Category: Politics

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Barack Obama Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Obama’s Promise Was To Break the Hold the Idiocrats Have On Our Society

[digg-reddit-me]It’s pretty clear that our national conversation, our national debate is broken – as Al Gore persuasively argued in The Assault on Reason. On health care – for example – we’re arguing over distractions and barely touching on the issues at stake.

When Barack Obama ran for office, he won in a large part because he convinced Americans he could change the debate – that he didn’t have a stake in the Baby Boomer arguments that had dominated our political debate since the 1980 election – that he would tackle the long-term festering issues these Baby Boomer debates had put off. This was the promise of Barack Obama, the source of people’s hope, the attraction he had for the young and indeed for the aging Baby Boomers themselves.

During his election campaign, he proved at least once that  he could rise above the vitriol of base politics that had accustomed the people to expect Clintons and Bushes to exchange presidencies in dirty campaigns. He broke the cycle that threatened to destroy his candidacy with his speech on race. In the end, he also prevailed over the forces of xenophobia, of racism, of bigotry. The fact that he won was extraordinary and proved something else – that not only was Obama able to raise the level of the national conversation – but that he could inspire a majority of the country to give his new approach a chance. For those who supported him, his failure to change this conversation is the root of their disappointment in him. I still think it’s early – but it has become clear that if Obama cannot fix our national conversation, he will not be able to accomplish most of what he has set out to do.

On health care, Paul Krugman has been gloating that he predicted this – that he knew the right wing would throw everything they had at Obama and at every one of his policies. But Obama never promised to stop people from throwing stuff at him. His promise was to rise above it.

This is what is the base issue at stake in this health care fight – more profound than our unsustainably increasing costs or the thousands who die each year because they are without coverage.

Fareed Zakaria pointed out that in a crisis our system proved it could act. But the financial crisis did not prove our system could handle a crisis; instead, it proved that we were lucky to have individuals in place who appropriated whatever power they needed. And it was the least accountable person in the room – Ben Bernanke – who had the most power and used it the most. Congress, responding to popular pressure, almost destroyed the whole process.

Obama – if he is to tackle any issues after health care – must break this budding idiocracy that derails every attempt to have an adult conversation; he must deflate the growing fears. I can see only one way he can do this – or at least begin to: He has to take the health care bill – and get it through with a strong public option and with end of life counseling. He has to call, “Bullshit.” Explain to the country again the point of these programs and what they will do – and ask anyone who experiences otherwise to contact the White House.

They called Medicare and Social Security and the entire New Deal “socialism” and “tyranny” too. And now they are broadly popular and considered key components of our market-based system. To break these idiocratic forces, Obama needs to force these controversial measures through and allow the Republicans opposing it to demagogue it in every way possible. Then make sure there are strong transparency measures in place. And then let those who predicted a Holocaust look foolish. It’s the first step to discrediting their methods and reforming our national conversation.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

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Economics Financial Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere

Fact-Checking Taibbi: The Sarah Palin of Journalism?

Having cited Matt Taibbi’s well-read Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs in a few previous posts, it’s worth taking some time to air some fact-checks of it. (Complete article here.) Megan McCardle has dubbed Matt Taibbi “the Sarah Palin of journalism”  but I wonder what this makes McCardle – whose feeling-based objections to any of the health care reforms on the table seem different only in tone than Taibbi’s hysteric rants on financial companies.

Which is why I cite this article at The Big Money instead – which takes a fact-based rather than feeling-based – look at Taibbi’s article. The takeaway by Heidi Moore is about what I suspected:

The mammoth article disappointingly failed to provide the smoking gun that so many people on Wall Street—who have envied and admired and hated Goldman for much of this decade—would have been delighted to see.

Moore’s piece also points out some of the ways in which Taibbi’s article is misleading – and it’s worth a read. Unfortunately, I do not know have the expertise in the subject to adjudicate these disputes – which essentially involve whether Goldman Sachs was a player or the main player in these various financial disasters.

It’s worth taking a look at Moore’s piece if you were one of the many who has read Taibbi’s. But I think it was pretty clear to anyone reading Taibbi’s piece that it was deliberately over-the-top and overstated.

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Barack Obama Health care Palin Politics The Opinionsphere Videos

The Maddow-Coburn Debate on Meet the Press; and the Necessity of Violence

[digg-reddit-me]A few observations on watching Meet the Press yesterday. In a lot of ways, I think that show demonstrates the low quality of our political debate today. And yesterday’s show was one of the better, more factually on point, more honest, least full of crap episodes in recent memory. It wasn’t about “gotcha” moments as much as policy and politics. No one there was seriously promoting any of the blatant falsehoods that have determined much of the debate in the rest of the media – the “death panels” and Nazi imagery for example. In many ways, this became a very meta debate about the debate – which is actually a conversation I think we need to have as a country.

David Gregory though seemed determined to take each moment that threatened to lead to acutal honest conflict or insight and “move on” as quickly as possible. With the participants wanting to argue it out, they would talk over him trying to make their point before he ended the game prematurely. Maddow created a few insightful moments with her apparently well-researched appearance. She wasn’t as willing to let the bullshit slide as the others at the table – and she had papers full of research in front of her. Gregory asked some good questions, but let the bull slide. For example, here he asked a serious question of Senator Tom Coburn:

MR. GREGORY: [L]et’s talk about the tone of the debate.  There have been death threats against members of Congress, there are Nazi references to members of Congress and to the president.  Here are some of the images. The president being called a Nazi, his reform effort being called Nazi-like, referring to Nazi Germany, members of Congress being called the same.  And then there was this image this week outside of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a town hall event that the president had, this man with a gun strapped to his leg held that sign, “It is time to water the tree of liberty.” It was a reference to that famous Thomas Jefferson quote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

That has become a motto for violence against the government.  Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, had that very quote on his shirt the day of the bombing of the Murrah building when 168 people were killed.

Senator Coburn, you are from Oklahoma.  When this element comes out in larger numbers because of this debate, what, what troubles you about that?

SEN. TOM COBURN (R-OK):  Well, I’m, I’m troubled anytime when we, we stop having confidence in, in our government.  But we’ve earned it.  You know, this debate isn’t about health care.  Health care’s the symptom.  The debate is an uncontrolled federal government that’s going to run–50 percent of everything we’re spending this year we’re borrowing from the next generation.  You…

MR. GREGORY:  That’s—but wait, hold on, I want to stop you there.  I’m talking about the tone.  I am talking about violence against the government. That’s what this is synonymous with.

SEN. COBURN:  The, the—but the tone is based on fear of loss of control of their own government.  What, what is the genesis behind people going to such extreme statements?  What is it?  We, we have lost the confidence, to a certain degree, and it’s much worse than when Tom was the, the, the leader of the Senate.  We have, we have raised the question of whether or not we’re legitimately thinking about the American people and their long-term best interests.  And that’s the question.

For me that exchange was a head-turning moment. Asked to confront a man who has adopted the same quote that a terrorist did when attacking a building in his own state, a man who is using extreme rhetoric that suggests he would be in favor of assassination, he refuses to condemn him outright. He hedges; he wants us to understand that man – to see him as responding to a world that’s unfair to him.

Gregory at this point seems to let the matter go – but Maddow takes Coburn on. You can tell she’s taken aback too:

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that a right wing Republican Senator would plead for “understanding” in quasi-defense of extreme right wing rhetoric and threats of violence. After all – what else can he expect?

I suppose my point is: if any people out there take Sarah Palin’s statement that children will be put to death by “death panels” if Obama’s health care plan succeeds seriously; if any people out there seriously believe a Holocaust is about to take place if this health care reform is passed; if they believe that their children are going to be indoctrinated into an atheistic faith in Obama if health care passes; if they believe that their grandparents of their children are in danger – if someone believes any or all of these things, then violence is justified.

We make heroes out of the men who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler. If we now say that Obama is another Hitler, aren’t we advocating assasination? If we say our child will be killed by Obama, aren’t we implicitly endorsing violence to protect our children?

How can we – as a society – have an adult conversation about the pros and cons of the specific health reforms being considered with this unhinged debate? We can’t. Instead, we just have to let the unsustainable status quo stay in place.

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Criticism Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Mad Men, Catholic NYC, Ezra Klein, Social Security, Jon Stewart, Jared Diamond

1. Mad Men. Bruce Handy has an excellent piece in Vanity Fair describing the creative process and background of Matthew Weiner’s period piece, Mad Men:

Mad Men is too clear-eyed about its period to be called nostalgic—Weiner loves writing anti-Semitic wisecracks for his admen and showing pregnant women with cigarettes dangling from their lips—but at the same time there can be a yearning tug, even an ache, in the intensity of the show’s backward gaze. Maybe it’s a kind of wised-up, at times even loathing nostalgia—precisely the kind of contradiction that drives the show creatively.

2. Catholic in Manhattan. Carlene Bauer writes in Salon about how she came to convert to Catholicism while living in New York City. A moving piece for me. This is her description of the Rite of Election:

On a damp, cloudy morning back in New York City, on the first Sunday of Lent, our church’s group of converts met at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to attend the Rite of Election, a ceremony in which all the catechumens in the city’s diocese declared their intentions before God and Cardinal Egan. Once our names were called and we stood before the altar receiving a blessing, there was apparently no turning back. There were hundreds of people there, faces of many colors. But then the priests before us: corpulent, white, reminding me of all the stories I’d heard about the princely class that lived like kept women in their rectories. Fat white men lording it over the faithful. Here was the other Catholic Church, the church that, in all my excitement, I’d been suppressing my knowledge of. It was the church that came to mind for most people when they thought of the Catholic Church, the one that turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse of its children, that would not let women become priests or let their priests marry, that castigated its liberation theologians. The moneyed, secretive, inflexible machine.

How many people would I have to climb over to run down the aisle and out onto Fifth Avenue? This really was intellectually irresponsible. The pope, Mary, Padre Pio, Pope Pius, Opus Dei, the sexual abuse, the forbidding of birth control, the official stance on homosexuality. I wouldn’t marry someone if I had to ignore this much sin and dysfunction. Or would I? But think: Why had I come all this way? And who had led me here? Dorothy Day had submitted. And if it was the church of Dorothy Day, it was the church of Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, Graham Greene, and Flannery O’Connor. A church of dissenters and mystics.

3. Ezra Klein on Health Care. By far the best blog to read to understand the policy and politics of health care reform is Ezra Klein’s at the Washington Post. A recent point:

In part, that’s why the debate has had to move toward fear-mongering and lies: There just aren’t that many scary elements in the bills, because the legislation is oriented toward preserving the existing system and avoiding points of controversy.

4. Social Security Sucked When It Was Passed. Paul Begala – who advised Bill Clinton that it was better to have no bill than a flawed bill in 1994 – is now making the alternate case. He makes it by invoking history – specifically Social Security:

The right has far more modest goals: At every turn, its members seek to advance their power and protect privilege. I’ve never seen the Republican right oppose a tax cut for the rich because it wasn’t generous enough; I’ve never seen them oppose a set of loopholes for corporate lobbyists because one industry or another wasn’t included. The left, on the other hand, too often prefers a glorious defeat to an incremental victory.

Our history teaches us otherwise. No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt’s original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers — a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn’t even cover the clergy. FDR’s Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn’t work, you got nothing from Social Security.

5. Consevatives Love Jon Stewart. Jacob Gershman explains why in New York magazine:

Conservatives like Stewart because he’s providing them a platform to reach an audience that usually tunes them out. And they often find that Stewart takes them more seriously than right-wing political hosts, who are often just using them to validate their broad positions, do. Stewart will poke fun, but he offers a good-faith debate on powder kegs — torture, abortion, nuclear weapons, health care — that explode on other networks.

6. Jared Diamond. David Pilling profiles one of the top intellectuals of our time for the Financial Times. This little clip seems to capture both Pilling’s writing style and the serendipity of Jared Diamond’s world:

Thus did the pomegranate boom begin, and the fruit make its way to the refrigerators of 21st-century America. The story somehow captures Diamond. We have the awe of ancient civilisations, the physical explanation of the fertile soil of ancient Mesopotamia and modern California, and the accident of his friend’s financial resources and ingenuity. In this way, all things, big and small, come to pass.

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Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

The Smearing of Ezekiel Emanuel

One of the more extraordinary things in the current distraction that is the right-wing response to health insurance reform is the smearing of Ezekial Emanuel. He’s quite an interesting figure – and the views being attributed to him are actually exactly the opposite of the ones he has consisently held for many years…

Jonathan Cohn in The New Republic:

In the course of his writings, which span academia and popular publications, he has argued forcefully and clearly against physician-assisted suicide. Yet somehow Emanuel finds himself accused of–wait for it–advocating physician assisted suicide.

Michael Scherer in Time:

“I couldn’t believe this was happening to me,” says Emanuel, who [spent] his career opposing euthanasia and working to increase the quality of care for dying patients…

In her Post article, McCaughey paints the worst possible image of Emanuel, quoting him, for instance, endorsing age discrimination for health-care distribution, without mentioning that he was only addressing extreme cases like organ donation, where there is an absolute scarcity of resources. She quotes him discussing the denial of care for people with dementia without revealing that Emanuel only mentioned dementia in a discussion of theoretical approaches, not an endorsement of a particular policy. She notes that he has criticized medical culture for trying to do everything for a patient, “regardless of the cost or effects on others,” without making clear that he was not speaking of lifesaving care but of treatments with little demonstrated value. “No one who has read what I have done for 25 years would come to the conclusions that have been put out there,” says Emanuel. “My quotes were just being taken out of context.”

Alex Koppelman in Salon also took on the smears.

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Barack Obama Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Right wingers, desperate to return to power, turn to the man they demonized, Saul Alinsky

[digg-reddit-me]A while back, I described what I saw as a characteristic of reactionaries to “internalize” an exaggerated view of their enemies’ ideology and tactical supremacy. Because of this, I wrote:

What ends up happening in many of these reactionary groups is that they construct themselves on a model based on their worst fears of their enemy.

I cited a few examples – from the John Birch Society organizing in self-sufficient cells like they imagined the Communists did to Dick Cheney’s presumption that terroristic violence was supremely effective. Now, with the rise of the anti-health insurance reform movement, we see another example of a reactionary movement that has internalized an exaggerated view of their enemy – and then adopted it for themselves.

As David Weigel firmly establishes in a piece for the Washington Independent, the tactics and strategies behind these town hall disruptions and other attempts to block health insurance reform are linked to the right-wingers’ reading of Saul Alinsky – who many right-wingers see as Obama’s closest mentor (though Obama never met him.) Alinsky and his methods were widely discussed by right wingers in the lead up to the election – and they took on the air of a biblical text after it – as every word or action by the Obama administration has been explained by reference to an obscure reference to something Alinsky wrote. The interest of the right-wing in Alinsky has actually caused his books to jump up the book charts. (Tellingly, Amazon’s reccomendation engine demonstrates in its “Users Who Purchased This Item Also Bought” section that the buyers are mainly right-wing.) And a new book will be coming out soon adopting Alinsky’s techniques for right-wing activists.

Though these right wingers have taken to calling themselves “Alinsky-cons,” one thing these right wing activists seem to have missed about Alinsky was his focus on community organizing and engagement with power. This is the part of Alinsky that Obama has adopted – as he has sought to demonstrate his good faith to his opponents, and to engage them as if they were acting in good faith – in other words, to use civility and respect as political weapons. As Mark Schmitt wrote in  piece for The American Prospect:

One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that’s not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists – it’s a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It’s how you deal with people with intractable demands – put ‘em on a committee. Then define the committee’s mission your way.

But these right wing protesters are not trying to demonstrate their good faith efforts to engage with reality and to win over undecideds. Instead, they are seeking to stop debate and discussion and to deliberately simulate that their opinions are common. They offer no solutions to the problems health insurance reform addresses – only chants to be used to overpower those who want to discuss the solutions they are offering.  One veteran community organizer and a student of Alinsky’s method described his response to the right wing adoption of Alinsky:

“They polarize,” said Galluzzo. “They’ve got that part down. They do direct action. But that’s not the kind of organizing we do. We end up building relationships with the people we oppose. I’m not going to go up to Mayor [Richard] Daley and say ‘you’re just a Nazi.’ I want to end up working with him.”

But according to Galluzzo, if Alinsky could take a look at the Alinsky-cons, he’d call them “petty protesters” who want to destroy the system without offering solutions. “If you just go around calling people assholes,” Galluzzo said, “you’re not going to get anything done.”

While Alinsky’s methods were designed to force those in power to be accountable to the people they have power over, these Alinsky-cons have adapted Saul Alinsky’s methods to simulate a large opposition. As an influential memo by one of the right wing groups organizing these sessions advises:

Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.

And while Alinsky’s methods are supposed to start a conversation with those in power, the methods of the Alinsky-cons have a different aim – as Paul Grenier quoted a right wing organizing memo in the Baltimore Sun:

Try to rattle [the congressman], not have an intelligent debate.

The deliberate method of these Alinsky-cons is to distract the public from the actual reforms at issue – by combining Rovian fear-mongering with Alinsky’s disruptive methods. And what you get is a big mess – and the preservation of the unsustainable status quo.

Categories
Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

The Right-Wing Canard of ‘Rationing’ and Health Care Reform

I came across this post by John Holbo at Crooked Timber somewhere in my web travels yesterday. (My guess is a Yglesias tweet. Because later, I came across it again on Yglesias’s blog.) Holbo makes a few good points about the use of the term “rationing” by opponents of health care reform:

Guaranteed minimum healthcare doesn’t forbid anyone to seek more on the private market – paying out of pocket, extra insurance. No more so than a guaranteed minimum income would forbid you to get a job to earn more than the minimum. So guaranteed minimal healthcare doesn’t ensure its minimum by positively forbidding anyone to get more. So it isn’t really rationing… There just isn’t going to be any attempt by the government to ration healthcare, as opposed to its own spending of taxpayer money. Because: why would there be?

Yglesias seconds this:

[C]onservative appear to have concocted a special one-off meaning of the term “rationing” to apply to government guarantees of basic health insurance coverage. They observe that insofar as the government guarantees basic health insurance coverage to everyone, the government probably can’t actually deliver an unlimited quantity of health care services without breaking the bank. Therefore, at some point someone will probably not get some service he or she might [want]. This is rationing and it’s evil and the solution, for unclear reasons, is for the government to deliver no guaranteed services whatsoever since . . . well . . it’s not clear how that’s better since either way you could still pay out of pocket.

Categories
Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

4 Points on Health Care

There’s just too much going on in health care – too many important points to make and second. So, here’s another hodge-podge post on health care.

Zeke Emanuel. Alex Koppelman addresses the irony of the fact that Ezekiel Emanuel – Rahm Emanuel’s brother and a member of the Office of Management and Budget – is one of the centers around which the conspiracy theories about death panels and such are flying. As a leading bioethicist, he has written academically about many hypothetical scenarios – and now, they are being taken out of context to suggest he is in favor of all sorts of Nazi-like practices. In fact, Emanuel is not even in favor of physician-assisted euthanasia:

[Zeke Emanuel] is actually one of the country’s leading medical ethicists, a forceful defender of people approaching the end of their life. Indeed, he opposes even voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide.

The Eight Point Plan. Matt Yglesias had an important post today – pointing out that though most of the attention on health care reform is being given to the public option (and to a lesser degree the Health Insurance Exchange), neither of these will affect the health insurance received by most Americans. (Though if done right, the public option and exchange would provide a measure of security to Americans as they realize they could lose their job as well as health insurance.) Instead, Yglesias says :

For those of us outside the exchange, the core of health reform is this eight point plan to make health insurance better by blocking dirty tricks by private insurers.

The Purpose of the Public Option. Jacob S. Hacker defends the public option in a white paper [pdf]  written describing the purpose of the public option in the Health Insurance Exchange:

The public Medicare plan’s administrative overhead costs (in the range of 3 percent) are well below the overhead costs of large companies that are self-insured (5 to 10 percent of premiums), companies in the small group market (25 to 27 percent of premiums), and individual insurance (40 percent of premiums).

What if the right “wins”? David Frum asks what it would mean for conservatives and right-wingers to “win” the health care fight. This Republican’s answer:

We’ll have entrenched and perpetuated some of the most irrational features of a hugely costly and under-performing system, at the expense of entrepreneurs and risk-takers, exactly the people the Republican party exists to champion.

Risk Adjustment in a Health Insurance Exchange. DiA asks a few questions of health care blogger Ezra Klein. Klein makes a point I hadn’t realized – that the legislation as currently written does not include a “risk adjustment fund” without which insurers could simply race to the bottom in creating plans. Without this, the Health Insurance Exchange would seem to offer nothing like an “ebay for health insurance.”

DIA: The House health-care bill includes universal community rating. But it doesn’t have a risk equalisation fund to compensate insurance companies who get stuck with the riskiest and least healthy clients. Doesn’t this ensure a race to the bottom in terms of the benefits companies offer, in order to discourage the unhealthy from signing up with them? Won’t they all just offer the minimum possible benefit package they can under law? (The point of the REF system, used in Germany and the Netherlands, is that companies actually offer extensive benefits and compete with each other to cover the older and less healthy, because they draw in more government compensation that way.)

Mr Klein: A risk adjustment fund is crucial, and, happily, a lot of senators understand that. I’d expect some form of risk adjustment to be added into the bill by the end. But you’re right: Without risk adjustment, the exchanges can’t really work, which means they can’t really grow, which means we won’t have changed much of anything at all.

Categories
Barack Obama Health care Politics

Ezra Klein’s Mood Swings

[digg-reddit-me]Ezra Klein has been far and away the most insightful blogger so far during this health care battle – snagging interviews with key Senators, from Lindsey Graham to Johnny Isakson, and even more importantly wrestling with the issues and politics in the frank manner that, of all mediums, only blogging allows (and perhaps talk radio.)

Through this August, Klein seems to be oscillating between two conflicting positions. This Monday, for example, Klein wrote that:

We have an unfortunate tendency to think of policy reform as episodic rather than continual. The process of reform is sold as a legislative Big Bang rather than an ongoing effort with lots of different policies all building on one another.

As reform is continual, he concludes that:

[T]he relevant question is not just whether they are an improvement on the status quo – they unquestionably are – but how they contribute to the next set of reforms. Health-care reform doesn’t end if we pass a bill in 2009. It begins.

I consider this a fairly optimistic take. We may not get everything we want done, but reform is a continual process and the bills under consideration “unquestionably are” an “improvement on the status quo.”

By Tuesday, he had a different take, saying, “It Is Democracy, Not Health-Care Reform, That Is Sick.”

Members of Congress are terrified of voter backlash and industry opposition. They are leaving virtually the entire health-care system untouched. They will scuttle the bill if a rural hospital in their district doesn’t receive sufficient reimbursement or if a local device manufacturer is harmed. Yet there is a certain portion of the country that believes that Max Baucus and Mike Ross are willing to vote for death panels and defend them before their constituents in the following election…

In a healthy relationship, such madness is simply unthinkable… Similarly, the relationship between the protesters and the government is not healthy. The protesters believe the government capable of madness. ((He express regret about this specific formulation later on Tuesday.))

But Klein’s swings aren’t without cause. Anyone following this issue closely can see each modest attempt at progress is quickly submerged by an inundation of non-coherent nonsense. Klein is right when he says that whether or not our democracy can act quickly to deal with the long-term and long-put-off issues of health care reform and climate change is a test of whether our political system is still relevant. But he should remember that our system has had some successes relatively recently – with Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil coming together to shore up Social Security and with Bill Clinton and the Contract With America crowd coming together on welfare reform. These attempts were successful because they steered clear of the Charybdis of deficit politics.

The challenge for progressives, for liberals, for those fighting to keep our political system relevant and to avoid the leeching of power by technocratic and not quite accountable institutions is to break this deficit politics that not only is preventing us from tackling these serious issues but that is also keeping us from reducing the deficit. On the positive side, there are reasons to hope that the tide is turning – at least regarding health care reform.

[Image adapted from this image by myglesias licensed under Creative Commons.  The same license applies to this adapted image.]

Categories
Domestic issues Economics Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

The Bankruptcy of Deficit Politics

[digg-reddit-me]Ezra Klein had a revealing interview with Senator Lindsey Graham over the weekend. Read the whole thing. Graham gives Obama some clear advice on how to get health care reform done: Make Republicans and Democrats fear opposing you:

There’s two ways to fix a hard problem in Washington. You make people afraid of opposing you or you get them rewarded for helping you. There’s no fear for opposing Obama’s public option, and the reward is for opposing it. Right now, Republicans feel no political exposure from opposing the president’s health-care initiative.

That’s a pretty good analysis of what’s going on – though I’m surprised Graham is the one giving it. I think this would qualify as a gaffe if it were a bit punchier – if Graham had expressed this idea in one or two sentences instead of three.

But this wasn’t what I saw as the most interesting moment. That came when Klein asked Graham point-blank about “deficit politics”:

If the deficit politics are so powerful, where do you specifically see an opportunity for cost savings? Where can the curve be bent?

Graham dodged the question – as the astute politician he is rather than the honest truth-teller he holds himself out to be. And that’s exactly the problem with “deficit politics.” People may be angry about the deficit – but they don’t want any government services cut. They have been raised with the expectation that they can shift the burden to a future generation – namely, my generation. Republicans have been extremely astute at harnessing this anger at the deficit, though extraordinarily ineffective at actually doing anything about it.

“Deficit politics” is only about fear – and has no positive agenda. As conservative David Frum explains what the “success” of deficit politics will look like:

We’ll have entrenched and perpetuated some of the most irrational features of a hugely costly and under-performing system, at the expense of entrepreneurs and risk-takers, exactly the people the Republican party exists to champion.

It’s a mistake to see it as about “fiscal responsibility. What “deficit politics” is about a general suspicion of government, a sense the country is on the wrong track, and a sense that America’s position in the world is eroding due to government encroachment, especially on economic matters. What “deficit politics” is about is a kind of uniquely Baby Boomer sentiment – that we must cut the size of government, except for the military and those programs which “I” am using. It’s not a new sentiment – gaining serious credibility as a standalone dynamic motivating people at least as early as Ross Perot’s 1992 campaign. Before then, it had generally been incorporated into Republican politics – but as Ronald Reagan railed against big government while ballooning the size of government and deficits – and as George H. W. Bush tried to be fiscally responsible and raise taxes to reduce the deficit, and was pilloried for it – those motivated by “deficit politics” grew disappointed with the Republican party. As Bill Clinton reigned in deficit spending, he defused the explosive “deficit politics” but got little credit from those motivated by the issue. When George W. Bush exploded the deficit, he got little blame from this same crowd.

But now that Obama is running a short-term deficit to keep the macroeconomic demand high during this downturn, “deficit politics” is back with force. Obama has sought to defuse this issue by approaching his opponents as if they are acting on a good faith concern about fiscal responsibility by constantly talking about the importance of the long-term deficit, by taking strong measures to reign in the long-term deficit, and by making sure all of his new programs which seek to reign in the deficit in the long-term are deficit neutral over the mid-term. But the problem is – “deficit politics” isn’t about fiscal responsibility – but a far more nebulous and near-impossible combination of goals.

What is happening is that the right policy on the deficit is being distorted by deficit politics; it takes an odd, risk-averse sort of leadership style to realize how to play this game. Clinton was a master of it. But the selectiveness of the targets of this anger coupled with its explosiveness when it finally finds a target make any movement motivated by “deficit politics” impotent. Our political system rewards those movements that apply steady and generally predictable pressure, have clear goals, and that offer commensurate rewards for their supporters. The NRA, the NRLC, labor unions for example. Deficit politics though offers none of these.

Which is why it will fail to accomplish anything, except perhaps block any changes needed to deal with our festering, long-term problems – in which case these problems will get progressively worse.