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Is the New Bin Laden Tape Really Him?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Nerd alert: My brother Bob and I have a long-standing competition to identify anonymous celebrity voice-overs on TV ads (and we’re pretty good — picking out Gene Hackman shilling for Lowes is amateur hour), but I don’t claim to ID celeb voices for a living. That’s why I can’t definitively say that the recently released Bin Laden tape isn’t him, but I suspect there’s a decent chance that it just might not be.

Last January, Bin Laden released a 22-minute tape on the eve of the Obama inauguration about everything from Israel to the economic crisis. The long-winded diatribe, replete with OBL’s standard Koranic references, was standard fare from al Qaeda’s chief taco. His tapes of May and March 2008 were also 22 minutes. That’s a far cry from this week’s version, which barely clocks in at 22 words (actually 144, but you get my drift), according to the Middle East Media Research Institute’s transcript.

Second, keep in mind that al Qaeda’s senior leadership has always had its eye on the big prize — the spectacular attack that generates either genuine fear or awe for its daring size, scale, or target. In 1998, they leveled two American embassies simultaneously; in 2000 they struck at the heart of the American military by blowing a massive hole in the side of an American Navy destroyer; and 9/11 speaks for itself. Even AQ’s latest significant attempt at a large-scale operation – the multi-flight Heathrow plot in 2006 – was an impressive feat of imagination. But in this tape, a man claiming to be Bin Laden embraces not a spectacular success that improves upon complex and sickeningly impressive plots, but a complete failure of an attempt that he likely had nothing to do with.

Then again, maybe even notable failures at small operations are enough these days. It’s possible that the combination of a tighter American safety net and the embarrassing overreaction of the pundit class has convinced AQ that small-fry attacks are sufficient to carry AQ’s fundraising and recruiting goals in the current climate. So if this was really OBL on the tape, it would signal a major degradation of AQ’s modus operandi and attack capabilities.

But the irregularity continues to bug me — it doesn’t make sense that Bin Laden would essentially admit al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. That’s why I keep thinking someone might be masquerading as the big man. By tying the Christmas Day attempt to Bin Laden, the real perpetrators of the plot — al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — could gin up money and recruits in its aftermath.

It would be a serious scandal within Islamic extremist circles if the CIA came out in the next 24 hours and declared the tape fake, so I have to imagine that even uppity terrorists aren’t that stupid. Then again, perhaps the CIA should consider floating a trial balloon about the tape’s “questionable authenticity” just to see what sort of reaction it generates.

Discipline Government, Too

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Since last week’s shocker in Massachusetts, the White House has amped up the populist rhetoric in hopes of deflecting voter anger onto Wall Street bonus babies and health insurance companies. That might make progressives feel better, but it’s unlikely to mollify ornery independents.

For one thing, Barack Obama is no Huey Long. As president, his job is to point the way out of the nation’s dilemmas, not channel voter rage. What our jittery country needs now is his calm, penetrating intelligence, not hackneyed demagoguery that will unsettle markets and retard the return of economic confidence. A swifter economic recovery is the best elixir for what ails Obama and his party.

Besides, independents, who are now more numerous than either Democrats or Republicans, are as upset with big government as they are with big banking and business. Everything that has happened in the past year – from bailing out feckless bankers, home owners and auto executives, to stimulus spending that has failed (so far) to keep unemployment from getting worse, to the spectacle of lawmakers appeasing powerful interests as they cobble together a huge and complicated health reform bill – has aggravated their misgivings about government’s cost and intrusiveness.

President Obama needs to speak directly to independents’ qualms about big government. The first step is to acknowledge their validity. Then he must take forceful action to show that he is as determined to discipline government as he is to impose new rules on irresponsible capitalists.

On no account should he back down on health care reform. Rather, he should work to strengthen its ability to control health care costs, the issue that matters most to independent and working-class voters.

The right response to anti-government populism is to get serious about restoring fiscal sanity in Washington. That’s why the president’s decision over the weekend to support a bipartisan deficit reduction commission is a promising sign.

In theory, establishing a bipartisan commission to cut federal budget deficits is a terrible idea. It lets Congress off the hook, even while usurping the legislative branch’s Constitutional responsibility for the nation’s fisc.

In the real world, however, a commission may be the only way to force Congress to do its job. Lawmakers’ inability to find common ground on expanding health care coverage – something both parties claim they want – doesn’t inspire much confidence that they will take the tough steps necessary to close the nation’s yawning deficits.

That’s why 14 moderate Democratic senators, led by Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad and Sen. Evan Bayh, have threatened to withhold their votes for raising the nation’s debt ceiling – which allows the government to borrow to meet its obligations – unless Congress sets up a commission. As currently proposed, the commission would present its recommendations to Congress as a package for an up or down vote. This is how Congress managed to close unneeded military bases after the Cold War ended. According to the Washington Post, President Obama has endorsed the idea of setting up a commission by legislation, after previously pushing for a bipartisan panel established by executive order.

The moderates are right that a “statutory” commission would have real teeth. For that reason, however, it has drawn fierce opposition from both ends of the ideological spectrum. A coalition of 50 left-leaning pressure groups came out swinging on Wednesday, blasting a commission as “undemocratic” and “truly dangerous” to Social Security. Having invested time and money in acquiring influence in the legislative arena, the last thing they want is a change of venue.

For such groups, “protecting” Social Security benefits from cuts is more important than dealing with the nation’s fiscal crisis – just as many conservatives would sooner see America plunge deeper into the red than raise a penny in taxes. “A budget deficit commission is nothing more than a time-tested ploy to get Republicans to raise taxes,” the Wall Street Journal harrumphed last month.

So there we are: the left won’t cut spending, the right won’t raise taxes, and the two remain locked in a tacit conspiracy to bankrupt America. Maybe all those angry independents have a point.

It remains to be seen whether Obama’s decision back a statutory commission will sway congressional leaders, who have been skeptical. In any case, if the Senate moderates hold firm, Congress won’t be able to raise the debt ceiling to $14.2 trillion, which it must do by mid-February or the federal government will run out of money.

This sets the stage for some interesting brinkmanship, and for a determined push by President Obama to change the way Washington works. Stay tuned.

Bring On the GOP Health Policies!

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’m with Steve Benen on this one: after listening to Republicans say all weekend that the president needs to surrender on health care reform and start embracing theirpolicy ideas, maybe it’s time to draw a lot more public attention to all that fine GOP thinking on the subject.

So where to begin? I guess that would be with the “plan” that drew 176 Republicans votes in the House in a test vote in November of last year, the so-called “Boehner plan.” Dissed by an official Congressional Budget Office analysis that suggested it would cover almost none of the uninsured, while controlling costs far less effectively than the House Democratic proposal, this plan followed the usual conservative template of focusing on tort “reform,” “interstate markets” for private heath insurance (e.g., elimination of state regulations), elimination of the entire employer-based system, and a two-pronged strategy of subsidizing high-deductible individual health plans for healthy people, and state-run risk pools for sick people. It was, as Matt Yglesias put it, an “un-insurance” plan that would take health policy, in some respects, back to the 1950s.

Another example of Republican “thinking” on health care policy is the idea of “voucherizing” Medicare, which was the central health policy element of the official House GOP “alternative budget” offered last April by Rep. Paul Ryan of WI. While “Medicare voucher” proposals vary, they all at the very least aim at transforming Medicare into a system of federal subsidies for purchasing private health insurance, while capping expenditures regardless of the impact on benefits. To put it simply, seniors would march through the streets with torches to protest any such plan if it were taken seriously.

And then there’s the most fully developed Republican health care plan, the one developed and implemented by the front-runner for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, and recently promoted by the party’s maximum “new star”: the Massachusetts health reform plan. How about allowing a vote on that in Congress? Oh, yeah, sorry, that’s pretty much the plan already passed by the U.S. Senate without a single Republican vote! It’s socialist!

Suffice it to say that while Democrats have been materially hurt by endless scrutiny and confusion about the substance of their ideas on health care, Republicans have massively benefitted from a total lack of accountability for their own ideas. Best I can tell, Republicans would probably be politically destroyed if people truly paid attention to GOP health proposals. So Democrats should find ways to help their GOP colleagues publicize their ideas.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Fast Track to the Future: A High-Speed Rail Agenda for America

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Download the full report.

In the next few weeks, the administration will be announcing which states will be awarded funds from $8 billion dedicated for high-speed rail (HSR) development in the stimulus package. Right now, 259 applications from the states valued at $57 billion are chasing the recovery plan money. The administration’s decision to devote considerable resources to developing HSR underscores its commitment to bring bullet trains to the U.S. But unless it makes the right decisions about where to put the money and what policies to follow, the new enthusiasm for HSR could be just the latest false start in a long, disappointing history.

Last spring, President Barack Obama unveiled his vision for a national HSR network. The president conjured up an image of a 21st-century train infrastructure, “a system that reduces travel times and increases mobility…reduces congestion and boosts productivity…reduces destructive emissions and creates jobs.” The administration also put forward a rail policy that, rather than laying track coast to coast, would concentrate on heavily populated corridors where short distances between cities would let faster trains compete effectively with cars and airplanes.

Since then, the administration has called on states to submit plans for HSR competitive grants. Congress, meanwhile, added $2.5 billion to the HSR pot for fiscal year 2010, and it remains possible that the House and Senate will add billions more in a second jobs stimulus, focusing on infrastructure, likely to be taken up this winter.

For decades, high-speed rail has been a fantasy, mired in bureaucratic, regulatory and market inertia. But with the renewed push for it by the administration, the high-speed rail future is beginning to take shape. The benefits of high-speed rail are enormous. For one, HSR is a big step toward energy independence and a post-carbon future. HSR corridors operated with nonpolluting electric locomotives could reduce carbon emissions by as much as six million pounds annually.

HSR also has a strong track record of jumpstarting economic development along its path. Fast, efficient transportation could revitalize depressed cities and transform regional economies. And while the creation of an HSR network lies in the future, it will put people to work immediately. Eighty percent of the cost of HSR is in infrastructure-building and land acquisition, while 20 percent goes for the trainsets and stations that passengers use. New rights of way need to be built now for HSR corridors that are projected to be operational in a few years – meaning tens of thousands of jobs that can’t be exported.

The question that we now face is: How do we get there from here?

The choice that the Obama administration and Congress face is simple: modest incrementalism versus a truly transformative vision. The administration’s commitment to fund high-speed rail is a step in the right direction, but it’s not the end of the process. Lest the allocation of stimulus funds to HSR become President Obama’s own “Mission Accomplished,” the administration needs to remain engaged, proactive, and forward-thinking in shepherding high-speed rail to completion.

With HSR, President Obama can leave a lasting imprint on the American landscape and economy. But that legacy can only be secured if the administration is willing to make bold decisions and confront a tired political culture. If we really are serious about making the high-speed rail future a reality, the old ways of doing business will not suffice.

Download the full report.

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

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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”

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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.