Establishment Coalescing

Here are a couple headlines that I didn't think I'd see. One, Tom Daschle saying that budget reconciliation may be the only way for health care reform to pass. Two, and this one is really a stretch, Terry McAuliffe saying health care reform is a failure without a public option:

Former Democratic National Committee Chair Terry McAuliffe is demanding his party take a stand on health care legislation that the president and many others aren't willing to take: Pass a bill with a public option for insurance coverage or don't pass anything at all.

The long-time adviser to the Clintons, striking an atypically progressive tone, urged the White House to get more assertive in its handling of health care reform and described a bill without a public plan as a "failure."

"If we don't have the public option, we are wasting our time," McAuliffe told the Huffington Post. "To chalk something up and get something that is not the right thing to do is morally wrong... To pass something just so you can go home and go into election saying we passed something is not why lawmakers are sent to Washington."

After a bit of silence following his loss in the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary, the former DNC chair has come out swinging on the year's most important legislative issue. On Thursday, McAuliffe agreed to host a fundraiser with the first Virginia pol who insisted that a public option be in the bill. The offer, he said, extends to Sens. Jim Webb and Mark Warner -- both of whom have been sour on the idea of a government-administered option for insurance coverage. He's also involved in whipping support in Congress for the public option.

McAuliffe is the first business-friendly Democrat making the business case for competition in health care, saying that the status quo is bankrupting individuals and companies. But more important, he's a figure with ties to the donor class and the Third Way wing of the party. That he's arguing so strongly for a public option suggests that he's placed a bet that the party would benefit from going that route, and more important, would suffer from failing to do so.

Now it's basically up to the leadership to decide which way to go. Nancy Pelosi has said that her chamber cannot pass a bill without a public option. Steny Hoyer cut her off at the knees yesterday, saying "I'm for a public option but I'm also for passing a bill." Of course, in the House, those two statements are not mutually exclusive, but Hoyer clearly counts on progressives caving. $361,614 says they won't.

As for the Senate, Harry Reid has a choice to make. He can include the public option in the elements of the bill to pass through the reconciliation process, or turn the screws on ConservaDems to invoke cloture on the bill, or he can continue to allow the Baucus caucus to hijack the process. Reid has the ability to bypass the Finance Committee completely, if he chooses, and bring a bill to the floor. And he can use reconciliation for the elements about which Baucus and his cronies feel squishy.

Reid can't do it alone, of course. The President would have to get involved behind the scenes. But Democrats who are losing their base had better think of something to get this through.

Public Option On The March

Turns out that the polls still show the same robust support for a public option, as long as the question is asked consistently.

More than three out of every four Americans feel it is important to have a "choice" between a government-run health care insurance option and private coverage, according to a public opinion poll released on Thursday.

A new study by SurveyUSA puts support for a public option at a robust 77 percent, one percentage point higher than where it stood in June [...]

Earlier in the week, after pollsters for NBC dropped the word "choice" from their question on a public option, they found that only 43 percent of the public were in favor of "creating a public health care plan administered by the federal government that would compete directly with private health insurance companies."

Opponents of the president's agenda jumped on the findings as evidence that backing for the public option was dropping. Proponents responded by arguing that NBC's tinkering with the language of the question (which it had also done in its July survey) had contributed to the drop in favorability for a public plan.

SurveyUSA's poll, which was commissioned by the progressive group MoveOn.org, a proponent of the public plan, gives credence to those critiques. While arguments about what type of language best describe the public option persist --"choice" is considered a trigger word that everyone naturally supports -- it seems clear that the framing of the provision goes a long way toward determining its popularity.

"Choice" may be a trigger word, but it also accurately describes the policy - under the plan individuals seeking insurance would have a choice of a range of options in the insurance exchange, including a public plan. And people like that. A lot.

Jacob Hacker, the progenitor of the structure of the public plan, is out today with a study showing that the types of plans in the initial House bill, the ones that progressives are fighting for, are the only ones likely to work (I'd personally like to see the firewall removed and allow individuals the same choice as well, but baby steps).

Progressives have raised $264,000 and counting for the 64 lawmakers who have said they will vote for nothing unless it contains a public plan. Nancy Pelosi is saying no plan will pass the House without that element included.

"There is no way I can pass a bill in the House of Representatives without a public option," she said to a crowd in California, noting that regional health care co-ops won't get the job done. "If they want to have [co-ops] for their state, perhaps that could be included in the legislation. But it is not a substitute for a public option."

And we're up to 45 Senators willing to support it as well, with the final five directly in the sights of activists. If 50 go definitively for a public option in the Senate, given the option of reconciliation for the more contentious bits there's absolutely no reason to leave it on the table.

Heck, when you have Terry McAuliffe vowing to hold a fundraiser in Virginia for the first lawmaker to pledge to support a public option (yes you read that right, Terry McAuliffe), something has shifted.

Terry McAuliffe thinks it is time to "insist" on the public option. We couldn't agree more. Terry's agreed to host a fundraiser with Virginia and national bloggers who are insisting on a public option for the first Virginia Congressman who will take our pledge! This will be an awesome event to highlight and honor any Virginia Congressman who shows leadership on this issue [...]

Will the fundraiser be for Bobby Scott? Jim Moran? Gerry Connolly? Tom Perriello? Any of them can get a night with national and local bloggers honoring them featuring T-Mac... but first they have to do the right thing.

All the energy and excitement on the Democratic side is around this element of reform. If it's bargained away, all the energy goes away. And so does any chance at a health care bill.

Figure it out, Rahm.

VA-Gov: Crazy Squiggly Lines

I haven't been all that plugged in to either of the two gubernatorial races this year, in New Jersey or Virginia, but the primary for the latter is on Tuesday, and the poll numbers have really bounced around on the Democratic side. You basically have the 3 candidates, former state Sen. Creigh Deeds, former DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe, and House of Delegates member Brian Moran all within the margin of error and basically tied. McAuliffe surged about a month ago but has dropped like a stone, and Deeds was nowhere a month ago, started running a bunch of ads and now leads in some polls. Moran's always been right there and reportedly has the best ground game.

As Nate Silver says, the dynamic does resemble Iowa 2004:

This was the polling situation in the run-up to the 2004 Iowa Democratic Caucus, with the last data point representing the actual results. As you can see, while it was clear from the polling that Howard Dean was losing momentum and John Kerry and John Edwards were gaining it, the polling far underestimated the magnitude of the momentum, and Dean wound up losing to Kerry by 19 points.

These kind of dramatic late swings happen more often in primaries than in general elections, and more often in multi-candidate fields than in two-candidate ones. I don't want to say they're always dispositive, because I haven't studied the issue systematically enough. Of note is that at least one hot-off-the-presses poll (from SurveyUSA) still has McAuliffe ahead by 6 points. But overall, and particularly in consideration of the fact that is Terry McAluiffe, who started out with the biggest warchest and the most name recognition, it's hard to see what he's going to do to halt his slide [...]

My armchair assessment is that the probabilities here are something like Deeds 60-70%, McAuliffe 20-30%, and Moran 10-20%. Like Dean, McAuliffe wears his emotions on his sleeve, and if he were to lose, the concession speech should be something to watch.

Maybe he'll talk about running for Governor in other states and end with a YEEARGHHH!

Whoever wins, it will be difficult to beat the Republican, Attorney General Bob McDonell, simply because he has not been bruised by a primary and Virginia has had two Democrats in the Governor's mansion in a row. If the winner of this primary gathers enough momentum to win in November, then you really can color Virginia blue.

VA-Gov: Terry McAuliffe's Money To The Rescue

The NYT Mag has a profile of Terry McAuliffe, who to me represents the worst of the Clinton-era corporate Democrats, but who is re-inventing himself as a candidate for Governor of Virginia. He's simply swamping the state with money, much of it out-of-state (82%) and corporate money, and using his peripatetic style to attract votes. Apparently he's campaigning on a message of jobs - a keen political insight considering the country has lost 5.7 million of them in the last year-plus:

His campaign is tailored for these times. “Jobs is the issue — the issue, the issue, the issue,” Cranwell, the Virginia Democratic chairman, told me. And wherever McAuliffe goes, he is surrounded by campaign placards reading, “New Energy for New Jobs.” He talks everywhere, albeit often vaguely, about using economic incentives to attract out-of-state industry and to promote clean-energy technology. When Terry McAuliffe pitches Terry McAuliffe, it is not as the former head of the Democratic National Committee but as the businessman who started his first enterprise, tarring driveways for Syracuse neighbors, when he was 14. “If the biggest problem facing Virginia today were crime, Terry would not be a plausible candidate,” says Paul Begala, who first worked with McAuliffe on Richard Gephardt’s presidential campaign in 1988 [...]

As he campaigns, McAuliffe’s economic plan is “probably the most aggressive economic plan that has ever been put out in the country,” if McAuliffe does say so himself. By the time he is done as governor, he will “create more jobs than all the other 49 governors,” Virginia will supplant California as the film-production capital of the world and Old Dominion University in Norfolk will become the nation’s leading research university.

His business acumen, however, mainly involves shilling for candidates and taking money off the top of deals, not creating thousands of middle class jobs for Virginians. I mean, this is ridiculous:

In December, in response to Moran's claim to be the only candidate who had run a business and raised a family in Virginia, McAuliffe boasted of launching five businesses in Virginia.

It turned out that all five are investment partnerships, with no employees, registered to his home address in McLean.

McAuliffe may or may not have some liabilities - the $100,000 investment in the ultimately failed company Global Crossing, which netted him $18 million while employees lost their pensions - on the business and jobs front. He's always been a salesman, and that sales pitch might get him through an election. But I worry more about his policy menu:

There are a few policy differences among the Democrats, in particular Moran and McAuliffe. Moran opposes offshore oil and natural-gas drilling and the construction of a coal-burning plant in Surry, and he has pledged to fight to repeal a 2006 state constitutional amendment banning gay marriages and civil unions. McAuliffe has said he is open to coal-burning plants and offshore drilling for natural gas, though only under stringent circumstances. While McAuliffe says he also opposed the gay-marriage amendment, he has argued that it is politically unrealistic to think the state’s two Legislatures would ever vote to repeal it.

Terry McAuliffe strikes me as a huckster, not a leader. He'll compromise and not advocate. He'll listen to donors while talking to voters. And he's apparently winning the primary. I hope Brian Moran can come back.

Dump Terry McAuliffe*

Let me make myself clear: Terry McAuliffe shouldn't be the Governor of anything. He was a terrible party chair who did nothing but raise money and spend it badly. The results speak for themselves; take a look at the 2001-2005 era compared to the 2005-2009 era. While he's lived in Virginia since the early 1980s, his connection to the state appears to be about as legitimate as MY connection to the state - he's previously been considered to run for Governor of Florida. He is from the money wing of the party, with no grassroots support whatsoever, and he's running on his wallet:

McAuliffe said in an interview that he is best suited to carry the Democratic banner because he will campaign as a business leader who can bring jobs to Virginia. McAuliffe also says he would be the strongest nominee because he could help finance the entire Democratic ticket.

"I have tremendous contacts everywhere and have many friends," he said. "If I decided to run, we could raise resources to run a first-class campaign. But I would also make sure House of Delegates and local races are well-funded and well-run."

Vote McAuliffe and local Democrats get paid!

The primary for this is coming up shortly - Virginia has an off-year election in 2009, and so we're only eight months out from the June election. I just read over McAuliffe's interview on Raising Kaine and he's making the right noises - high-speed rail, universal broadband - but this is a guy who hangs out with health insurance industry lobbyists and whose rich friends would be likely to run Richmond. I see no earthly reason to support him.

(* - It's a reference to someone's username on Daily Kos)

The Fight For Health Reform

Today begins the AHIP (Association of Health Insurance Plans) conference in San Francisco, and Hillary Clinton's lead shill Terry McAuliffe will be addressing the crowd. The health insurance industry is the single largest force blocking meaningful reform in the United States, and for any Democrat to treat them as a partner and an ally - and to take money from them in speaking fees - is unacceptable. McAuliffe, of course, is part of the establishment crowd who is very cozy with corporate interests and dismissive of conflicts with the values and principles they don't seem to have. David Broder makes a mint on corporate speaking deals even though he covers a lot of the corporations that pay him. They don't see a problem with this - it's how things are done in Washington. Which is why the rest of us see no progress on the issues that affect us.

The Courage Campaign (I've done a little work for them but am not an employee) has highlighted this disconnect and is rallying in San Francisco today.

I was quite surprised when I learned that Terry McAuliffe was going to appear at a major convention of health insurance corporations in San Francisco on June 19.

After all, how could the former Chair of the Democratic National Committee show up as a guest of health insurance executives -- much less accept any money for his appearance at the AHIP (America's Health Insurance Plans) convention? This appearance seems inappropriate at best, especially after Barack Obama and Howard Dean courageously directed the Democratic National Committee last week to reject contributions from lobbyists, including the health insurance industry.

And now it's personal. My sister, who suffers from severe and rapidly deteriorating hearing loss, just told me that she has been denied useful health care coverage. Again. Why? Because her hearing problems have been diagnosed as a "pre-existing condition," precluding her from receiving cochlear implants so she can hear again.

The last I checked, being able to hear is not "optional" medical care. Unfortunately, my sister is one of over 100 million Americans who either have no health insurance coverage or are underinsured. My entire family worries about her, but the system is designed by these health insurance executives to keep her out -- not to help her.

Health care is a human right. The middlemen have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to deny that. Politicians and insiders like Terry McAuliffe get paid off by these middlemen to legitimize it.

The coalition is building to end this perversion. In California we're going to end rescission and ban junk insurance. It's a game of inches, but we're putting an end to the stranglehold groups like AHIP have over public policy.