settled on the idea that it was a bailout to the insurance industry.

But despite these political disadvantages, a bill that is modest enough to tinker is the best policy solution. This approach is epistemologically modest – it seems designed to avoid hubristic assumptions about the power of government and to take advantage of the process that Nassim Nicholas Taleb called “black swans

Trial and error will save us from ourselves because they capture benign black swans. Look at the three big inventions of our time: lasers, computers and the internet. They were all produced by tinkering and none of them ended up doing what their inventors intended them to do.

This idea of tinkering imbues all of Obama’s policies and his governance so far. It represents a synthesis of the core conservative critique of Reagan, Hayek, &tc with an empirical approach towards government generally favored by liberals. In other words, Reagan correctly saw that there are limits in how well government can address societal problems – as liberal projects of social engineering backfired. He demonized it in his affable way, for example claiming that “The ten most dangerous words in the English language are ‘Hi, I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ”

Barack Obama absorbed this critique – and saw the limits of centralized planning and the power of markets that lay at the core of Reagan. But he did not adopt Reagan’s visceral hatred for government. Instead, he believed government could be useful. Rather than seeing government as something that needed to be attacked, he adopted Hayek’s view that “we needed to think of the world more as gardeners tending a garden and less as architects trying to build some system.”

As I wrote as part of my summing up of the case for Obama last November:

Tinkering is the best we can do in a world we only imperfectly understand. Anyone looking at Obama’s policy proposals can see that he is a tinkerer rather than a revolutionary. For example, he seeks to build upon our current health care system rather than demolish it as McCain does in one manner and socialists do in another.

With the impending fiscal crisis upon us, driven by rapidly rising health care costs, the primary goal of the reform has been to cut costs. (Which counter-intuitively actually is aided by universal coverage, as even the libertarian Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman acknowledged.) A number of health care experts have similarly praised the current health care reform effort for its modest but positive steps coupled. Atul Gawande in an influential piece in the New Yorker asks: “The health-care bill has no master plan for curbing costs. Is that a bad thing?” He concludes:

Pick up the Senate health-care bill—yes, all 2,074 pages—and leaf though it. Almost half of it is devoted to programs that would test various ways to curb costs and increase quality. The bill is a hodgepodge. And it should be.

After the Senate released their version of the bill, health care expert Jonathan Gruber was quoted:

My summary is it’s really hard to figure out how to bend the cost curve, but I can’t think of a thing to try that they didn’t try. They really make the best effort anyone has ever made. Everything is in here….I can’t think of anything I’d do that they are not doing in the bill. You couldn’t have done better than they are doing.

Health care reform is the clearest experiment testing whether the government can work by properly aligning incentives rather than brute, centralized takeover.* It is an attempt to tinker with our unsustainable system – which on its own would be “sure to raise your taxes, increase your out-of-pocket medical expenses, swell the federal deficit, leave more Americans without insurance and guarantee that wages will remain stagnant” – rather than to demolish it and start anew.

It isn’t as exciting as some grand effort to re-shape 1/6th of the economy or a moral crusade to help those being victimized by evil private industry. Rather, it is a bet that out of a million pilot projects, something will help and we will be able to see that it does, and adapt it to a larger scale. It is a bet that it is better to expand health insurance as much as possible and to establish it as a universal right and responsibility than to wait for something better. It is a bet that government can improve things, while acknowledging that unintended consequences will ensue and it should tread carefully. It isn’t the exciting rhetoric of Change You Can Believe In! – but it is a step towards change we can believe in.

Update: I would propose this explanation – of tinkering and epistemological modesty is a better explanation than either of the two described by Ed Kilgore in a very interesting piece for The New Republic:

To put it more bluntly, on a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector.

* Though sometimes, brute, centralized government takeover is best – the military and the courts being two items like this everyone could agree on.

[Image not subject to copyright.]