Month: September 2009

Factcheck.org dissects.

 

Ta-Nehisi says it well:

I keep meeting lefties who tell me Obama's "too soft" with these guys, and I keep looking at them like they're crazy. I am going to go out on a limb and say that there is something deeper at work here, something beyond the policy fights. I think a lot of us don't just want Obama to be effective, we want him to exact some measure of revenge. It's smart to understand the difference between the two, and moreover, how the desire for one can undermine the other. A section of conservatives love Sarah Palin because she drives liberals crazy. That she drives a lot of other people crazy too, and hence undermines herself, is beside the point.

Further thoughts here. I repeat my belief in the core attraction of Obama's candidacy and presidency: that he is not engaging in Rove-Morris daily politicking, or descending into the cable news muck. The whole point of the Obama candidacy, in my view, was to help us get past that to a substantive discussion of practical policy decisions which America simply has to face.

Is he tilting the country leftward? In one sense, yes. He believes that government has been too inert in confronting healthcare costs and access; he believes it was too passive in the face of irresponsible unregulated financial markets; he believes we need to move to a post-carbon economy sooner rather than later; he believes we should never have gotten into Iraq; he believes it is better to find a way to resolve the Israel-Palestinian question than to allow it to blow up the entire Middle East (and us); and he believes, it appears, that we have to hunker down in Afghanistan. Sure, he's liberal in this sense. But doesn't he have a fricking point after the last eight years?

In an ideal world, I'd favor a Sarkozy style carbon tax, an end to employer subsidies for health insurance, a swift departure from Afghanistan. I'd also like marriage equality in Alabama, an end to agricultural subsidies and a flat tax.

But the right had its chances and blew it. And the problems are real and he's our best bet at tackling them seriously for a long time to come. Moreover, Obama's proposals are within the center of rational debate, and he is open to persuasion. As he said last night, he's happy to back tort reform, or McCain's catastrophic insurance idea. He has also bent to the Clinton position on mandates. His proposal, one should recall, is to massively increase the markets for private insurance companies and drug companies. If David Cameron, the British Tory leader, were to propose this, he'd be called a Thatcherite radical. But in the world of Fox News, this is tantamount to government "take-over". Piffle. Claptrap. Bollocks.

The reform is also reformable. The healthcare exchanges – where individuals can buy insurance from competing plans – could be a strong basis on which to slowly decrease employer subsidies and encourage self-insurance. The "trigger" for a public option is a perfect Obama compromise because it is an empirical judgment. All these defensible and centrist proposals – while not as radical as I'd like – are nonetheless a great start and the achievement of near-universal insurance coverage would be a historic milestone. And you have to be a very bitter person to celebrate the denial of insurance to anyone.

In this, the tone of his discourse is critical. He would lose it all if he followed MoDo's advice. He needs to stay bipartisan, reasoned, and centrist to succeed. Despite the fulminations of an unhinged GOP, he is doing all of that.

Many of us supported him not to revive a right-left war, but to try to move past that divide. He has kept that promise. We need to reward him with our support.

Atul Gawande approved of Obama's speech. On reform more generally:

[T]his is just a start. Our current health-care system presents seemingly insurmountable difficulties. It is too big, too complex, too entrenched, bloated, Byzantine, and slowly bursting. What may be most challenging about reforming it is that it cannot be fixed in one fell swoop of radical surgery. The repair is going to be a process, not a one-time event. The proposals Obama offers, and that Congress is slowly chewing over, would provide a dramatic increase in security for the average American. But they will only begin the journey toward transforming our system to provide safer, better, less wasteful care. We do not yet know with conviction all the steps that will rein in costs while keeping care safe. So, even if these initial reforms pass, we have to be prepared to come back every year or two to take another few hard and fiercely battled steps forward.

Andrew Sprung demolishes the silly idea that Obama never gets down to policy specifics in his speeches. As someone once bored to death by one of his speeches two years ago, and who has covered Obama's speeches in detail for a few years now, I concur with Andrew.

My favorite detail – true or not – from last is here on the reaction to Wilson's boorishness:

First Lady Michelle Obama, seated behind and above Wilson, seemed to mouth a drawn-out "damn" at the scene unfolding before her.

He saw him coming a mile off:

"Just as Americans in general do not have the habits of deference, so the conservative in America does not have them either. Ultimately he does not defer even to the country’s institutions. If one of these institutions, such as the Supreme Court, makes decisions he detests, he will defame that institution. He is as ready as is the common man to bypass the institutions he ought to defend."

James Traub has a fair piece in the NYT magazine. This caught my eye:

Robust debate has not, in fact, broken out on Capitol Hill. When I asked a senior Congressional staff member whether she felt that legislators were now prepared to say what they think on the Middle East, she replied, “I don’t think we’re there yet.” But, she added, “There are changes in the playground.”

What kind of democracy is it when legislators cannot say what they think on an issue? And why can they not say it?

A reader writes:

In Greg Mankiw’s blog-post about the impact of

health care costs for American businesses, there seems to be something missing in the equation. Unlike wages, the costs of health care are dictated by forces outside of the control of management for something like GM. As such, while admittedly workers would fight for higher wages in light of eliminating the burden of health care costs from the shoulders of their employers, the employer has the option of not giving those workers higher wages. These things are negotiated between management and labor. Health care costs, however, rising at rates far higher than that of wages, are outside of the control of management. The costs are dictated to management, which itself is made up of participants in health insurance programs.

This all boils down to the question of opportunity costs.

Economic choices are being forced upon businesses by the health care industry, rather than being the product of a genuinely free market. It’s the equivalent of saying that if a kid throws a baseball through your window, your economic situation is no worse than it would have had you not needed to replace the window, because in the end, your kids would have pressured you to buy them more expensive Christmas presents. By this standard, raising corporate taxes should have no impact either, because lower tax rates is simply more that can be demanded by labor.

The argument is kind of silly when you look at it closely. And it purports to be a market based analysis when it’s clearly ignoring key features of what makes up a free market.

Ed Kilgore doesn't go so far as to endorse Snowe's public plan trigger, but he urges the left to seriously consider it:

I've argued elsewhere, progressives who want to reject the trigger out of hand are in effect dictating a Senate strategy for health care reform that involves use of reconciliation or some other vehicle (like enforced party discipline on cloture votes) that reduces the necessary margin to 50 votes.  That may well be the way to go, and it certainly would reduce the leverage of "centrists" in either party.  But if that's the game plan, progressives should go into the fight with eyes wide open and weigh the risks.  All "centrist" ideas aren't brain-dead, and even as we properly mock the worship of compromise as an end in itself, there are limits to what "standing on principle" on the details of legislation can accomplish.

Andrew Exum doesn't think we should withdraw from Afghanistan but he isn't painting a very pretty picture:

When people look back on the Afghanistan war, this might be the moment when historians will judge we should have cut the cord on the Afghan government. If we believe Generals McChrystal and Petraeus, and we believe a counterinsurgency campaign to represent our best chance of success in Afghanistan, then we have a big problem. Because if we believe what we ourselves have learned about counterinsurgency campaigns, we understand that we cannot be successful in one if the host nation government is seen as increasingly illegitimate — and that's what the Karzai government is.