The Dish

“[Obama] reminds me of a chess grandmaster who has played his opening in six simultaneous games. But he hasn’t completed a single game and I’d like to see him finish one,” – Henry Kissinger.

Suderman thinks that health care reform will drive up insurance premiums:

In 1996, Massachusetts passed an earlier set of reforms—community rating and guaranteed issue—that required insurers to take all comers, and to sell plans to individuals at the same price, regardless of their individual health status.

For pretty obvious reasons, those sorts of reforms drive up premium prices tremendously. In New York, for example, similar reforms have driven up individual insurance premiums enough that the Manhattan Institute estimates that premium prices would drop 42 percent if they were repealed. And going back to AHIP's reports, sure enough, New York and Massachusetts are the states with the two most expensive individual market premiums.

A reader writes:

Word on the street, courtesy of McClatchy, is that Obama is planning on sending 34,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan. In light of this possibility, and on behalf of all Americans who want some semblance of sane government, can I respectfully request that you lay off of Sarah Palin, including withholding, for the time being, any kind of bombshell that you're putting together? If escalation in Afghanistan is a reality, I am concerned that Obama's base – which has already been battered through the health care fight, the failure to deliver on promises of homosexual rights, the failure to effectively address the financial crisis and a general sense that Obama has 'sold them out' – is going to collapse.

I think that the left can tolerate a less than ideal health care plan, the postponement (we hope) of a push for homosexual rights, and a crappy attempt at putting a band-aid over the financial giants, but the left really found its voice during the last Administration around the Iraq War. Support for that war was the litmus test that drove many to Obama over Hillary in the first place. If Obama is to truly own the Afghan War, and to do so through escalation, I can't see how he holds his base together. And without his base, without Bush, and with the worst economy any of us can remember, I don't think that Obama or vulnerable Democrats in Congress get re-elected.
 
This is why we need Palin. It's cynical, it's political, it is devoid of any intellectual integrity. But that's politics, you can't get to the stuff you really want to do if you don't have the power to achieve it. We need Palin to win the Republican nomination. We need the tea baggers to continue rolling. The Republicans are not in any shape to be a viable alternative, and so even though the Democrats for all their electoral success have completely and utterly refused to govern (including Obama) they are still preferable. The only thing I can think of, in the face of the complete abandonment by Democrats of the things they told the American people they were going to deliver, that brings the base home is the specter of a Palin presidency. We need the Republicans to think that she's viable. So please, lay off of Palin. Or, if you are despised by the right, continue to attack her so that she can build up much needed cred.

Kerry Howley knocks Bill Bennett:

“Is there anything more important than the issue of terrorism?” Bennett asks in his post. It’s meant as a rhetorical question; the obvious answer is supposed to be no. And that’s absurd. Lots of things, like hernias, are more “important,” or at least more deadly, than terrorism in the United States. But you see where Bennett is going: Hasan’s atrocity was terrorism. Nothing is more important than terrorism. Any rights abridged along the way to prevent another act of terrorism must be justified, because … nothing’s more important than terrorism. There is a kind of bright, shining clarity in that, an invitation not to muddy the waters with too much thinking.

E.D. Kain wants to cut defense:

America is not imperial in the traditional sense, of course. We are not colonists. We have little interest in actually conquering territory. But we do have an overabundance of faith in the ability of our military to insure our security and our economic interests across the globe. Our military foots the bill for the defense of Europe and our Asian allies, allowing those countries to spend their own tax revenues on lavish safety nets and top-notch education programs. Meanwhile, Americans pay for Leviathan. Or at least the Leviathan with the guns.

Without serious cuts in our defense budget, it becomes almost certain that we’ll be unable to afford programs like those the Europeans have, or to even maximize the potential of our private-sector economy and innovation. One trillion dollars a year is a lot of money that could have gone to innovation in the markets. We can’t have it both ways, of course, even though everyone in Washington will tell you that we can. Indeed, it is the European governments which are freed from this military spending which are spending the most on butter, while Americans find themselves more and more mired in debt. You can have guns or you can have butter, but you can’t have both.

Massie gets into the weeds of the parallel:

[H]istorical comparisons are never exact. Nonetheless, assuming the economy recovers then you can bet that Democrats will argue that it was the stimulus what done it and you can further bet that plenty of voters will be happy to nod and agree with this proposition. And if health insurance reform passes and if Afghanistan looks less problematic in a year's time, well, you can see where a second term is coming from, can't you?

Sure, there remains the deficit and I'm skeptical that Congressional Democrats are really terribly interested in tackling that but economic recovery will create some greater room for tackling the deficit in a second term. Equally, if the economy recovers, voters may be less concerned by aspects of the liberal agenda that, at present, they find disconcerting.

Granted, there are plenty of ifs there. But that's always the case. Like Reagan a generation ago, one sense that Obama realises that he has the opportunity to redraw the map. He can be a consequential President whose legacy is such that it defines or shapes the parameters within which his successors must operate. He may not succeed, but the scale of the Republican crisis and the depth of the hole he found himself in at the beginning of his presidency give him a chance to be the heir to LBJ liberals have been waiting for.

The Dish wrote about this comparison in January 2008.

(Image: By Hiroko Masuike/Getty Images.)

TNC:

Palin's base confuses "liberal fear" with some kind of populist power, by ignoring the fact that a lot of people who want nothing to do with us pinkos, are afraid of Palin too. People misunderstand fear. It doesn't always cause your foes to cower in a corner. Sometimes it causes them to beat the crap out of you with a bag of rusty nails.

Paul Staniland is pessimistic:

Insurgencies can be militarily defeated, but at a high cost that may be greater than U.S. interests require. It is deeply doubtful that the U.S. should want to replicate in Afghanistan the experiences of counterinsurgency in Kashmir, Pakistani Baluchistan, or Sri Lanka. The Obama administration needs to decide if a similar strategy is worth the likely trail of American and Afghan blood.

A cheaper and more efficient policy for the United States in Afghanistan instead involves following the second pathway outlined above — ugly stability. There is evidence that this approach has at least minimally succeeded in South Asia and Iraq. This strategy requires understanding and dealing with the real and existing social sources of power on the ground, mixing accommodation, coercion, and bribery, and being willing to accept imperfect and morally ambiguous outcomes. The U.S. may be able to satisfy its basic interests in Afghanistan without trying to build a simultaneously strong and legitimate central state.