Professional Jealousy

Because Glenn Beck had the foresight to get out in front of an anti-government movement that does not fall neatly along left-right lines, movement conservatives are lashing out at him:

Beck added that McCain would be worse than Obama:

"I think John McCain would have been worse — [laughs] How about this? I think John McCain would have been worse for the country than Barack Obama. How’s that?"

Beck’s opinion elicited a fierce and angry response from right-wing radio host Mark Levin yesterday. “To say [McCain] would be worse is mindless, mindless, incoherent as a matter of fact,” Levin said on his radio show. He then suggested Beck is playing politics: “I don’t know who people are playing to. I don’t know why they’re playing to certain people.”

Levin never mentions Beck by name (he refers to Beck as “the 5 pm’er” because Beck’s show airs at 5 pm on Fox News). He concluded with this final dig at Beck:

"I think there’s enormous confusion and positioning and pandering. It may be entertaining, but from my perspective, it’s not. It’s pathetic."

Levin's right, to an extent. Beck has no coherent worldview, and his de facto leadership of the Ron Paul movement - which he came to very suddenly after expressing contempt for it - is nothing short of opportunistic. And it's killing his competition - Joe Scarborough, Peter Wehner, The American Spectator, even Rush Limbaugh. They're jealous of his attention, his opinion leadership. The fact that the knives came out after the TIME cover story is not coincidental.

But there's something a little more interesting at work. While Beck is a mess from an intellectual standpoint, and his bashing of Republicans is little more than cover, at least a part of the movement he's positioned himself at the front of doesn't have a worldview that falls into any ideological box. Sure, corporate forces aligned with the movement GOP are trying to co-opt it and steer it to business-friendly ends, and the protest audience is as variegated as any would be on the left. But there's an element in there that is not easily defined:

In one important sense, the "tea party" movement is similar to the Obama campaign for "change": it stays sufficiently vague and unspecific to enable everyone to read into what they want, so that people with fundamentally irreconcilable views believe they're part of the same movement.

But all that said, there are some identifiable -- and plainly valid -- underlying causes to these protests that are neither Republican nor Democratic, or even left or right. That's when conventional political language ceases to be useful.

Is opposition to the Wall Street bailout (supported by both parties' establishments) left or right? How about the view that Washington is inherently corrupt and beholden to the richest corporate interests and banks which, through lobbyist influence and vast financial contributions, own and control our political system? Is hostility towards Beltway elites liberal or conservative? Is opposition to the Surveillance State and endless expansions of federal police powers a view of liberals (who vehemently opposed such measures during the Bush era but now sometimes support or at least tolerate them) or conservatives (some of whom -- the Ron Paul faction -- objected just as vigorously, and naturally oppose such things regardless of who is in power as transgressions of the proper limits of government)? Liberals during the Bush era continuously complained about the doubling of the national debt, a central concern of many of these "tea party" protesters. Is the belief that Washington politicians are destroying the economic security of the middle class, while the rich grow richer, a liberal or conservative view? Opposition to endless wars and bankruptcy-inducing imperial policy generally finds as much expression among certain quarters on the Right as it does on the Left.

I don't think, in the end, that it's supposed to make sense. Politics has a tribal component and is waged much like sports fans wage their battles against one another. There will always be a sizable audience for a polemicist, whether viewed as partisan or non-partisan, especially when his or her attacks always seem to fall on the Democratic occupant of the White House. But I think Beck's unpredictability, as well as his reaches into the depths of wingnuttery - wait until the Christian conservatives figure out Beck chose to be a Mormon - frighten the establishment in the GOP. They tolerate him when he's whipping up a frenzy against Obama, but he could just as easily call to break up the banks - whatever he thinks will make him a ratings point - and suddenly the clean ideological lines break down.

Now, if there was a coherent Democratic Party which would argue for the virtues of government and its role as a protector of individual liberty, equality of opportunity and the common good, the ideologies of the parties would be a little cleaner, and the DC establishment wouldn't be such an inviting target. In a way, Democrats have brought this on themselves. They invented a Glenn Beck by failing to make the case for government themselves. And as a result, distrust of government is rising.

Um, The Stimulus Is Working

Conservatives very smartly conflated the bailout and the stimulus in people's minds, and traded off public anger with one to demonize the other. They're still doing it, too, with Eric Cantor today suggesting to cancel the rest of the stimulus and "pay off the debt." Most of the debt comes from Bush-era policies, so this is nonsense. It's also wrong to state that the stimulus should be cancelled because it's not working. In fact, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal tells us the opposite today:

The U.S. economy is beginning to show signs of improvement, with many economists asserting the worst is past and data pointing to stronger-than-expected growth. On Tuesday, data showed manufacturing grew in August for the first time in more than a year. "There's a method to the madness. We're getting out of this," said Brian Bethune, chief U.S. financial economist at IHS Global Insight.

Much of the stimulus spending is just beginning to trickle through the economy, with spending expected to peak sometime later this year or in early 2010. The government has funneled about $60 billion of the $288 billion in promised tax cuts to U.S. households, while about $84 billion of the $499 billion in spending has been paid. About $200 billion has been promised to certain projects, such as infrastructure and energy projects.

Economists say the money out the door -- combined with the expectation of additional funds flowing soon -- is fueling growth above where it would have been without any government action.

Many forecasters say stimulus spending is adding two to three percentage points to economic growth in the second and third quarters, when measured at an annual rate. The impact in the second quarter, calculated by analyzing how the extra funds flowing into the economy boost consumption, investment and spending, helped slow the rate of decline and will lay the groundwork for positive growth in the third quarter -- something that seemed almost implausible just a few months ago. Some economists say the 1% contraction in the second quarter would have been far worse, possibly as much as 3.2%, if not for the stimulus.

The recovery is still jobless thus far, which means it's not a real recovery yet. And the White House made two mistakes - one, they soft-pedaled the recession, claiming that unemployment would not go above 9% or so, leaving them susceptible to the charge that the stimulus isn't working; and two, they put too much of the stimulus into tax cuts instead of the public investment that would have made it even more successful, particularly on the jobs front.

But without the public investment the stimulus has thus far provided and will continue to provide, we'd be mired in more negative growth and a near-depression. That's the reality.

The President has actually tried to talk up the benefits of the stimulus, but not in a forceful way. As a result, the conservative conflation has led to a souring on government, directly attributable to a lack of leadership and messaging.

Paul Krugman argued recently that Obama hadn't effectively used the bully pulpit to slay "government-is-bad fundamentalism." This is only one poll, but it's fair to ask whether these numbers bear that out.

Obama's poll slide has prompted some to ask whether his presidency might fall short of the transformative moment many expected. I think it's too early to reach a conclusion on this. If Obama pulls out a health care victory, everything will shift again.

But for a time it seemed like shattering the government-is-bad paradigm was distinctly within Obama's reach. General confidence in the government's ability to secure the public's well being seems like pretty good number to keep an eye on when gaming out the potential for transformation of this moment, and of this presidency.

This has mostly resonated in the health care debate, with insurance companies inexplicably getting somewhat higher marks now than government as a health care provider, despite the fact that the groups with the highest satisfaction with their health care are seniors (government-provided single-payer system), and veterans (government-run NHS-style system).

Politics is about storytelling. Obama during his campaign actually started to tell a pretty decent story about government as a guarantor of basic rights, which can equalize opportunity and give everyone a shot. He told a story of community, where we take care of each other and use government as a means to do so.

That's basically gone. And as a result, the public investment program that averted a depression is considered a failure.

Very dangerous.

The Meaning Of Compromise

I think everyone expected Republicans to pre-emptively accuse Democrats of politicization in the wake of Ted Kennedy's death. (By the way, please politicize my death.) But that's just the far edge of the Overton window, the bluff so Democrats won't try to take comfort and inspiration to pass the cause of Kennedy's life. The far more insidious tactic, proffered by the right in a coalition with the bipartisan fetishists in the media, is to revise Kennedy's legacy as that of the ultimate centrist, in a fashion, the bipartisan dealmaker, the Great Compromiser. They've done a full-court press on this:

Senator Judd Gregg is already hinting at the idea. In an interview with the Boston Globe, Gregg hailed the bipartisan support for legislation he and Kennedy created together, adding that Kennedy knew how to “move the ball down the road with conservatives like myself.”

Meanwhile, Karl Rove hailed Kennedy on Fox this morning for being “willing to compromise.”

Other GOPers are floating the idea in The New York Times anonymously, in a discussion of how to navigate the politics of Kennedy’s death:

Republicans also noted that Mr. Kennedy, though an ideological liberal, was a legislative pragmatist who worked with Republicans to strike compromises on difficult subjects like health care, education and immigration. They said they saw little such reaching across the aisle in his absence.

Any member of the United States Senate with a long record will have many moments of compromise, whether between the parties or intra-party. But the idea that Kennedy should be remembered for "making the right concessions," solely in the context of bipartisanship, is a media projection helped along by a right wing who wants to blame Kennedy's absence for political polarization and the eventual death of a health care bill. We see this today with Steven Pearlstein's eleventy-billionth column arguing for the wise, high Broderist, split-the-baby approach:

And while there will be plenty of liberal Democrats who will be fuming about all the compromises forced upon them, somewhere from above will come a familiar voice with that distinctly Boston accent, whispering, "The dream will never die. Take the deal."

Notwithstanding the fact that Kennedy's staff wrote the HELP Committee version of the bill, and Kennedy himself labored over it, and that includes a public option, misses the point of Kennedy's legislative style, which continued to focus on broadening his goals and moving ever forward even when the odds weren't on his side. As Jonathan Cohn writes:

But this notion that Kennedy's liberal reputation somehow belied his pragmatism--a notion already gaining traction in the media, which has turned non-partisan accommodation into a fetish-- misses the point. Kennedy compromised on means, not ends. He would negotiate because it helped achieve his broader goals--signing on to NCLB, whatever its cookie-cutter standards, because it would send money to schools in poor, underfunded districts; embracing the Medicare drug benefit because, however poorly designed, it'd save senior citizens from having to choose between medicine and food.

It was precisely because Kennedy's devotion to his notion of social justice was so clear and dependable that he could make such deals stick. Liberals trusted him because we knew he wouldn't sell out the broader cause. If it was good enough for Kennedy, we figured, it was good enough for us. We knew he didn't see pragmatism as an alternative to ideology. It was just a necessary method of fulfilling it [...]

In the hours since Kennedy's passing, his speech to the 1980 Democratic convention--his most memorable oration, along with the RFK eulogy--has gotten a lot of play. Typically the networks show the final quote, in which he promises to continue his crusade even as he gives up his quest for the presidency. But the more important passage is where he invokes Franklin Roosevelt as an unabashed defender of the common man against the forces--and, yes, the people--who would disregard his well-being. Like FDR, Kennedy was not afraid to talk about values, to talk about right and wrong. Now that Kennedy is gone, who will pick up that torch?

Blue Dogs and ConservaDems have high praise for compromise these days, but their version of it basically preserves corporate goals and sells out their constituents in the exchange. Kennedy's version was precisely the opposite. His concern was "the least among us," the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the sick, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the less fortunate. He tried to get something for them, whenever possible. Pundits can call that "bipartisanship" but they ought to understand what that means.

The deviousness of the conservative project, to lament Kennedy's passing because now wild-eyed ideologues (like Max Baucus?) will go crazy, is clear. The true scoundrels, however, are those in the press trying to position the life of the man who did as much to advance the causes of the voiceless as anyone in the history of the Senate as someone who preferred half a loaf. Democrats should take a better lesson.

No, mere words cannot honor Ted Kennedy's memory. To pretend otherwise would be to cheapen his legacy, to lie about who Ted Kennedy really was. He was, for the vast majority of his life, a fiercely ideological public servant. It was his commitment to that New Deal social compact which defined him, which made him relevant to you and me. And his actions, not his words, were what marked him as the greatest Senator of his era. To attempt to honor Ted Kennedy without striving to further his life's work is simply impossible.

When Paul Wellstone died they told us that we couldn't celebrate him him as a political actor, that to do so would be crass and opportunistic. But the entire reason we knew Paul Wellstone, the reason we were crushed by his passing, was his political activism. It would have been a lie not to celebrate that legacy. It would have been crass to act as if Paul Wellstone hadn't been first and foremost a progressive hero, to feign nonchalance over political concerns as we eulogized the man, and in so doing stripping him of his essence. Likewise, it would be a lie today to pretend that the reason we loved Ted Kennedy had nothing to do with his leadership for working people. And it would be crass to attempt to celebrate him with mere words, rather than the action he demanded from us in life. How can we not "politicize" his legacy? The man was who he was because of his wholehearted commitment to his politics. The real obscenity -- the real opportunism -- would be for his political opponents to now try and depoliticize a quintessentially political life.

...George Steph agrees: Kennedy would have ditched the public option. Amazing how Kennedy's beliefs, after his death, line up perfectly with the beliefs of the blow-dried commentariat, n'est-ce pas? Lawrence O'Donnell, by the way, has a different perspective:

"Senator Kennedy...is not an easy compromiser on health care reform. In 1994, I was in the room when he told the president that he believed the strategy should be a Democrats-only strategy and that we should not be trying to reach out and get Republican votes."

Yes, We're Going To Politicize Ted Kennedy's Death.

I'm hearing a lot of whining on the right about the wall-to-wall coverage of Ted Kennedy's death and his politics, and how it's being "politicized". They're particularly concerned that Democrats might use Kennedy's death to push their health care reform package forward.

On the first point, those of us who sat through weeklong tributes to Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford - heck, even Jerry Falwell! - are pretty amused at this complaint. If nothing else, Ted Kennedy spent 46 years in the world's most deliberative body and has his name on over 300 pieces of major legislation. Celebrity politician deaths are practically the only time we hear anything substantive about political ideology and political positions, and there are plenty of living Republicans who will go gently into that good night someday, so it seems to me this will even out at some point. A fairly important American died. We'll get back to some guy with a sign at a town hall meeting tomorrow.

On the second point, it's similarly amusing that anyone in either party would whine and complain about events becoming "politicized." Another word for it is "the normal rhetorical connections human beings make to advance their policies." It's been done by approximately every human being in all of history. And it actually should be that way. Aimai puts this about as well as it can be put:

It's our own little dance of death. Anyone remember the fake outcry at the Wellstone Memorial's political tone? If you missed it, or can't remember, you can read all about it here. Its one of the things that really politicized Franken, and in the linked essay he draws the connection between the way the right wing treated the outpouring of grief and political activism around Wellstone's death to the way they treated Coretta Scott King's funeral. In both cases the left was lectured in how we are to understand the lives of our own members and we were ordered not to celebrate those lives, not to take up the banner of their causes, but to mourn quietly, secretly, almost shamefacedly. But funerals and memorials aren't about something quiet, private, shameful. Death and Politics are both important parts of life. Funerals and memorials are places where we gather to be together and to pursue communal goals. We mourn, but we celebrate. We gather together to remember, and to plan to leap forward.

In America, as around the world there is a natural logic to the political and social use of the funeral. The end of one life is not the end of that person's struggle. Sometimes its the key inflection point, the moment that the solitary struggle becomes public, or the moment that the lone voice, though stilled, is taken up. This is as true for the famous (see e.g. MLK, Malcolm X, JFK, BK, Ninoy Aquino, etc..etc...etc...) as it can be for the lowly member of the crowd--(Neda Soltan).

As inevitable as the use of the funeral, or the memorial, by partisans is the attempt to repress the funeral or the memorial by the forces of reaction. Wherever funerals are an important social setting--a safe place for people to turn out, grieve, communicate, and organize there will be attempts from above or below to prevent any mobilization around the body, or the cause. In Iran, to give just one example, the state decides who is a "martyr" and whose death will be publicly solemnized, and it has for years interfered with families trying to publicize or socialize the deaths of their loved ones if those deaths looked like they would cause trouble for the government. The recent death of Neda was one such occasion. In the US, of course, we have struggled for years over who owns or appropriates public deaths like those of the 9/11 victims, the Katrina dead, and our soldiers.

Funny, I seem to remember plenty of Republicans waving the bloody shirt and using the death of Neda to serve their political ends. And I remember walking back from a night of the DNC in Denver - site of Ted Kennedy's last major speech - to anti-abortion conservatives holding up pictures of dead fetuses trying to compel me to change my mind on a women's right to choose. Death has been used as a weapon by conservatives for many, many years. "Death panels," anyone?

It is perfectly normal in any society for heroes to be lauded in death and for people who admired them to honor their memory by endeavoring to secure their goals. If I die, I'd want others to politicize it by taking up the causes I favor and working to pass them. Most people would call that tribute and not an insult.

So, in the event of my passing, I want it to be clear these are my wishes:

1) Please honor me by continuing to fight for the liberal causes I held dear.
2) Explicitly state in any obituaries, memorial services, etc. that what I would have wanted was to keep the fight going
3) Impassioned speeches about the fight ahead for progressivism are especially welcome
4) Indeed, the only way to honor my memory is to double down and fight for a better world
5) Conservatives who don’t like this should shut the fuck up.

Similarly, I don't think conservatives have to necessarily stop their advocacy just because of the death of a popular opponent. It's a nice sentiment of respect, but I don't think anyone really considers it sincere. Liberals should draw inspiration from their heroes just as conservatives draw inspiration from theirs. And if each side is comfortable in their ideas, there should be no reason to censor them in the face of an untimely loss from their adversaries. We don't need loss to remind us of our goals, but it tends to put things in perspective and serve as a focal point for them. I'm assuming that leaders would want it that way.

What set Ted Kennedy apart was not his liberal scorecard or how he lined up on this issue or that issue - there are plenty of liberals who have come and gone through the Senate - but how he set his ideology in specific moral terms. Few others were willing to advocate on moral grounds for, say, the right to a living wage, or quality health care for all, or civil rights regardless of race or creed, color or class, or physical disability. He spoke not to the head but to the heart. And when someone with that worldview dies, it's perfectly natural to react in the same moral terms - to honor the legacy through carrying out his many causes, by living up to his ideal. It's how we repay the debt of a man who put himself on the line for the less fortunate.

And we shouldn't apologize for it.

Obama And The Base

Everybody has gotten to this before me, but I did want to say a few words about Obama and the progressive base. You can see in recent polling that the slide in the President's numbers is coming not from the right, who have already lined up against him, but from the left. Liberals and Democrats are not seeing the change they voted for, and are responding by rejecting this President. Liberals tolerated a lot of the slow-walks and aping of Bush policies in the areas of civil liberties, gay rights, the banks, and other realms, but the wobbling over the public option was the last straw, as they say. Digby explains it well.

There have been a series of issues, one on top of the other and each one more distressing, in which the fundamental principles on which Obama ran have been either betrayed or compromised. It's been too much, too many, in too short a time, from civil liberties to secrecy to cozying up with industry behind closed doors. These aren't minor issues --- they go directly to values and principles.

He's losing trust among the base because he appears to believe that those constituents have no serious claim on his agenda. Even the appointment of Sotomayor did not reflect a liberal commitment beyond the breaking of ethnic barriers, which is wonderful, but cannot be seen as a substitute for progressive principle. Bargaining away the one substantial progressive demand in health care reform is seen as simple bad faith.

I'm not one to trust politicians, but I recognize that most people do, even ardent partisans. They are busy, they don't want to have to follow every detail of the political sturm and drang or try to read between the lines of the NY Times every day to try to figure out what's going on. They more or less inform themselves before an election about what their representatives say they believe in, they assess their sincerity and commitment to certain broad principles and values, and then they leave the governing in their hands, trusting them to do what they said they would do to the best of their ability. Obama promised a lot. A whole lot. And he garnered the trust of many millions of liberal minded folks. When that kind of trust is betrayed, it's very hard to get it back.

I certainly hope they are not fighting the last war. Bill Clinton did not suffer a backlash in his base because he was operating in an environment of conservative dominance and a very weak left flank. The base was desperate and demoralized. But it's not 1996 anymore and that strategy just won't work this time. The conservatives are a clownish group of know-nothings whose approval ratings are in the single digits. They should not, in a democratic society, have the power to shape strategy to the extent they are and the president should not be empowering them. Big business and finance is even more discredited and has no trust among the poeple whatsoever. Openly catering to them in this environment is nothing short of defiant (and politically suicidal.)

Glenn Greenwald and Joan Walsh make largely the same points. I want to say a few things about it.

• There is no question that the Obama Administration isn't getting a lot of credit among the public at large from essentially preventing a Great Depression. If the environment was such that the crises happened a year earlier, and Bush's bumbling put us firmly into Depression, Obama would probably have received a lot more credit for digging us out that preventing things from getting to that point. You can argue with his team's methods for preventing such a crisis, namely shoveling all kinds of money to the banks. But EJ Dionne is right - this prevention has led conservatives to go right back to talking up deficits and spending and big government, as if big government didn't just prevent the worst economic calamity in post-war history.

• That said, Obama isn't blameless for the problems with the base. Indeed he has cozied up to industry in unseemly ways - playing golf with the head of UBS, a company his Justice Department is trying to investigate for harboring illegal tax shelters, is just a metaphor. Bungling multiple gay rights issues and the open hostility of the DOMA brief was just stupid.Joe the Nerd was correct when he told the President on Michael Smerconish's radio show that his "knees were buckling" a bit by trying to compromise with people who have no interest in such a compromise. And the civil liberties outrages are truly contemptible, amounting mainly but not totally to covering up the sins of the past, and in turn abetting them.

• The actual tipping point for all of this was not necessarily the weak-kneed language on the public option, but something that happened a little before, when it came out that the backroom deals Obama cut with industry would save them plenty in the health care reform and shield their profits. Bob Herbert wrote about this last week, but it's been rumbling under the surface for a while. In fact, it was my question to the President at that blogger conference call a few weeks back:

I asked the President about this tension between these buyoffs to stakeholders and his goal to "bend the cost curve" and make health care cheaper and more effective in this country, and here's a paraphrased version of his answer.

"I cannot expect the hospital association, for example, to sign up for something they don't think is right for hospitals and exepct them to back reform. So I understand what they're doing to protect their interests. I think we can negotiate and find a good way to go about this. In theory we could cram down additional savings, but to have the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, the drugmakers, the insurance companies, all of them on our team, that does help us move the process forward. Theoretically, there should be enormous savings inside the system. We all know that we pay more for health care than we should, and we shouldn't need additional revenue. But that's harder to do in practice, because all these powerful interests block the efforts. What I think is that we can get a framework where reform begins, one with an insurance exchange, and a robust public option, concrete reductions in cost, prevention, health IT, comparative effectiveness research, and it will be possible to achieve greater savings with a more efficient system down the road. And we can revisit the policy 10 years from now and possibly see even more savings than what was scored and anticipated."

He's basically admitting that he allowed industry to cut favorable deals to keep them on the side of reform. This is still reverberating. Today's New York Times has hospital associations crowing about the benefit to their members over the 10-year window in the form of reimbursement payments for the newly insured. Drug companies are seeing a freer hand to deny access to affordable drugs abroad so they'll keep their end of the bargain on health reform. When people started to put two and two together, and realize that the health reform bill looked more like a giveaway to the stakeholders, they got extremely upset. I don't begrudge hospitals and drugmakers the ability to make money if they are healing more people, but there's a real disconnect when the groups who profited from the broken system stand to profit more off of something called reform. THAT was the moment things went off the rails.

• Nevertheless, I think that Obama has a chance to turn this around. It's not just about progressive outreach, however; it's about the actions he will take, or be forced to take. The President late last week started to use forceful, moral language about the need for health care reform, and that's great too.

It has never been easy, moving this nation forward. There are always those who oppose it, and those who use fear to block change. But what has always distinguished America is that when all the arguments have been heard, and all the concerns have been voiced, and the time comes to do what must be done, we rise above our differences, grasp each others’ hands, and march forward as one nation and one people, some of us Democrats, some of us Republicans, all of us Americans.

This is our chance to march forward. I cannot promise you that the reforms we seek will be perfect or make a difference overnight. But I can promise you this: if we pass health insurance reform, we will look back many years from now and say, this was the moment we summoned what’s best in each of us to make life better for all of us. This was the moment when we built a health care system worthy of the nation and the people we love. This was the moment we earned our place alongside the greatest generations. And that is what our generation of Americans is called to do right now.

But actions will now drive the outcomes, because liberals have heard enough talk throughout the campaign and the first seen months of the first term. Whether the White House likes it or not, the public option has become central to most progressive conceptions of the health care debate. Calling it a source of confusion or a sliver or reform simply won't work. And liberals who are needed at the end of this fight will not work for a policy in which they do not believe. The President put himself down this rabbit hole, and only he can bail himself out. Because progressives are going their own way.

For many Obama supporters who supported President Obama's candidacy because they believed he would rally the public to pass a reform agenda, the White House focus on legislative chess in the healthcare debate has resulting in grumbling about whether or not President Obama is the President they voted for. Fairly or unfairly, Obama now faces a rising tide of doubt in his administration from the very supporters who have backed him most steadfastly since the election.

Many of these supporters are now using internet tools and small donations to signal that their support of healthcare reform anchored in a robust public option would be stronger than their support for an Obama administration willing to negotiate away or weaken a public option.

Thus, weeks before any final bill has actually been written, the healthcare debate has already brought about the most significant change in the American political landscape since Obama won the Iowa caucus to become the leading contender for the Democratic nomination.

The idealists who elected the President are siding with their ideals rather than their candidate.

Obama can choose to live up to those ideals, and turn the tide at this stage of his Presidency, or he can play the same games he's been playing, and lose the base - perhaps permanently.

...Arianna has some very good thoughts on this.

Freedom Riders

Turns out that the teabaggers at one town hall meeting in Texas weren't from the area:

Last night, Rep. Gene Green (D-TX) hosted a rowdy town hall meeting to discuss health care reform. Fox’s local Houston affiliate reporter, Duarte Geraldino, reported that he talked to the participants and found that “some attendees admit they don’t live in the district.” How did they get there? Geraldino noted “an internet campaign” by far right activists urging their allies to attend and heckle Democratic Representatives. Geraldino then aired a clip showing one participant acting disrespectfully towards Rep. Green. “Pay close attention to the man behind the congressman,” Geraldino says in this clip, “he seems to have forgotten the part about respect.” Watch it:

Here's my favorite part:

During the town hall, one conservative activist turns to his fellow attendees and asks them to raise their hands if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Almost all the hands shot up. Rep Green quickly turned the question on the audience and asked, “How many of you have Medicare?” Nearly half the attendees raised their hands, failing to note the irony.

Decades of conservative message dominance has convinced a healthy portion of the public that a government-run program isn't run by the government. Failure to counteract that message 30 years ago is deeply affecting this debate today. Paul Waldman writes:

After decades of being told that the federal government is a sinister, rapacious beast with nothing but evil intents, the idea that a complex bill might contain a Soylent Green provision isn't too far a stretch. Nonetheless, it remains entirely possible that before long, health reform will no longer be a debate but will become an actual policy, one that will succeed or fail on its own merits. As both sides have understood (the Republicans more so than the Democrats, however), this battle is so critical because the stakes go to the heart of each party's approach to the role of government.

Both parties hope that the successful implementation of their favored policies will lead to a broader acceptance of their ideology. Republicans want to privatize government services not only as an end in itself but to show people that the private sector works better than government. In the same way, Democrats advocate for effective government services not only to solve an immediate problem but to demonstrate that government can in fact do some things very well.

Unfortunately, the successful implementation of a government program doesn't necessarily convince people that government can successfully implement programs. Antipathy toward government even among many who receive both Medicare and Social Security -- two of the most successful government programs in history -- is remarkably strong. In fact, by some measures, the elderly have the most skeptical views of government. For instance, in the latest version of the Pew values survey, 64 percent of those over 65 -- who are either on Medicare and Social Security or know that they will be soon -- said that "when something is run by the government, it is usually inefficient and wasteful" (see page 34 here). That compares to only 43 percent of those age 18 to 29.

Part of that is just the tribal identity with conservatism (which is stronger in those over 65, based on most surveys) trumping the shared knowledge of government programs like Medicare and Social Security. Because these same people generally really like those programs; they've just convinced themselves, in a supreme case of cognitive dissonance, that government doesn't work well (except for whatever it is they're getting). And mainly, that's because they've heard this repeated from the conservative noise machine for thirty years, virtually unchallenged and sometimes enthusiastically endorsed by Democrats.

Or perhaps there's another answer. The polls are showing that people under 50 support health care reform at much higher levels than people over 50. It's no accident that the strongest smears against the plan have to do with killing grandma or taking things away from Medicare. They like what they have and are wary of extending it to the rest of the population, mainly because of how it might impact them.

But this is a funny type of skepticism. Seniors don't oppose government-run health insurance. They like it too much. Americans over 65 live in a welfare state that most Europeans could only dream about. They have single-payer health care and government-run pensions. Most of their political activity is either an effort to expand those programs or a defense against anything that could in any way harm them. That includes not only direct changes, like cuts to Medicare, but indirect changes, like health-care reform that would focus new resources on the uninsured.

This is a reversal of the normal politics of opposition. Generally speaking, people who oppose health-care reform are worried we're going to end up with something like what Canada has. Not seniors. They have something like what Canada has (Canada, in fact, also calls their health insurance program "Medicare"). And they like it. They report higher rates of satisfaction with their health care than do people in employer-sponsored insurance. They're worried, rather, that they might end up with something like what the rest of America has. And having spent time in both Medicare and private health insurance, they don't want that. They don't want that at all.

The fight to get successful government recognized is an ideological fight. To those who already have evidence of successful government, the fight is somewhat different. They still echo the conservative line of "government is teh suck," but they don't want their government programs tampered with. How do you thread that needle?

The Real Problem With Obama's Poll Numbers

My big takeaway today is supposed to be that Barack Obama is fading in selling his health care plan, as eroding poll numbers, both on health care and his job approval rating, threaten legislation in the coming year. As references to "Obamacare" rise, some blame the President for a poor sales job with health care legislation. I fault the President, but for different reasons.

Right now Obama is simply a captive to Congressional process. That process is messy, it's easy to view it as negative, and people are in general reacting to the ups and downs that wound the possibility of passing a bill. The President has no bill to go out and hawk because the Congress is deep into negotiations, so he's selling nothing, a difficult task for anyone. You could say that Obama should have just stepped in and laid down the law, but not only has that proven to fail in the 1993-94 Clinton health care plan, but I don't necessarily want executive dictates to trump Congressional process. I think there's a lot of unnecessary bottlenecks in Congressional process, like the undemocratic filibuster and the seniority system for Committee chairs (particularly in the Senate) and the anti-majoritarian nature of the Senate itself. But in general, we don't elect emperors, and checks and balances are by and large healthy, and I'm OK with Congress performing their task of coming up with legislation and the President performing his task of executing it. Obviously he has some input, but I don't want an executive dominating the process. The paradox of this is that, since people generally believe that a President can just walk in and magically implement his policies, his personal approval is getting dragged down by the slog of health care bills in Congress.

The other wall that Obama is running into has been described for years as the Two Santa Claus theory. For 30 years and more, the American people have been sold on the idea that they can have unlimited services and endlessly low taxes. Somehow the lower taxes generate enough revenue to cover all the services they desire. This was part of a Republican ideological project begun by Reagan aides to basically force Democrats into wearing the black hats, and it has turned into doctrine from then on.

By 1974, Jude Wanniski had had enough. The Democrats got to play Santa Claus when they passed out Social Security and Unemployment checks – both programs of the New Deal – as well as when their "big government" projects like roads, bridges, and highways were built giving a healthy union paycheck to construction workers. They kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for things, which didn't seem to have much effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up, in fact), and that made them seem like a party of Robin Hoods, taking from the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class. Americans loved it. And every time Republicans railed against these programs, they lost elections [...]

Wanniski decided to turn the classical world of economics – which had operated on this simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years – on its head. In 1974 he invented a new phrase – "supply side economics" – and suggested that the reason economies grew wasn't because people had money and wanted to buy things with it but, instead, because things were available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money. The more things there were, the faster the economy would grow.

At the same time, Arthur Laffer was taking that equation a step further. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would go up!

Neither concept made any sense – and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies – but together they offered the Republican Party a way out of the wilderness [...]

Democrats, (Wanniski) said, had been able to be "Santa Clauses" by giving people things from the largesse of the federal government. Republicans could do that, too – spending could actually increase. Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting people's taxes! For working people it would only be a small token – a few hundred dollars a year on average – but would be heavily marketed. And for the rich it would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. The rich, in turn, would use that money to import or build more stuff to market, thus increasing supply and stimulating the economy. And that growth in the economy would mean that the people still paying taxes would pay more because they were earning more.

There was no way, Wanniski said, that the Democrats could ever win again. They'd have to be anti-Santas by raising taxes, or anti-Santas by cutting spending. Either one would lose them elections.

The most important numbers in these collections of polls this week are this. People generally still want health care reform and they believe the system is broken. But they also believe that Congress should cut the deficit without raising taxes or cutting spending. With the caveat that we're talking about aggregate data and cannot make specific conclusions about individual beliefs on the deficit, taxes, and spending, this is not the result of one poll but pretty much the standard poll result over many decades, particularly when Democrats are in power and the deficit-industrial complex ramps up their rhetoric. Simply put, Republican fantasy projections have given the country an out to refuse to accept the normal choices that must be made to deal with reality.

If you don't have the time or inclination to obsessively pay attention to issues, I don't see why you wouldn't decide that we should just pay down the deficit but get good services like comprehensive health care reform but do it without raising taxes. It's very untroubling and simple, and if I'm working two jobs or busy with other things in my life it sure sounds like a good deal to me.

I agree that the President needs to do better in selling his plans to the public. A speech in prime-time, not a press conference but an actual speech, complete with Ross Perot graphs if necessary, as Nate Silver advocates, sounds like a good idea. But his problem is more about American political ideology than the ins and outs of this bill. America elected a Democrat because they didn't like George Bush. But they didn't elect a liberal ideology, even if they may agree with it on many points, because a liberal ideology wasn't on offer. Nobody in the Democratic Party has pushed back against the Two Santa Claus theory, or offered up a competing theory of their own, in the thirty-plus years since it was invented. Obama spent the first few months, when he had a honeymoon and his approval ratings were high, assuring everyone that 95% of Americans will see a tax cut, that he was pragmatic and will only go with "what works," and so on. And so when you get to an issue like health care, which does have moral overtones, which does speak to the fundamental rights of a society to ensure care for their sick and bleeding, there's no ideological foundation to fall back upon, no belief that America is worth paying for and those who use the commons to a disproportionate degree need to give a little bit to maintain the societal fabric. So we have an overhaul of health reform to expand coverage to everyone who needs it couched in the terms of cost curves and long term budget projections and constrained by the obsessive desire of deficit neutrality. This does not inspire activists and partisans to action. It does not force any thinking from those susceptible to attacks on "government-run health care" from the other side. And it does not break the underlying principles of the Two Santa Claus Theory. Nobody has fought the dominant wisdom, inside the Beltway and even in the country, and stated plainly that conservatives have lied to the country about economic issues for 30-plus years. The epic collapse of the economy under the Bush Administration provided an opportunity that nobody took.

Unless and until we start challenging conservative ideology and not conservative candidates, we will always have trouble making major changes because the public has swallowed a notion of government that makes no logical or coherent sense.

Froomkin Torched

I actually don't read a ton of punditry, which may sound odd to some people. I prefer primary sources, and I find the High Broderism so prevalent in the chattering class to be completely unworthy of the slog. If a pundit says something particularly egregious I'll probably find it from elsewhere. But to me, Dan Froomkin was quite a good pundit, always intellectually honest and worth reading. And so the Washington Post fired him today, according to Michael Calderon. Several things are notable about this. Glennzilla notes that Froomkin's columns are widely read and populat online. Second, far from being a house organ for the President as long as he had a D next to his name, of late Froomkin has shown himself completely willing to criticize the President from the left:

The Politico says the move is "sure to ignite the left-wing blogosphere," but Froomkin's departure, if true, should disappoint anyone concerned with insightful political analysis. Indeed, far-right complaints notwithstanding, Froomkin has spent months scrutinizing the Obama White House, cutting the Democratic president no slack at all. Just over the past couple of days, Froomkin offered critical takes on the president's proposed regulations of the financial industry, follow-through on gay rights, and foot-dragging on Bush-era torture revelations.

Froomkin was one of the media's most important critics of the Bush White House, and conservative bashing notwithstanding, was poised to be just as valuable holding the Obama White House accountable for its decisions.

The Post, a sea of arch-conservatives (Will, Krauthammer) and status-quo Broderists (Hiatt, Cohen, Broder) had an oasis with Froomkin, who did the work media should do - questioning power vigorously regardless of ideology. Now they fired him. Sad.

...Froomkin's statement:

I’m terribly disappointed. I was told that it had been determined that my White House Watch blog wasn’t "working" anymore. But from what I could tell, it was still working very well. I also thought White House Watch was a great fit with The Washington Post brand, and what its readers reasonably expect from the Post online.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I think that the future success of our business depends on journalists enthusiastically pursuing accountability and calling it like they see it. That’s what I tried to do every day. Now I guess I'll have to try to do it someplace else.

Not Your Father's Supreme Court

Without the Internet, this level of detail almost certainly wouldn't exist, but we can now paint a pretty full picture of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's decisions on the 2nd Circuit Court, a body of evidence that can be used to form an opinion about what kind of Supreme Court Justice she will make. And it's a mixed bag. There are some hopeful signs, like her ruling in Hayden v. Pataki, where she argued that felon disenfranchisement laws do fall under the purview of the Voting Rights Act, suggesting an inclusive treatment of the franchise for all citizens. She based this on the plain reading of the statutory text of the Voting Rights Act. She dissented in the case of Pappas v. Giuliani, arguing that an anti-Semitic rant sent by the plaintiff was not enough to have him fired by the NYPD, and that he deserved a jury trial to determine if his First Amendment rights were violated. This is a powerful endorsement of the First Amendment, even in a case where the speech is distasteful. Her dissent in a strip-search case shows her defense of civil rights and the unreasonable search and seizure clause of the Fourth Amendment.

At the same time, in Jocks v. Tavernier, she strongly upheld, and convinced her Republican colleagues, police power and broad grounds for arrest in a case where a man who needed help with his truck in an emergency ended up being arrested and losing his job. And her general temperament is of a judge who hews extremely close to the law, never mind the bleatings of the right. Far from being a conquistador or leading with her race, she actually favored the law over blanket claims of discrimination the majority of the time.

Other than Ricci, Judge Sotomayor has decided 96 race-related cases while on the court of appeals.

Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge. In the one divided panel opinion, the dissent’s point dealt only with the technical question of whether the criminal defendant in that case had forfeited his challenge to the jury selection in his case. So Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a margin of roughly 8 to 1 [...]

In sum, in an eleven-year career on the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor has participated in roughly 100 panel decisions involving questions of race and has disagreed with her colleagues in those cases (a fair measure of whether she is an outlier) a total of 4 times. Only one case (Gant) in that entire eleven years actually involved the question whether race discrimination may have occurred. (In another case (Pappas) she dissented to favor a white bigot.) She participated in two other panels rejecting district court rulings agreeing with race-based jury-selection claims. Given that record, it seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking.

I truly value this variety of treatment of the Sotomayor record, all of which came from blogs and not the traditional media. And I think you can get a full picture of Sotomayor from this treatment. What come sup for me is the overwhelming feeling that this is a highly qualified, competent, brilliant judge whose opinion sits pretty much in the middle of mainstream legal thought. Maybe in past years, that would be enough to put her as the swing vote on the Court. In the current makeup, it puts her on the far left - because this Court has moved sharply to the right over the past 30 years, particularly on corporate issues.

Here's a simple way to expose the Myth of Balance. In 1980, when I clerked at the Court, the justices were, roughly from left to right, Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Byron White, John Paul Stevens, Lewis Powell, Potter Stewart, Warren Burger, and William Rehnquist. Believe it or not, this Court was widely thought to be conservative. But think, just for a moment, about how much would have to change in order for the Court of 2007 to look like the supposedly conservative Court of 1980.

First we would have to chop off the Court's right wing, removing Scalia and Thomas and replacing them with Marshall and Brennan. Far to the left of anyone on the Court today, Marshall and Brennan believed that the Constitution banned the death penalty in all circumstances, created a right to education, and required the government not merely to protect the right to choose but actually to fund abortions for poor women.

Next we would have to replace Kennedy with Blackmun. Blackmun was also to the left of anyone on the current Court. Fiercely protective of the right to privacy and opposed to the death penalty on constitutional grounds, Blackmun believed that the social-services agencies were constitutionally obliged to protect vulnerable children from domestic violence and that affirmative-action requirements were broadly acceptable.

Then we would have to leave Breyer, Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg essentially as they are. All of a sudden, the four would be perceived as the Court's moderates rather than its liberals, operating as a group much like White, Stevens, Powell, and Stewart. (The parallel between White-Stevens-Powell and Breyer-Stevens-Souter is very close; true, Ginsburg is somewhat to the left of Stewart in many domains, but their voting patterns and general approaches are pretty close.)

Finally we would have to assume that Roberts would vote more or less like Rehnquist (which is to say, definitely to the left of Scalia and Thomas) and that Alito would vote more or less like Burger (definitely to the left of Rehnquist).

To say the least, all this would represent a radical change in the Court's composition -- so radical that liberals cannot even fantasize about it. But this radically changed Court would be essentially identical to the supposedly conservative Court of 1980! [...]

The upshot of all these shifts is that what was once on the extreme right is now merely conservative. What was once conservative is now centrist. What was centrist is now left wing. What was once on the left no longer exists.

Cass Sunstein, who works in the Obama Administration, wrote that, and he's absolutely right. And Sotomayor does nothing to rebalance this debate. And I don't know that the President could have gone further than he did. She was generally a good pick. But that's a failure to stand up to conservative messaging. The end result for the country is that the Court shifts to the right, and nobody blinks an eye.

"Is There Anything Wrong With Saying Yes?"

New York Times reporters had a conversation with Barack Obama on his plane, where they actually asked him if he were a socialist. Obama answered no, explained the thought process behind his budget, and later, after pondering it, actually called the reporters back and said, "It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question."

As a statement of empirical reality, this is true. As Daniel Gross pretty expertly explained, the Bush tax cuts that Obama is allowing to expire would result in about 3-4 percentage-point increases in the two top marginal tax rates, which is about $4 a day for someone making $300,000 a year. And despite the media insanity around the issue, the other 98% that doesn't make over $250,000 would see a tax cut, making it hard to understand how you can call this an overall increase. People in that top 2% can whine about how they are being persecuted for their genius and talk about going Galt all they want - and I hope they do instead of just talking about it, we need elites that don't have a track record of breaking the global economy - but the kind of "burden" placed on the wealthy, who have it better in America than any other country on Earth, isn't even the burden their patron saint placed upon them in the 1980s, which they also whined about incessantly.

According to a recent Treasury Department study, Ronald Reagan proposed the largest peacetime tax increase in American history as part of a budget deal to get the federal deficit under control. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) of 1982 was signed into law on Sept. 3, and most of its provisions took effect on Jan. 1, 1983.

During debate on TEFRA, many conservatives predicted economic disaster. They argued that raising taxes in the midst of a severe recession was exactly the wrong thing to do. "Every school child knows you don't raise taxes in a recession unless you want to make it worse," The Wall Street Journal's editorial page warned. Said Rep. Newt Gingrich, "I think it will make the economy sicker." The Chamber of Commerce of the U.S. said it had "no doubt that it will curb the economic recovery everyone wants."

Looking at the data, however, it is very hard to see any evidence that TEFRA had a negative effect on growth. Indeed, one could easily make a case that its enactment stimulated growth. As one can see, the economy's growth rates after TEFRA took effect were among the fastest in history.

I know that Paul Volcker's monetary policy at the Fed, a luxury we pretty much don't have right now, had a lot more to do with this, but the point is that the same defenders of the rich and powerful made the same statements about taxes then that they are making now.

But beyond the debates over opinions which are obviously ridiculous, there's a larger point that was touched upon in the follow-up question about socialism by the Times.

Q. Is there anything wrong with saying yes?

Only in a country where the balance of acceptable discourse has been so tainted and distorted that reasonable social democratic policies are completely forbidden from the conversation. And so you have Obama's advisers running to David Brooks to prove that they aren't crazy socialist radicals, but pragmatists. Which makes a certain political sense, but isn't actually true. In fact, the debate over the stimulus package was quite instructive in this regard. Obama released an initial bill that was too small for the task, perhaps assuming that the package would get bigger, as most spending bills do, as it made its way through Congress. Therefore they would not be saddled with the impression that they were expanding government as much as Congressional Democrats would. That's not what happened, and as a result, the stimulus is looking too small for the task.

Analysts increasingly view the administration's actions so far as insufficient given the scope of the problem. The stimulus package was designed to "save or create" 3.5 million jobs, according to the administration. But the nation has already lost 4.4 million jobs since the start of the recession. Many banks and other financial institutions, whose health is critical to the economy, are teetering, and the Treasury Department has yet to finalize the details of its plans to remove from their balance sheets the toxic assets dragging them down.

"It's premature to say we need another stimulus, but the economy is performing much worse than when [the law] was signed, and the odds are increasing that we'll need a bigger policy response," said Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com, who has advised Democratic lawmakers. "What we've learned is policy has been a step behind this whole downturn. It's important to get a step ahead."

It was well-known among economists that the size of the stimulus may have been too small, but that perspective was kept off the news. It was surely known to the Administration, however, which preferred a more cautious route.

The subsequent release of the budget, along with moving forward on long-sought initiatives on health care and energy, does seem bolder, and there are signs that Obama is learning from what may have been an initial negotiating mistake. But even this
"boldness" is being carried out along narrow technocratic liberal lines that becomes very clear from a look at the past:

Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital, FDR boldly chose to make all other forms of energy in the U.S. uneconomical, by slapping high taxes on kerosene and coal. With the money from the new federal Kerosene Cap and Trade system, President Roosevelt and Congress funded a small-scale federal research program, in the hope of attracting much greater private investment ...

Wait. What's that you say? FDR didn't do that? He poured federal money into the all-public Manhattan Project and created the first atomic bomb in a couple of years? He didn't tax kerosene to make it uneconomical and to encourage private investment in atomic power? [...]

All right, then, forget FDR. He was a socialist, anyway. Let Dwight Eisenhower serve as a model for the Obama administration. President Eisenhower authorized the biggest infrastructure program in American history, when he signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. The interstate highway act created an elaborate system of private tax incentives and public-private partnerships (PPPs) to encourage private corporations to build national highways. To begin with, all U.S. highways were leased to domestic and foreign corporations for a period of decades. Second, all U.S. highways were set up with toll booths, so that American drivers would be forced to repay the corporate owners of the national highways every few dozen miles. Finally, a system of high-speed lanes with higher tolls was created, so that the rich could whiz down the road while middle-class and poor Americans were stuck in traffic jams ...

All right, what now, wise guy? So that's wrong, too? Eisenhower's national highway system wasn't based on tolls, leases to foreign companies, income-based pricing, and tax credits for private corporations? It used gasoline taxes to fund free public highways?

Free highways without toll booths, owned by the public, paid for out of taxes? My God. So the John Birch Society was right after all. Dwight Eisenhower was as much of a socialist as Franklin Delano Roosevelt!

The point here is that conservatives have so demonized the concept of the public commons, particularly inside the Beltway, that what is now considered a bold and socialistic policy shift - raising the top marginal tax rates 3-4%, investing in infrastructure with a mix of public and private money, using an individual mandate to keep insurance companies in the health care game, cap and trade - is actually a pre-compromised, market-friendly, neoliberal jumble that fits squarely in the center of the ideological divide. And this is essentially why the Army of Galts screams about socialism, to force the debate further to the right from the center where it is now situated.

I'm not totally blaming Obama for this. As a pragmatist, he is more interested in what is politically possible, and 50 years of conservative demonization has battered the ability to make anything that's not "market-friendly." In addition, members of his own party are even more cautious than he is and thus even more unwilling to do anything truly paradigm-shifting. But we have to understand the historical reality.

But a lot has changed since Wall Street imploded last fall. The great investment banks are gone, the U.S. has nationalized much of the financial system, and appears to be on the way to effectively nationalizing the automobile and housing sectors as well. In this environment, we need to consider some heresies, like the idea that the best way to provide a public good is not necessarily to pour subsidies on middlemen, and then bail them out with more subsidies when they fail at their public function.

The fundamental barrier today is the way that the issues are framed, by Democrats and Republicans alike. Thus the problem is defined not as making credit available for individuals and businesses, but as saving the banks and the shadow banking system. The goal is not to provide healthcare to all citizens, but to enable all citizens to purchase private health insurance. The objective is not to ensure universal access to higher education; it is to insure universal access to colleges and universities. In these and other cases, the means is confused with the end. The ultimate goal -- providing credit, healthcare or education -- is identified with the interests of non-governmental for-profit or nonprofit providers of that service. If these private institutions fail to provide the public service in a low-cost, effective and equitable way, then they must be subsidized even more. The idea of achieving the same public goals through simpler, more direct and efficient means that would cut out the middleman appears to be heresy to the Obama administration.

By the way, this is a centrist, Michael Lind, writing this. But one who is mindful of the past.

I grow fairly tired of the defense that "the President isn't a socialist; he isn't even doing anything that radical" used as a defense, when we're in a position with unemployment and the overall economic meltdown where we actually, um, NEED something radical done. And I think the country is prepared for that more than Beltway insiders think. So while I agree with the empirical assessment that Obama's positions are squarely in the center, and that the cult of Galtism is absurd, I don't believe that Obama's team is made up of pragmatists. Because pragmatists would look at reality and do exactly what's necessary, regardless of ideological concerns.

Obama The Empiricist

Barack Obama has talked himself into a comfortable position on the issue of nationalization - that Japan did too little and Sweden did too much, and we're going to settle in a nice middle ground, and anyway Sweden has five banks and seven customers and we have a bank in every Starbucks so it would just be too messy. This is a decent soundbite but isn't necessarily going to help credit get flowing anytime soon, and so I'm happy that this interview quote shows Obama more willing to step out of the ideological box and toward an empirical reality.

When pressed on whether he was ruling out the Swedish approach, he declined to do so:

"My absolute goal is to make sure that our financial system is set and that we get credit flowing again, that homeowners, small businesses and large businesses will get -- invest and create jobs and get this economy going again. I’m going to be very practical in terms of how to approach it. What we want to do is to make sure that we get this right on the front end. What Tim Geithner did was to provide a framework. He is presenting then a timeline of how this is going to roll out over the next several months: When do we start applying these stress tests to the banks; opening up their books; making sure that everybody knows for sure exactly what’s going on in there; structuring plans to attract private capital to help deal with some of these weaker institutions. Some of the smaller institutions that don’t pose systemic risks, if it turns out that they’re in really, really bad shape, then we may have to reevaluate how we approach some of those institutions.

"He’s also working the Federal Reserve Bank and the FDIC to open up lines of credit that immediately provide some relief to small businesses and consumers. There are a whole bunch of credit markets, like student loans or credit cards, that are locked up right now, but actually the underlying assets in these securitized markets are not that bad, so we may just have to use a variety of different tools to give private investors some confidence on that front.

"But here’s the bottom line: We will do what works. It is going to take time to lay out every aspect of this plan and there are going to be certain aspects of any plan that was designed which will require reevaluation and then have some experimentation -- if that doesn’t work then you do something else. What I’m confident about is that the basic framework that we have put forward is the right one, and that it balances a whole host of issues, including, by the way, the issue of making sure the taxpayers aren’t just carrying the whole freight on this thing, and that we’re sharing -- that institutions on Wall Street are sharing the burden of cleaning up this mess.

"We want to help because -- not because I’m particularly happy about how Wall Street has been running its businesses, but because if we don’t fix the banking system and the credit markets, then businesses can’t make payroll and we continue to see pain among ordinary Americans. On the other hand, I think that folks on Wall Street have to understand that these burdens have to be shared, and so restrictions on executive compensation, transparency, making sure that shareholders are more effectively involved, all those things we’re taking into account. And by the way, the market is not always going to like some of those decisions, because ideally what they’d like to do, they’d like to continue business as usual and not pay a price for a whole bunch of really big mistakes that were made."

We pressed him again on his meaning, and he said:

"I will not allow our financial system to collapse. And we are going to do whatever is required to get credit flowing again so that companies and consumers can do their business and we can get this economy back on track."

That is a flexible enough approach, and I appreciate the candor. As long as there's the recognition that we need a functioning banking system rather than one that hoards capital because it can't admit defeat and wants to spare a few bondholders, we can live with it. And this does reflect Obama's general approach. The details are subservient to the main goal - creating or saving 3-4 million jobs, getting credit moving again. If he is truly willing to do what it takes to reach those goals, then we may finally see the inventiveness we've needed from government over the past several decades. Josh Marshall has more.

Mr. President, Tear Down This Conservative Spin!

The Republicans are throwing a lot of crap up against the wall to try and derail the stimulus package. Not all of it fits into a coherent whole, but it's all generally negative, decrying the hateful liberals in the House and the "pork" they've stuffed into the bill. Meanwhile, Obama is sitting back, organizing house parties (which is something you do two months before the bill comes up for a vote, not while the horse-trading is going on), and trying to stay above the fray. Obviously there's no chance of that working in the Senate, where the bipartisan brigade is already taking the conservatives' side on the bill. First it was Ben Nelson and now Kent Conrad.

CONRAD: [T]here are other areas of the package that are really very questionable in terms of whether they’d stimulate the economy. Some of the programs that are given money only have ten percent spend-out in the next two years. … There’s very little done in this package to help housing. Very little done to help the financial sector.

I guess those trillions of dollars in TARP money and Fed outlays wasn't enough for the financial sector, they need more and more. Whatever happened to the Wall Street/Main Street construction?

The stimulus is slowly drifting, then. Nobody's out there explaining why government spending is urgently needed and fast, what the implications are for the economy, and why anything that creates a job makes sense right now. Everybody, on the other hand, is nitpicking one spending program or another, tarring it with the "pork" brush, and framing it like a giveaway instead of the last resort we have. There is no private investment happening right now, trade is way down, and so is consumer activity. NOBODY IS SPENDING and so government has to or we'll have a depression right quick. Now you don't have to lapse into econo-speak to explain that, and it just so happens we have a charismatic leader who can make the case clearly and elegantly to the public and get them on board. At least they should hear from SOMEBODY, right?

The country needs to be instructed about the logic and necessity of this stimulus plan because they clearly don't fully understand it. And because of that, the Republicans are making headway with their rhetoric of "fiscal responsibility," conflating stimulus with bailouts and the rest of their destructive obstructionism.

Despite his huge personal approval, Obama didn't start off with a lot of public support for the plan and support is inching down. He is asking for a huge amount of money and the promise of bipartisanship is not working out. I think it would be helpful if he explained what a stimulus is and why this plan will succeed. People want him to succeed and they will back him if he makes the explicit case and give the plan some time to work if he asks them for it. Not having congressional Republicans on the team won't matter if the American people stay behind him. But if he continues to make bipartisanship the test of the plan's success or failure, it really could fail whether it passes or not. One of the main components of the success of the plan is its ability to inspire confidence and the Republicans, the Blue Dogs and their friend in the media are doing everything they can to ensure that Americans believe it won't work.

This is very serious. Red-state Senators are pulling away from this bill because conservatives in their backyards are winning the rhetorical war. There's only one way to turn that around, by using the bully pulpit. The ads running from surrogates will help, but the message is "support Obama's plan for jobs, not Rush Limbaugh and the failed policies of the past." A good start, but it needs more meat on the bones. It's time for a fireside chat with a nervous public.

UPDATE: Chris Bowers has some worthy thoughts on this topic.

Impacts Of Conservative Demagoguery

The result of the recent conservative dominance on cable, even if not a lot of people are watching, is a growing amount of misinformation delivered to the public, over the course of many years. One of the reasons we focus on this and think it's so important is that progressives are cutting through 30 years' worth of rhetoric designed to push conservative movement ideas into the mainstream. And without a sustained effort to demystify those ideas, they will hold in the minds of the public EVEN IF the result of those ideas has been disaster. Republicans destroyed the country and people fully understand that, and yet their ideas haven't been invalidated. See this Rasmussen poll.

Paul Krugman, last year's winner of the Nobel Prize for economics and a regular columnist for the New York Times, recently wrote that you should “write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.”

If you follow that advice, you’ll be writing off a majority of Americans. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 53% say that it’s always better to cut taxes. Only 24% share Krugman’s views.

Krugman’s views are a bit more aligned with public opinion when he asserts that “public spending rather than tax cuts should be the core of any stimulus plan.” On this point, the public is evenly divided--34% agree, 34% disagree, and 32% are not sure.

While overall public opinion is divided on that question, there is less public support for another Krugman claim. The columnist wrote that “it’s clear that when it comes to economic stimulus, public spending provides much more bang for the buck than tax cuts.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed that view on ABC’s This Week on Sunday when she said, “There is more bang for the buck by investing in food stamps and in unemployment insurance than in any tax cut.”

Thirty-one percent (31%) agree with Krugman and Pelosi that “public spending provides much more bang for the buck than tax cuts.” Forty-two percent (42%) disagree.

Now, running polls on factual statements by Paul Krugman isn't going to get the best result, especially because Krugman is a high-profile liberal and a small segment of the population will knee-jerk dismiss anything he says. The point is that conservative ideas live on despite the fall of conservatives nationally. Voters definitively favor Democrats over Republicans, but the ideas remain.

I try to think about the reaction to yesterday's party-line vote from the perspective of a low-information non-junkie. They saw Republicans vote as a bloc against a popular President who wants to create jobs. That's probably a net negative for Republicans as people. It has nothing to do with invalidating their ideas. And the Village obviously isn't going to help with that. Here's chief lickspittle Mark Halperin explaining how Obama "didn't go for centrist compromises" in the stimulus.

This is a really bad sign for Barack Obama to try to change Washington... he needs bipartisan solutions. They went for it, and they came up with zero... The other thing he could have done, you can go for centrist compromises, you can say to your own party, sorry, some of you liberals aren't going to like it, but I'm going to change this legislation radically to get a big centrist majority, rather than an all-Democratic vote. He chose not to do that. That's the exact path that George Bush took for most of his Presidency, with disastrous consequences for bipartisanship and solving big problems.

See, it was all Obama's fault. He didn't compromise enough and kick the left. By the way, I don't remember the media reporting on those "disastrous consequences" of George Bush's approach in real time, do you? Funny how bipartisanship only matters with a Democratic President.

I don't think Halperin's insanity will be listened to by the public, but the effect here is that conservative ideas are still respected while conservatives aren't. And so tax cuts will always be prominent in bills like this, limiting their effectiveness. "Market solutions" will always be preferred. People will think that conservative solutions done right are the path to success. And that is a looming disaster.

As it stands right now, there's one man being listened to seriously that can command an audience: the President. He hasn't used the bully pulpit to a great degree yet, though I assume that's coming. Until conservative ideas are rejected, we will continue in this muddle, blocked from the tools we need to get out of this economic crisis.

Davis Unbound

This is a pretty smart assessment by former Republican Rep. Tom Davis of the troubles of the modern GOP. Sure there are some fallacies ("We're victims of our own success!"), but in general it's pretty honest.

With the heavy lifting out of the way, we indulged in more trivial pursuits – and this led to trouble. We talked to ourselves and not to voters. We became more concerned with stem cell policy than economic policy, and with prayer in schools rather than balance in our public budgets and priorities. Not so long ago, it was easy to paint the Democrats as the party of extremists. Now, they say we’re extremists, and voters agree.

As a result, we’ve seen our support erode. Urban centers remain under Democratic control. Exurbs and rural areas remain under Republican dominance. But in the battleground that lies between – the suburbs -- we were winning them; now we’re not. Our candidates are safe in a swath that extends from North Texas across to North Alabama and up through Appalachia. Elsewhere, we are on the run. Almost every voter who can be convinced – who sometimes votes Democratic, sometimes Republican – now votes Democratic.

We’ve long-since given up on the African-American vote. We’re forfeiting the Hispanic vote with unwarranted and unsavory vitriol against immigrants. Youth vote? Gone. We ask for nothing from these idealistic voters, we offer little except chastisement of their lifestyle choices and denial of global warming, and we are woefully behind the Democrats in learning how to connect with them.

Soccer moms? They’re not comfortable with much of our social policy agenda, so many are gone as well. NASCAR dads? They’re our last redoubt, and the trends even there are not encouraging as unemployment rises and 401 (k)s are decimated. They want clean, competent government that meets basic challenges.

This is generally right, although Davis isn't willing to admit that the GOP lock on rural voters is starting to unloosen as well. What we saw in 2008 is a fall in support for Republicans from virtually all demographics except seniors. But if Davis can be forgiven for that oversight, I think the solutions he comes up with are a mixed bag.

First, we eliminate checklists and litmus tests and focus on broad principles, not heavy-handed prescriptions. Free trade. Strong defense – at home and abroad. Government as small as is practicable in these times. Economic, education and energy policies that promote growth, energy independence and a competitive agenda that will allow businesses to grow and compete, not be protected by artificial barriers [...]

Remind ourselves the first principle of conservatism is not tax cuts or free trade or even smaller government. It is prudence, and prudence should be our guide.

Prudence dictates we take seriously the concerns of those who elect us and tailor our policy proposals to counter the government-mandate-heavy ideas bound to emerge from the other side.

This is essentially a call for fiscal conservatism (right when such a strategy would doom us to depression, and is also deeply unpopular) with a nod toward "strong national defense." Now, I think the electorate has basically spoken and called those policies unnecessarily cruel toward the weakest among us. And while he's right that conservatives ought to "stop talking about how much we hate government if we expect people to elect us to run it," his prescription that they have to "reduce it to its ideal size is basically the same exact philosophy with different language. But what's interesting is that Davis essentially counsels the GOP to tell social cons to go pound sand. As Markos says, that's just not going to work.

That is the current GOP agenda minus one big, glaring omission: nothing about "Strong family values". In fact, he ignores the issue altogether, pretending that the modern GOP isn't beholden to its Sarah Palin wing. I have no doubt Palin cost McCain support among independents and Democrats, but she certainly energized McCain's campaign by bringing aboard its most motivated foot soldiers. Who does Tom Davis think will knock on doors for GOP candidates if you strip out its evangelical base? Wall Street Rockafeller Republicans? Stockbrokers? Bankers?

They made a corrupt bargain back in the 1970s to use the religious right as a grassroots army. They can jettison it now, but then they lose the only piece of the electorate that they're holding, and their entire volunteer base.

People have basically seen the outcome of conservative policies and they didn't like it. They may see the outcome of Obama's policies, call them "liberal," and decide they don't like them either. But the GOP's influence on this debate is largely irrelevant. They can use the Twitter and the Facebook and reinvent themselves all they want, but their path back to power is out of their hands. It depends on whether or not the Democrats waste this moment.