Making Her Blanche

I wrote over the weekend about how the road to tying down Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus ran through their individual states. Another "Democrat" who has been out front in slow-walking anything that deviates from the status quo, who is also up for re-election next year, is Blanche Lincoln. They have a racket in Arkansas where the two parties almost never challenge each other in general elections - and considering that both party stalwarts do the bidding of their corporate contributors, why should they? In addition to her changing statements on the public option, which drew a round of ads from Blue America, Lincoln thinks the climate change bill should be dumped.

The U.S. Senate should abandon efforts to pass legislation curbing greenhouse-gas emissions this year and concentrate on a narrower bill to require use of renewable energy, four Democratic lawmakers say.

“The problem of doing both of them together is that it becomes too big of a lift,” Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas said in an interview last week. “I see the cap-and-trade being a real problem.”

I remarked to Digby last week that maybe we should rerun the Harry and Louise-type ads against Lincoln, only with two polar bears at the kitchen table instead of the couple.

Maybe that's something that Arkansas State Senate President Bob Johnson can use when he challenges Lincoln in a primary.

Arkansas Senate President Bob Johnson said Friday that he's considering challenging incumbent Democrat U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln in next year's primary.

Johnson told The Associated Press that's he's been encouraged to challenge Lincoln, who is seeking a third Senate term next year. Johnson said he doesn't have a timeline for deciding whether to challenge Lincoln.

"I'd be less than honest if I told you it hasn't surfaced in a number of circles," Johnson said. "I am weighing it very carefully."

Let's not harbor any illusions. Johnson is "running as a conservative Democrat" against Lincoln. He actually sounds like a scoundrel. But in a primary, someone will have to play to the base, where primary voters live. And that could help Lincoln get over her reticence on health care and climate change legislation.

In even better news, Howie Klein says that Jim Cooper's going to get a primary challenge, on the heels of his pathetic approval ratings on the health care issue.

There's enough anti-Washington sentiment in the country that a lot of lawmakers ought to be looking over their shoulders.

Playing With Fire

Rahm Emanuel has been strutting around lately, taking full credit for bringing the stimulus bill to term. This could be seen positively if you didn't understand his next act:

The fiscally conservative Democrats might not have been able to defeat the bill, but a large chunk of Democrats defecting on the top priority of a new Democratic president would have heaped insult on the injury inflicted by the GOP’s wall of opposition. So they huddled in the majority leader’s hideaway, and Emanuel pledged that they would see signs of Obama’s commitment to fiscal reform.

Fiscal reform is a coded word in political circles - he's talking about entitlements. And as nuts as it would be for the President to concern himself with them (in the name of "taking them off the table") during an economic free-fall, that really appears to be what's happening, if Dean Baker is to be believed.

Word has it that President Obama intends to appoint a task force the week after next which will be charged with "reforming" Social Security. According to inside gossip, the task force will be led entirely by economists who were not able to see the $8 trillion housing bubble, the collapse of which is giving the country its sharpest downturn since the Great Depression.

This effort is bizarre for several reasons. First, the economy is sinking rapidly. While President Obama's stimulus package is a good first step towards counteracting the decline, there is probably not a single economist in the country who believes that is adequate to the task. President Obama would be advised to focus his attention on getting the economy back in order instead of attacking the country's most important social program.

The second reason why this task force is strange is that Social Security doesn't need reforming. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it can pay all scheduled benefits for the next 40 years with no changes whatsoever [...]

In short, the vast majority of baby boomers will be approaching retirement with little other than their Social Security and Medicare to support them. And now President Obama is apparently prepared to appoint a commission that will attack these only remaining pillars of support.

I've tried to give the President the benefit of the doubt when hearing these rumblings. His stated goals for Social Security reform have always been progressive (like raising the payroll tax cap), and his description of Medicare's problems have always shown an acknowledgment that runaway health care spending is the problem, which requires a comprehensive health care solution. You can see that thinking here.

Nevertheless, he's playing a dangerous game by flirting with the fiscal responsibility scolds, the same people who voted to appropriate hundreds of billions for endless war, bank bailouts and the Bush tax cuts. They don't have an interest in controlling long-term Medicare spending, they have an interest in self-aggrandizement and pushing an essentially conservative agenda. Chris Hayes' Nation article profiles one the Blue Dogs, and they are not allies:

The Blue Dogs continue to wield influence. Before the stimulus could be brought to the floor, the House had to approve emergency orders to expedite the process. The Blue Dogs balked and threatened to rebel until the White House sent a letter to several House committee chairs reaffirming its commitment to return to pay-go budgeting after the stimulus is passed. In the end, half the caucus voted against the leadership anyway. The week after the stimulus passed the House, Blue Dog co-chair Stephanie Herseth Sandlin sent an open letter to Pelosi and House majority leader Steny Hoyer expressing the caucus's support for efforts by Senate Republicans and conservative Democrats to cut approximately $100 billion from the package--including money for things like school construction, rural broadband and early childhood programs. "We believe that's a highly worthwhile goal," they wrote [...]

This "fraternity" is ostensibly built around a single issue: fiscal discipline. It's a term that is both more and less than it appears.

Everyone understands that Democrats attempting to represent conservative districts have to convince their constituents that despite the D next to their name, they hear them, understand them and share their concerns and worldview. But to do this they've chosen to invest a tremendous amount of political capital in something that, well, no one cares about. In a recent national poll of priorities, the deficit/debt came in a distant sixth, after regulating the financial industry, ending the war in Iraq and healthcare reform. This could be because the national debt as a percentage of GDP is well within post-World War II norms. A Democratic Congressional candidate who unsuccessfully challenged a Republican incumbent in a conservative district in the South put it to me this way: "Nobody brings up the deficit. Ever." [...]

For all their cohesiveness, positive press and legislative leverage, the Blue Dogs haven't produced a ton of legislative accomplishments on their signature issue. On the two most massive expenditures of the last Bush years--the Iraq War and the financial bailout--they've offered little organized resistance. The offsets on the issues on which they've been able to enforce pay-go--like the tax increases to pay for the new GI bill, which the Blue Dogs peg at $63 billion--pale in comparison with the cost of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and the bailout, which have cost more than $1 trillion over the past two years.

Where Blue Dogs have perhaps been most effective is in helping Republicans pass legislation and blocking or diluting progressive legislation. During the months-long debate in 2006 over the Military Commissions Act, which was crafted explicitly to deny the right of habeas corpus to enemy combatants, many Blue Dogs supported the bill (against the directive of the Democratic House leadership), and ultimately twenty-three of thirty-seven voted for it. And it's not just on national security issues that they've played this role. In 2007 Representative Brad Miller proposed legislation that would have amended bankruptcy law to allow judges to alter home mortgage terms, a reform seen by many Democrats as necessary to reduce the number of foreclosures. But according to National Journal's online Congress Daily, "bankers...knew exactly whom to go to in order to stop the bill in its tracks: the Blue Dog Coalition of moderate-to-conservative Democrats." Sixteen members of the caucus signed a letter objecting to the legislation, prompting it to be pulled from consideration on the floor. As of this writing, it has yet to pass the House.

Positions like this have convinced many progressives that Blue Dogs are little more than bought-and-paid-for agents of big business. One corporate lobbyist explained the Blue Dogs' fundraising prowess this way: companies say to themselves, "Blue Dog Democrats are probably going to be more business-friendly, so let's give them more campaign contributions.... You get elected, you join the Blue Dogs...the money comes flowing." Individual fundraising is then amplified by contributions from the Blue Dog PAC, much of it from large corporations like UBS ($10,000), Citigroup ($10,000) and Coca-Cola ($10,000).

These are corporatists who want to shrink the social safety net. When pushed, Rahm Emanuel will side with them every single time and say "It's the best we can do." This is his way. He sidelined antiwar candidates at the DCCC, he pushed freshman Dems to come out as more anti-immigrant because Hispanics "don't vote." (except they do). He is an accommodationist, perfectly willing to listen to and act on critiques like Dan Boren's, that any bill without bipartisan support is "not American." If fiscal responsibility is seen as the common ground, where the left must sit by while Rahm and the Blue Dogs build a bridge to the Beltway media by cutting off the mass of society to fend for themselves, then we will have a major problem winning elections anywhere in the future.

Obama thinks he can charm the pants off an elephant. This is not the crowd to try that with. They will seal his political fate.

More Than Mandates?

The RNC thinks they have a plan of attack for Barack Obama, but it's pretty thin (They'll be focusing on "undisciplined messaging?" This is the Republican Party?). They should probably just read particular liberal blogs for a couple weeks to get some good opportunities. I've seen some very effective smears there (thanks liberal blogosphere!).

One that actually is effective, and worrisome to me as well, is the appearance of Jim Cooper as a surrogate on health care. Cooper, a Representative from Tennessee, offered an alternative health care plan in 1994 that was more business-friendly, and some claim it led to the torpedoing of the Clinton plan.

I was part of the Clinton White House team on the health care reform issue in 1993/94, and no Democrat did more to destroy our chances in that fight than Jim Cooper. We had laid down a marker very early that we thought universal coverage was the most essential element to getting a good package, saying we were to happy to negotiate over the details but that universality was our bottom line.

Cooper, a leader of conservative Dems on the health care issue, instead of working with us, came out early and said universality was unimportant, and came out with a bill that did almost nothing in terms of covering the uninsured. He quickly became the leading spokesman on the Dem side for the insurance industry position, and undercut us at every possible opportunity, basically ending any hopes we had for a unified Democratic Party position. I was never so delighted to see a Democrat lose as when he went down in the 1994 GOP tide.

This is not a universal view. Brad DeLong offers this:

What Mike Lux, "veteran of the Clinton health care wars," knows--but is very careful not to tell you--is that in 1993-1994 health care reform needed 60 votes in the Senate in order to defeat a Dole-led filibuster, and that Sen. John Breaux (D-LA) was vote 55. "undermin[ing] Clinton's health care plan by... [working] with former Senator and current lobbyist John Breaux" translates as "working on bills that might actually pass the senate."

Mike Lux knows this. He just hopes that his readers don't.

The story of the 1994 debacle has a lot to do with Republican intransigence, a lot to do with Democratic variance of opinion, and a lot to do with Hillary Clinton's bad management style. I don't think you can pinpoint any one individual and shoulder all the blame on them.

I do think that health care is going to have to be forced into the conversation in an Obama Administration. However, labor and progressive groups are showing a great willingness to do so, and legislation like that is certain to come up from the Congress, where we should have a nice advantage, and Obama has actually promised health care reform in his first term. So there are many pressure points here, which is how something like this will get done. On foreign policy, which is somewhat more immune to such pressures, I favor Obama's approach. That's really been it for me all along.