Where Ya Been?

Steven Pearlstein is shocked, shocked to see dishonesty at the RNC:

After reading his broadside, one is left wondering exactly what health reform plan Steele thought he was attacking. At one point, Steele claims that Democrats would prevent Americans from keeping their doctors or an insurance plan they like. Later, he warns that government will soon be setting caps on how many heart surgeries could be performed in the United States each year. Where is he getting this stuff? Has the chairman of the Republican Party somehow gotten hold of a top-secret plan for a government takeover of the health-care system that GOP operatives snatched during a break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters?

If all that sounds like a spurious and unsubstantiated allegation, it is. And it fits right in with the cynical lies, distortions and political scare tactics that Steele and other Republicans have used to poison the national debate over health reform.

Have you no shame, sir, have you no shame?

The answer is no, and a lot of us had this one figured out long, long ago. Here's Joe Klein discovering the same thing about conservative front groups and professional liars. James Fallows has been on this beat for a while, but even he succumbs to asking "will it never end?"

And now we have the New York Times, in a big take-out story, saying that Dr. Emanuel, in his role as Obama health-care advisor, is in an "uncomfortable place" because he is being criticized by*:

1) Betsy McCaughey !
2) Rep. Michele Bachman (look her up) !!
3) Sarah Palin !!!
4) Lyndon LaRouche !!!!

McCaughey, Bachman, Palin, LaRouche -- shaping American debate and media coverage about health policy? Was Zsa Zsa Gabor not available?

I think Fallows knows the answer: no. Being complete liars and obstructionists has worked out pretty well for the GOP. They get to maintain power even when they don't hold the Congress or the Presidency. They all make a lot of money off the lies in which they traffic. They go to beds with the clear consciences of people choosing not to see the suffering caused by their handiwork. And they get no penalty whatsoever from the media.

I suppose it's good that people like Pearlstein and Klein are waking up to this. But it won't take them long to balance themselves by saying, well, what Klein said in his recent piece, that liberals are scumbags too, sure, don't get him wrong. This amazing story of Klein confronted by aimai, the grand-daughter of I.F. Stone, and then sputtering about the god-damned liberals for the next hour, is very revealing. It doesn't matter how many instances of Republican perfidy confront them, establishment types and their reflexive hatred of hippies will always allow that reflexivity to color their thoughts.

Paul Krugman nails this.

It’s all true. But I’m having a hard time writing columns like that. Why? Because while the raw dishonesty of the modern GOP appears to be a revelation to Pearlstein, Joe Klein, and others, I thought it was obvious at least as far back as the 2000 election campaign. (If I’d really been paying attention, it would have been obvious much earlier.)

Don’t get me wrong: I welcome Pearlstein and Klein to the reality-based community — better 9 years late than never. And in a way they have an advantage: having fought this thing for so long, I just can’t muster the same sense of shock. But I think it is important to realize that the current behavior over health care is nothing new — in fact, it’s been this way for a very long time.

As Rick Perlstein, our premier historian of the rise of modern movement conservatism, puts it, crazy is a pre-existing condition.

It's just the way things are.

They Should Be Thrilled

Anonymous wankers in the White House expressed surprise in the WaPo this morning about the intensity of feeling about the public option in the health care debate.

President Obama's advisers acknowledged Tuesday that they were unprepared for the intraparty rift that occurred over the fate of a proposed public health insurance program, a firestorm that has left the White House searching for a way to reclaim the initiative on the president's top legislative priority [...]

"I don't understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo," said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We've gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don't understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform."

"It's a mystifying thing," he added. "We're forgetting why we are in this."

If the public option gravitated to the center of the debate and the White House never wanted it there, it's their own damn fault for talking like CPAs about "cost curves" and "risk adjustment" and arguments that could be plotted on a graph for six months without being specific about the moral case of covering millions of people who have no choice and no hope, and beating back the unrivaled greed of the insurance industry. The only element of health care reform as set out by the White House with a beating pulse has been the public option, and humans being emotional creatures as well as rational ones, that's where progressives gathered.

But I want to focus in on this element of "surprise," which is silly, since the public option was the compromise down from the policy with the most intensity on the left in the health care debate, single payer. Beyond this anonymous staffer being clueless for his surprise, he's not even understanding that the revolt on the left is the only thing saving health care reform at this point.

When town hall crazies and conservative misinformation dominated the debate, health care was on a losing trajectory, if not dead in the water. Since Kathleen Sebelius' statement on Sunday on CNN, the nature of the debate has shifted so much away from that and toward actual policy you'd think it was intentional on the part of the White House. Noam Scheiber captures this at TNR.

Around the conference table at TNR, we’ve been saying for weeks that what Obama really needed was a group of equally vocal, equally zealous critics on the left, pulling the debate’s center of gravity in the other direction. And, wouldn’t you know, that’s exactly what’s happened over the last 48 hours. We’ve now got a pole on the left to match the intensity of the pole on the right. (Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting a moral equivalence between the two. As far as I’m concerned, the critics on the left are basically right and the critics on the right are either insane or deeply cynical.) From a sheer tactical perspective, I think the White House and the Democratic leadership in Congress have dramatically improved their position.

You now have 64 House Dems who have raised over $100,000 and counting from over 1,600 Democrats in 24 hours since they took the pledge of not voting for any bill without a public option. You have House Democrats strongly behind the public option in their weekly caucus meeting, with everyone in support of it because their constituents had pressed them on it. You have labor warning Democrats that they'll sit out specific elections if any members oppose a public plan. There's a vital energy to the debate now that was simply missing when Obama was offering vague principles and playing an inside game trying to frame health care reform as entitlement reform. And it's actually doing more to get a health care bill passed than anything the White House has done all year.

Elites who reflexively kick the left will retreat to the familiar ground of the Washington Post editorial page to demand that liberals "give up on the public option". And they can make their case for that on the policy - the currently administered public option on offer, by firewalling those who get insurance through employers, will struggle to survive because it cannot capture enough of the market to force competition on price and quality of care (though historically, governments build on what gets enshrined into law gradually over time, so the policy of the moment matters less than what can be done with it eventually, and having nothing, or weak co-ops that experts have shown cannot work at all, would be disastrous). On the politics, liberal elites are dead wrong. They will lose health care completely if they alienate the base. And the base wants competition against for-profit insurance CEOs with a public option, at the very least. Because they understand that a properly administered version of this competition would save people and the government money, with more savings the more popular it is. That's only something to fear if you want to protect insurance company profits.

As Chris Bowers says:

However, the current fight over the public option is a perfect demonstration of why such left-wing criticism is absolutely essential to any attempts to pass progressive legislation by the Democratic leadership and the Obama administration. If there had been no left-wing revolt to Sebelius's statements on Sunday, it would be far more difficult for the Democratic Congressional leadership and the Obama administration to justify not giving into right-wing demands. Lacking any Progressive Block demanding more progressive legislation, the Democratic leadership and administration would be practically forced to offer up even less progressive legislation than even the compromises they were floating over the weekend [...]

It is understandable that some progressives who worked very hard to elect President Obama get irked by left-wing criticism. Not all Democrats are on the left, not everyone buys into the same strategies as me, and criticism toward someone you personally identify with is irritating [...]

No matter these objections, in order to pass progressive legislation, both prominent left-wing criticism and powerful, Congressional Progressive opposition to a Democratic trifecta is absolutely necessary. In the current health care fight, the lack of such criticism and the lack of such a block would mean that the public option was dead in the water right now. Not everyone is going to like it, and some party higher ups like Rahm Emanuel may call it "f*ckng stupid," but any progressive ecosystem lacking such criticism and left-wing organizing is only a short time away from suffering a mass extinction.

I would go further, and say that without progressive organizing around the public option, there wouldn't be any health care reform legislation. Period. The band of hippies is saving the Democrats from themselves.

Please thank those who have stood up for their efforts. Let's get to $200,000 today.

An Army Of Krugmans

Paul Krugman delivered some upside the head slaps on Morning Joe today. Pat Buchanan actually tried to argue in favor of the WARREN HARDING TAX CUTS that led to expansion - never mind the Republican Great Depression afterwards. Joe Scarborough tried the fool's game of disowning Bush, saying he was a big spender and not a classic conservative - never mind the fact that Reagan and both Bushes increased the deficit more than every other President combined. Krugman was having none of it. It's worth watching from about the 4:30 mark on. Here's one sample bite.

KRUGMAN: Look at what just happened, we had a proposal I think it was McCain’s proposal for an economic recover package, his version of it which was all tax cuts, a complete, let’s do exactly what Bush did, have another round of Bush-style policies. After eight years which that didn’t work and we got 36 out of 41 Republican senators voting for that which is completely crazy. So how much bipartisan outreach can you have when 36 out of 41 republican senators take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh?

Unfortunately, there aren't 150 Paul Krugmans to deploy to every news outlet in America. There are, however, 150 liberal Democrats in Congress, maybe even more! I know there's a substantial faction of Democrats who are moles, essentially, and committed more to having Beltway chatterers smile at them in the hallways than anything else. But there really are enough actual Democrats to defend the concept of a stimulus. Here is someone who is decidedly NOT a Democrat, Steven Pearlstein, saying what shouldn't need to be said, but definitely is, because Democrats have been cowtowed by Republican B.S. for so many years.

Let's review some of the more silly arguments about the stimulus bill, starting with the notion that "only" 75 percent of the money can be spent in the next two years, and the rest is therefore "wasted."

As any economist will tell you, the economy tends to be forward-looking and emotional. So if businesses and households can see immediate benefits from a program while knowing that a bit more stimulus is on the way, they are likely to feel more confident that the recovery will be sustained. That confidence, in turn, will make them more likely to take the risk of buying big-ticket items now and investing in stocks or future ventures.

Moreover, much of the money that can't be spent right away is for capital improvements such as building and maintaining schools, roads, bridges and sewer systems, or replacing equipment -- stuff we'd have to do eventually. So another way to think of this kind of spending is that we've simply moved it up to a time, to a point when doing it has important economic benefits and when the price will be less.

Equally specious is the oft-heard complaint that even some of the immediate spending is not stimulative.

"This is not a stimulus plan, it's a spending plan," Nebraska's freshman senator, Mike Johanns (R), said Wednesday in a maiden floor speech full of budget-balancing orthodoxy that would have made Herbert Hoover proud. The stimulus bill, he declared, "won't create the promised jobs. It won't activate our economy."

Johanns was too busy yesterday to explain this radical departure from standard theory and practice. Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services -- a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus. The only question is whether spending it on other things would create more long-term value, which it almost certainly would.

All spending is stimulus. It's four words that have been absent from the debate. Democratic lawmakers have been banned from the teevee, I know, but when they do manage to get on, they could do worse than uttering those four words. All spending is stimulus. And if you want to talk about speed, the fastest stimulus is government purchases, either local, state or federal. This is exactly what the axis of centrism and the far right are trying to remove from the bill.

I think Obama's speech to House Democrats last night was intended for a very particular audience. They are being outworked and they need to pull their weight.

(Just to be clear, the bill has too many tax cuts, and if the Axis of Centrism can't swallow the price tag, they can get rid of the $70 billion AMT patch and the $35 billion home-buying credit and the auto-buying credit, cuts which won't help anyone who can't afford a home or a car and will just give away free money to people who would have bought those items anyway. There's your $100 billion in cuts.)