The Republican Resistance To Reform

Beutler compares the contemporary GOP to the pre-Clinton Democratic party:

Maybe a third defeat, in 2016, will catalyze a more rapid transition. But over time, I think the important differences between the Democrats’ old challenge and the challenge Republicans now face have started to show.

Democrats didn’t have an easy go of it, exactly, but they were able to modify their positions across a range of issues without, for instance, creating a left-wing-primary perpetual motion machine, or giving rise to a permanent population of resentful protest voters. Maybe Republicans can do the same. But the 2013 experience suggests they are so in hock to aging, white, conservative reactionaries that taking on new debts with minorities, gay people, single women and so on entails the risk of defaulting on the old ones.

Regardless, the GOP could win in 2016:

It is far too early to do a formal forecast for 2016. The economic and political conditions in that year will be paramount. But given that at least some in the GOP appear pessimistic as of today, it’s worth asking: If economic and political conditions in 2016 were the same as they are today, what would happen? So assume that Obama’s approval rating is about 41 percent. Assume that GDP has grown 1.6 percent in the first two quarters of 2016. And, of course, no incumbent will be running.

Based on those assumptions, the model predicts that the Republican Party has a 64 percent chance of winning the presidency. That is far from 100 percent, of course. At the same time, it doesn’t suggest much cause for GOP pessimism in January 2014 — maybe even some Democratic pessimism, in fact.

Should Republicans retake the White House, Chait predicts that they will ditch austerity:

Liberating themselves from austerity will allow them to back away from their brutal campaign of confiscating food stamps, Pell grants, and low-income tax credits, and still hand out tax cuts for the 1 percent. Tax cuts for one and all! That, after all, was the Bush formula: small elements of programmatic reform for low-income workers, stapled onto the agenda of The Wall Street Journal editorial page, all costs deferred.

A Republican Party that reprises the Bush era was a grim and unfathomable prospect in 2008, and is not exactly palatable now. But in the wake of the party’s thrall to Ayn Rand and Rand Paul and Paul Ryan, a return to Bushism sounds almost comforting.

 

Chart Of The Day

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Drum looks at what Citizens United has unleashed:

The chart [above], based on data from Open Secrets, shows spending on midterm elections through January 21 in order to get a clean comparison of 2014 with previous election years.

Up through 2006, outside spending at this point in the election cycle had been flat for years at a very low level. In 2010, we were on an upward trajectory even before the Citizens United decision was handed down. And 2014? With Citizens United now in full operation, the sluice gates have opened wide. Outside spending is 25 times higher than it was at this point in 2006. Welcome to the future of American elections.

Meanwhile, Seth Masket studies publicly financed campaigns. One drawback to them:

Miller and I, along with Andrew Hall, have found some preliminary evidence that public financing contributes to partisan polarization. The method by which this occurs is not completely clear, but it appears that when we open up elections to a wider range of candidates, the candidates who take advantage of this tend to be more ideologically extreme than those who rise up through traditional financing schemes. Party donors don’t get to filter out candidates the way they normally do. My guess is that this outcome is not what most backers of public financing initially hoped for.

The Uninsured Aren’t Signing Up?

Last week the WSJ reported that “the majority of the 2.2 million people who sought to enroll in private insurance through new marketplaces through Dec. 28 were previously covered elsewhere.” Laszewski responds:

If this continues, people will be asking a very big question come election day:

While we needed to do health insurance reform, why did we have to do it in a way that so disrupted the existing individual and small group market if the people it was supposed to benefit, the uninsured, weren’t going to buying it?

McArdle thinks these numbers could indicate two things:

First, would-be applicants may simply be waiting until March. They’ve gone without insurance a long time; why not wait a few more months and save on premiums? The second possibility is more troubling:

There may be something seriously wrong with our understanding of who the uninsured are, and what they are willing and able to buy in the way of insurance. I don’t know exactly what the fault may be in our understanding. But if the numbers stay this low, I’d say we need to reassess the state of our knowledge about the uninsured — and the vast program we created to cover them.

Sprung looks on the bright side:

1) It is perhaps not that surprising that those accustomed to shopping for insurance would be quicker to buy on the exchanges.

2) According to HHS, 79% of those enrolled in exchange plans so far qualified for subsidies. It does seem surprising that a high percentage of those buyers were already able to afford insurance on the individual market. Perhaps current signups, at least those coming from the indvidual market, lean toward the higher end of the subsidy scale, say 200-400% of the Federal Poverty Level.

3)  Weaver and Mathews emphasize insurers’ worries that they’re not getting new customers so much as churned existing ones. On the other hand, the already-insured are likelier to be healthier than the uninsured,  perhaps easing worries that the early risk pool will skew too sick.

He later questions the validity of the research the WSJ relies on. Suderman’s view:

Given the fuzziness of the data, it’s still hard to tell exactly what’s happening. And even if it’s true that there are no more uninsured now than there were last year, there’s still time for that to change. As the administration is keen to remind us, people who want coverage have until the end of March to sign up for coverage this year. But even still, this doesn’t exactly bode well for Obamacare’s future. Certainly, the law isn’t off to the kind of start that the administration hoped for, or promised.

Tyler Cowen’s two cents:

I would emphasize that we still don’t really know quite what is going on here.  But the view that everything is now in the clear simply is not warranted by the available evidence.

“A Lot Of Sliding Toward Undecided”

Noam Scheiber doubts media-bashing will work for Chris Christie’s comeback campaign:

[A]s satisfying as it may feel in the moment, media-bashing has a rather poor track record of papering over candidates’ ideological heresies. Just ask those august GOP nominees, Newt Gingrich (global warming, immigration, chronic bride-shopping) and Rudy Giuliani (gay marriage, abortion, gun control). The seams invariably show, especially since the media-bashers tend to be pols who’ve basked in a fair amount of media adulation at various points in their careers. Sooner or later, Republican voters tend to notice that the anti-media fulminating is suspiciously timed to deflect the most damning questions.

That’s not to say media-bashing can’t work—it clearly has on occasion. But the only reliable formula is when the infraction that kindled the media firestorm in the first place attests to one’s conservative credentials. Say, when Sarah Palin accuses the Democratic nominee for president of palling around with terrorists, then blames the resulting uproar on media bias. Or, to pick the more relevant example of a moderate trying to gin up conservative support, when Rudy Giuliani questions whether waterboarding is in fact torture, accuses Democrats of refusing to use the term “Islamic terrorist” out of misplaced political correctness, or trims the welfare rolls by hundreds of thousands of people. All of these prompted a media uproar, which in turn prompted Giuliani to attack the “liberal media.” (Not that he ever needed much provocation.) And though these frequent outbursts didn’t exactly secure the GOP nomination for him (see point one), they probably did boost his ratings among primary voters at various points in 2007.

Christie’s polling numbers are getting worse:

In the last Quinnipiac poll, 64 percent of Republicans said Christie would be a “good president.” Only 18 percent disagreed. That’s shrunk to 50 and 22 percent, respectively—a mere 4-point increase in the hard-no number, but a 12-point move from “good president” to “ask me something else.” Conservatives, more skeptical in general of Christie, had given him a 54–26 advantage on the “good president” question. That’s down to 37–24. Again, not huge movement to “no,” just a lot of sliding toward undecided.

A Better Relationship With Iran

Post Election March

Walt imagines what it might produce:

When trying to make their case, in short, both sides tend to focus solely on the downside. But what about the potential benefits of a successful negotiation? To judge the pros and cons of diplomacy properly, we have to consider not just the downside of failure, but also the potential upside of success. And I don’t mean just the possibility of limiting Iran’s nuclear program (a desirable goal in itself), but also the more important possibility of putting U.S.-Iranian relations on a fundamentally different path (which is what AIPAC, et al are really worried about).

Among the potential benefits he outlines:

[I]f you’re not a fan of the clerical regime, you might want to consider killing it with kindness instead of bolstering it with belligerence. More than half of Iran’s population is under 35, and many are eager for better relations with the outside world (including the United States). Making it easier for Iranians to travel, get educated in the United States, and get exposed to the rest of the outside world will put those aging mullahs in a very awkward position. Have we learnt nothing from the failed Cuban embargo, which has helped keep the Castro Bros. in power for half a century? If we really believe in the transformative power of markets, Hollywood, hip-hop, the Internet, democracy, and free speech, let’s turn ‘em loose on Tehran. If your goal is a more moderate Iran, that approach is likely to work a lot better than ostracism, covert action, and repeated threats of military force, which merely galvanize Iranian nationalism and help justify continued repression by hardliners.

My view is that ignoring the positive potential of this engagement is a betrayal of the Green Revolution. And they do not deserve to be betrayed.

A Silver Age?

Edinburgh International Book Festival

I have to say it’s been amazing to see Washington get almost giddy about the Ezra Klein story. Well, maybe only Washington journalists … but, still. My basic take on the rise and rise of the super-blogs – from Nate Silver’s new enterprise at ESPN to our old friend Josh Marshall’s TPM to Kara Swisher and now Wonkblog – is here. All the stories about these ventures rightly take a wait-and-see approach as to whether we are witnessing a realignment in which those old big media companies accelerate their decline by being unable to accommodate their new media stars …  or whether these new ventures will eventually founder in a grim business climate for journalism. These new models may be evanescent or central to the future. We just don’t know yet.

So here’s an update on the Dish’s progress in this new Nate Silver Age of media. Our crucial first year subscriptions all expire en masse in a couple of weeks. We currently have no other means of support, and have chosen to eschew investors and let this online community grow at its own pace and in its own organic way. Last year, as we jumped off the cliff, we got a one-off, staggering sum of $427,000 in the first week. Recouping that a year later was always going to be our biggest challenge as our little plane tried to reach cruising altitude.

So here’s the full graph of Dish gross revenues since we announced we were leaving the Beast:

Screen Shot 2014-01-22 at 11.32.03 AM

Those peaks tell it all. Since January 1 this year, we have raised almost $400K. On the one hand, that’s a long way from our total revenues of nearly $900K in 2013. On the other, we’re only three weeks in. Since subscriptions don’t actually expire for two more weeks, and since subscribers will still have their free read-ons for a while after that, we won’t really know till the end of March how the year is going to shake out. If we stall now, we’ll be in deep trouble. If you keep renewing, we’ll survive and even thrive. Whether this model works is entirely up to you at this point.

But here’s what’s really struck us after a year. The average subscription price we received from you last January was around $31. This year it is hovering around $37. So those readers who have already renewed have voluntarily increased the price. Ask yourself: how often does that happen in business? You offer something for sale at a certain price and the customer requests she pay almost double ($37 is damn close to twice the minimum of $19.99). I’ve never been a businessman, but, man, isn’t that unusual? And encouraging? Yes, we’re chuffed.

But not complacent. The downside is that the number of subscriptions is down considerably on last year. We are emphatically not out of the woods yet. Yes, we now have 19,000 auto-renewing subscribers. But we need many more if this model is to succeed without sponsored content or venture capital. It’s just one model for journalism in new media, and many others make sense as well. But it’s the simplest, clearest and most transparent there is. And you, the readers, play the critical part in this. You can decide to endorse this model and help sustain a fledgling new era in journalism. Or you can be a by-stander.

By my reckoning – over nearly 14 years – Dish readers are not the by-stander type.

Renew now! Renew here!

core-strength

Update from a reader:

I don’t mind at all your posts encouraging us to subscribe / re-subscribe. I LOVE the updates, where we get to chart how much you’ve earned. I disagree with your reader who suggested that your calls for subscriptions are advertorials or whatever. I WANT to see your number get to “900,000”, and it is enjoyable for me to see the “Dish Updates” with the numbers growing higher each time. If you want to install a real-time chart so that even when you’re reposting your calls for subscriptions we can see the very latest numbers, that would be cool but no biggie. As long as you keep me up on what’s going on.

We made that promise of transparency when we launched last January and we will keep it.

(Top photo: Nate Silver, American statistician, political forecaster and author of The Signal And The Noise, appears at a photocall prior to an event at the 30th Edinburgh International Book Festival, on August 13, 2013. By Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images. Bottom photos of Dish readers used with their permission.)

The Struggle For Syrian Peace, Ctd

The “Geneva II” Syrian peace talks got off to a rocky start today:

In his opening remarks, opposition leader Ahmed Jarba accused Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of war crimes, bringing up new evidence of torture investigated by three war crimes prosecutors, and demanded the government delegation agree to the “Geneva I” transition of power. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem accused the West of “pouring arms” into Syria and backing terrorism. He addressed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who said Assad had lost legitimacy and that there could be no place for him in a transitional government, asserting, “No one, Mr. Kerry, has the right to withdraw legitimacy of the [Syrian] president other than the Syrians themselves.” U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon appealed to the warring parties to seize the opportunity to resolve their conflict.

The conference began with more than 30 international governments, but is expected to be followed by mediated talks between government and opposition representatives at the end of the week. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, whose invite to the conference was withdrawn on Monday, said the peace talks were unlikely to succeed due to the lack of influential players at the meeting.

Given the fragmentation of the opposition, William Mccants and Jomana Qaddour are not optimistic:

After almost three years of brutal warfare, the Syrian ‘opposition’ is an alphabet soup of internally warring and ideologically polarized political and military forces: the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (SOC), the al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Islamic Front, and numerous other independent battalions. The Syria-based Islamic Front has dismissed the talks (ISIS rejects power-sharing even for a transitional period, and thus rejects the conference in its entirety), and only the Turkey-based SOC has agreed to participate after a contentious vote that a third of its 119 members boycotted.

Even in the unlikely event that a political settlement emerges from the Geneva conference, there is no guarantee that the SOC can effectively negotiate and implement the agreement on behalf of the Syrian opposition in Syria due to the dwindling power of the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Joshua Landis points out that Assad is negotiating from a position of strength:

The regime’s resilience is based, first and foremost, on the Syrian Army. Without its loyalty, Assad would likely have fallen as quickly as did Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. But while many soldiers and officers did join the rebellion, most did so as individuals; few entire units defected and no entire divisions did. Structurally, the military held together, and it was able to replenish its ranks through intensive recruitment among the Alawite minority, where many are loyal to the regime and still more live in mortal fear of sectarian retribution at the hands of the Sunni-led armed rebellion. The same factors allowed the military to expand its capabilities through the paramilitary Popular Committees, often called shabiha. And it has also been able to enlist the support in critical battles of units of the Shia Hezbollah militia from neighboring Lebanon, whose leaders recognize that their own military fortunes depend on maintaining the re-supply lines that the Assad regime has long provided.

Stewart M. Patrick also doubts that the talks will succeed:

[T]he most likely diplomatic outcomes of this long awaited “peace conference” are likely to be pretty thin gruel. Even with the Iranian spoilers relegated to the sidelines, “Geneva II” is unlikely to see any major breakthroughs. At best, the summit will mark another phase in a protracted negotiating process that may continue for years, unless circumstances on the battlefield result in a clear victory for one side.

The Dish previewed the talks yesterday.

History Can Still Be Made

Earlier this week, Iran suspended its activities on its nuclear program, in accordance with an agreement reached with six great powers – the US, Russia, China, Britain, Germany, and France. And you could have heard a pin drop in the American public discourse in the face of this remarkable turn of events. And that is a bizarre thing.  For the constellation that came together these past twelve months is unlikely to happen ever again. All the major world powers – including Russia and China and the US – are in agreement. The Iranian regime and – most significantly – the Iranian people want a deal that would both restrain Iran’s nuclear capacities to civilian purposes green-peaceand slowly pry open its economy after brutal sanctions have close to extinguished it. A huge amount still needs to be figured out and it will be a formidable task of negotiation to move forward. It may all come to nothing. But surely, surely, it’s worth giving diplomacy a chance.

Why? For my part, it’s for the Iranian people, and global security. Neoconservatives portray their position against any agreement as one of solidarity with the Iranian people against their regime. And I’m sure that’s a genuine as well as admirable motive. But aren’t they engaging in a classic bit of ideological projection? In so far as we can tell anything about the views of the actual Iranian people – especially its younger and more educated generation – it is that they overwhelmingly want both a peaceful civilian nuclear program (in part as a matter of national pride) and re-engagement with the wider world, including the West. So the neocons are in fact either acting against the interests of the Iranian people, or accusing them of false consciousness. Neither seems to me the right response to this moment.

It’s also an ineluctable fact that Iran has acquired the intellectual and material infrastructure to become a nuclear military power if it wants to at any point in the foreseeable future. Let me repeat that: Iran’s potential as a nuclear military power is a fact. The time to prevent that would have been the Bush-Cheney years; but we tragically chose to pursue the control of imaginary weapons of mass destruction in Iraq instead. So the proximate actual choice we have with a regime with a disgusting record of internal repression and a nuclear potential is a) negotiating an internationally-monitored civilian nuclear program with strong inspections, b) a pre-emptive war with unknowable consequences to delay (but not end) the regime’s potential for a viable nuclear weapons program, or c) resume the Cold War stand-off, increase sanctions some more, destroy their economy and contain their military power.

For a long time, I thought c) was probably the least worst, realistic option. That view was entrenched during the Green Revolution. To see such hope and positive energy crushed by merciless regime thugs was a sober reminder of the forces we are dealing with. But here’s the thing: the Iranian people did not despair. Hemmed in by rigged, approved political candidates, they nonetheless voted in 2009 for a clear shift back toward the West and then in 2012 for the most pro-Western candidates there were. The Iranian people told us that engagement – and not continued polarization – was the answer they wanted. This movement – combined with the effect of, yes, “crippling” sanctions – brought the Iranian leadership to the backrooms of diplomacy. It was a perfect constructive storm.

This is where we are. It is not an ideal situation – but after the catastrophe of the Bush-Cheney years in foreign policy, we have no ideal situations. But it is also not the worst situation.

It’s an extraordinary victory, in many ways, for pro-Western forces in the Middle East. A hugely important country – America’s natural ally in the region – is a hotbed of democratic activism and pro-American sentiment among many of its people. That country has declared that it will never use nuclear weapons and, unlike nuclear-armed Israel, is a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Its newly elected government, backed by the theocratic Supreme Leader, openly says it wants to entrench a nuclear-weapon-free Iran in an international agreement. In return, it’s asking for relaxation of sanctions that would allow its economy to grow. And that growth would redound to the credit of the reformers, and perhaps begin a slow thawing of the regime itself.

These moments do not come often in human history. I remain of the view that the greatest single threat to our civilization is the combination of religious extremism with weapons of mass destruction. If we can reliably ensure that the biggest Shiite power does not seek to build or use nuclear weapons and retain that commitment over time, we have made a huge stride toward reducing the greatest danger we face, in the wake of 9/11. The Obama administration has already – by design or accident – managed to secure and begun to dismantle another major global WMD danger in Syria. To get an inspections regime in place to do the same for Iran would be a historic gain for global security in the most volatile region on the planet.

A deal would help Iran’s moderates; it would be a real achievement in a new global partnership between the major world powers; it is our only hope to keep Iran’s actual nuclear capacities restrained to civilian use without a full-scale war; its economic benefits would accrue to the regime – but also, critically, to the moderate path the Iranian people have chosen – in the face of bullets and torture and terror – for the last several years.

Let’s re-appraise the value of this moment, and not let it pass into the ether, because of fear or paranoia or habit, or fail to grasp the full extent of the advance that is now possible. And those Senators actively backing the American sabotage of the process should take a deep breath, put AIPAC on hold, and let diplomacy take its course. This is history. It deserves more than the politics of a domestic lobby. It deserves statesmanship. And prudence. And patience. And time.