October 2013 – Page 65

Will Cruz Get His Comeuppance?

Jonathan Bernstein no longer considers Ted Cruz a viable presidential candidate:

It’s one thing to have a reputation as a loudmouth; it’s quite another to have a reputation as a loser. That’s what the shutdown fight has done to Cruz. Among true believers he’ll be the one who was a leader in a fight that surely would have won if the squishes hadn’t sold them out. But for most party actors, including many sympathetic to Tea Partyism, he’s going to be the guy who ran up the wrong hill.

Larison nods:

What may hurt Cruz’s prospects as a presidential candidate most is the fact that he will not or cannot acknowledge that he was wrong in promoting his failed strategy. As if to prove how oblivious to political reality he is, he was at it again today in his speech this morning.

Barro marvels at Cruz’s complete detachment from reality.

Maybe The Shutdown Won’t Be A Turning Point, Ctd

Silver believes that the shutdown is unlikely to significantly impact the midterms. In response, Ezra asks, “If they reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling for six weeks and then they get nothing for it, will they really be able to pass a clean CR and another debt-ceiling increase in late-November?”

If this ends and the negotiations fail, the lesson many in the party will take isn’t that the GOP erred terribly in in employing these extreme and unpopular tactics. It’ll be that they erred terribly in backing down from them, and letting the leadership muck up the clear messaging of Ted Cruz and the Tea Party.

Republicans should be very worried about what this episode means for their party in the midterms. But not because the shutdown itself is going to be foremost in voter’s minds 13 months from now. It’s because the shutdown is evidence of a Republican crack-up that is leading the party to pursue doomed, reckless and self-destructive campaigns. And if they keep doing that through the rest of 2013 and much of 2014, that will matter in the elections.

The Chekhov Of Ontario

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Bruce McCall praises this week’s Nobel prize-winner Alice Munro for her precise depiction of southwestern Ontario – “that grindingly conformist, stonily Calvinist world of humble lives and humbler expectations, where a gnawing sense of shame was inevitable”:

Hers doesn’t really feel like Nobel territory. A low cloud of modesty over-hangs Ms. Munro’s fictional world – no harrowing diasporas, no heroic sagas, just vignettes of everyday life in perhaps the least colorful, least dramatic setting in North America. And no grand passion – that’s for the Yanks and the Brits. There is instead a clinical quality to Ms. Munro’s work, a dissection of her characters as if they were so many bugs under a microscope. …

Yet a root part of the Munro magic is that you somehow care deeply about her forlorn losers and their constricted lives. She gets you hoping against hope that they’ll come out OK. And even when they don’t, she has set up fates of such exquisite and spiritually just logic that you realize there was ultimately no alternative. Ruefully perhaps, certainly sadly, you have to agree: that’s life. Unforgiving, unfair, futile life. If only Alice Munro had lived in, say, Southern California!

(Photo of an aging barn in Huron County, Ontario, by Flickr user breakthrunow)

The Path The GOP Is On

Douthat considers where it leads:

[T]he strategy that Republicans choose today doesn’t only shape the landscape for 2014: It has consequences for the Republicans’ broader position and brand identity, and for how everything from ongoing gubernatorial campaigns to the ’16 presidential election plays out. The G.O.P.’s problem at the moment is that it’s a congressional party with no clear ability to win presidential-level majorities. In that context, a faction that’s trying to gain control of the party — as the right’s populists currently are — should be demonstrating why its preferred approach and preferred policies are winning ones, and why a more populist turn can actually help Republicans avoid a replay of 2012 in 2016 and beyond.

But the strategy that the populists are currently pursuing — narrowing the definition of True Conservatism to a point where tactics rather than ideology are the only working litmus test, pursuing those tactics even when they put conservatives squarely on the wrong side of public opinion, and then denouncing any alternative approach as a sell-out that justifies bolting for a third party — is likely to deliver one of two alternatives instead: Either a successful populist/Tea Party takeover, à la Goldwater in ’64, that leaves the party in no position to actually contest a national election and secures Obama’s legacy instead, or a backlash that elevates a Republican nominee who runs against Congressional conservatives, à la George W. Bush in 2000, and in the process re-empowers all the interest groups that the populists detest.

My bet is on a Goldwater moment. Meep meep.

Obamacare: “The Worst Thing Since Slavery”

Yes, this dude is ~~running for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia~~:

Correction from a reader:

You’re confusing E.W. Jackson – who is running for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia – and Dr. Ben Carson, who appears in the clip you posted. But yes, this dude is an actual neurosurgeon!

Apologies to Jackson. Though he is also prone to extreme rhetoric.

Maybe The Shutdown Won’t Be A Turning Point

Nate Silver entertains the possibility:

Most political stories have a fairly short half-life and won’t turn out to be as consequential as they seem at the time. … None of this applies if the United States actually does default on its debt this time around, or if the U.S. shutdown persists for as long as Belgium’s. But if the current round of negotiations is resolved within the next week or so, they might turn out to have a relatively minor impact by November 2014.

He goes on to argue that, even “if the shutdown were to have a moderate political impact — and one that favored the Democrats in races for Congress — it might not be enough for them to regain control of the U.S. House”:

First, there are extremely few swing districts — only one-half to one-third as many as when the last government shutdown occurred in 1996. Some of this is because of partisan gerrymandering, but more of it is because of increasingly sharp ideological divides along geographic lines: between urban and rural areas, between the North and the South, and between the coasts and the interior of the United States.

So even if Democrats make significant gains in the number of votes they receive for the House, they would flip relatively few seats because of the way those votes are distributed. Most of the additional votes would come in districts that Democrats were already assured of winning, or where they were too far behind to catch up.

Nate Cohn agrees:

[I]f Democrats do as well in 2014 as they did in 2006, they’ll gain far fewer seats, simply because the best pick-up opportunities are already held by Democrats. Or put differently: without 8 or 9 pick-ups in lean-Democratic districts, a 2006-esque wave would only barely get the Democrats over the 17 seat threshold they need to take back the House in 2014.

All of this ignores, I think, a central factor. Will this experience traumatize enough Republicans to begin to inch back from the precipice of far right Southern nullification politics they now favor? We have to wait and see. My fear is that their cultural alienation and economic vulnerability and religious fundamentalism has gone too far to be turned back any time soon. Maybe a presidential candidate who runs against the Tea Party could do it. But the climate of fear is hard to pierce; and the epistemic closure is close to hermetic at this point.

Ask Rick Doblin Anything

[Updated with many new questions from readers]

From his bio:

Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana and his Master’s thesis on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana vs. the oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients. His undergraduate thesis at New College of Florida was a 25-year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment, which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences.

His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people, and eventually to become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist. He founded MAPS in 1986, and currently resides in Boston with his wife and three children.

What should we ask Rick? Sound off in the survey below (if you are reading on a mobile device, click here):

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Our extensive coverage of the spiritual and therapeutic benefits of psychedelics is here (or in chronological order here).

(Photo of Psilocybe Cubensis by Flickr user afgooey74)

Heckuva Job, Kathleen! Ctd

A reader quotes me:

Why does Kathleen Sebelius still have her job? If this were a private company and she were responsible for rolling out a critical new product and came up with this nightmare, she wouldn’t last the week.

I have been an IT consultant for private companies that ranged in size from startups to Fortune-100 since 1998, and a smart private company would not fire someone within a week. When there is a bad product launch (and the errors I’ve seen in the CA Obamacare site are just embarrassing), the company goes into crisis mode trying to deal with major issues. When you’re in that mode, you don’t rock the boat unnecessarily. Why fire your leader and add one more complication to an already-complicated situation? I guarantee you that behind the scenes everyone is scrambling to get the exchanges to an acceptable level of functionality, and once there is a chance to take a breath, people will be held accountable. But unless Sebelius is somehow making things worse by being there, why would you fire her at this time and make a chaotic situation even worse?

Another adds:

Suppose she was let go, would her replacement not have to go through Congressional hearings before taking the position? How long is that going to take, and what would the effect be on HHS to be without leadership, especially NOW, for an extended time?

Another reader who takes issue with my quote:

Really? The exchanges were contracted out to private companies, CGI Group and Quality Software Services. As far as I know neither of their CEOs have resigned or been fired. Having worked in IT project management for a long time, the Obamacare glitches look pretty routine for such a complicated undertaking.

One of many more readers:

I would like to point out two parallel failures in private business that mirror the launch failure of healthcare.gov.

Last year’s Sim City 2013 and the Diablo 3 launches are great examples of digital products released to mass demand exposing deficient servers and buggy products. While these events are in the sphere of gaming culture and thus might not be “serious” enough for critical discussion both multi-million dollar products had awful launches which serve a good parallel. The individuals in charge of each of these products were not fired, in contrast to your view that private business would hold such incompetence immediately accountable. While both games ended up being disappointments, their directors were allowed to fix the problems before being shuttled off to the side.

If anything, the Obama administration is acting like a business by not removing someone who failed with a product launch, thus creating a larger PR problem, and allowing that person to remain until the problem is fixed.

The myths that surround “how business is done” and the empirical real-world examples are one of my pet peeves. Even the disastrous Apple Maps launch didn’t result in an immediate firing. It took two months and an internal power struggle to remove Scott Forstall and Richard Williamson.

Another example:

Fifteen years ago I was in management at the US headquarters of a Global 500 IT company. The president wanted to roll out an new (but internal) intergalactic system for managing distribution, networks, sales forecasts, revenues, and other operations. He believed his Accenture consulting cronies when they assured him that the turn-up would go smoothly. Seamlessly! (SAP was a co-conspirator.) Little testing was done, at load or otherwise. The integrity of data went unchecked.

The company was unable to take inventory, track sales, or recognize revenue, except by hand, for over a month. Dozens of worker bees had to be flown in from the home country to count the beans. Needless to say, no one was fired.

Another:

Um, I just want to point out that all new systems have their gliches and burps and crashes. Take the iPhone 5s; it’s crashing like crazy: “iOS apps are twice as likely to crash on the new iPhone 5s as they are when running on the iPhone 5 and 5c” – so would you put this in the category of massive failure? You say “And this while the roll-out has been about as disastrous as I could have imagined…” Really? The ACA is a brand new system that’s never been done before and it crashes and you say disaster? I realize this kind of talk is not just coming from you, but really, the drama, THE DRAMA! Nobody steps back and looks at the big picture.

Another steps back:

I’m all for accountability and no fan of Kathleen Sebelius. But you’re a bit harsh in criticizing what is perhaps the most ambitious online system roll-out in the history of the internet. As I understand it, this is an enormously complex system because of all the different agencies – with their own codes, protocols, and security measures – that need to “talk to one another” through the healthcare.gov portal. And isn’t the IRS partially shutdown – I would guess that affects the portal’s ability to verify all the data it needs to check people’s subsidization levels.

In any case, this is a site with high variables, high traffic, and very scary internet security possibilities. To top it off, it was never supposed to be run mostly by the federal government! The plan was that the states would run their own exchanges, right? But too many of them decided that they didn’t actually want “states’ rights” in this instance because rights entail responsibilities, and responsibilities are hard.

And I’ll repeat what many others have said: the comparison here should not be to other quotidian online transactions, but to the previously existing open market for individual health insurance plans. Even dealing with COBRA is a huge hassle – and that was the easiest way to have individual health insurance before the Affordable Care Act.

It was reported that more people tried to sign up for this in 24 hours than in Twitter’s first 24 months. So, maybe, just maybe, take that Mental Health Break a bit early today and chill out?

Another steps back even more:

First, I want to say that I agree with you, Ezra Klein, and all the others who have been enormously critical of Healthcare.gov’s lack of functionality. I do information technology for a large healthcare nonprofit in Chicago and it has caused me and the people who actually need it nothing but problems. So I am not only disappointed but genuinely incensed at such an important program lacking such basic functionality.

I am also not surprised.

I fully believe that those in the Obama administration who were responsible for the rollout should actually live up to that responsibility. But I don’t think we should stop there. I think this speaks volumes about the process of awarding government contracts. The process to simply find a firm that is willing to do it is rough enough. Then you add in that the government usually chooses the lowest bidder, not the most qualified, which already won’t get the best results. But before you can choose the best of the lowest bids, you have to make sure that the engineers in the firm meet a myriad of federal requirements. I’m not a total anti-regulation nut (despite how it ties my hands, I still am mostly in favor of HIPAA and HITECH) but there are regulations that prohibit the best quality, especially in cases like this. And when it comes to something like a massive new healthcare initiative for the entire nation, how could you want anything but the best?

I’m sure you’ve received a bunch of emails like this one, so thanks for taking the time to read it! And keep up the good work on the blog; it’s still one of the best sites on the Internet – and it had a solid launch!

The GOP Hates Itself

The Fix highlights the above chart:

The last thing the GOP needs as it seeks to unify, expand its reach and attract new voters is anger directed inward. But that’s the reality of what it’s dealing with.

The trouble is: I don’t think this is primarily moderate Republicans, if they actually exist, blaming Tea Party hostage-taking for their party’s fate. I think it’s base Republicans hating on their leadership’s alleged moderation! As someone who has read, edited or written countless “Republicans’ Coming Crackup” pieces, it might just be true this time that it’s happening. As so often, Obama is causing his enemies to self-destruct. How else to interpret a public statement like this one from the head of the National Federation of Independent Businesses:

There clearly are people in the Republican Party at the moment for whom the business community and the interests of the business community — the jobs and members they represent — don’t seem to be their top priority.

McCain (see below) and now Peter King have emerged from the shadows again. This is King on Cruz:

How did a guy eight months in the Senate be able to dominate the House Republicans, Senate Republicans, tie up the country, and bring the government to a halt with no end game, no strategy, and then now just sort of walk away, as if he’s done his job?

Meanwhile, a study finds that the government shut-down is hurting the red states most of all. Much of which prompts the usually sober John Judis to declare that the current GOP is pining for the fjords:

What is happening in the Republican Party today is reminiscent of what happened to the Democrats in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

At that time, the Democrats in Washington were faced by a grassroots revolt from the new left over the war in Vietnam and from the white South over the party’s support for civil rights. It took the Democrats over two decades to do undo the damage—to create a party coalition that united the leadership in Washington with the base and that was capable of winning national elections. The Republicans could be facing a similar split between their base and their Washington leadership, and it could cripple them not just in the 2014 and 2016 elections, but for decades to come.

Seth Masket doubts that we are in the middle of a realignment:

Obviously, it’s hard to know how the current rift will play out. There seems to be a consensus emerging that the current Tea Party-inspired crisis over health reform, the shutdown, and the debt ceiling has been an unmitigated disaster for the Republican Party, costing it in terms of policy and popularity. If that is the dominant interpretation a few weeks and months from now (especially among Republicans), Tea Party affiliates will get much of the blame, and this may represent an opportunity for the more traditional establishment types to reassert themselves and to ignore Tea Party demands in the future.

What more traditional establishment-types? Name one in the House with any clout or on Fox News with any regularity.

Month: October 2013