Kausfiles: A mostly political weblog.

How to Write A Piece On How to Save the President

Steve Clemons praises a What's-Wrong-With-the White-House diagnosis by Edward Luce in the FT:

 "[M]any of the nation's top news anchors and editors are sending emails back and forth (I have been sent three such emails in confidence) on what a spot-on piece Luce wrought ..."

Luce's piece seems incompletely convincing to me, as it follows a template familiar to connoisseurs of Save-the-President analyses from earlier administrations (e.g., Carter, Clinton). The rules are:

1) Blame the campaigners. The problem is the President relies for close advise on his closest advisers-- those who saw him through the campaign. For Carter it was the boys from Georgia--e.g. Hamilton Jordan. For Obama it's the Chicago interlopers: Axelrod, Gibbs, Jarrett, plus Rahm Emanuel. If only the circle were broadened! This reflexive Washington kvetch allows DC experts to think that the decisions would be better if only experts like them were consulted. Time to bring in a "Team B" consisting of [insert list of your friends here]. As if Chuck Hagel is going to save Obama.

2) Blame campaigning: "The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing," says Luce. This implies that the serious business of policy and governance is qualitatively different--and superior to--the grimy business of getting elected. ("To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn't happening," says one of Obama's "close allies.") All the more reason for getting those campaign hacks out of there! And very flattering for DC policy types who would in theory take their places.

3) Blame process: If only the process were changed--the circle of advisers broadened, the "stream" of advice augmented, with cabinet officers and State department officials consulted--better results would pop out (no matter what the elected official in question actually believes in). This avoids messy arguments about substance and offers the prized Neutral Story Line--an MSM-safe narrative that seems to explain everything without taking ideological sides.

4) Never Blame the President. Goes without saying. What good would that do? ....

And of course,

5) Call David Gergen. ("[T]he lightbulb must want to change," he says of Obama.)

It can't be that the President made a mistake of substance precisely when he reached outside his inner circle to policy types, buying his OMB chief Peter Orszag's circle-squaring argument the health care reform was deficit reduction. As Ryan Lizza noted at the time, Obama was "in effect betting his Presidency on Orszag’s thesis." It was a bad bet** and he seems to be losing it.

It can't be that this was a mistake Obama would have made if Kathleen Sebelius and Ken Salazar had been consulted--a mistake he would have made if Jim Fallows and Fareed Zakaria were installed in the West Wing, supervising a "stream of advice"designed by Peter Drucker and Norman Ornstein, with Emanuel and Axelrod exiled to 40 cars back in the motorcade. It can't be that Obama would have made this mistake because it's what he really thinks, which is why he kept on talking about it even as his health plan sank lower and lower in the polls. (Some good campaign-oriented advisers might actually have helped at that point--they would have noticed that the President's vaunted salesmanship wasn't working. But probably not even that would have helped, since the problem was something they couldn't change: Obama.)

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**--Luce's piece is eye-opening in its description of what was sacrificed in the push for health care reform:

Insiders attribute Mr Obama’s waning enthusiasm for the Arab-Israeli peace initiative to a desire to avoid antagonising sceptical lawmakers whose support was needed on healthcare. The steam went out of his Arab-Israeli push in mid-summer, just when the healthcare bill was running into serious difficulties.

So Orszag's thesis didn't just sink health care. It also destroyed hopes for peace in the Middle East. ... Only half joking.

Update: At least according to The Hill, Obama believed the Orszagist alchemy wouldn't just reduce the deficit in the long-term, but also revive the economy in the shorter term:

One senior Democratic senator said Emanuel was initially reluctant to push healthcare reform so early in Obama’s first term, counseling instead for the president to focus on jobs and the economy

But the president decided healthcare had to pass when he had a strong political mandate and the party controlled large majorities in both chambers.

Obama was convinced overhauling the nation’s healthcare system would boost the struggling economy by curbing costs and reducing the long-term federal deficit, say Democratic sources. 
 

12:47 P.M.

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Our Whippersnappers Is Learning

Something is Killing the President's Approval Numbers (especially on Rasmussen):  Is it his budget? Or the failure to pass health care reform, his #1 priority, and the ensuing strategic flailing, which is creating the impression that he's ... well, a loser? Nice guy. Knows all the arguments. Can't get it done. In other words, the numbers might vindicate the argument of health care reform supporters--that not passing the bill is extremely damaging to Obama and the Dems. What are they good for, anyway? ... 11:21 P.M.

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First Time Farce, Second Tragedy: Fire Mickey Kaus talks about how

old new leftists ...see tension and perhaps hypocrisy in a political philosophy devoted to a just and equal society that is dependent on groups formed around fragmentation and selfishness for its electoral success.

Well put. ... You might even speculate that--after a few decades of pursuing a more ideal society through fragmented, selfish interest group/constituency politics--liberals would have accomplished what there is to be accomplished via that route, and that the remaining problems would be those raised or perpetuated by interest group/constituency politics itself. ... The one exception would seem to be health care reform, which really should have been achieved in the last century. Yet now it appears to have foundered once again on the rocks of ....interest group/constituency politics. ... Hmm. I always wondered what "exception that proves the rule" means. ...  3:28 P.M.

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The scales have fallen from young Ezra Klein's eyes. He's not writing the surface health care "ego" story (e.g. procedural wrangling) when the underlying "id" story (e.g. they do or they don't want the bill) is the key:

There's been a lot about procedural impediments to moving forward on health-care reform: Can the Senate can pass a reconciliation bill before the House passes the Senate bill? Can Republicans delay reconciliation with amendments? Who should go first, House or Senate?

You all know I'm big on procedure. You've also noticed I'm not writing about this. I don't buy it. What Democrats can do is a lot less important than what they want to do. If 51 Democratic senators and 218 Democratic congresspeople are dead-serious about passing a bill, they can, and will, pass a bill.

Too bad most of the blogosphere's health care reform spirit squad didn't notice that the bill was failing the "id" test--and that this failure would be dispositive--until it was seemingly too late. ... 12:31 A.M.

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Are there really 1,690 people in the federal Department of Transportation making $170,000 or more a year? ...

Update: An alert reader who once worked at the DOT emails--

If this is true, I sort of know why. ... The simple answer is that DOT is, first of all, a collection of agencies that existed in other forms and were simply gathered together when the Department was formed -- the FAA, and the Federal Highway Administration are the big ones, but there are also NHTSA, the Federal Transit Administration, and I think eight others.  All of these have their own administrators, chief counsels, press offices, and so on.  They each have all the bureaucratic facilities they's need if they were independent agencies.  (It was done this way probably to preserve Congressional committee jurisdiction over these functions.  This is a far more significant factor in Washington than is  generally recognized -- the topic of transportation is rationalized in the executive branch by putting all of those agencies together, but they are still left separate within the department so that Congressional oversight can be left unrationalized.  ...)  

Then, spread over all of these there is an enormous Office of the Secretary, with another full complement of policy, legal, and Congressional-relations functions.   The result is that there's a huge number of presidential appointments and high level executive functions, many more than if the separate agencies had been destroyed when the department was created.

Then, on top of that, a number of these agencies have enormous presences around the country. ...  Take a look at http://www.dot.gov/DOTagencies.htm , start clicking on its links, and you will get the picture.  In  the way that bureaucracies work, all of those local offices have people at the top.  The number of top level people mentioned in your blog does not surprise me.   [E.A.]

12:31 A.M.

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Don't Start the Orgy of Recrimination Without Me!

Give Us 'Fat Product,' Please: The real long-term damage to Toyota from the unintended acceleration mess? Now the public will learn about the company's decades-long "decontenting" binge (designed to eliminate "fat products" that were 'overbuilt' in terms of quality). As Truth About Cars notes,

Toyota’s reputation was built on those “fat” products of the mid-80s to early-90s ...

They aren't coming back, even after Toyota weathers the current crisis. ... P.S.: Has Honda avoided decontenting, or has it just wisely not written so much about it? ...  P.P.S.: Toyota customers should demand the Denso pedal! (via Ellisblog). ... Was the superior Denso device deemed too "fat"? ....1:49 P.M.

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All of a Sudden They Had an Election in Massachusetts! Who Knew? President Obama in Nashua, New Hampshire on Tuesday:

What I have said is that both the House bill and the Senate bill were 90 percent there. Ten percent of each bill, people had some problems with, and legitimately so. So we were just about to clean those up, and then Massachusetts' election happened. Suddenly everybody says, oh, oh, it's over.

Some would call this a stunning admission of incompetence. They couldn't have cleaned up the bill before the Massachuetts election? They didn't know there was an election coming up? ... I'm not saying Obama's screw-up was of that order of simplicity (i.e., forgetting to look at the calendar). I'm saying he's making it look like a screw-up of that order of simplicity. ...P.S.: The more complicated and, I assume, accurate explanation is that Congress moved too slowly to pass the bill because in their now-conscious subconscious lawmakers didn't want to pass the bill, because it wasn't popular enough. That's Obama's fault too--but it's a less simple failing. ...

P.P.S.: You can never start the orgy of recrimination too early! Sometimes it avoids the need for a later orgy--as with the tax reform of 1986, when anticipatory condemnation of Senator Packwood spurred him to change course and save the bill. ... 11:56 A.M.

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Name First, Shame Later ...

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Cherchez La Fern: Why did Bunny Mellon decide to give millions to help John Edwards?  Turns out it's all about ... gardening. From Lloyd Grove's Daily Beast report: 

One reason Bunny Mellon was supporting John Edwards, she told friends, was that somebody had to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming president. Shortly after Bill Clinton was inaugurated, Mrs. Mellon heard to her dismay that Hillary was planning to display modern sculpture in the First Lady’s Garden at the White House. Mrs. Mellon—a self-taught horticulturalist and landscape designer who had created a special First Lady’s garden for her friend Jacqueline Kennedy (as well as helping Jackie redecorate the White House and refurbish the White House Rose Garden)—lobbied Hillary to leave things as they were. After all, Bunny Mellon argued, it was a matter of respecting history: Ladybird Johnson, no less, had formally named the area the “Jacqueline Kennedy Garden.”

“It’s my garden now,” Hillary allegedly replied—thus earning the lasting enmity of the offended heiress. [E.A.]
 

P.S.: Marc Ambinder asks "Should Edwards aides be shamed and blamed?" Nut graf:

But there were a handful of staff members who knew that Edwards had at least one affair, who knew that he continued to have extramarital sexual liaisons during the campaign, who knew that the portrait of the Edwardses marriage was fictitious, who aided and abetted the perpetuation of an image they knew to be false; who arranged for the cover-up; who lied, directly, to reporters and to other staff members; who were veterans of the campaign game; whose loyalty to the Edwards family, such was it was, trumped whatever residual responsibility they felt to the democratic process.  These men and women did the country a disservice.   Not that they should have gone public and accused their guy of being a demon: several folks who learned about the affair decided that they would leave the campaign and pursue other opportunities. [E.A.]

I think that's a 'yes' to "shamed and blamed." How about named? ...  11:36  P.M.

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Mark Greenberg was one of the smartest opponents of the 1996 welfare reform--a brilliant guy, just on the wrong side. Because he's extremely smart, he's exactly not the sort of person those who backed the bill would want administering the program, Yet Obama has given him a high position at HHS's Administration for Children and Families. ... Someone needs to watch Greenberg (and his HHS colleagues) like a hawk. Luckily, Heather Mac Donald is on the job. .... 11:30  P.M.

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Are We "Cool" Yet?

Don't tell Glenn Beck: Obama favors nuclear power. Now he's taking his orders from the Port Huron Statement. ... 8:53  P.M.

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Mark Krikorian and Polipundit note that the immigration module in the SOTU was encouragingly weak. I don't think amnesty for illegal immigrants is something Democrats are going to be able to sneak through under the radar, so if Obama can't bring himself to utter the words "path to citizenship" or "comprehensive"--itself a euphemism designed to allow pols to avoid saying clearer words like "legalization"--it probably isn't going to happen. ... It's all going according to plan! At least that part. ...

P.S.: You can see why Obama might be allergic to "comprehensive" at this point, since it was the "comprehensivist" fallacy that led him to think he should tackle all the health care system's problems--i.e., both coverage and long-term cost control--in one bill, as if that made it more likely to pass. ... Hello? Did "comprehensive" sell  immigration reform? Sell anything, ever? ... Alternative view: "Comprehensive" = unpopular. Voters wonder what you are hiding under that word. ... Update: Obama did call for a "comprehensive energy and climate bill." In this case, "comprehensive" was apparently a euphemism for 
"not comprehensive"--i.e., not including 'cap and trade.' ... 8:36  P.M.

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Gawker Buries the Lede ... well, the second lede, anyway:

Up until he discovered the DVD, says one of our sources, Young's devotion was typical of the "cultish" fervor Edwards brought out in his staffers. This is why, says our source, who is close to Hunter, major media organizations could not stand up the affair story despite well-intentioned efforts. "They [staffers] would do anything to stop it coming out — they lied, they bullied, they called reporters' editors and bad-mouthed them, they exchanged access."

There's your story! What aides told what lies and bullied and bad-mouthed whom? Names please. It wasn't only John and Elizabeth who lied. ...

Update: Gawker unimpressively gets an interview with "an Edwards staffer":

Our staffer says Edwards' lies fooled most everyone:

We all bought the spin. Until the pregnancy stuff surfaced, it wasn't that crazy a story, just a report that he had an affair with a videographer.

This seems like BS. I do not think "most everyone" on the Edwards staff "bought the spin." I've probably written this before, but at the time I had two acquaintances who thought it was maybe ill-advised to push the story of Edwards' affair and who contacted friends of theirs in the Edwards camp. Both times the word came back, to paraphrase, 'It's true, but keep mum about it.' Lots of Edwards staffers knew about this. It's mighty convenient for them to now say they didn't. ... Gawker, in its desperation for Edwards items, seems to have become a happy purveyor of disinformation. Sort of like People.... 8:32  P.M.

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Unlike Glenn Reynolds, I have not changed my view of Andrew Sullivan! But then, I knew him better. ... 8:22  P.M.

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kausfiles Pivots and Recaptures Its Message of Change!

Here's your mystery "celebrity" entering the California governor's race. Yes I was hoping for someone more ... celebritous. This guy's mainly famous for being married to someone who's famous for being famous, right? ... 6:35 P.M.

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John Ellis argues that Obama's job, governing in circumstances not of his choosing, isn't to pass health care reform or cap and trade but to:

get the country on a path to fiscal sustainability and to defeat (as much as humanly possible) those who seek to put nuclear weapons in our cities and detonate them in time for the evening news. His job, more accurately, is to cut costs, delay benefits, right-size government programs, rethink military and diplomatic strategies, re-focus our war efforts, all while rebuilding (or expanding) intellectual and physical infrastructure for the years ahead. And he must do all this while devising new strategies for jump-starting wealth creation. [E.A.]

That makes a lot of sense, except that establishing a guarantee of affordable health care is one of the things that would enable painful cuts in both the public and the private sector. If you know your health care is taken care of, then a cut in your projected pension becomes less threatening. It's less of a big deal to be downsized or outsourced, to give up your Detroit assembly line job (or D.C. newspaper job) and move to find work at some other company with a future. It's just money, then, not life or death. .And it's easier to jump at risks when there's a secure platform underneath you. ... P.S.: Tom Schaller of 538 thinks this sort of health care = flexibility argument should have been the basis of Obama's sales pitch: 

Meanwhile, there should have been a rollout explaining that reform was not only good for corporate employers and thus American productivity, but also for worker and workplace performance and, thus again, American productivity. He should [frame] reform in those terms--rather than as a series of vignettes, true and as sad as they may be, about people with dropped coverage or bankrupting bills--and then publicly dared Republicans and their tea-partying conservative allies to vote against a bill that would make the American economy and the workers who fuel it more effective, more efficient, more productive and more competitive because we would no longer lose time and money and paperwork and missed work days to a cobbled-together health care system

It would have been better than the Orszagist pitch Obama chose (i.e., that near-universal health care coverage would somehow lower health care costs and the deficit). ...6:32  P.M.

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Truth About Cars says: Scott Brown's truck sucks!  6:29 P.M.

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The Left Takes a Powder

Here's a twitter exchange I had today with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (I've reversed the order so read from top down):

 joshtpm I hear official DC is agreed: just wouldn't be right to pass HC reform post Scott brown victory. Welcome to Broder-Brooks-ocracy. about 5 hours ago from Tweetie

@joshtpm but my impression is that it's the left (Weiner, Grijalva) and not the evil centrists who are abandoning hcr on Hill. No? about 5 hours ago from web in reply to joshtpm

@kausmickey many shoes still to drop. But that is our impression. The real story of the last week has been the silence of the centrist dems about 5 hours ago from Tweetie in reply to kausmickey

@kausmickey but "official dc" resides in the commentariat not the right flank of the Dem caucus about 5 hours ago from Tweetie in reply to kausmickey

a) Fair enough. Just don't ever saddle us New Dems and moderates with Broder again, OK? b) Let the record show that, in the crunch, it was the "progressive" left that bailed on health care reform. Arianna bailed too! c) I'm sure many progressives have talked themselves into thinking that the Senate bill is just so awful--no public option, keeps the insurance companies in business, the Pharma deal, etc.--that doing nothing is better. If so, they are deluded. When do they ever think they are going to get this close again? Do they think a bigger, better, lefter Obama is going to sweep America off its feet anytime soon?

The argument that the Senate's scheme would be such a disaster that it would poison the public on reform--made explicitly by local Double-A League radical Robert Scheer--is a special stretch, calling out for a semi-Freudian excavation of progressives' subconscious impulses. After all, isn't it much more likely that, if the Senate scheme fails for lack of a public option, then a public option, or Medicare buy-in, could be added later? Maybe the real fear on the left is that the Senate bill might work. (Then the public option would be in trouble.)

Some observers would argue "progressives" are simply more comfortable staying angry and on the outside. It helps them stoke their followings, or raise funds, or get on MSNBC. I'd say it's more likely that recalcitrant House members like Raul Grijalva are simply advancing their left objections as a handy cover for the universal trans-ideological self-interested Congressional political survival instinct: they don't want to pass a bill and lose in 2010 in a wave of independent, swing-voter displeasure.  ...

In any case, it's revealing, as Marshall said, that the "center" hasn't been playing this covertly self-preservationist game, at least in public. Not that they have to do it when Anthony Weiner is doing it for them. ...

Update: When the most plausible, optimistic scenario for passing health care reform is outlined by .... Dick Morris, you know you're in trouble:

Nancy Pelosi’s strategy is to delay and let the impact of the Brown win in Massachusetts be blunted by time. Meanwhile, she will propose amendments to the Senate bill and submit her proposed changes to the upper chamber. Harry Reid will tell her that such a bill is dead on arrival but she will demand a vote. When the measure is rejected (or fails of closure), she will go back to her caucus and say, “I tried, but the Senate would not accept any of our amendments.”

More: Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio tells TPM he's been meeting with House "progressives" who don't want to pass the Senate bill in part because "it really writes them out of having any impact." Pathetic, no?  Is it that they want to show lobbyists they can deliver, they want to impress voters with Kabuki,, they're just juvenile--or they really don't want to pass a bill? ... 8:26 P.M.

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Game Change Outtakes: Left on the cutting room floor when New York magazine excerpted the juicy Edwards bits from Game Change were these rather forceful sentences from the book itself, about St. Elizabeth:

What the world saw in Elizabeth: a valiant, determined, heroic everywoman. What the Edwards insiders saw: an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazywoman.

They said it! I don't know the truth. I don't think any of the embarrassing, wacky incidents recounted in the book quite add up to that last word. But it would still explain a lot. ... 9:23 P.M.

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I dont thnk I've seen an uglier mass-market sedan than the new Mercedes E-Class. A pretentious pile of dreck. Makes Chris Bangle look like Pininfarina. ....9:30 P.M.

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Groopman 1, Orszag 0

If you didn't want Obama to fire Peter Orszag already,** you might after reading Jerome Groopman's piece in the New York Review of Books. Groopman notes that "comparative effectiveness" research on which treatments work and which don't--research Orszag would back up with financial incentives and other semi-coercive measures, and which he and Obama think will cut costs--is often a four card flush:

Over the past decade, federal "choice architects"—i.e., doctors and other experts acting for the government and making use of research on comparative effectiveness—have repeatedly identified "best practices," only to have them shown to be ineffective or even deleterious.

Plus, declaring one course of action a "best practice" often involves a value judgment that experts aren't in a much beter position to make than individual physicians or patients. When a federal panel recommended against mammograms for women in their forties--allegedly without considering cost--it implicitly decided that the anxiety and pain of false positives (resulting in biopsies and sometimes surgery) outweighed the saving of nearly 12,000 lives over 10 years. Maybe that's not an unreasonable weighing--seems crazy to me, and Groopman doesn't buy it--but it's not a "scientific" finding to be imposed through financial penalties.

P.S.: Obama, who (Groopman notes) consistently portrays "comparative effectiveness as equivalent to cost effectiveness," either a) has an average President's shallow understanding of the subject, or else b) is conveniently trying to make "bending the cost curve" look painless (by pretending cost-cutting will never require denying treatments that have some benefit).  ... Or else c) he knows that if he knew more--enough to second-guess Orszag--he couldn't do the pretending, so he doesn't want to know more. (And Ron Brownstein and Dave Leonhardt love his position the way it is! ) (C) would be my guess.

P.P.S.: I think Groopman pretty clearly demonstrates why Bob Wright was wrong, so wrong, in our latest bloggingheads debate about what was and wasn't in the health care bill. But at least Wright wasn't smug about it. Oh wait, he was! ...

**--The latest humiliation to the Obama/Orszag/Pelosi/Reid health care effort: Dems are apparently floating the idea that the ban on excluding pre-existing conditions will apply only to children (who are of course the least likely to have them). That would be a pathetically small achievement designed mainly to preserve the careers of Dem Congresspersons by allowing them to hype a tiny, face-saving accomplishment. Kabuki wins! Or, as Charlie Peters calls it, Washington Make-Believe. ... 11:40 P.M.

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It's Not Rahm's Fault. It's Obama's Fault.

On bloggingheads, Bob Wright and I have a full and frank discussion of "curve-bending," rationing, "death panels," etc., and whether the health reform bills are objectionable on those grounds. I was in control at all times, I swear. ...

Have I mentioned that the point isn't that I'm right or Bob's right--the point is that this is an entire debate we didn't need to have right now. Obama could have proposed a bill that expanded coverage and raised taxes to pay for it. True, that would have pissed off voters who really don't like tax increases. Instead, he proposed raising taxes and instituting some ominously vague, to-be-determined, 'scientific' and anti-democratic restraints on health care treatments. This successfully pissed off voters who really don't like tax increases and voters--mainly older voters--worried about being denied treatments. The combination of losing the anti-government voters and losing seniors may prove fatal. ...

If it does, it won't be David Axelrod's fault, and it won't be Rahm Emanuel's fault. It won't even be Peter Orszag's fault. It's Obama's fault. Obama's the one who fell for Orszag's Laffer-curve-like, win-win, 'this will save money' line, and who raised the issue at every opportunity in the middle of 2009. It's Obama who became infatuated with--and ordered his staff  to read--Atul Gawande's amorphous New Yorker curve-bending argument and Ron Brownstein's even-less-convincing-than-it-seemed-at-the-time cheerleading piece. It was Obama who eagerly let himself get suckered into discussing end-of-life rationing in the pages of the New York Times. 
 
What do presidents do when they should fire themselves? They fire their advisers and bring in a new crew. That's what may happen here. I'd guess we're about 36 hours away from a Beltway call for "wise men." ... If it wasn't for his role in the Massachusetts Senate debate, I'd say we're a week away from David Gergen's touchdown at Reagan National. ... 10:22 P.M.

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Who's Going to Denounce Raul Grijalva?

Congressman Raul Grijalva--co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus--must be a great source for the liberal healthbloggers in the TPM/TNR/Whippersnapper axis. He's now dramatically announced that he can't vote for the Senate's health care bill--"It does not add up to an improvement in our health care system"--and proposed a complicated two-step alternative that would require the Senate to pass a bill he prefers via the "reconciliation" process, to be followed by a "handful of popular regulatory measures." Yet liberal health reform proponents--who routinely point out that a) the Senate bill is a huge improvement and b) the reconciliation and piecemeal alternatives are unworkable--somehow seem to spare Grijalva the scorn he deserves.
 
Under the Ezra Klein Standard, shouldn't Grijalva be condemned for being "willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people"? I think yes!

P.S.: Grijalva's statement reeks of exactly the sort of posturing and ass-covering you would expect to accompany an engineered train-wreck in which Congressmen decide they want health care reform to die while they pose as its ardent proponents. Grijalva even highlights a poll-tested objection to "the last-minute deal-making with certain individual senators in exchange for their votes," as if a) that isn't how almost all legislation, including "progressive" legislation, gets passed and b) those deals couldn't be easily reversed--and, in the most obvious case (Ben Nelson's Nebraska Medicaid exception) haven't been voluntarily offered up for sacrifice by the now-chastened individual senator in question. ...
 
P.P.S.: I'm 2,500 miles away from the roiling pit of careerist fear in Washington, but I have to think there's still a decent chance (buck up, Josh!) that House Democrats--maybe even those who are good sources--will get enough grief for having wasted 6 months of the nation's time (and maybe a Presidency) that they'll eventually be moved to face reality and accede to Plan B for Sudden Victory (ratification of Senate plan + some fixes). [Update: Maybe less likely with consultants like Tad Devine, Doug Schoen and even ex-Howard Dean campaign manager and 'I-saw-nothing' Edwards aide Joe Trippi counselling retreat. (via Bevan)] What was that Sean Wilentz said about how "history will track you down and condemn you"? Mrs. Pelosi, maybe he was talking about you. Do you want to be remembered as the Ralph Branca of the Democratic Party? ...

Update/Correction: Pride of the Juiceboxers: Alert reader M.E. notes that if I'd scrolled down further in Matt Yglesias' column I'd have seen him denouncing Grijalva, complete with a photo, for "pernicious nonsense," on the grounds that "this is no time for ego trips." The headline even says he's "Flirting with History's Greatest Monster Status." It's a start!--though the "history's greatest monster" jibe turns out to be a self-undermining Simpsons reference. ...  2:39 A.M.

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As monocausal explanations go, this one explains a lot. ... See also. ...  2:55 A.M.

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I just bought the latest edition of the Consumer Reports 2010 Buying Guide, and noticed that the Cadillac CTS--arguably General Motors' flagship vehicle, and the car most often cited as being in the same league with BMW, Audi, and Infiniti--has crappy reliability (in the form of a large black mark). It was crappy in 2008 and in 2009 it's still crappy, with big brake problems, plus problems with "Body Integrity" and "Power Equipment." ... How can holdover 'New GM' VP Bob Lutz blame GM's troubles on a "perception gap" if it can't even fix the CTS? ... P.S.: Cadillac apparently doesn't make a single model with even "average" reliability, though the latest SRX crossover is too new to rate. (The previous versions sucked, reliability-wise). ... 3:10 A.M.

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Would Voters Punish Dem Health Care Backsliders?

Jonathan Cohn, and SEIU head Andy Stern, among others, argue that there's no turning back on health care for House Dems who've already voted for it once. If they now claim to have changed their minds, they'll still be attacked for their earlier vote, or else they'll be pilloried as Kerryesque flip-floppers. 

I'd like to think this is true. But in my experience voters are all too reluctant to punish politicians who've had timely conversions to the winning side after a drubbing at the polls.** Voters may even value those pols more than their colleagues who were on the "right" side all along--the post-defeat change of heart a) pays respect to the voters' power and b) suggests that the pol knows who is in charge and will be easy to control from now on (unlike an annoying principled true believer who might not take orders). ... Pols who have followed electoral repudiations with seemingly opportunistic turnabouts--but have survived thanks to this perverse rewards system--include Jerry Brown (who flipped after losing on Prop. 13) Arnold Schwarzenegger (who started looking a lot like a Democrat after his 2005 "year of reform" flopped in a special election). ...

All this suggests, unfortunately, that many wavering House Dems may decide that declaring they've 'gotten the message' and changed their position on health care reform could, in fact, help protect them from being effectively attacked for their earlier support. ... P.S.: This doesn't mean they won't be effectively attacked for having failed to accomplish much, a slightly different question.. ...

**--Kerry's flip-flops were different--they smacked of instinctive "positioning," the attempt to insure that whatever happened Kerry could say he was on the more popular side. Not a one-time move from "yes" to "no," as it were, but a drumbeat of "yesnos." ...1:18 A.M.

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We're All Excitable Now!

Reservoir Moose: Tarantino has never achieved a scene this saturated with the tense rising threat of imminent violence ... 7:44 P.M.

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Blame Orszag First! Let's Go to the Numbers: Isn't Question 32 in the NBC/WSJ poll pretty close to a verdict on the success or failure of Orszagism as a means of selling health care reform? The verdict would be failure:

32: Thinking about efforts to reform the health care system, which would concern you more?

Not doing enough to make the health care system better than it is now by lowering costs and covering the uninsured.

OR

Going too far and make the health care system worse than it is now in terms of quality of care and choice.

The second option wins, 53-40. Doesn't this at least suggest that all the talk about "game changers" and curve-benders, about how "we're going to have to change how doctors think about health care and how patients think about health care" and the need for a "very difficult, democratic conversation" about costly end of life care (requiring "guidance" from an "independent group" outside of "normal political channels") has spooked people, in a way that just saying "we're setting up these health care exchanges and here's how we pay for them," or "we're going to let anyone over 50 buy into Medicare" wouldn't have spooked them? ...

P.S.--Ask Not for Whom the Chooch Tolls: The GM bailout (Question 28) is shockingly unpopular:--65 vs 30. ...

P.P.S.--"I was upset": Barney Frank had more in common with Andrew Sullivan than I realized. He's calmed down now. ... 4:47 P.M.

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Keeping Up With the Whippersnappers: It's a Mini-festival of bitter excuses over at Ezra Klein's Twitter feed: 

So refusing to shake voters hands turns out to be a bad campaign strategy? Same with insulting the beloved local sports franchise? Huh. about 3 hours ago from web
 
If Brown wins, Democrats go from the largest majority since the 70s to the second-largest majority since the 70s. about 14 hours ago from web
 
Daily Show: "Coakley believes Larry Bird is a Sesame Street character. She went into the bar in Cheers and didn't know anybody's name." about 14 hours ago from web

Meanwhile, travel back in time with us to ... five days ago, when authoritative juiceboxer Matt Yglesias chastised Scott Brown for having managed  "to squander a very favorable electoral landscape." According to Yglesias, Brown "finds himself running in a winnable race, and yet he’s overwhelmingly likely to lose." .... 10:37 P.M.

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Missing in Massachusetts: A good day to remember the late Dean Barnett. ... [via MKH]  P.S.: This past year I would gladly have traded the entire national staffs of the New York Times, Washington Post and all four TV networks for any two of Barnett, Deborah Orin, Marjorie Williams and Cathy Seipp. They were all immune to Democratic BS. ... 10:31 P.M.

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I still haven't heard a convincing argument against the Sudden Victory strategy (in which the House passes the Senate health care bill, fixes it later). Sure, attention-hounds like Anthony Weiner (who's done quite enough to damage the cause of health care reform, thank you) will denounce it today.** Give them a couple of weeks for the Kabuki makeup to wear off. (Or a couple of months--alert reader S.S. wonders if there is is there a time limit on how long the House can let the Senate bill sit there before they take it up?) . ... P.S.: On Hardball just now, Lawrence O'Donnell said he's never seen a case of 'pass it now, we'll enact a fix later' work. But President Clinton endorsed (and signed) the 1996 welfare reform while pledging to correct its excesses (notably its harsh treatment of legal immigrants). There were rumors of a memorably cynical left-wing bumper sticker along the lines of "Only Clinton Can Undo What He Has Done." But in fact Clinton was largely successful in going back and fixing the problems he identified, if I remember. ...

**--Don't we have to add Anthony Weiner's name to the list of those awaiting Ezra Klein's denunciation for being "willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people"? 10:25 P.M.

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Democrats: Are You Ready for ... Victory?

Why Andrew Sullivan is not someone you'd want to follow into battle, Part XVIII: Andrew Sullivan declares, upon contemplating a possible Coakley loss:

Democrats can stop hoping at this point.

I can see no alternative scenario but a huge - staggeringly huge - victory for the FNC/RNC machine tomorrow.  ... [snip]

What comes next will be a real test for Obama. I suspect serious health insurance reform is over for yet another generation.

Even if Coakley wins - and my guess is she'll lose by a double digit margin - the bill is dead. The most Obama can hope for is a minimalist alternative that simply mandates that insurance companies accept people with pre-existing conditions and are barred from ejecting patients when they feel like it. That's all he can get now - and even that will be a stretch. [E.A.]

Later, Sullivan writes, about health care reform:

It's over. Rahm Emmanuel did such a great job, didn't he?

Excitable! ... Q: How do we know this is the real Andrew Sullivan, and not one of his ghostbloggers?**  A: The ghost would have been more level-headed.. ... 

It's not over, of course. There's a good chance of passing the Senate bill through the House, which would be a perfectly legitimate course of action. Nate Silver, for one, has a useful analysis free of theatrical overreactions.. ... Does Dennis Kucinich, in the crunch, really want to be the one who blocked coverage for the uninsured? ... P.S.: Jon Chait calls on Sullivan to keep his head. Never a good bet. ... But once he loses it he recovers quickly! Peer pressure works.  ...

**-- Sullivan's new name for them, apparently, is "under-bloggers." Flattering! ...12:31 P.M.

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Stop me before I curate again: Slate Overboss in Pre-Election Shock Tweet: Even the liberal Obamaphile Jacob Weisberg wouldn't vote for Coakley (because of her role in the Amirault case). .... Neg for Meg: Who is the mystery "celebrity" that conservative radio host John Phillips hears will jump into the California governor's race in about a week? Phillips doesn't specify that it's a Republican.... Lawrence O'Donnell thinks Senate GOP leader McConnell has been secretly trying to make sure Obama's health care reform passes. ... 2:53 P.M.

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Kf hears that if Coakley loses on Tuesday, the White House strategy will in fact be to try to pass the already passed Senate bill, word for word, through the House. Sudden Victory! **... Sorry about all the lost Kabuki! ... And Mr. Trumka, you'll have to get labor unions out from under the Senate's "Cadillac tax" later. ... P.S.: You didn't actually believe Speaker Pelosi when she dismissed this prospect, did you? ... P.P.S.: Always trust content from kausfiles. ...

Update: Keith Hennessy raises the question: Would it really be less controversial for the House to pass the already-passed Senate bill intact, as opposed to quickly ramming through a new House/Senate compromise before Brown is seated? A: Yes. One strategy requires blocking the result of the Mass. election. The "sudden victory" strategy does not. You could seat Brown promptly, and if the House passed the Senate bill it would still be Game Over. ... Of course, that assumes that spooked House lawmakers can be persuaded to pass the Senate bill (something Megan McArdle doubts).. ... [via 538]

**-- formerly known as "Pong."...1:29 P.M.

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Blame Orszag First, Part VIII: A friend emails: 

I think Mass. is validation of your take on Obama's stupid framing of insurance reform.  He has given people absolutely nothing to feel bad about if the bill is stopped.  "WHAT?  THEY TOOK AWAY MY COST CONTAINMENT?"

Coakley and all the Dems are bearing the burden of that stupidity.  It's not that people don't want insurance reform.  It's that they don't want what they have been hearing about it -- from Obama no less than the Republicans. 

Obama has let the respectable press nudge him into talking about vague or downright ominous-sounding Orszagist cost-controlling schemes at virtually every opportunity. Here he is being all-too-easily driven off-message on NPR recently:

SIEGEL: Mr. President, some people have faulted this whole process for not focusing enough on how medicine is practiced in the U.S. and our appetite for lots of tests and the like. I want to ask about a recent, coincidental event, which would be the new guidelines on mammography. They suggested that we've been testing too much and it would be better to get tested less. There was an outcry. ...

OBAMA: Well, I think what it says, No. 1, is that we still have a tendency to think that more medicine is often - is automatically better medicine. And that's just not the case. Inside this reform bill that I'm pushing is a provision that has a panel of experts - doctors, medical experts - who are going to look at all these practices to start changing how we think about medicine.

SIEGEL: Will politicians defer to their judgments - to their scientific judgments?

OBAMA: Well, one of my goals is to make sure that doctors and scientists are giving the best information possible to other doctors who are seeing patients. Look, if you talk to most health care economists right now, they will tell you that every good idea out there, when it comes to improving quality of care and reducing costs of care, are embedded in this bill. It's not going to happen overnight because we're going to have to change both how doctors think about health care and how patients think about health care.

And there are going to be millions of small decisions all across the country and interactions between doctors and patients that, over time, change the trajectory of our health care system. The important point is that we're getting started in this process. And I'm actually very confident that the average person is going to say to themselves, if, right now, I'm taking and paying for five tests and my doctor tells me that I only need one, that person's going to want to take one - save some money and save some time. But they need some validation. They need somebody who's giving them the better information. And we have set up a system where, year after year, best practices are going to get disseminated across the country. [E.A.]

a) Obama says,"[W]e're going to have to change both how doctors think about health care and how patients think about health care." And here I just wanted to get covered! I'm not sure I want to change how I think about health care. ... I thought the genius of the President's health care strategy was that it told people who were happy about their current insurance not to worry. Now he's telling them that under his bill they will need to alter the whole way they look at not only insurance but medicine itself-- that they, and the doctors they like, have it all wrong. Bad voters! Thinking that "more" is better! That's so American. Get your heads re-programmed. b) As Peggy Noonan notes rather forcefully, Obama's making an inside,elite appeal here--to moderate swing members of Congress and respectable Ron Brownstein types:

He negotiates each day with Congress, not with the people. But the people hate Congress! Has he not noticed?

c) "I'm taking and paying for five tests and my doctor tells me that I only need one." Do you have any confidence that Obama knows what he's talking about here? I don't. I think he's read some New Yorker articles. ...

These don't seem like mistakes a pol like FDR or LBJ would make. The program we know as Social Security, for example, was not all that popular when it was enacted in 1935 (for one thing, it took years to get up to speed). But FDR and the Dems realized this--which is why they hid our current contributory pension scheme behind a straight, cash-dispensing program of Old Age Assistance for the elderly poor--a means-tested plan that was wildly popular because it promised to start sending out checks immediately. (It's still with us, having morphed into SSI, which sends checks to, among others, impoverished seniors.) .... 11:26 P.M.

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The Deal: Join a Union, Get a Tax Break?

Is Health Care Reform Now a Vehicle to Promote Unionization? It's one thing to delay until 2018 the tax on "Cadillac" health plans for existing union-negotiated plans, to let the parties rejigger the balance between wages and benefits. That's a standard "grandfather" clause, letting people whose existing arrangements are disrupted keep them going for a while (though why it should apply only to union pay packages is a good question).

But it's another thing to extend this union loophole to collective bargaining agreements that haven't been negotiated yet, or to not-yet unionized firms that organize and then tap into existing collectively bargaining benefit arrangements. That would in effect give workers a tax bonus if they should organize between now and 2018. The government might as well mail a "first time union member" check of $3,000 to every American who successfully unionizes his workplace. As IBD notes, that would be a pretty good substitute for the stalled "card check" legislation, which would try to spur organizing by letting unions avoid a secret ballot (and call in federal arbitrators to set wages).

So which is it? Does the loophole extend only to existing union members or does it apply to future union members--to grandfathers not yet born? I haven't been able to figure out the answer to this question from descriptions  posted online, and suspect it is one of those important issues that turns on the fine details of statutory language (e.g. what the meaning of "is" is). The "Cadillac" tax doesn't kick in for second-class citizens non-union members until 2013. Does the bill give unions until then to sign up new members--who would then be "grandfathered" until 2018 at least?**

If someone knows the answer, feel free to contact me. (Mickey_Kaus@msn.com). I hope the business lobbyists' who declared war on "card check" are on high alert. ....You wouldn't think Obama could afford to rile up more opposition to his plan at this point. ...

**--That's certainly what Lori Montgomery's WaPo summary suggests, perhaps inadvertently:

Health plans negotiated on behalf of state and local workers, or as part of collective-bargaining agreements, would be exempt for five years after the 2013 effective date, giving labor leaders time to negotiate new contracts,

2:24 P..M.

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How Health Care Reform Could Crash

Poll watcher Sean Trende (if that really is his name) thinks Massachusetts GOP challenger Scott Brown may have peaked too soon. Hmm. Doesn't necessarily look like it. .... Mark Blumenthal has some guidance for reading and reconciling all the Mass. polls--it's not just that lower turnout (and tighter voting screens on polls) tend to favor Brown. Everybody knows that!  It's also a robo vs. human contest, especially when it comes to independents.

Perhaps it is harder for them to tell a live interviewer they are ready to vote Republican. Perhaps the more anonymous nature of the automated methodology better simulates the act of voting which will ultimately force a decision.

Plus the Incumbent Rule is on the line, yet again.  ...
 
P.S.--Shock Waves Rippling: Trende makes a good point about the possible effect of a Brown win on health care:

[P]eople are predicting that if Brown wins either (1) the Democrats will pass the Senate bill or (2) the Democrats will get the revised bill through the Senate before Brown is seated.

I guess this is possible, but you have to think that a few more Democrats in R-leaning districts or states will be spooked enough by this to resist voting for the bill.  Does Evan Bayh really think his seat is THAT safe?  If Scott Brown can win in Massachusetts, John Hostettler can sure as heck win in Indiana. [E.A.]

I suppose, if the Congressional id is screaming for a way not to pass health care, the most obvious way that's left would seem to be this: a Senator bails (Nelson, most obviously) or if Coakley is defeated they just can't pass the bill before Brown takes her place. (Darn!) So the bill can't go back to the Senate--any House-Senate compromise is doomed by the lack of a 60th vote. The only hope becomes getting the House to pass the already-approved Senate bill word-for-word (the Sudden Victory strategy). But just enough House liberals declare they can't stomach the Senate bill--on the grounds that the uncompromised Cadillac tax is unacceptable, perhaps, or the subsidies are too low, or that a public option is essential. Presto, a train wreck. Everyone gets to go home and claim they were fighting the good fight. ... P.P.S.: Jay Cost runs down the names of the House swing votes, although he's paying more attention to the moderates who might bail on a compromise, not the liberals who might balk at the Senate bill. ... 2:21 A.M.

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How to Blow It All in One Twitter

Haiti Donations: If, like me, you still don't trust the Red Cross (sorry, boss!)  former Mystery Pollster Mark Blumenthal and others recommend Partners in Health. You can donate here. [via Atlantic Politics Channel] 8:20 P.M.

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 Amy Wilentz-- a good twitterer to follow re: Haiti ... 2:10 A.M..

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Today's worry: That Obama will get unions to swallow the "Cadillac tax" on costly health care plans in part by somehow promising to pass a version of labor's "card check" bill before the big Dem majorities vanish in November. ... The mechanics of such a deal seem complicated: Unless the unions are bigger suckers than I think they are, the White House would presumably have to get all the swing Senate votes on "card check" (e.g., Blanche Lincoln) to promise not to filibuster, even though that meant going on record for another controversial leftish agenda item and angering their business constitutents. Extracting such a promise would almost certainly require specifying what sort of "card check" bill we're talking about (e.g. Retain secret ballot for organizing elections but with a shorter election timetable? What about mandatory arbitration?). And that would in turn add a whole new galaxy of issues to the already touchy health care negotiations. Still, I hope the business opponents of "card check" are alert to the threat. Murphy? . ... 2:19 A.M.

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Twitter has dramatically lowered the barriers that once prevented respected figures from publishing what Malcolm Gladwell calls "Disqualifying Statements". Here are three tweets that do the job for me:

The amazing thing abt "The Hangover"? You can watch it again, know ev. thing that's coming, know how it ends, and still laugh 2x as hard.  David Carr 

Don't try "Tangled Up in Blue" as your first Rock Band effort. Dylan should have never gone electric. Greg Mitchell
 
Some idiot set firecrackers off on a jet and were spsd to be afraid of that? Al-Q is a joke  Spencer Ackerman

Maybe the second one is ironic in a way I'm not getting. ... P.S.: More nominations accepted. (Mickey_Kaus@msn.com). Remember, everybody has at least one Disqualifying Statement in them. ... 2:10 A.M.

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Why Peter Orszag is No Gary Hart

We're All Claire Milonas Now: Byron York places the blame for ObamaCare's unpopularity squarely on Orszagism--specifically the claim that  "you can insure millions of currently uninsured people and save money in the process." People don't believe it. Opponents of the bill don't believe it and half the supporters of the bill secretly don't believe it. (They think they are "stuffing the beast." or "feeding the beauty"). ... [via Instapundit] 1:24 P.M..

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Hasen v. Kaus: We will find out soon enough, in the Citizens United case, whether Prof. Hasen was right (in thinking the Court will strike down most of the restrictions on corporate financing of campaign ads) or I was right (in thinking the Court would grope for at least a temporary halfway house/centrist position). Let me say that upon rereading I have somewhat less than rock solid confidence in my prediction--though it seems like the preferable outcome. ...  10:33 P.M.

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Sudden Victory Suddenly Acceptable: Insiders scoffed when it was suggested that the House should simply pass the Senate bill, word for word, thereby avoiding the need for a second, risky Senate vote. Why, House liberals would never stand for it! They needed changes, if only to show they'd fought! The House must be allowed to work its will in conference! Now, with the prospect that a Republican might win Kennedy's Senate seat--denying Dems their 60th vote-- they're not scoffing anymore. ... Jon Chait is on board with this "Pong" strategy**, which maybe should be officially renamed Sudden Victory (to distinguish it from the standard "ping pong" approach of sending a modified bill back to the Senate). Chait also notes that many of the changes the House would want can be handled later through the "reconciliation" process, which only takes 50 votes (i.e. Pong Plus). ... kf in December, TNR in January. ... 

**--Update: Shrum too. ...  2:34 P.M.

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Truth About Cars hasn't completely lost its bite. It's Detroit Auto Show coverage trashes a) GM CEO Ed Whitacre's strategic dissembling about how the government will "make a lot of money" on its bailout,  b) Chrysler's iffy forecasts and absurd new "lifestyle" trim levels (e.g. "Express, Hero, Heat, Crew and Uptown," plus "Detonator" and "Shock"), c) Honda's seeming inability to wring impressive mileage numbers from its hybrids, d) VW's new commitment to blandness, and e) Transpo Secretary Ray LaHood's general public cluelessness. .... P.S.: But they're wrong, so wrong about the looks of the Honda CR-Z 2-seat hybrid. The production version with its pug schnoz is much cuter than the excessively lean-mean concept car.  ...  1:20 P.M.

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kf is Stumped: Here are two seeming contradictions I haven't quite figured out how to resolve:

1. I admired the "military reform" movement championed by Col. John Boyd, Gary Hart, and James Fallows, which attempted to do more with less money by altering the culture that underlay defense spending. But I'm deeply skeptical of the "delivery reform" movement championed by Peter Orszag and Atul Gawande, which attempts to do more with less money by altering the culture that underlies health care spending. Why would a neoliberal find one proposition compelling but not the other? ...

Possible answers: 1) Military reform promoted a new doctrine for how to achieve the goal of beating the enemy--maneuver warfare (as opposed to attrition warfare). Health care reform proposes no equivalent new strategy, only a different means of pursuing the old strategies. Its military equivalent would be procurement reform, not strategic reform; 2) Maneuver warfare ultimately proved successful at winning wars but not so successful at cutting costs. A lot of the fancy high-tech weapons the military reformers derided turned out to work, especially in a fast-changing "maneuver" context. Now we have to pay for them; 3) All our military has to do is to be able to defeat our enemies. Once we have superiority, there's no reason to pursue ever-more-expensive weaponry. But the purpose of the health care system is to keep people alive--its enemy is, in effect, death, which will never be defeated. We can always do better, and there will always be legitmate reason to pursue ever-more-expensive treatments (which is why all of Gawande's hodge-podge trial-and-error efficiencies, however desirable, won't necessarily compensate for the rising cost of more complex, yet effective, procedures) ...

2. I'm skeptical of the ability of "sunshine" procedural reforms--open meeting requirements, or televised conference committeees, etc.--to actually show voters what is going on. More likely they just drive the real negotiations into an un-televised pre-meeting. But I admit that when you attend an actual debate in Congress, you do learn things. (Examples: During the 1996 welfare reform debate, when Bob Dole accidentally allowed an amendment that essentially restored the welfare entitlement after being assured on the floor by Sen. Chafee that it was non-controversial. Or during the immigration debate of 2007, when Harry Reid tellingly congratulated Sen. Byron Dorgan for pushing the dealbreaking amendment that effectively scuttled the bill.) 

Possible explanations: 1) When the outcome is in doubt, Senators have to come to the floor of the Senate to do battle, and because they are adversaries they try to surprise each other in public. It's not all Kabuki. But in most conference committees--like the one the Dems are skipping on health care--the outcome isn't really in doubt. There are just deals to be cut. 2) Floor votes and debates are the only time Senators and Representative are all gathered in one place. Naturally they try to get in a lot of actual business. ....

None of these answers is completely satisfying. Suggestions welcomed. ...  11:18 P.M.

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I went to my local Mexican diner and offered to give them a bundled payment to cure my hunger, but they insisted I pay for every dish I ordered under the archaic "fee for taco" model. ... 11:17 P.M.

Honey, Will You Be My Game-Changer?

We Remember Jim Johnson!

Rug or punk? You make the call! ... 3:18 P.M.

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Tom Blumer buries his unburying of the lede from a recent Peter Wallison op-ed. Wallison's key graf:

New research by Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer for Fannie Mae and a housing expert, has found that from the time Fannie and Freddie began buying risky loans as early as 1993, they routinely misrepresented the mortgages they were acquiring, reporting them as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime or Alt-A. [Emphasis added]

"[A]s early as 1993." Hmm. Doesn't that put this alleged routine misrepresentation well before Designated Fall Guy Franklin Raines' tenure as head of Fannie Mae--and back into the watch of Getting-Away-With-It-Because-I'm-Well-Connected-and-Spread-It-Around Mondale campaign manager and initial Obama veep-vetter Jim Johnson? I think it does! (Johnson was CEO of Fannie Mae from 1991-1998.) ... P.S.: 'Misrepresented the mortgages ...." Isn't misrepresenation some kind of, I dunno ... fraud or ... crime? Even if it was done in an arrogant, misguided attempt to extend the American dream of home ownership down the income scale (which maybe had a side effect of justifyiing the high pay of Fannie Mae executives)?  ... Just asking! ... [via Instapundit] 3:10 P.M.

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If that's what Brit Hume thinks why shouldn't he say it? This is my in-depth analysis of Hume/Woods controversy. Carl Cannon has more context. ...  4:23 P.M.

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Did Tom Brokaw read this NYT article before going on Meet the Press and claiming it shows the folly of "what happens at UCLA, where they extend life no matter what the cost?" The article actually badly damages the righteous, self-referencing Dartmouth/Orszag/Leonhardt Cult of Curve-Bending, which holds, a la Brokaw, that high-cost hospitals spend more on Medicare without producing results. a) Did you know that the Dartmouth analysis--contrasting the amount spent by U.C.L.A. in the last six months of life with the smaller amount spent by Mayo in Rochester--doesn't count the money spent on patients who live?

It can be hard, sometimes impossible, to know which critically ill patients will benefit and which will not.

That distinction tends to get lost in the Dartmouth end-of-life analysis, which considers only the costs of treating patients who have died. Remarkably, it pays no attention to the ones who survive. [E.A.]

And here I thought having patients survive was kind of the whole point.  ... b) The NYT's Abelson gives a cheering example of an instance where U.C.L.A.'s expensive "Hail Mary" worked. ... And Tom Brokaw wouldn't want a doctor who'd throw the Hail Mary? Is there a more benign use of society's resources than throwing medical Hail Mary's? More videogames, maybe? c) Abelson presents several sources of evidence that variations in spending aren't as great as the Dartmouth cult would have it; d) Most important, spending more appears to not necessarily be as wasteful as Orszag and Obama would have us think it is, at least according to one study (commissioned by the expensive California hospitals themselve):

One-third is a huge number, no? ... Yes, the high-cost hospitals paid for the study. But if we're going to start taking things like that into account ...

I'd say Brokaw's comments prove Jack Shafer's point: The biggest corrupting force isn't money, it's consensus--what respectable people believe. These days, they believe the Dartmouth dogma. ... 5:23 P.M.

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All the hopes and dreams of the Democratic Party are bound up in the person of one woman: Janet Napolitano! . She must be protected at all costs. ... 2:20 P.M.

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The NYT is Peter Orszag's Love Child

C-SPAN BFD: Complaints about the Dems failure to televise or otherwise open up the House/Senate health care negotiations seem near-completely hollow (as were Obama's promises during the campaign). Real legislative deals are always most efficiently cut behind closed doors, where the principals can be candid and concession-minded without fear of embarrassment, and where they can't grandstand. ... That's life.  It's not like we don't know what the issues are, or that we won't find out how they've been resolved ....If the Dems let C-SPAN cover the negotiations they'd just have to find another room nearby in which to hold the real negotiations first. ...

In essence, understandably desperate Republicans (aided in this case by MSM reporters looking for a bit of cheap, non-ideological adversarialism) have now adopted, for tactical reasons, one of the most immature goo-goo liberal fantasies: the idea that "open meetings" on high-profile issues produce actual legislative transparency (as opposed to another layer of fake transparency). Next they'll be complaining the negotiators don't exhibit enough race and gender diversity. ...

P.S. Because all pols need to have someplace where they can talk in private, the complaints that Sarah Palin dared to use a private email to discuss state business seem equally hollow. ... 11:25 P.M.

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Even the normally skeptical Truth About Cars seems to have bought the NYT's account of the newfound spirit of cooperation between labor and managment at GM's Lordstown, Ohio plant. TTAC:

Who’d have imagined it? But then, who in the UAW of the 1970s and 80s imagined that GM would one day be bankrupt? Like so many of the internal problems that brought GM down, labor issues were largely a product of GM’s sheer size and dominance in the market. The same arrogance that led GM to squander its technological edge and commitment to quality led GM’s UAW workforce to believe that the gravy train would always be there, and that the primary goal was to get a bigger cut of the pie. That sense of certainty that GM would always be a dominant player in the industry has died hard, but with bankruptcy the lesson seems to have been learned. [E.A.]

This seems like a convenient liberal fallback fantasy: First line of defense--the UAW didn't help bankrupt GM. Second line of defense-- OK, sure, the UAW helped bankrupt GM. But these "labor issues were largely a product" of the attitudes engendered by "GM's sheer size and dominance in the market," not by, say, New Deal-style unionism itself. But wasn't the impending end of GM's dominance clear a couple of decades ago? Why couldn't the spirit of cooperation have effectively taken hold a few months, or even years, before bankruptcy and the resulting bailout?  ... Alternative view: GM's labor issues were, and are, largely a product of the labor laws that structure labor relations in America's unionized industries. In other words, the Wagner Act. It will always be less efficient to produce cars in a regime of adversarial negotation and legalistic grievance-filing and rulemaking, especially in an industry where (like virtually all industries these days) you have to be constantly making lots of little changes.  If GM somehow survives, and the "gravy train" returns, the Wagner Act will still be there to make sure it goes away again. ...11:10 P..M.

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One day I'll read a persuasive article describing how we can "bend the curve" on health care costs without reducing care. Hasn't happened yet! The latest addition to this massive Archive of the Unconvincing is the NYT's  David Leonhardt's piece on what he forthrightly calls "rationing" of medical capacity in Richmond, Virginia. Basically, Virginia limits the number of hosptial beds. South Dakota doesn't. The idea seems to be that without the limits, medical entrepreneurs build more capacity, and then doctors order patients to use that capacity, running up costs without improving care. This would seem to require doctors to order up treatments they should know are flat out not effective--not just cost-ineffective-but that's the argument. So how does the Richmond vs. Dakota comparison come out?

1.  In Richmond the number of beds per 1000 residents fell from 4.8 in 1996 to "about three." You would now expect Leonhardt to unleash a string of stats showing that medical care in Richmond has gotten better despite these limits. You would be wrong. Care in Richmond is "better than in most American metroplitan areas," says Leonhardt. OK, but what was it like before? Maybe it was better than nearly every metro area before.  Richmond hospitals do a "better-than-average job of treating heart attacks," Leonhardt says. OK, but were they much-better-than-average before? Anyway, that's just heart attacks. ... Oh, and a patient named Janet Binns--actually, a patient's daughter--feels there is "nothing cheap about the care." Well, all right then! ....

But wait a minute:, Leonhardt later notes that "[S]ome of Richmond's hospitals do poorly on Medicare's metrics." But that's "kind of the point," he assures us, because it just proves that Medicare in Richmond is just like the rest of the country. Huh? I thought the point was that Richmond's cuts hadn't reduced the excellent quality of care, not that they'd lowered it to the national average. ... And why doesn't he tell us more about those underperforming "metrics"?

 2. South Dakota, meanwhile, lifted its regulatory caps on hospital beds. As a result, a health care company named Bon Secours went on "an expansion binge. ...Suddenly, southeastern South Dakota had vastly more medical capacity than just a few years earlier." You would expect Leonhardt to now demonstrate that all this expensive new medical capacity didn't translate into healthier South Dakotans. You would be wrong. He just drops the subject. For all we know, the Bon Secours spending binge revolutionized prarie health care the way LBJ's rural electrification program revolutionized life in the Texas hill country.

3. Some "doctors and hospitals" told Leonhardt that Virginia regulators had become "lax" in their rationing of hospitals beds recently. You would expect Leonhardt to then demonstrate that this rumored relaxation had in fact happened--with the number of hospital beds per thousand rising, perhaps. You would be wrong. Yet Leonhardt uses the rumored, unsubstantiated laxity to explain why Richmond's "spending growth had ... accelerated" recently. Yikes.The curve is coming unbent! Instead of 39th cheapest in the country, Richmond is now only 69th. But wait--a dozen paragraphs earlier Leonhardt had tried to convince us that rationing worked in Richmond by brandishing the "39th" figure. If that was merely an ephemeral success, why didn't he tell us at the time? Alternative explanation: Rationing works for a while. Then it stops working and costs start rising because it starts to impinge on care (which prompts regulators to become "lax" and allow new facilities).

4.  Richmond is one city in Virginia. What's happened in the rest of the state?

5. Some 37 states have a program like Virginia's requiring hopsitals to get permission to add beds, etc. What's happened in those other states?

6. Indeed, if so many states have this program, then isn't it part of the status quo? In other words, it's not "our future." It's our present. Whatever savings the regulations may produce,  they are part of the profligate spending curve that Obama confidently tells us he'll bend further.

7. Leonhardt's articles in general would be more convincing if he didn't seem a puppet of the Orszagist agitprop bureau "Dartmouth researchers" he constantly cites. It's almost as if they're ...I  don't know ... feeding him the stats he says he needs. Too bad they didn't feed him some better ones.

10:20 P.M.

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