Month: March 2010

A reader writes:

When on I saw the NYT headline, "House will not use ‘deem and pass’ to pass health care”, I had a thought: What if it was all a ruse?  What if Pelosi and Slaughter know the right wing so well that they knew if they dropped a hint that they might use it to pass the health care bill, the right blogosphere and all their friends would jump on it like it was a piece of red meat thrown to the lions. 

So while Peggy Noonan was busy writing a column for the WSJ entitled “Demon Pass” and excoriating the Dems for even thinking about it …

and Mitch McConnell’s op-ed piece about its constitutionality and the AG of Virginia vowing to sue if deem and pass was used…while in the background, where no one noticed, they were working to get a deal with Stupak, the president was working the phones, etc.  So when they essentially said "oh, never mind, we’re not going to do that," there are a whole bunch of Republicans on record that deem and pass is not only the wrong thing to do, it’s unconstitutional.  Wait til the Republicans are in charge in the House again (which will happen, I’m sure) and they try deem and pass. Won’t THAT be fun to watch?

Maybe they are all smarter and tougher than I thought.

The NYT has an interactive guide. The LAT has a chart. The WaPo has a time-line.

Yglesias hoses the Kristol-NRO-WSJ brigade:

it’s worth observing that it’s literally not possible for Republicans to win enough Senate seats in 2010 to pass anything over Barack Obama’s veto.

Toobin posits that the Supreme Court isn't going to overturn the law on constitutional grounds.

But what does a movement do when it has to face a fact on the ground that refutes its fantasies of public opinion and purist ideology?

Denial and more acting out. They cannot yet understand that their visceral hatred of a moderate and long overdue bill just isn't credible to reasonable people, has been made to sound half-nuts by the fringe and that the benefits of the bill – the lifting of anxiety so many feel with respect to illness – may well make it a popular bill by the fall. If the GOP runs on repeal, they will seem bitter, angry sour losers obsessed with the past.

Because they still haven't understood why Obama was elected, the GOP will get worse before it gets better.

And yet no-one seems to get it:

I watched Obama's rise from Hyde Park over the last 15 yrs. Two things stand out: his political rivals almost always, and fatally, underestimate the guy's abilities. I sense there's some racism there, and his opponents always try to smear him as a "radical black guy" but Obama has always positioned himself above racial street fighting. The fact is, Obama is not just smart, he's brilliant.

Second, the guy constantly fights a war of attrition, staying the course, keeping his cool, but applying constant steady pressure to the abutments of the opposition, and over time almost all of them crumble. 

I don't think conservatives have yet figured this out about a guy, who now, is their biggest danger to future political relevance. He's grinding them, slowly, into dust.

It's why I supported him. Because he was change; and because he actually thought change was needed for substantive reasons; and because he had proven his capacity not just to argue for change, but to persist in it, zigging and zagging, waiting and holding back, but still persisting.

The question is: will Netanyahu get the message?

West Wardsboro, Vermont, 11.58 am

Resistance to national standards for schools has long been a bipartisan effort; the far right fears that the feds will impose "liberal" curriculum, while the far left resists accountability for teachers' unions.  But TNR highlights some headway in breaking that resistance:

[H]ere’s the most surprising thing: The movement to create national standards isn’t coming from Washington; it’s coming from the states themselves. Last week, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers released a draft of rigorous common standards. These benchmarks would not be enforced by the federal government; rather, they would be voluntarily adopted by the states. An impressive 48 states participated in drafting the standards. (The predictable holdouts? Texas and Alaska.) Already, several have pledged to adopt them. And the National Association of State Boards of Education expects that half of the states will sign on by the end of the year.

Josh Marshall takes a pin to it:

I was in DC last week. And I was again struck, as I used to be when I lived there (1999-2004), by the powerful group-think that affects the place. It’s really no different than you’d see in any other company town. But it’s pervasive and hard to escape.

When I was training down I read an update from a campaign watcher whose work I normally greatly respect. He clearly believed that Health Care Reform was not only a catastrophe for Democrats but that the actual passage of the bill would have no political effect. According to him, we’re on pretty much a straight line between today and the November elections.

Again, I don’t want to paint any rosy pictures. And, as I said, I don’t want to hazard any predictions. But I think this conventional wisdom is quite mistaken. Hard fought victories don’t deplete political capital; they build it. And political wins themselves often have a catalyzing effect that shapes political opinion far more than we realize.

Yep. That’s why most of friends aren’t in politics and I escape every summer to Ptown. Oh, and almost never go to any parties.

Gizmodo reviews Beard Me:

If the internet and indeed, the iPhone, wasn't invented for the sole purpose to test whether your two year old looks better with a chevron or a balbo, then I give up.

Reihan sighs:

If you believe as I do that the president's health reform legislation will not perform as advertised, you can see it as a failure of the policy itself. Or you can see it as an inevitable consequence of the fact that the legislation was, as liberal wonks insist, a "moderate Republican bill," one that true progressives supported only very reluctantly. So to fix the legislation, we'll need to spend more money, further centralize the system, and impose tighter regulation and control. And if that doesn't work, well, clearly we need to spend still more money, centralize the system even more, and impose even tighter regulation and control. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Or, of course, if you make sensible and pragmatic suggestions from the right, you could improve it in a more market-directed fashion. Why don't conservatives focus on that? Why don't they now insist that they in Congress will make sure those Medicare cuts go through to save money – and hold Obama's feet to the fire. Because it might be good in the long term for the country and therefore bad in the short-term for the GOP?

Romney is furious about the passage of Romneycare Obamacare. Massie previews the 2012 race:

Romney is now pledged to running against his own record.

This is an unusual strategy but one forced upon him by a) his actual record and b) the temper of the Republican party and conservative movement. All this trouble over one tiny bill he signed when Governor of Massachusetts! Because Obamcare is, in the view of plenty of sensible observers, merely a souped-up version of the Romneycare Mitt signed into law in Boston – and that he boasted about during the 2008 campaign. Back then it was a case of "I can fix health care because I've done it in the Bay State". How times change.

Actually, nothing changes as fast as Mitt Romney's principles. He aims to please.