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Fragile Consensus

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Everyone should read Matt Yglesias’s post,”How Close Were We, Really?” which makes a point that I’ve been mulling. The fact that health care reform blew up so quickly after the Brown win implies that whatever consensus had been achieved between the Senate and House, it was significantly incomplete, weak, or both. House liberals apparently were not prepared to pass anything coming out of conference that didn’t reverse the problems they have with the Senate bill. But it’s unclear whether moderate senators or representatives would have stayed on board in that event. If the last week shows nothing else it reveals that a whole lot of members of Congress were decidedly un-excited about supporting anything resembling either chamber’s bill.

This seems like a job for Keith Hennessey: knowing what we know now about the uneasiness of moderates and the stubbornness of liberals, what was the likelihood that reform would have passed if Coakley had won? (Keith had the probability of collapse given a narrow Coakley victory at 10 percent — and two percent with a big win — before the election.)

If this interpretation is right, it implies that many progressives haven’t given enough credit to how far out on the plank many moderates actually went (which isn’t that surprising given how many of them misread the polls). Pre-Brown, moderates were betting that antagonism toward reform wasn’t so strong that their job — their chance to work on all of their other legislative priorities — was in mortal danger. The Brown win provided new information that clearly affected the calculus (as did the initial freak-out by Massachusetts’s own Barney Frank).

Perhaps one big reason why the Obama team (and everyone else) was caught flat-footed after the election was that they were unaware of how much moderates already felt they had stuck their necks out.

All this said, I think the consensus that Democrats having second thoughts ought to accept that they have no choice but to vote for the final bill is correct. Actually, I think these Democrats have probably reached that conclusion too. But it’s important to note that that wouldn’t be enough to pass something — if House liberals won’t vote for the Senate bill, it doesn’t matter what moderates do. What progressive bloggers need to do is start working the liberal legislators in the House.

Scott Brown Tests Republicans, Too

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As Democrats try to piece together the shards of an agenda that Scott Brown’s election just blasted to pieces, there’s been a lot of talk about how they should proceed. What lesson should Democrats take away from this? Can they withstand the test that Brown’s victory and its aftermath poses? (The nearly unanimous answer from despairing liberals and cynical pundits: no.)

But set aside the Democrats for a minute. One thing that few people are talking about is how the Republicans will respond to Brown. Based on the party’s trajectory, it won’t be too long before Brown prompts another round of party soul-searching – and it won’t be the Democrats doing it the next time.

As Boris Shor, a political scientist at the University of Chicago (h/t Andrew Gelman) has pointed out, Brown is a liberal Republican – perhaps the most liberal of the party. Shor’s analysis of Brown’s State Senate record revealed that Brown enters the U.S. Senate as the 60th most liberal senator, somewhere to the right of Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, a Democrat, and somewhere to the left of Maine’s Olympia Snowe, a Republican. This makes sense – Massachusetts is, Tuesday notwithstanding, one of the bluest states in the union.

There is, of course, a not insignificant chance that Brown will turn to the right now that he’s in the national spotlight. But Shor douses water on that scenario by pointing out that if Brown is like almost every other politician, he’ll vote with both eyes trained on his home state electorate. And, as Shor adds, “Brown will have a far harder time in 2012 against some credible, seasoned Democrat who won’t get surprised again (or run so badly). Turnout will be higher in that presidential year, meaning the Democratic base will be far more evident at the polls” – meaning that a turn to the right in a blue state is, though not impossible, probably not likely.

This is where the Tea Partiers that have elevated him to party folk hero status come in. For putting a halt to health care reform, Brown may have earned a lifetime pass from the far right. Rush Limbaugh just this week bashed John McCain while invoking Scott Brown as a model maverick. But the euphoria of this week will wear off, and the votes will start trickling in. If Brown becomes a member of the Snowe-Collins bloc of northeastern Republicans willing to deal with the other party, will the Tea Party still cheer for him?

For a Republican Party struggling to present a responsible, sensible face to mainstream America (they’re showcasing Virginia’s Bob McDonnell, who ran a centrist campaign in November, in their State of the Union response), a moderate Republican from Massachusetts is a godsend. But you can’t escape who you are.

The Tea Party DNA is deeply embedded in the party’s makeup. The party of Rush Limbaugh may be cheering now, but chances are good they’ll be cursing Scott Brown’s name down the road. What Scott Brown’s win has obscured is that the Republican crack-up is still proceeding apace – and, like Brown’s victory, it might well sneak up on everyone, too.

The Living Standards of the Poor — Part I

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Last week, I spent some time looking at the living standards of the middle class, showing that they have improved notably over time and giving evidence that they are better than or comparable to middle-class lifestyles in other industrialized nations. I will be returning to this issue in a later post in order to address the “two-income trap” argument of Elizabeth Warren, which was raised by Reihan Salam and by Rortybomb.

For now though, I want to talk about the living standards of the poor. It’s important to make the distinction between trends (which I’ll discuss today) and absolute levels of material well-being (which I’ll discuss in a later post) because things can have improved a lot at the same time that they are still not all that great.

Let’s return to the comparison I used in my post on the middle class of “the gold standard” of 1973, when median household income was at its pre-stagflation peak, to 2008. To represent “the poor,” I’ll look at the 20th percentile — the household that is doing better than 20 percent of other households but worse than 80 percent of them. You’ll have to trust me that my research indicates the story would be similar if I were talking about the tenth percentile.

It’s easy to look at only a fairly limited income measure going back to 1973 for the 20th percentile. Doing so indicates that income at the 20th percentile grew from $19,046 to $20,712 (in 2008 dollars, adjusted by the Bureau’s preferred CPI-U-RS). That’s obviously not impressive growth, though it should be noted that the poor are a bit better off today than they were in 1973 (and they look a little better comparing 1973 to 2007, which is a fairer comparison). Using the PCE deflator, which the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis uses (and which I prefer because of the evidence that the CPI-U-RS overstates inflation, particularly among the poor), income increased by about $3,000 after accounting for the cost of living, or 16 percent. That’s about the same as for the middle class using the same measures and methods.

As I noted in the middle-class post, the official income definition is pretty limited. The Census Bureau’s “Definition 14” takes into account taxes, public benefits, and the value of health insurance, and it’s easy to look at going back to 1979 (which was at least as good/bad a year for the poor as 1973 was). By this measure, income at the 20th percentile rose from $17,999 to $24,642 from 1979 to 2008 (using the CPI-U-RS). That’s an increase of over one-third—after adjusting for the cost of living. When the PCE is used to adjust for the cost of living, the increase is almost $8,000—45 percent!

A number of commenters to my post on the middle class didn’t like that the value of health benefits were included in my “comprehensive” income measure. I prefer including them in “income” because employer health care costs have caused earnings growth to be quite a bit lower than it otherwise would have been, and employer- and publicly-provided health insurance contribute to living standards. It is possible that the way the Census Bureau estimates the value of health insurance exaggerates improvements in well-being, but it is not simply the case that rapid health care inflation negates those estimates. Many health economists believe that rising health care costs do reflect corresponding improvements in the quality of care received. At any rate, whether or not you believe I have a dog in this fight, hopefully you believe that the Census Bureau doesn’t.

Nevertheless, we can look at the trend omitting the value of health insurance in 2008. Doing so offers a somewhat conservative estimate of the increase because I can’t omit the value of insurance from 1979. The increase, however, is 21 percent using the CPI-U-RS, and 29 percent using the PCE.

So it seems pretty likely that the living standards of the poor in the U.S. have improved fairly robustly in recent decades. Before leaving behind the question of trends, I should note that there is pretty overwhelming evidence that male workers who don’t get further education beyond high school have seen real wage stagnation (though the story for the median male worker, as I showed in the middle-class posts, is much better). The fact that household incomes at the bottom have grown reflects a decline in taxes paid, an increase in the value of means-tested benefits, and greater work among women (including single women). Computations I have done indicate that confining things to non-elderly households doesn’t affect the story importantly; nor does adjusting incomes for household size.

This issue of greater work among women is one of the last remaining arguments to my case that I feel I need to address more, because it is obviously key to the question of whether higher incomes really reflect improved living standards broadly construed. After all, we could all work more hours and sleep less, which would improve our incomes but not necessarily our quality of life. I’ll take this up in my next couple of posts, but suffice it to say, you can assume my read of the evidence doesn’t overturn the case I’ve been trying to make thus far.

They Don’t Like Each Other

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A problem that seems to be getting lost in the current confusion over the fate of health reform legislation is something that has little to do with party or ideology, much less with the details of health policy. It’s cameralism.

To put it simply, members of the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate have very different perspectives, mistrust each other’s motives, and rarely communicate. In general, they don’t much like each other. They live and work in two very different institutional cultures, and with the exception of House veterans serving in the Senate, they don’t go to much trouble to find out how the other chamber functions.

Much of the time this “cameralism” is background noise in the legislative process. But when it comes to the kind of highly complex, trust-based maneuvers that health care reformers are talking about this week–you know, House passes Senate bill with assurance that Senate passes bill “fixing” their own bill via budget reconciliation, somewhere down the road–it’s a real problem that can’t just be wished away. And that’s particularly true in an environment requiring almost total agreement among Democrats in both Houses. Maybe that’s one reason the White House is talking about a “cooling off” period on health care reform.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

One Step Forward, One Step Back

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The White House yesterday announced new restrictions on banking activity, designed to address the issues that caused the crisis 15 months ago. Wall Street reacted by letting stocks fall 200 points, which initially would make you think the announcement must be right. The White House’s plan has two main parts: a limit on the scope of banking activity and a limit on the size of banks. One part makes sense, but as presented, the other should be re-thought.

Limit on Size – The good part is the limitation on the size of banks. This will include a tighter cap on the control of deposits. Currently no bank can control more than 10 percent of the nations deposits — but Bank of America got the Bush administration to waive that in 2007 to buy LaSalle. The administration’s proposal would have this cap include non-insured assets and other deposits. While this is a good first step, its effectiveness will be spelled out in the details. Bank of America is the only bank that exceeds the current cap, and almost 25 institutions could be considered “Too Big To Fail.”

Limit on Scope – At first blush, this seems to be a ban on banks taking FDIC-insured deposits – or having received TARP money – from engaging in proprietary trading. Prop trading is a major part of Wall Street activity, in which investment banks trade with “their own money.” That is, they engage in trading on their own behalf, not on the behalf of customers. The administration is right that a lot of this trading on prop desks is speculation. However, prop trading is also how investment banks and market makers engage in risk management and hedge positions. Banning prop trading by banks would severely curtail their market-making ability, and dry up liquidity on Wall Street faster than a sponge in the sun. Better than limiting the type of activity trading desks engage in would be to limit the amount of leverage they can use in that speculation.

The administration has said it is going to work with Congressional leaders in the coming weeks to spell this out in details. We’ll see if Congress is able to improve on these suggestions.

Secretary Clinton, Cyber Diplomacy, and Google

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Echoing FDR in reference to cyber-repression in places like Vietnam, North Korea, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today outlined her vision of a world with five Internet freedoms: freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom to connect online everywhere, freedom from fear of cyber attacks, and freedom from want – the idea that information networks are a “great leveler” that can help lift people out of poverty.

Clinton’s speech clearly signals that fostering free access to the Internet can be a powerful tool that can help loosen the grip of the most repressive regimes. And to that end, she launched a new $15 million project for grassroots civic participation and new media capabilities in the Middle East and North Africa. Small, to be sure, but a worthy start.

But on the panel following Secretary Clinton’s speech, Rebecca MacKinnon of the Open Society Institute warned that though online access no doubt promotes openness, the Internet is not “freedom juice” that can be simply injected into a country and hope that all its oppressive tendencies vanish. That’s because places like China have done a devilish job of networking authoritarianism – a policy that toes a tight line by plugging into the global economy while blocking the receipt of global information. China is of course hardly alone – up to 40 countries (including some nominal democracies) now censor Internet content.

Finally, Clinton had a few words pointedly directed at private sector Internet companies, whom she encouraged to embrace the principals of openness as part of American companies stand for:

I hope that refusal to support politically motivated censorship will become a trademark characteristic of American technology companies. It should be part of our national brand. The private sector has a shared responsibility to help safeguard free expression … And when their business dealings threaten to undermine this freedom, they need to consider what’s right, not simply the prospect of quick profits.

Thus far, Google is the standard-bearer on this issue. The company’s slogan – Don’t Be Evil – has been invoked as it weighs whether to withdraw from China following allegedly government-sponsored cyber attacks on Google-housed email addresses of human rights activists. Since Google and its ilk in effect own the leverage of cyber-diplomacy, it makes sense that the State Department is cajoling them in this direction. I’d expect to see more Foggy Bottom conferences with various Silicon Valley CEO’s to drive home this point in the near future. That’s a good thing.

Finally, the business argument is worth examining. Contrary to the American market, Google isn’t quite as ubiquitous in China as it is stateside. That said, the WSJ grades Google.cn’s results (under censorship) as superior to its Chinese rival Baidu. The article concludes, “From a policy standpoint, the worst move China could make would be to force Baidu’s main competitor out of the country, leaving Baidu with no incentive to spend on R&D and improve its results.” But I’m not so sure — if China wants to stem the flow of information, why would they need a better search engine?

Health Reform, Public Opinion, and “Liberal Pundits”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the wake of Tuesday’s Republican victory in Massachusetts, Scott Winship wrote a post here that expressed hope that “liberal pundits” would finally get out of “denial” about the unpopularity of health care reform.

Now as Scott knows, there’s always peril involved in making generalizations about the views of large classes of people. I don’t know which “liberal pundits” he’s thinking about in making the suggestion that there’s a general unwillingness to accept public opinion data on health reform; the links he offers don’t really support the claim. But most of the “liberal pundits” I’ve read in recent months don’t dispute the fact that public support for the particular legislation being discussed in Congress at any given moment has been flagging (though given the very fluid nature of the legislative process, it’s difficult to identify which version the public is reacting to, which is why the variations in the wording of polling questions on health reform so often produce different results).

Scott goes on to mock particular arguments that he views as rationalizations for this alleged unwillingness to accept reality: voters are uninformed, Republicans have misled them, and in any event, a significant part of the opposition to health reform bills is “from the left.”

Are these really just rationalizations? I don’t think so. Poor public information on health reform and Republican lies about “ObamaCare” are germane for the simple reason that public opinion may well change if health reform is enacted, and lo and behold “death panels” aren’t convened, Medicare benefit cuts don’t happen, and “government” does not in fact “take over” health care. And the “opposition from the left” data point is relevant to nervous Democrats in Congress because voters unhappy with the absence of a public option, for example, are not terribly likely to vote for Republican candidates who favor voucherization of Medicare or oppose regulation of health insurers.

Scott also seems to assume that “liberals” who talk about the “will of the majority” being frustrated by the de facto 60-vote requirement in the Senate are talking about public opinion. But all the examples he cites are in fact discussing the “will of the majority” of senators, and the majority of the population they represent. The rules of the Senate, after all, cannot be adjusted daily based on tracking polls of the relative popularity of this or that piece of legislation.

Finally, there’s the apparent motivator of Scott’s post: the Massachusetts results. Should the strong opposition of Scott Brown voters to health care reform (at the federal level, at least) represent an “aha” moment for those with any doubts about public opinion on this issue? Again, I see no atmosphere of denial on the subject; yes, many observers, myself included, have noted that a lot of different things were going on in Massachusetts, and have argued that it was not all just one vast referendum on health reform in Congress. But more to the immediate point, the relevance of the Massachusetts results to public opinion nationally is significantly damaged by its unique status as a state that has already enacted reforms almost identical to those attempted by the pending legislation in Congress. And this, in fact, was Scott Brown’s number one talking point on health care reform: why should Bay State citizens pay taxes to give Nebraska the benefits Massachusetts already enjoys? That’s a pretty compelling argument, on the surface at least, but it’s not one that can be made elsewhere.

Ironically, Scott closes his piece by suggesting that perhaps congressional Democrats should put aside fears about public opinion and enact health reform legislation anyway. In doing so, he reflects the real debate I’ve been hearing among “liberal pundits” for many months now: when given a historic opportunity to achieve a long-held progressive goal which happens to represent an immediate national challenge, should Democrats defer action until public opinion is completely on their side? What’s the point of running for office as a progressive if you aren’t determined to achieve progressive policy goals when you can? Is there any other approach to health reform that might be more popular? Is there any time like the present for action?

These questions don’t automatically answer themselves, but I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that health reform advocates are in denial about the political risks involved in health care reform, particularly at a time when Republicans are absolutely refusing to cooperate, and when much of the beltway commentariat has been telling the president for months that he should abandon all goals other than agitating the air for more jobs and lower deficits.

Progressives need data-driven critics like Scott Winship who are willing to contribute to our debates with sometimes troubling information. But in this case, I suspect, to use an old southern expression, he’s just goosing a ghost.

Memo to Obama — Be the Change

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Mute all those cable TV pundits. The commentator who has the best grasp on what happened in Massachusetts this week is none other than President Barack Obama. It was a change election, he said Wednesday, just like his own.

In 2008, Obama won a solid majority by rolling up an eight-point margin with independents. His race, his youth, his political inexperience cast him as the antithesis of the despised “Washington insider.” These non-aligned voters warmed especially to Obama’s “post partisan” promise to put the nation’s interests above those of political careerists, partisan hacks and rent-seeking interest groups.

On Tuesday, Massachusetts independents — many of whom had voted for Obama — backed little-known Republican Scott Brown, who improbably captured Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat by running an insurgent campaign against politics as usual in both Springfield and Washington.

And not just in Massachusetts. Independents also propelled GOP gubernatorial victories last fall in Virginia and New Jersey. According to an Allstate/National Journal poll, the president’s approval rating among independents has fallen 17 points, to 44 percent, since April.

Evidently, America’s swing voters are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. What’s got them so riled up?

Read the full column at Sphere.com.

Health Reform Back From the Dead

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

There was a point yesterday when it sure looked like Scott Brown had managed to kill federal health care reform without setting foot in Washington. Senate Democrats were busily disclaiming any interest in further action on a potential House-Senate conference committee report before Brown could arrive to joyfully join a filibuster and impose the will of the minority. House Democrats were refusing to consider passage of the Senate bill (which could avoid the necessity of a conference committee report and another Senate vote) without iron-clad assurances of future action to change objectionable features (e.g., the “Cadillac tax” which unions hate, and language restricting abortion). Such assurances did not seem to be forthcoming from Senate Democrats. And no one knew where the White House was, though rumors abounded that the president had told a reporter it was time to go back to the drawing board and try to enact something less ambitious.

All this was happening as conservatives in effect snaked-danced through the streets hailing Brown’s victory as the largest political event since, maybe, World War II, and the effective end of the Obama presidency.

The general malaise among health-care-reform-minded progressives was probably best expressed by The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn, who has been an eternal optimist about prospects for eventually getting legislation done. He published a piece late yesterday bewailing the White House’s apparent drift, with the bitter title: “Where’s the Obama I voted for?”

As often happens, though, the panic subsided, and things look more hopeful today. Turns out the president’s comments were vague but resolute about pressing forward on health reform. Senate Democrats are not walking away from health reform, and House Democrats have stopped making angry comments about the impossibility of getting acceptable assurances from the Senate about future action in order to facilitate passage of the Senate bill. It still will be complicated to put together a “deal” that both progressives and moderates in both Houses can live with, but it seems to be sinking in that failure to enact anything, after so many Democrats have already cast votes for reform and made themselves targets for conservative attacks, is just not an acceptable outcome.

So the conservative exultation over “the death of ObamaCare” may be a bit premature. We’ll know soon enough.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Progressives Need to Take a Deep Breath

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I spent a chunk of time on the train to New York yesterday reading through bloggers’ reactions to Democrats’ reactions to the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts. And I’m confused.

First, an awful lot of liberal bloggers seem all too eager to advance a pernicious stereotype about the Democratic Party — that it is feckless, weak, wimpy, cowardly, unprincipled, etc. Look, it’s not that every Democrat was scared away from health care reform by the Brown win. As far as we know, very few were. If you want to make accusations of cowardice, aim them at those few specific legislators who have flip-flopped — the rest of the party can’t do much to make them vote in favor of reform. If President Obama didn’t come out as aggressively in favor of passing the Senate bill as you wanted, that’s probably because he knows he doesn’t have the votes and has little interest in self-immolation. By tarring the entire party, you aid and abet Republican efforts to caricature Democrats.

And for the love of God, if you feel no longer energized to elect Democrats in November because some congressman in some other state caved, well, you need to take a deep breath and count to 10. Losing health care would be a huge, regrettable defeat, but by sitting out November, you would also make progressives in Congress worth supporting suffer for the sins of others.

Perfect Storms Do Happen

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Progressives looking at yesterday’s results from Massachusetts would be wise to avoid over-interpretation. Republicans naturally are spinning Scott Brown’s victory as one of the most epochal events in political history, and as a “message” to President Obama that he needs to abandon pretty much everything he is trying to do. And just as naturally, Democrats with varying grievances about the way that the administration or the congressional leadership are comporting themselves will find vindication in so visible and startling a party defeat.

Scott’s post notwithstanding, the reality remains that the segment of Massachusetts voters who went to the polls yesterday were not setting themselves up as a national focus group on the Obama administration generally or a specific issue like health care reform. They chose between two candidates. As Nate Silver reminded readers last night, the desire to find a single explanation for Brown’s victory is almost certainly misguided. Yes, the national political environment (itself heavily affected by the struggling economy as much as or more than anything the president or his party have or haven’t done) undoubtedly contributed to the outcome; but so, too, did the vast disparity between the quality of the two campaigns; and so, too, did factors unique to Massachusetts, most notably long-simmering resentment of a dominant but complacent state Democratic Party (reflected almost perfectly by Martha Coakley’s complacent campaign), and the existence of a health care system that enabled Scott Brown to promise to shoot down almost identical national reforms with impunity.

I’d add to Nate’s analysis the point that timing made a lot of difference to the outcome. Had the election been held a week later, it’s likely that the “wake-up call” to Democrats provided by radically worsening poll numbers would have bestirred the Coakley campaign to get moving earlier; a Rasmussen exit poll suggested that she actually gained ground in the last few days. And without question, the fact that this special election occurred at an especially late and sensitive moment in the national health reform debate made Brown’s campaign a source of intense excitement for Republicans nationally and in Massachusetts, which helped him raise vast sums of money quickly, and pre-energized GOP voters.

So this really was in many respects a “perfect storm” for the Republican candidate, and no one pointing that out should be accused of rationalizing a painful defeat for Democrats. Still, part of the outcome was attributable to the national political environment. But it’s not clear that Brown’s election added a whole lot to our understanding of that dynamic. As John Judis pointed out this morning, we already knew that Barack Obama has a persistent problem connecting with non-college-educated older white voters, who happen to turn out disproportionately in non-presidential elections. We also knew that the approval ratings of presidents tend to be affected in ways that are difficult to overcome by high levels of unemployment. We already knew that we were in an environment of toxic hostility to the political status quo. And we knew that a majority of Americans don’t much like the pending federal health care reform legislation, though nothing like a majority supports the Republican proposition that the status quo in health care is acceptable.

In other words, the Massachusetts results confirmed much of what we already knew about the tough but negotiable road ahead for the administration and its agenda. And even though the GOP has a bright new star in Scott Brown (who nonetheless probably won’t be reelected to a full term in 2012 given a normal presidential turnout in Massachusetts), it didn’t change the fact that the Republican Party itself is in greater disrepute than any other political institution in the country.

Brown’s election does, of course, create an immediate and difficult challenge to the final enactment of health care reform in Congress. But it’s surmountable if progressives keep their eyes on the prize and refuse to panic or point fingers at each other. I couldn’t agree more with Will Marshall’s point about the perversity of letting the Massachusetts results deny the country the same reforms that Massachusetts voters, not to mention their new senator, seem to like. And I hope congressional Democrats think about Jonathan Chait’s argument that they’ve already taken the risk of voting for health care reform, and would be monumentally foolish to abandon their efforts now.

Sure, yesterday’s results were significant and worth analyzing. But let’s wait a while before adjudging them as an event with huge consequences beyond Massachusetts.

Public Opposition to the Health Reform Bill — and Liberal Pundits Who Ignore It

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

There will be a mountain of analysis regarding the Brown victory in Massachusetts last night and what it means for health care reform. But what is striking to me this morning, skimming my RSS feeds, is the same thing I have found striking throughout the past year — how willfully ignorant liberal advocates of health care reform continue to be about public opinion on the Senate- and House-passed versions of health care reform.

There’s no need for extended analysis of the polling to make my point. Start with the basic favor/oppose trend for health care reform:

You can argue that people are uninformed. You can argue that Republicans have misled them. You can argue that people support something called “health care reform” as a general concept. But the numbers are what they are — only a minority supports the bills under consideration.

Faced with such numbers, reform advocates have defensively pointed out that much of the opposition to health care reform comes from the left, as if that somehow rendered the bills’ unpopularity irrelevant. What is devastating to their case, however, is a look at the intensity of views toward reform.

When assessing polling results, I have found it is crucial to employ what I call the Kessler Rule, after Third Way’s Jim Kessler. Jim argues that anytime someone tells a pollster that they are “somewhat” supportive or opposed to something, it basically means they don’t have strong feelings one way or another or that they have so little interest in the issue that they haven’t even formed an opinion. Rasmussen has been asking its respondents whether they “strongly” or “somewhat” support or oppose health care reform for months. The first time they asked was in August, during the congressional recess, when they found that 43 percent of respondents were strongly opposed, compared with 23 percent who were strongly supportive. Keep in mind, this was when the public option was still included in all major proposals, so liberal backlash was unlikely to have been much of a factor in this contrast.

The most recent poll Rasmussen conducted was over the weekend. Results: 44 percent strongly opposed, 18 percent strongly supportive.

You would think that such numbers would dent the confidence of reform advocates that the public overwhelmingly supported their own preferences. You would be wrong. Instead, incredibly, health care reform was cited throughout the fall and winter as Exhibit A for why we need to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate! If something as popular as health care reform faced such difficulty winning passage, it was argued, then the Senate can no longer govern!

Now with Scott Brown’s defeat of Martha Coakley, advocates have bent over backwards making the case that the election of a conservative in one of the most liberal states in the country — to fill a seat vacated by the patron saint of health care reform, at a time when the result would determine the fate of reform — had nothing to do with public opposition to reform.

Rasmussen’s election night survey says everything you need to know about how much these advocates are kidding themselves: 78 percent of Brown voters strongly oppose the health care bills before Congress.

What’s my point? It’s not that the case for health care reform is bunk or that policymakers should make their decisions based on polls. Like many progressives, I think the House should pass the Senate bill and that they should fix it later. (Unlike most progressives, my “fixes” would involve moving in the direction of Wyden-Bennett or even a more generous version of the House Republican bill rather than in the direction of House Democrats.) It’s not that liberal advocates should not spin issues in ways that promote their policy preferences. It’s that they should not believe their own spin — the country remains moderate. But don’t take it from me — take it from the 2010 electorate in November.

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

Massachusetts Election Postmortem

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Brutal ironies abound in Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts. First and most obvious, Brown won Ted Kennedy’s seat, despite promising to kill what Kennedy called the cause of his life – a federal push to expand health care coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.

Apparently, Bay State voters – or at least the independents who put Brown over the top — aren’t sentimentalists where the Kennedys are concerned.

Another incongruity: Scott comes from the first state to achieve a nearly universal health care system – and whose system is the model for what President Obama and Democrats are trying to achieve nationally. The reforms before Congress share the same basic architecture as the Massachusetts plan: health exchanges where people can choose among competing private insurance plans, subsidies for those who can’t afford to buy coverage, and an individual mandate to prevent people from “free riding” on the system by getting coverage only when they get sick.

Yet Brown says he won’t work to undo his state’s system. Apparently, what seems to be working in Massachusetts becomes something hideous, a hydra-headed example of “big government” and “socialism,” when the federal government tries to apply the same principles on a national scale.

It’s tempting to dismiss Brown’s improbable upset as purely a reflection of a bad economy. Economic distress, compounded by public anger over the perceived injustice of bank bailouts and bonuses, has surely contributed to the voters’ cranky and volatile mood. But there’s more going on here.

It’s not an ideological shift to the right so much as an upsurge of anti-establishment, even anti-politics, sentiment. Brown ran not only against health reform, but also against Obama’s stimulus package, the administration’s plans to cut U.S. carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade system, and its decisions to ban “enhanced interrogation techniques” and to try terrorist suspects in civilian courts.

It’s not hard to discern in all this an angry rejection of elite certitudes, and hostility toward the way politics is played in Washington. Although the media predictably casts the Massachusetts result as a repudiation of President Obama, he remains personally popular and will rebound from this setback. But Congress is another matter. Public attitudes toward the legislative branch seem particularly sulfurous. This suggests that Obama needs to be more forceful in shaping his major initiatives, lest parochial and special interests run rampant as they have often seemed to do during the endless negotiations over health care.

For now, though, Democrats should make this clear: Scott Brown won the right to represent Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. He did not win the right to thwart the will of a president and party that won solid majorities over the last two national elections. As the governing party, Democrats have not only a right but a responsibility to advance health care reform, for which they won an unambiguous mandate in 2008. If Republicans want to stop them, they will need to win a lot more than one Senate seat.

America Acts in Haiti

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With a hat tip to Spencer Ackerman for flagging the video (and accompanying sentiment), scenes like this symbolize what America stands for:

Watch as LA County rescue workers pull a victim from the rubble; the crowd erupts with spontaneous applause and chants of U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

I worry that there’s a strain within progressive America that doubts our country’s place in the world. I worry that America’s actions over the last decade have irreparably damaged progressives’ image of America as a great nation that was conceived to do great things.

To be sure, the Iraq war has triggered worthy reflection on that point. But my uber-fear is that with President Obama’s decision to adopt a new strategy in Afghanistan, progressives’ degraded concept of America has been legitimized now that one of their own has allegedly–if falsely in my opinion–“followed in Bush’s footsteps.”

Not to trivialize the point by being colloquial, but with issues like Iraq, it is unfortunately and tragically true that America screws up sometimes, and royally so (and Massachusetts, don’t think I’m just looking at that ranch in Crawford). Let’s remember that though even gross misjudgments in policy may raise questions about what America is, the worst errors are ultimately set right. America will remain a great place that does wonderful and selfless acts of kindness. It does so for two reasons–because it can and because that what it was meant to do.

Rebuilding Haiti

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Scott and readers at TPM have suggested that the United States must assume nation-building efforts on the scale of Iraq or Afghanistan in Haiti. Scott makes an excellent point that the silver lining of all this is that America’s humanitarian mission in Haiti is an opportunity to provide reconstruction assistance in a country where it’s welcomed by all. However, let’s keep in mind that American assistance will likely flow under the auspices of the U.N., so the rebuilding effort won’t provide the unfettered learning tool that Scott envisages.

That said, I’m nervous about the comparison drawn between Haiti and Iraq/Afghanistan. If the evocation of America’s other nation-building efforts is meant merely as a general comparison to signify the size of the U.S.’s contribution to Haitian reconstruction, stabilization, and eventual growth, then it’s right on. But the cynic in me worries that comparisons to Iraq and Afghanistan are designed to elicit a direct contrast between very different missions. It’s as if some are almost daring the Obama administration to prove that America actually cares about a country that doesn’t immediately impact America’s national security (though if reports of mass refugee influxes prove accurate, then there is a decided self-interest as well).

Haiti is neither Afghanistan nor Iraq. The circumstances of America’s involvement couldn’t be more different. Haiti is closer and smaller. It had a more stable government that could control its territory. Haiti’s geography and history of foreign occupation are less violent. Its social structures and norms couldn’t be more opposite… and on and on.

So let’s dispense with those comparisons as quickly as possible. The bottom line is that America’s contribution is, and should be, of historically large proportions. The reason for our involvement will be for no better or worse reason that what President Obama wrote:

[F]or a very simple reason: in times of tragedy, the United States of America steps forward and helps. That is who we are. That is what we do. For decades, America’s leadership has been founded in part on the fact that we do not use our power to subjugate others, we use it to lift them up—whether it was rebuilding our former adversaries after World War II, dropping food and water to the people of Berlin, or helping the people of Bosnia and Kosovo rebuild their lives and their nations.

And that’s all that matters.