-
sponsorship
Delusion Watch: Ezra Klein thinks the good news is that Obama "hasn't given a speech on health-care reform ..." You could have fooled me. The problem, Klein reports, is that
the media reported on his news conferences and town hall meetings as if they were the White House's failed attempts to set the agenda.
You mean they weren't attempts to set the agenda? That explains it! ... [via Faughnan| ... P.S.: Klein's post does raise a disturbing possibility: Maybe the White House is proceeding ploddingly according to a plan laid out months ago, in which Obama's formal address to Congress was going to be a dramatic, fresh, deal-clinching intervention as opposed to three more cubic yards of the same ineffective rhetoric the public is already sick of. . . .They haven't adjusted at all in the WH, according to this theory. We're still on Plan A. ...
P.S.: "Our CBS News tally shows that Mr. Obama has given 27 speeches specifically on his health care objectives. Add in other remarks, events and statements in which he mentioned health care and the number soars to 119." [link and emphasis added] ... 8:30 P.M.
___________________________
Suppose Obama's 'inside' deal-cutting strategy works, and a health care reform along current lines passes. Would anything then actually happen that would come back and bite the Democrats before the next couple of elections? If so, what? Bob Wright asked this question on bloggingheads yesterday. His answer: The individual mandate could be to health care what the 55 m.p.h. speed limit was to Jimmy Carter's energy policy. I had a different answer, perhaps prompted by my recent, not uncommon, experience with rising credit card rates. ... A mandate will only impinge on those who don't have insurance already. A rise in insurance premiums will impact nearly everyone, no? .... 8:31 P.M.
___________________________
That 'Loving Thing' You Do: Alec MacGillis on the La Crosse, Wisconsin hospitals that push end-of-life directives:
"The [directive] itself doesn't really matter very much -- it's the clearly expressed belief and shared understanding that it represents," Hammes said. "The family members have to believe that what they do is not only legally right, but personally right. If Mom said, 'Don't do this or do do this,' it's much easier for them to say, 'I'm doing a loving thing,' and it's a decision you can live with."
The obvious question MacGillis ducks: What if you write a directive that says you want aggressive and expensive death-delaying measures to be taken? "I'd like to die hooked up to machines." Do the hospitals of LaCrosse just automatically follow your wishes and spend $100,000 in your final weeks, telling themselves that it's a "shared understanding" and "a loving thing." Or is ... subtle pressure exerted to have a further "conversation"? ... 9:02 P.M.
____________________________
-
sponsorship
Dropping the public option:
a) A little early, no? Quite apart from whether it reeks a bit of panic--Politico notes that the public option was a useful threat to hold over the insurance industry when negotiating the rules insurers will have to abide by;
b) Moving toward compromise on this issue already seems to be helping the administration with the inside game--i.e., getting enough moderates on board to, in theory, pass a bill. But the inside game is not the administration's biggest problem. The problem is the outside game--public support for the bill out in the country--where it has been losing fairly decisively. If the public ends up 60-40 against a bill, it's probably not going to happen even if Sen. Conrad is on board.
Will dropping the public option help with the outside game too? Maybe a bit: it reduces fear of a government takeover. But it does little to reduce legitimate fears of rationing in the existing, huge govenrment program--Medicare. To calm those fears, the provision to drop is Peter Orszag's precious IMAC commission, which Obama himself has seemingly promoted as nudging the system in the direction of denying care toward the end of life. ...
P.S.: Pulling Back from the Public Option? This is a Job for The Dreidl! Atlantic's Marc Ambinder declares "the President never insisted that a health care bill contain a public plan." Huh? Is Ambinder being spun so fast he can't read? The Obama address he links to says this:
That's why any plan I sign must include an insurance exchange: a one-stop shopping marketplace where you can compare the benefits, cost and track records of a variety of plans - including a public option to increase competition and keep insurance companies honest - and choose what's best for your family. [E.A.]
That annoying word, "must." Sure reads to me like the President insisting that a health care bill contain a public plan. ...10:47 P.M.
___________________________
Mike Murphy is not a fan of Sarah Palin. ... 11:07 P.M.
___________________________
From Public Option to Pubic Option! Pigeon O'Brien thinks she knows why the delay in the rumored Edwards paternity admission. ...11:07 P.M.
___________________________
-
sponsorship
The Wages of Being Spun: Yesterday, Atlantic's Marc Ambinder told us how the loud town hall protests against Obama's health care plans were discrediting and damaging the Republican position, especially among independents.
Today, a USA Today/Gallup poll delivers what seems like swift and brutal punishment to desperate Rahmesque spin Ambinder's analysis:
WASHINGTON - The raucous protests at congressional town hall meetings have succeeded in fueling opposition to proposed health care bills among some Americans, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds - particularly the independents who tend to be at the center of political debates.
In a survey of 1,000 adults taken Tuesday, 34% say the sometimes heated protests at sessions held by members of Congress have made them more sympathetic to the protesters' views; 21% say they are less sympathetic.
Independents by 2-1, 35%-16%, say they are more sympathetic to the protesters now. ...
Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel. ... [Thanks to alert reader M]
Update: Gallup's fuller results here. ... The real test is whether support of the reform goes up or down after the town halls, not what people say they think of the protesters or their views. Still, it's hard to look at this poll and conclude that support will go up, or that opponents have been "discredited." ... 3:52 P.M.
___________________________
-
sponsorship
"Conservatives are blowing it" on health care. So argues Marc Ambinder. Republicans are turning town halls into general "anti-Obama venting sessions," he twittered on Sunday. All that shouting-down was turning people off. "[T]his trend favors the left." It certainly wasn't going to cause the Blue Dogs, whose votes are crucial to reform, to vote against it.
Ambinder elaborated on Sunday's instant analysis today:
At this same hour last week, several of the President's top political advisers were meeting in a White House conference room to discuss the appearance, over the first weekend in August, of a coordinated effort to scare Democratic lawmakers who planned to attend town hall meetings into a state of panic. A week later, and the Atlantic's tricorder readings are picking up much calmer electromagnetic energy from the White House. ... Democrats are beginning to notice that opponents of health care reform have discredited themselves. They ramped up much too quickly. When smaller, conservative groups Astroturfed, they inevitably brought to the meetings the type of Republican activist who was itching for a fight and who would use the format to vent frustrations at President Obama himself. ...[T]the loudest voices tended to be the craziest, the most extreme, the least sensible, and the most easy to mock. ...
A coherent, organized effort would have recognized that the moment the media began to take sides was the moment that the entire enterprise could be damaged. The media, being a collection of different megaphones, reported on the town hall meetings in one of two ways, both damaging to Republicans. Either they credulously reported the louder, angrier voices (inherently damaging to Republicans in this case) or they reported on the political architecture of the town hall meetings, which plays down the substance of the protests.
Remember, the target audience for Republicans is Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. They won't panic unless they perceive organic anxiety. The White House's goal was to prevent the Blue Dogs from panicking. The swing constituents in these congressional districts aren't angry Republicans, and the Blue Dogs know this. They're political independents for whom the sanctity of the process is important. .... Unrestrained, these town hall meetings are going to turn off the type of voters Republicans most need to pressure Blue Dog Democrats -- independents who don't have red genes or blue genes.
These are good points--possibilities, at least. They're the possibilities you'd want to emphasize if you were, say, a Democratic aide talking to Marc Ambinder. But are they the most important possibilities? For example, anti-Obama activists indeed seemed uncouth and even thuggish in some early townhall MSM coverage. But how many people watch the MSM in the middle of August? (And anyway, Obama has now shown that these meetings aren't that uncivil!)
The bigger picture is whether support for health care, already too weak, builds over August or shrinks, no? Does Ambinder really think it's going to build simply because GOPs ramped up too quickly and got too loud last week? Doesn't the latter criticism, however valid, have the half-life of either a twitter item or Rahm Emanuel's attention span, whichever is shorter?
Ambinder seems to be operating on the premise that all Obama needs to do is convince a finite number of Blue Dogs to vote with him and a "comprehensive" health reform will pass--the way a few more delegates once enabled him to lock up the nomination. But lawmaking isn't that cleanly mathematical. When the general public sours on a bill, it affects more than a few swing votes. Unpopular bills have a way of magically bogging down in Congress even if a majority technically favors them and regardless of what happens with Senators and Congressman whose votes were once considered "crucial." (There were crucial swing Senators on Clinton's health care reform too, at one point. And on "comprehensive" immigration reform in 2007.) The White House aides whose temperature Ambinder's taking certainly have an interest in making it all seem like simply a battle for the Blue Dogs, because that seems more like a battle they can win.
If Ambinder were any easier to spin, he'd be a dreidl. ... Update: See also Patrick Ruffini. ...
P.S.: Ambinder says the GOP effort was not "coherent, organized." Doesn't that undercut the left talking point that it was secretly, centrally controlled by sophisticated DC corporate lobbyists? ...
P.P.S.: A more interesting, though equally spinnish, Ambinder post makes some subtle points about the real views of Obama health care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm's brother).
a) For example:
Hospice care costs more than hospital care in most circumstances, Emanuel found -- and so the end-of-life counseling that a doctor provides has little to do with saving money.
But if that's true, then why doesn't Obama calm everyone down by ostentatiously dropping the end-of-life- oriented parts of the bills? ...
b) I knew it was all Michael Sandel's fault! On Ezekiel Emanuel's "communitarian" world view:
Emanuel sketches out a "civic Republicanism" telos -- that is -- our health care decisions as a society should be yoked to a system that "promote[s] the continuation of the polity-those that ensure healthy future generations, ensure development of practical reasoning skills, and ensure full and active participation by citizens in public deliberations-are to be socially guaranteed as basic." He notes that such a system would deny "services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens."
Emanuel is setting up a contrast: our health care system today treats everyone equally -- as if they ought to have equal access to every possible procedure or treatment. To most of us, the status quo seems intuitively right. Everyone is equal -- equal under God -- Emanuel doesn't say this, but he might as well -- and therefore it would be evil to make distinctions. What Emanuel is arguing, here, is that this liberalism substitutes one goal -- equality -- for another -- a healthy society -- and that substitution may be responsible for the limited choices that policy-makers confront. [E.A]
Well, if you put it that way ... I'm for equality! For a health care system that "treats everyone equally," even if it's expensive. Against a system that would deny "services ... to individuals" who won't ever achieve "full and active participation .. in public deliberations."
Like I said, Sarah Palin had a point. ...
P.P.P.S.: Who said social equality would always be cheap? ... 8:59 P.M.
___________________________
-
sponsorship
Friday, April 24, 2009
Plot Holes: In their New Republic cover story divining Obama's "new theory of the state"--which turns out to be "Nudge-o-cracy," or having the state "monkey around with the choices people face, seeking to influence decision-making rather than mandate decisions"--Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber declare that:
Obama has set out to synthesize the New Democratic faith in the utility of markets with the Old Democratic emphasis on reducing inequality. [E.A.]
They go on to describe Obama policymakers' shift in attitude since the Clinton administration:
In recent months, several of the architects of Clintonomics--Larry Summers, Gene Sperling, Rahm Emanuel--have reassembled to take another crack at creating broad-based prosperity. What's striking is the change in their thinking about how to pull it off.
In fact, the center-left had revised its economic theories while the bubble was still inflating. Beginning in 2004, the data gradually began to undermine the Clintonites' central assumption: that the benefits of growth would accrue to the poor and middle class. Their policies, it turns out, had only temporarily tamped down the income inequality that had been rising since the 1970s. Workers' wages had once tracked productivity growth. Now workers were producing more, but only the wealthy were reaping the rewards; everyone else's income had basically flattened out.[E.A.]
But Foer and Scheiber's description of Obama's attempt, in the face of these realities, to restore "the old Democratic emphasis" on reducing income inequality never gets around to giving us Obama's nudge-o-cracy plan for reducing income inequality. Just thought I would point that out! I suspect it's because there is no Obama nudge-o-cracy plan for reducing income inequality--which, I suspect, is because there is no conceivable nudge-o-cracy plan that could reduce income inequality in the face of the global economic forces of trade and increasing returns to skilled labor.
Obama at least claims to have a non-nudgeocratic plan, based on restoring the power of labor unions through the Employee Free Choice Act ("card check"). But a) the Employee Free Choice Act is dead in the water, for now, b) Obama doesn't seem to be pushing it very hard; c) the idea that signing up more workers in labor unions will reverse growing inequality (at least while maintaining prosperity) is wishful thinking untested. The backup EFCA mechanism for propping up middle class incomes--mandatory arbitration--is pretty much the opposite of mere "nudging." It's the direct mandating of wages by federal mediators. ... 4:08 P.M.
___________________________