Tag: Ezra Klein

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Barack Obama Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Greenwald Jumps the Shark?

[digg-reddit-me]I am quite honestly shocked reading this piece from Glenn Greenwald yesterday. His reaction to defenses of Obama is quite visceral – and in fairness, I’m sure many of the attacks on him for attacking Obama have come from a similar type of unreasoned anger. But I expect more from a figure of Greenwald’s statute, of his intellect. His reaction – to be generous – mirrors those he is critiquing.

His attacks on Ezra Klein, who has been consistently fair-minded in evaluating the politics and policy of the health care debate in a manner of which Greenwald sometimes seems scarcely capable, are especially unfair. Klein has been strongly making the case that this bill, for all its faults, should be passed – against the Tea Partyers back in the late summer and now against progressives – all the while acknowledging flaws in the bill and the process. Thus, he has been taking on a number of important progressives recently – and in doing so, at least once, he found that his progressive opponent (Jane Hamsher) had made an arguments against this health care legislation that substantially misstated the facts of the case, as so much political propaganda does. Klein writes that of the list he is responding to:

Some of the list is purposefully misleading and is clearly aimed more at helping activists kill the bill than actually informing anyone about what is in the bill.

Klein then goes on to deal with each of the points Jane Hamsher raised in a substantive manner. Greenwald linked to this piece claiming that Klein is calling opponents of health care reform, “liars” (a word that appears nowhere in the piece) and then later in an update, insisted that Klein is part taking part in “coordinated efforts by the President’s loyal supporters to attack the credibility and character (rather than the arguments) of Obama critics.” Greenwald does acknowledge that “there has been some very responsible and informative debate among these various factions, the insults have flown in both directions, and it’s understandable that passions run high on an issue of this significance.” But then he goes right on to equate “campaigns by White House loyalists in government and the media to destroy the personal credibility and malign the character of the President’s critics” during the Bush years to out Valerie Plame as a secret agent to efforts today regarding health care.

Really?! This attack falls fall short to me – the type of hyperbolic rhetoric that generally leads me to take a several-week break from Greenwald. I mean – does this post by Nate Silver on “Why Progressives Are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill” which Greenwald specifically cites strike you as the equivalent of the demonization of Valerie Plame and Richard Clarke? I suppose that depends on whether or not you see the title as serious – or deliberately heightened language.

Don’t trust my take on this – read Klein’s piece, read Greenwald’s piece, read Hamsher’s piece, read Nate Silver’s piece – and see if your respect for Greenwald is diminished. Respond in the comments either way.

Greenwald likewise took the curious tact of defending Matt Taibbi. He slandered all critics of Taibbi as, like Ezra Klein, part of “coordinated efforts by the President’s loyal supporters to attack the credibility and character (rather than the arguments) of Obama critics.” But even the piece Greenwald linked to defends Taibbi against one of his critics concludes with this rather limited endorsement:

Personally, I love it that Taibbi exists, and I’m impressed that his 6,500-word screed (into which a great deal of work clearly went) in fact has very little in the way of factual errors, let alone “lies”. Yes, Taibbi is polemical and one-sided, and he exaggerates his thesis, and he’s entertaining; I daresay he’s learned a lot from watching Fox News. And no, I would never want to live in a world where everybody wrote like that.

This is roughly the opinion I, along with most admirers and critics of Taibbi, have. While hiding behind the fact checkers of Rolling Stone, Taibbi makes various un-fact-checkable statements (that also seem to be designed to convey his meaning without being subject to a lawsuit for defamation), for example:

The point is that an economic team made up exclusively of callous millionaire-assholes has absolutely zero interest in reforming the gamed system that made them rich in the first place.

Ezra Klein, as usual, has an excellent substance-based critique. This is more than I can say for Greenwald’s visceral response. As I wrote earlier, Greenwald “creates his own politically stereotyped parody of Obama defenders, which he then viscerally, emotionally reacts to.” Yesterday’s post was more of the same, with just a bit less of the good Greenwald than usual.

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Barack Obama Criticism Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Today in Health Care

Another day, another post on the best points on Ezra Klein’s blog.

And apologies for the lack of a post yesterday, as I was caught up in Christmas shopping for the entire day. With my sister. As we visited every women’s clothing store in Manhattan. It was exhilarating. (Just like going to the dentist.) (If you’re reading, I’m kidding, sister!)

But on to more interesting matters. Klein asked George Halvorson, chairman and chief executive of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, what he would put into the health care bill if he could:

The exchanges as designed in the current bill deal with health plan choices only. That is a wasted opportunity. The future health plan marketplace for America should be about dueling care teams, not dueling actuaries. Let’s not miss this chance to transform care by building the exchange model with components that help consumers make smart choices. Insurance competition is good. Care team competition is better. Exchanges should have low barriers to entry for accountable health systems and high standards for important data about care outcomes and successes. It’s not too late to go down that path. The entire bill can point us in a direction that facilitates care delivery reform as well as insurance reform. We need both.

Klein also tackles the talking point that Glenn Greenwald and others on the left who oppose the bill have been repeating in an almost Republican-sounding chorus – that because the stocks of health insurance companies went up in the aftermath of the deal to pass the bill, that it represents a complete sellout to the industry:

Look at the graph atop this post. This bill is not, in the market’s estimation, a gamechanger for the insurance industry. All of these stocks have seen both larger rises and larger falls in the past. None of them have recovered to their pre-crash highs. The market is not viewing the insurance industry in a dramatically different light than was true a year ago.

This is, at best, back-of-the-envelope work. But so too is divining the true worth of the health-care reform bill by tracking the daily fluctuations in the stock prices of insurers.

Klein also links to Alex Pareen’s essential Gawker piece headlined, “News of First Major Progressive Legislation in 30 Years Enrages Liberals.”

Earlier today, Klein continued to take on the role of referee of the health care debate, declaring that Obama’s statement that he did not campaign on the public option was false:

[I]t’s a good example of why the left is losing its trust in Obama. Obama could have given an interview where he expressed frustration that the math of the Senate forced his administration to give up the public option but nevertheless argued that the rest of the health-care bill was well worth passing. Instead, he’s arguing that he never cared about the public option anyway, which is just confirming liberal suspicions that they lost that battle because the president was never really on their side.

Edit: Link fixed.

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Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Ezra Klein: Health Care Blogger Extraordinare

Ezra Klein has been my essential read during the health care debate. Today, he makes a few important points:

  1. Regarding Obama’s Campaign Health Care Plan. “The health-care bill that looks likely to clear the Senate this week is not very close to the health-care bill most liberals want. But it is very close to the health-care bill that Barack Obama promised.”
  2. Regarding Senate Collegiality. “Another example came last night, when the ailing Robert Byrd was wheeled in at 1 a.m. to break a filibuster on the manager’s amendment. Byrd’s presence was not required, especially considering that he’d clearly telegraphed his intention to vote to break the filibuster. But Republicans forced him to travel to the chamber. Indeed, shortly before he arrived, Sen. Tom Coburn headed to the floor to propose a prayer. ‘What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote tonight,’ he said. ‘That’s what they ought to pray.’ “
  3. Contra Jane Hamsher’s 10 Reasons to Kill the Bill. “Some of the list is purposefully misleading and is clearly aimed more at helping activists kill the bill than actually informing anyone about what is in the bill. Some of it points out things that really should be changed in the bill but aren’t central to the legislation itself, and are simply being leveraged to help activists kill the bill. But maybe there’s some utility to putting the document in context.”
  4. Citing the Creator of the Public Option, Jacob Hacker. “As weak as it is in numerous areas, the Senate bill contains three vital reforms. First, it creates a new framework, the “exchange,” through which people who lack secure workplace coverage can obtain the same kind of group health insurance that workers in large companies take for granted. Second, it makes available hundreds of billions in federal help to allow people to buy coverage through the exchanges and through an expanded Medicaid program. Third, it places new regulations on private insurers that, if properly enforced, will reduce insurers’ ability to discriminate against the sick and to undermine the health security of Americans. These are signal achievements, and they all would have been politically unthinkable just a few years ago.”
  5. Regarding the President’s Role in Shaping Legislation. “The Obama administration has played a seriously inside game here, acting more as an accessory of the legislative branch than as the great figure of health-care reform that many of its supporters had expected. That is, in my view, the right way to understand the president’s role in the system, but it’s left a lot of the campaign’s supporters feeling a bit betrayed, particularly given that the Obama campaign was uncommonly aggressive on presidential pomp and dramatic speeches. Obama’s supporters don’t feel like the president lost to Lieberman along with them. They feel, instead, like the president cut them and their hopes loose.”
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Barack Obama Criticism Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Paul Krugman Attempts to Fill Ted Kennedy’s Shoes

[digg-reddit-me]Ezra Klein had a smart bit of analysis about the role Ted Kennedy could have played on health care were he still with us:

If you know the health-care debate really well, it means a lot to say that Jay Rockefeller and Sherrod Brown support this bill. If you don’t know the debate very well, it means virtually nothing. Kennedy was the only liberal with the stature to sell a painful compromise to the base. [my emphasis]

There aren’t many liberals out there with that kind of stature and with the trust of those to the left, and you only get to use your position this way a limited amount of times. But Paul Krugman today took on this task with his op-ed, largely echoing arguments made by me yesterday, as well as Ezra Klein. First, is from me:

So, to my brethren on the left posting at reddit, and on progressive blogs around the nation, remember this: Be angry the bill has been undermined. Be angry that various interest groups have gotten their way at the expense of the majority. But keep perspective, and see which direction the bill moves us. And ask: Does it create a framework of exchanges and subsidies that can improve our health care system? Does it bring us closer to universal health insurance? Will it be easier to add a public option to this structure in the years ahead if, as seems likely, the health insurance industries continue their abusive behaviors, than to start anew?

The answers are clearly, Yes, Yes, and Yes.

As a progressive, as a liberal, you don’t have to be happy about supporting this bill. But you should support it.

And now Krugman:

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy. Declare that you’re disappointed in and/or disgusted with President Obama. Demand a change in Senate rules that, combined with the Republican strategy of total obstructionism, are in the process of making America ungovernable.

But meanwhile, pass the health care bill.

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Barack Obama Criticism Economics Financial Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere

The Left’s Odd Abandoment of Obama: Matt Taibbi

I recently castigated Glenn Greenwald for the umpteenth time for distorting the world to fit his ideological lens. He, like a significant portion of the left, seems to have turned on Obama. Despite his claims to judge politicians on a case-by-case basis and not to give them support or opposition based on their history, it is clear that Greenwald’s recent attempts at rationally ranting about Obama have a strong emotional core; I extrapolate this from the somewhat tortured manner in which he caricatures the positions of Obama and Obama’s supporters in order to take them down, and the eagerness with which he seems to try to get to his rants in which he loses the remaining bits of common sense he has. Thus, it isn’t that exceptional that he endorsed Matt Taibbi’s recent piece on the Obama administration. While Taibbi is sloppier than Greenwald – and lacks the “fair” persona that Greenwald sometimes adopts – both have a core position: they are anti-establishmentarian. Taibbi though writes news rather than opinion journalism and constantly hides behind the (no-doubt vigorous) fact-checking of his pieces by Rolling Stone – but his most egregious errors are implicit. He writes as if insinuation were fact, which makes him difficult to take seriously whether he is writing about AIG or Goldman Sachs or Obama. And his constant mode is paranoid conspiracy theorist – which certainly fits the moment. Perhaps the best response to Taibbi was to call him the “Sarah Palin of journalism.” And he certainly demonstrated that out-of-the-gate with his first sentence responding to critics:

When we went to print with the latest Rolling Stone piece about Obama’s economic hires, a couple of my sources advised me to expect some nastiness in the way of a response from Obama apologists.

Like Palin, Taibbi defends himself by pointing out who his enemies are, as if their existence makes him right. Granted, Taibbi is a better writer than Palin – and doubtless is better informed. But what he does with his knowledge is create elaborate conspiracy theories embedded in the colorful opinions he gives throughout his news:

The point is that an economic team made up exclusively of callous millionaire-assholes has absolutely zero interest in reforming the gamed system that made them rich in the first place.

Go ahead – fact check that! The main point of his most recent piece seems to be the pernicious effect of Clinton Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs head, and Citibank big shot, Robert Rubin. A good article could be written about this – but Taibbi chose instead to write a piece about Obama’s hypocrisy demonstrated by his embrace of Rubin’s mentees. Taibbi accomplishes this with a quick bait-and-switch, describing the vague hopes people had for Obama during the campaign – that he was “a man of the people” – and then deftly pivoting:

Then he got elected.

What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history.

Now – this assertion is the core contention Taibbi makes – yet he entirely fails to do several things: (1) to describe what Obama actually campaigned on; (2) to fairly or honestly describe the Rubin/New Democratic positions; or (3) to describe accurately the attempts made by Obama to reign in the financial industry. Instead, Taibbi merely lists the many people who worked for Rubin at some point who now work for Obama as if that proved the audacious opinions he starts his piece with. His entire piece would work better as a footnote supporting one contention in his three paragraph opening.

Tim Fernholz also writes a good piece taking on Taibbi’s anti-Obama screed.

Andrew Leonard of Salon provided a pretty good summary of Taibbi in general:

It’s the classic Taibbi approach: vastly and sloppily overstate the case in absurd, over-the-top rhetoric while ignoring any possible counterargument.

But Ezra Klein as always has an extremely intelligent take:

But in this case, Taibbi chose a swift-moving narrative at the expense of an accurate picture of how — and more importantly, where — Wall Street is capturing the political process.

The issue here is not that Taibbi should be nicer to the Obama administration, which is how he’s framing most of the criticism of his article. Quite the opposite, actually. Taibbi is being much too nice to the Obama administration. He’s imbued them with a lot more power than they have.

If the result of the 2010 election is that Obama fires his economics team and moves his administration to the left, but the Republicans pick up 60 seats on the House and move the body to the right, then American public policy outcomes move to the right.

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Barack Obama Criticism History Politics

You don’t have to be happy about supporting this bill. But you should support it.

I apologize if this is a bit long – but I felt it was important.

[digg-reddit-me]When I read and hear and watch the progressive reaction to Obama – calling him a sellout, calling health care reform a scam, calling it a bailout of the insurance industry, claiming Obama has been allying himself with Rush Limbaugh, claiming Obama has betrayed them, asking when it is time to march Obama to the guillotine – I’m reminded of how abolitionists reacted to Abraham Lincoln.

Despite his almost universally praised legacy today, in his time, Lincoln was a polarizing figure – scorned by Confederates and abolitionists, Copperheads and radical Republicans. Yet in time, he came to be seen as our greatest president. One has to wonder why all these involved and motivated individuals who eviscerated his actions as he did them came to see him as a visionary leader when these actions were seen in perspective.

The reason is that Lincoln was ruthlessly pragmatic. He had principles, but was willing to forgo if he didn’t think he could achieve what he wanted. Thus, Confederates seeing what he felt believed he was an abolitionist bent on the destruction of the South and seceded from the Union. The abolitionists derided him as weak-willed and unwilling to stand on principle. The progressives of today might learn something from looking at their precursors, the abolitionists of Lincoln’s time.

Wendell Phillips, a prominent abolitionist, labeled Lincoln “the Slave Hound of Illinois” for his reluctant support of the reviled Fugitive Slave Act, even claiming as Lincoln ran for president that, that he was worse than James Mason, the author of the Fugitive Slave Act. Lincoln won election promising not to end slavery, but that “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” He even refused to expand on his limited remarks to explain his thinking further – afraid that any further revelations might cost him votes that his carefully worded statement preserved.

After his election, Frederick Douglass declared: “Abraham Lincoln is no more fit for the place he holds than was [pro-slavery and worst president ever] James Buchanan…” The aforementioned Wendell Phillips continued to attack Lincoln after his election: “I believe Mr. Lincoln is conducting this war, at present, with the purpose of saving slavery…[I]f Mr. Lincoln had been a traitor, he could not have worked better to strengthen one side, and hazard the success of the other…The President…has no mind whatever.“

When one of Lincoln’s generals issued an order ending all slavery in the state he was ruling under martial law, Lincoln rescinded the order and fired the general, saying: “I think there is a great danger, confiscation of property, and the liberating of slaves of traitorous owners, will alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us.”

Other abolitionists complained that Lincoln’s “face was turned toward Zion, but he seemed to move with leaden feet.” They declared him, “stumbling, faithless, uncertain.”

Even when Lincoln finally decided to make a dramatic move condemning slavery – his famous Emancipation Proclamation – it did not end slavery in America. Only in those states still in rebellion, because, as Lincoln reasoned: “I hope to have God on my side. But I must have Kentucky.” Even after this Emancipation, the radical abolitionists in his own party sought to impeach him for being too soft on slavery and the rebellious states. All through this, Lincoln was assailed by the abolitionists as weak, as timid, as cowardly, as unmanly. He refused to let his idealism determine his policy – but rather let it guide it when possible.

Lincoln’s legacy is rightly lionized – he proved to be a brilliant leader, pushing and prodding America in the direction he believed in over time, persevering as his supporters gave up hope, and always looking for the opportunity to push the country in the direction he believed it should be going, rather than forcing it into the place where he thought it should be. This is the difference between a leader and a pundit. After Lincoln died, one of his most prominent critics, Frederick Douglass, scolded himself and those other abolitionists:

His accusers, in whose opinion he was always too fast or too slow, too weak or too strong, too conciliatory or too aggressive, would soon become his admirers; it was soon to be seen that he had conducted the affairs of the nation with singular wisdom, and with absolute fidelity to the great trust confided in him. [my emphasis]

It is normal for those watching the day-to-day activities of a leader to be disillusioned, angry, and bitter, as idealistic hopes are broken on pragmatic realities. While our politicians campaign in poetry, as Mario Cuomo said, they must govern in prose. What frustrates me though is the type of short-term thinking and reacting that leads to good policies being destroyed for improvements being derailed because of their imperfections.

The health care bill before Congress is far from ideal – and it has been weakened every step. But it is progress! It is, in the words of progressive Senator Sherrod Brown, “Not a great bill, but a good bill.” It will help millions of Americans. (As well as, unfortunately, the profits of health insurance companies.) Most importantly, it provides a foundation for future reform. Remember that “Social Security was designed to exclude African Americans. Medicare didn’t cover prescription drugs. Medicaid was mainly for pregnant women and their young children. Canada’s system was limited to a single province. There was no University of California at Los Angeles.” Once the funding and system is there, it can be improved upon. This bill takes a huge step to making health care insurance universal and expands access to health insurance more dramatically than any program since Medicare in the 1960s.

As a liberal, I’d rather start reforming health care now and help the insurance companies as part of the bargain, then than fuck over the uninsured to spite the insurance companies. To quote Ezra Klein:

To put this a bit more sharply, if I could construct a system in which insurers…never discriminated against another sick applicant, began exerting real pressure for providers to bring down costs, vastly simplified their billing systems, made it easier to compare plans and access consumer ratings, and generally worked more like companies in a competitive market rather than companies in a non-functional market, I would take that deal. And if you told me that the price of that deal was that insurers would move from being the 86th most profitable industry to being the 53rd most profitable industry, I would still take that deal.

And if getting this done means caving in to a weasel like Joe Lieberman, who is willing to block this bill and let 150,000 die as a result of their lack of access to health insurance, then so be it. I’d rather protect the thousands than, in a display of pique, destroy any chance of reform. (This posturing reminds me of nothing so much as a domestic application of neoconservative foreign policy: It’s better to be strong and get nothing done than appear weak and negotiate.)

So, to my brethren on the left posting at reddit, and on progressive blogs around the nation, remember this: Be angry the bill has been undermined. Be angry that various interest groups have gotten their way at the expense of the majority. But keep perspective, and see which direction the bill moves us. And ask: Does it create a framework of exchanges and subsidies that can improve our health care system? Does it bring us closer to universal health insurance? Will it be easier to add a public option to this structure in the years ahead if, as seems likely, the health insurance industries continue their abusive behaviors, than to start anew?

The answers are clearly, Yes, Yes, and Yes.

As a progressive, as a liberal, you don’t have to be happy about supporting this bill. But you should support it.

Postscript: And to preemptively answer 3 other issues:

I have yet to see an argument which truly makes the case for why this bill should be scrapped from a progressive view that doesn’t focus on insurance company profits – which suck – but there are worse things, or an exaggerated view of what the White House could have done, or an exaggerated view of how important the public option was to the reforms.

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Categories
Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Harry Reid’s Heroism

I’ve said it before, but I’m saying it again:

If you’re trying to follow the ins and outs of the health care debate, there’s no better source than Ezra Klein. But for the moment, I wanted to cite one particular post of Klein’s citing Matt Yglesias:

[L]iberals have rarely found themselves hailing Reid’s leadership. But the fact of the matter is that there’s almost no precedent for the legislative mission he’s been asked to accomplish of turning 59 Democrats, one loosely Democrat-aligned Independent, and two slightly moderate Republicans into 60 votes for a package that’s simultaneously a dramatic expansion of the welfare state and a measure that reduces both short- and long-term deficits.

On top of the intrinsically difficult nature of the task, he’s facing a really ugly political situation back home. Because Beltway mores dictate that you can never hold a member of congress morally culpable for actions undertaken in the name of raw politically self-interest, it must have been very tempting for Reid to get distracted. But he’s stayed on point and focused, dealt with the timid members of his caucus, dealt with the ignorant members of his caucus, dealt with the egomaniacal members of his caucus, and dealt with the all-too-typical Senatorial combination of policy ignorance, egomania, and political cowardice among some members. For his troubles it looks like we’re going to get a bill that liberals feel churlish about at best. But it’s really an extraordinary achievement.

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Politics The Media The Opinionsphere

And it was said that bloggers shall inherit the earth.

A bit under the weather – but not with swine flu apparently. That accounts for the lack of Tuesday blogging.

So, let me briefly blog about…..blogging. Ezra Klein chews on something I’ve been thinking about, as I set my opinions into the public domain day after day, with my name attached to it.

As the Internet becomes more and more pervasive and job applicants have a longer and longer paper trail, prospective employers are going to have to overlook a public record containing opinions that, in previous eras, they would never have seen, and would never have tolerated.

Klein’s reflections note that both he (who had criticized and is now employed by the Washington Post) and economist Willem Buiter (who blogged extremely harsh things about Citibank and has now been hired to be their chief economist) support this hopeful point.

And Andrew Sullivan highlighted a Choire piece observing a little-noticed but significant event – as Joshua Micah Marshall, blogger for Talking Points Memo and Peabody Award Winner has now hired a publisher for his blog.

My friend’s point was: here is an editor, who built and owns his publication, who is now going to be the editor-owner, who will employ the publisher. For those of you who have worked at any sort of publication, the implications of this are staggering…[I]t’s high time media publishing—where, nearly everywhere across the industry, the business side that has failed so utterly at its duties is currently squeezing every last bit of blood out of editorial—tried something different.

And it was said that bloggers shall inherit the earth.

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Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Health Care Reform is the most significant effort at cost control in a generation, if not ever.

[digg-reddit-me]Once health care reform passes, the White House has signaled it will begin to focus more specifically on the deficit. (Also, on jobs, cap and trade, and financial regulation.)

But as the Obama administration presented it initially: Health care reform is deficit reduction. (Ezra Klein, health care policy wonk, blogger, and columnist for the Washington Post, has been making this case all along, as have many other technocratic types and policy wonks and health care experts.) That’s why Peter Orszag made the phrase, “bend the curve” into a buzzword, referring to the attempt to bring down the rate of growth of health care spending. Here for example is a graph of our projected budget deficit as a percentage of GDP based on current growth rates, lowering those growth rates, and adopting measures to have Britain-like growth rates:

While any bill that might get past Congress at this point won’t live up to the early wet dreams of policy wonks (It won’t even bring us to the level of the blue line in the above graph), it would – to quote Ezra – still “represent the most significant effort at cost control in a generation, if not ever.” (my emphasis.) (He specifically refers to three provisions in the Senate Finance Committee bill: the excise tax on high-cost insurance plans; the newly empowered Medicare Commission; and various delivery-system reforms.) In fact – again according to Ezra – the “health-care reform bills currently under consideration in both the Senate and the House actually cut money from the deficit.” Despite this, the same Republicans (often the exact same individuals) who 6 years ago cast “a vote to add about $400 billion to the deficit in the first 10 years, and trillions more in the decades after that,” with Medicare Part D are now criticizing the current bill which would decrease the deficit as “fiscally irresponsible.”  Ezra:

It’s like watching arsonists calling the fire department reckless.

This constant obstructionism by the Republicans – on both matters of fiscal stimulus and health care – is gradually eating away at the public will to act and is therefore undermining confidence in America’s economy and long-term fiscal situation, and by undermining this confidence, making a disaster more likely. Noam Scheiber of The New Republic describes how the struggle to enact meaningful health care reform is a concern for the largest holders of American debt, the Chinese:

To his surprise, when Orszag arrived at the site of the annual U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), the Chinese didn’t dwell on the Wall Street meltdown or the global recession. The bureaucrats at his table mostly wanted to know about health care reform, which Orszag has helped shepherd…”At some point, if you refuse to contain health care costs, you’ll go bankrupt,” says Andy Xie, a prominent Shanghai-based economist, formerly of Morgan Stanley.

The efforts at cost control proposed by the Democrats might fail, as Republicans suggest. But it is irresponsible not to try, and to obstruct any attempts to try. Republicans have begun to demagogue the bills before Congress both for cutting Medicare and for increasing the amount of health care spending. They are not willing to give the Democrats any political cover to take any fiscally responsible measures. This partisan refusal to work towards solving long-term problems has been the key to Republican successes from 1994 to the present. (Not so for the Democrats, many of whom joined George W. Bush in passing his No Child Left Behind act, his tax cuts, and his Medicare Part D bill, but undoubtedly, both sides bear some blame.) This has created a political culture in which Washington has two directives:  “spend money on things I like and don’t raise my taxes.” This isn’t solely a Republican problem. It is more that the Republicans, by remaining stubbornly united, have made these flaws evident. Klein again:

The issue isn’t that some storm will unexpectedly slam into the economy and there will be nothing anybody can do, but that the storm will hit and Congress will choose to do nothing

The biggest danger America faces is not rising health-care costs or global warming or the budget deficit. It’s the political system’s inability to act on these issues, even though the solutions are generally quite clear.

Take a moment and read the articles linked to – especially the three Ezra Klein posts from the past two days. (On the Senate Finance Bill’s cost control measures; On Medicare Part D; and On Our Political System’s Inability to Act.)

Keep in mind that Obama’s proposals are not “radical leftist” but essential and moderate tinkering that incorporates Republican as well as Democratic ideas. The Tea Party-ers may be outraged at the imaginary specters of death panels and government-mandated abortion. But it is the rest of us who should be outraged at the inability of our political system or our politics to address these long-term issues responsibly.

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Domestic issues Environmental Issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Nancy Pelosi’s Essential Leadership

[digg-reddit-me]At this point, whatever you think of Nancy Pelosi’s policies – or her personality – you have to admit this: she’s ruthlessly pragmatic, knows how to wield her power effectively, has excellent political instincts, and is one of the more effective Speakers of the House in recent memory. In an interview with Ezra Klein, Pelosi described her legislative philosophy:

“You get the votes,” she said, balling one hand into a fist, “and you take the vote,” and she punched her other hand. “Because you never know what can happen.”

Pelosi’s 11th hour compromise Saturday night – accepting the Stupak amendment – proved she was willing to do what it took to get the health care “bill that no one loved but almost everyone still believed in” passed. The Stupak amendment brought two key constituencies on board: the Catholic bishops and pro-life Democrats. As Minority Leader Boehner prepared to use legislative maneuvers to scuttle the bill on the grounds it would make everyone in the health insurance exchange pay “an abortion premium” – Pelosi’s acceptance of the Stupak amendment lead Cardinal Francis George, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, to call Boehner to make sure “the GOP didn’t play any games,” blocking health care reform on the pretense of a pro-life position. At the same time, the Stupak amendment also allowed the bill’s sole Republican supporter to sign on, Congressman Anh Cao. The fallout among the pro-choice Democrats has been severe – but Pelosi must assume it’s manageable. Given the fact that this provision will likely be stripped from the final version of the bill, it seems a small price to pay to pass this historic legislation.

At the same time, Klein points out that Pelosi’s decision to push cap and trade legislation through months ago looks prescient today:

I’m not saying that cap and trade has great odds this year, but whatever chance it does have is a function of Pelosi passing it back in June. She got the votes, and she took the vote.

The House has now passed two bills tackling two major issues that have been growing worse for the past two decades but Washington has been unable to address due to partisan gridlock. Obama deserves much of the credit. But Nancy Pelosi has proven to be a formidable pol – and it is her leadership most of all that has gotten this legislation as far as it has.

Now, all eyes turn to the Senate – for both health care and cap and trade. In the coming months we will find out whether or not Washington is able to deal with either of these issues, or to once again put them off, drawing closer to the moment that is too late. But in the meantime, Nancy Pelosi has done her job.

[Image by Public Citizen licensed under Creative Commons.]