Category Archives: Democratic Party

Steve McMahon Is So Wrong

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I caught the segment in the video below on Hardball yesterday. If you don’t want to watch, it’s a discussion among Tweety, Democratic strategist Steve McMahon and Republican strategist Todd Harris. McMahon thinks the Democratic Party should cut the public insurance option from the health care reform package and pass a “compromise” bill without it.

McMahon thinks the health care package won’t pass with the public insurance option but could pass without it. He thinks it’s better for Congress to pass something it can call “health care reform” now rather than have the whole effort defeated because of the public insurance option. We have a window of opportunity to pass a health care reform bill, he says, and if we miss this window and pass nothing there may not be another chance for years.

My thinking is just the opposite. If Congress passes a bill without the public insurance option, it will confirm the darkest beliefs of Americans about government being irrelevant to their lives. I sincerely believe that the rest of the legislation might make some marginal improvements in the system. It might make a tangible difference for a few people. But it would do nothing that will make a big, tangible difference in the lives of most American citizens.

So if they pass this bill without the public insurance option, there will be a big whoop-dee-doo in media about how now everybody’s got health care reform. And the days and weeks and months will go by, and most people won’t notice that anything has changed.

This is, I think, the absolute worst thing that Congress could do. It would be better to let the whole thing be defeated, then go to the American people and say, look, we tried to get you this meaningful reform, but Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats blocked it. And, yeah, that’s a lame excuse. But I think rank and file Dems, and many Independents, are sick to death of these pathetic tweaks that Washington mistakes for accomplishments but which don’t make any real difference in the lives of Americans.

In the long run, whether a bill was passed with bipartisan support or not will mean absolutely nothing. If a bill passes that really does relieve many of our fears of losing our insurance and being dumped out of the health care system altogether, that bill will be very popular. Before long, politicians who didn’t support it will pretend that they did. There’s your bipartisan support.

On the other hand, a “compromise” bill passed with everyone in Congress holding hands and singing “Koom By Ya,” but which does not make a tangible difference in peoples’ lives, won’t mean a bucket of warm spit by the time the next elections roll around.

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Pull “The Trigger”

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Certainly President Obama’s health care proposals fall short of what most of us want — national single payer — but at least there’s a public insurance plan that promises to provide coverage for many Americans now locked out of private insurance, either by lack of money or a “preexisting condition.”

Although I expect many Americans would still fall through the cracks and remain cut off from health care, I believe the public option would be a great help to millions who don’t have health insurance now. If that option is removed from the reform package, however, what’s left will amount to feeble tweaks of the current system that would make little tangible difference to anyone. Well, anyone but health insurance executives.

Naturally Republicans are fighting the public plan tooth and nail. Now there’s a “compromise” option championed by “moderates” that effectively would remove the public plan without officially killing it.

My definition of a “moderate” in this context — politicians who vote against the interests of their constituents not because of lunatic right-wing ideology, but because they’ve just plain been bought off.

“Moderate” Republican Senator Olympia Snowe came up with the idea of a “trigger” that would postpone the public plan to some hazy place in the future unless private insurance fails to meet certain benchmarks. Then the public plan option would be taken off the shelf and put into effect.

This means there never will be a public plan, except on paper. Even if private insurance misses the benchmarks, you know that Congress will come up with fine excuses for them so that the public plan doesn’t happen.

Ryan Grim reports for Huffington Post that a pack of Blue Dog Democrats are backsliding on earlier pledges to back the public plan and are coming out in favor of the trigger. Although the Blue Dog Coalition (click here for member list) hasn’t officially declared support for the trigger, it may be heading in that direction. If enough Democrats sell us out for the “trigger” option, health care reform is dead.

And, once again, the Democratic Party will have failed us, and once again, special interests and not the people will set public policy.

The Scare Party

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I didn’t watch the President’s national security speech today, but I take it he made a firm commitment to closing Guantanamo in spite of the lack of confidence from congressional Democrats. Good for you, Mr. President.

I also understand many people watched a split screen duet between the President and former Veep Dick Cheney. This manufactured showdown was nothing other than a gimmick to pull in a few more viewers.

But we’ve got serious issues to consider; we don’t need Sideshow Dick, thanks.

Speaking of Dick — yesterday Glenn Greenwald published a post titled “Terrorists in Prison: is there anything the Right doesn’t fear?”

The answer appears to be, maybe tapioca pudding, but I’m not placing any bets on the pudding.

What’s being called “a four-man homegrown terror cell” was busted in New York. The four were unsophisticated hoodlums with no connections to any other terrorist group, and authorities have had them under surveillance for several months. The FBI helped orchestrate their “plot” and even sold them some phony bomb that the four planted around a synagogue.

And faster’n you can say “booga booga!,” the entire Right Blogosphere went into panic meltdown. I swear, just today, Pam Atlas used up her annual budget of boldface italic exclamation points!!! And throughout the Right there are CAPS LOCKS THAT WILL NEVER COME UNSTUCK AGAIN !!!

As Steve M. says, the system worked. Let’s panic!

Did I mention the four hoodlums were jailhouse converts to Islam? You get the picture.

Yet the pathetic, sniveling cowardice of the Right is nowhere nearly as pathetic and as sniveling as some other cowardice — namely, that of congressional Dems. As Glenn says,” There’s no more mewling, craven, subservient entity in the United States than the Senate Democratic caucus.”

Rachel Maddow was at her most brilliant last night explaining that Dems have been terrorized by “Fortuna, Imperatrix Mundi (O Fortuna)” from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Now, that’s pathetic.

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Specter Switching Parties?

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If this is true, it would be huge — CNN is reporting that Sen. Arlen Specter has switched parties. That means when Al Franken finally takes his seat in the Senate the Dems will have 60 votes.

Here’s Chris Cillizza reporting the same thing. Looks like it’s a “go.”

That means, assuming Dems vote together (a big if), the Dems could break GOP filibusters that prevent vital bills from being brought to the full Senate for a vote.

I take it Specter, who is up for re-election in 2010, made the move to avoid a defeat in his primary next year. Republicans were throwing their support behind the more conservative former Rep. Pat Toomey, even though (I’m told) Toomey has little hope of winning a general election unless he’s running against a mollusk.

Blackbird

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Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free.

Blackbird fly
Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.

News item: Beatles Stars Reunite at Concert, dedicate song "Blackbird" to President Obama.

Never Say Never

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I wrote yesterday that I hadn’t seen any Democrats talk of a permanent majority. Well, now I’ve found one.

“This was not just a change election, but a sea-change election,” Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, said during remarks at the National Press Club. “This is the end of the conservative era.”

“What you’re seeing in the nation is the emergence of a center-left majority,” Borosage continued. “We are witnessing the creation of a permanent progressive majority.”

Let’s forget the word “permanent,” shall we? That’s nonsense. The pendulum will continue to swing. But the rest of the Politico article linked above makes some critical points.

The groups Democrats were successfully able to court in 2008, including Hispanics, single women, Asians and youth voters, are a growing part of a electorate, said [Stan] Greenberg, while the base voters Republicans have depended on have become a proportionately smaller part of it.

Conservatives ought to be worried that 66 percent of voters under 30 voted for Barack Obama. A clear majority of voters between the ages of 30 and 64 voted for Obama. Only the 65+ voters preferred John McCain. This doesn’t bode well for the future of the Republican Party.

Certainly, many of those young voters might be persuaded to vote Republican in the future. However, this election shows us that this group won’t be won over by Atwater-Rove style “fear and smear” campaigns. This means the current Republican establishment has no clue how to campaign to them. Also, I think Republicans have bleeped up so badly that younger voters will be wary of them for a very long time. They are not likely to switch allegiances until Democrats bleep up really badly. Which, of course, they are capable of doing.

Back to Stan Greenberg:

“A lot of Republican voters were brought in with gimmicks,” the pollster said. “They had their base and then would try to pick off specific groups of voters on narrow issues.”

Greenberg insisted meanwhile that those who voted for Obama “share a world view.”

I think this is critical. I’ve lectured many times on the patched-together nature of the Reagan coalition. People calling themselves “conservatives” in America really do not share a worldview in the intellectual sense. They share a lot of resentments and biases, yes. They are attracted to the gauzy glow of a shared mythos, and the imagery (e.g., cheesy eagle art), narratives and slogans that go with it.

Other than that, however, conservatives don’t make sense. They want “small government” but a big military. They support war as a solution to foreign policy problems, but they don’t want to raise taxes to pay for war. They want “liberty” but support warrantless wiretaps. They want “free markets” but mostly support corporate welfare. They want government “off our backs” but in our bedrooms. (One could do a lot with that last one, metaphorically speaking, but I think I’ll leave that to your imaginations.)

In other words, they have a laundry list of positions (on which they do not all agree), but the positions do not make an integrated whole. They don’t see how the parts fit together. Well, they don’t fit together. But they should, if they’re going to come together as a philosophy of governance. This give us a clue why a Republican Congress, working together with a Republican president, totally bleeped up large parts of the planet.

Frankly, after the New Deal coalition broke up in the early 1970s, Democrats didn’t have much in the way of a worldview, either. Less ideological than Reagan Republicans, Dems have been great at thinking up programs to solve this or that problem, but beyond “good government” they had no glowing worldview to unite them or make the Dem brand distinctive. They had no talent for pointing to the shining city on the hill.

Republicans, on the other hand, were great at pointing to the shining city on the hill. They developed a religious faith that if they were true to their ideology, it would lead them to the Promised Land. But, as I’ve said, their ideology is a disjointed mess. And as the luminous Saint Ronald fades from memory, if not from rhetoric, they’ve forgotten the shining city and have fallen back on stoking hate, fear and wedge issues to keep the coalition together.

[Update: Yes, I know Saint Ronald stoked hate, fear and wedge issues also, but he made these nasty things sound virtuous and positive. A large part of Reagan’s appeal was that he could make bigots feel good about themselves again. There was genius to that. No one who has come after has been able to match him.]

The hopes many of us have pinned on Barack Obama is that he personifies the best of both sides. He has the rhetorical skills to show us the shining city, while at the same time he’s got the smarts to see how the parts fit together, how the details add up to a big picture. If he gets anywhere in the ball park of being the president he promises to be, he’ll be a great president.

(This morning I changed the default blog category, the stuff that is listed after “Filed Under,” from “Bush Administration” to “Obama Administration.” Boy, did that feel good.)

I’ve been having a lot of fun reading conservative commentary on where conservatism should go from here, and I hope to write about that sometime over the weekend.

The Myth of Liberal “Overreach”

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So far I haven’t seen a single Democrat, or independent liberal for that matter, claim that the election of Barack Obama means there will be a permanent Democratic majority forever and ever amen. The best outcome most of us hope for is that Dems will at least keep if not increase their seats in Congress in the 2010 midterms and that President Obama gets a second term. Beyond that, anticipation dissipates into the Unknowable Unknown.

The only certainty is that all compounded things will decay. Nothing lasts forever, in other words.

This has not stopped a number of conservatives from wagging fingers at us and warning us not to expect a permanent Democratic majority. Of course not, dears, but nobody thinks in terms of “permanent majorities” except you. Oh, and clue: As long as there are human beings, history will not end.

The disconnect may be that conservatives don’t grasp the meaning of the word “permanent.” James Antle, associate editor of the American Spectator, writes,

After Tuesday, the Republican remnant in Washington is fearing the worst. While they seem to have dodged a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, they will have less ability to shape and block legislation than at any time since Jimmy Carter’s administration. Conservative Democratic senators are few, and many moderate Republicans from blue states will feel pressure to cave into Obama’s agenda. Republican opinion leaders warn of a big, and perhaps permanent, shift to the left.

It’s happened before and could happen again.

A permanent shift to the left happened before? But it didn’t last, did it? That means it wasn’t permanent.

Conservatives also are warning us not to “overreach,” meaning don’t go all New Deal on us. Antle continues,

But these concerns could be as overwrought as Democratic worries that their party would forever be shut out of power by an ascendant right wing after November 2004. Undivided American government leads to overreach, and overreach leads to defeat. It took four years of Carter to bring about eight years of Ronald Reagan. It required just two years of Clinton to give way to Gingrich and a dozen years of Republican domination of Congress.

Let’s think about this. Did Reagan sweep Carter out of office in 1980 because of “overreach”? Did George Bush and the GOP win in 2000 because the Clinton Administration was guilty of “overreach”? That’s not how I remember it. There were many factors that caused Dems to lose those elections, some of which were the fault of Dem administrations and Dems in Congress, and some of which were not. But “overreach” was not one of those factors.

Carter lost in 1980 mostly because he seemed weak and ineffectual, not because he “overreached.” His actual policies were middle-of-the-road for the time. Among his achievements were deregulation of the airline and telephone industries.

Regarding “It required just two years of Clinton to give way to Gingrich and a dozen years of Republican domination of Congress” — let us note that President Clinton won re-election easily in 1996. And, frankly, I think it’s possible that he would have been re-elected in 2000 if he could have run for a third term.

So what “overreach” is Antle talking about? If you want to see an example of “overreach,” let’s see — invading Iraq? the Patriot Act? The Terri Schiavo episode?

Don’t Forget to Breathe

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The final pre-election polls show Obama in the lead. I would have said “comfortably” in the lead, but you know us lefties. We always expect a cartoon anvil to drop out of the sky and flatten us.

The Right is still running a signature right-wing campaign. They’ve got the illegal immigrant aunt, more 1960s terrorist ties, claims that Obama will destroy entire industries/ban Christianity/start another holocaust. A vote for Obama is a choice to go to hell.

Good thing the election is tomorrow, or in a few more days they’d be claiming Obama wants to eat your baby. With fava beans and a nice chianti.

Michael Tomasky theorizes why the smears aren’t working the way they used to:

That coalition of affinity that Reagan created between right and middle, Bush has put asunder. His failures have made the average, apolitical American as distrustful of conservatism as he or she once was of liberalism – indeed somewhat more so, since the memory of conservative failure is fresher in the mind. This is a new context. Many experts have yet to grasp it. Certain elements within the mainstream media haven’t quite got it yet. And clearly some liberals just can’t believe that it might be the case.

This is not to say that negative campaigning will disappear as of tomorrow. But it is to observe that political contexts change, and eras end. I’m still suspicious enough to use the conditional tense, but by Wednesday morning even the most paranoid liberals may be forced to accept that fact.

I believe we are looking at an enormous political re-aliagnment, bigger than 1980. More like 1933. But these things don’t begin and end neatly. The re-alignment has been going on for a while — at least since Katrina — and I don’t expect it to end tomorrow. I’ll have more thoughts on that later.