issue: Politics

In Galt They Trust

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI Senior Fellow Ed Kilgore reviews two new books on Ayn Rand in the newest issue of Democracy. Here’s an excerpt:

When the novelist, philosopher, and social critic Ayn Rand died in New York in 1982, her world had been reduced to a small group of sycophantic disciples, ironically dubbed “The Collective.” Twenty-plus years later, though, the circle of Rand’s influence is arguably wider than ever. While Rand has never lacked for book sales–the nature of her fiction virtually guarantees a self-renewing audience of underappreciated adolescents and self-righteous business executives–at present, her work is exerting far more political influence than it has enjoyed since the earliest days of American libertarianism. As Jonathan Chait of The New Republic and others have explained, Rand’s denunciations of government taxation and regulation as “looting” and her moral defense of capitalism are crucial to conservative rhetoric these days, especially within the militant “Tea Party” movement.

What a coincidence, then, that two well-researched, serious books on Rand should appear this year. Jennifer Burns, a University of Virginia historian, has penned a fine account of Rand’s life that particularly focuses on her place in the pantheon of the American Right, while veteran magazine editor Anne C. Heller (her resume ranges from The Antioch Review to Lear’s) has written a more conventional biography that thoroughly explores the heretofore darker corners of Rand’s life, including her childhood and adolescence in revolutionary Russia. While neither are Rand disciples (although Burns, unlike Heller, was given access to Rand’s private papers, zealously guarded by her institutional monument, the Ayn Rand Institute), both defend her philosophical originality and her literary talent, and both view her as a tragic figure whose greatness was spoiled by her intolerance for dissent and her abusive private behavior toward her closest associates and potential allies. They also think she has been vindicated by her posthumous impact on the libertarian movement and a variety of writers and entrepreneurs, including the founders of Wikipedia and Craigslist.

But much as Rand craved appreciation for her work (as sadly reflected in the worshipful eyes of The Collective and her bitterness about every negative book review she ever received), it’s hard to imagine that she would have been terribly happy about its current appropriation by a motley assortment of conservative populists, who mix quotes from The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged with Christian Scripture and the less-than-cerebral perspectives of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. In her own view, Rand was nothing if not a systematic philosopher whose ideas demanded an unconditional acceptance of her approach to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, psychology, literature, and politics.

Rand’s famous intolerance should not be dismissed as simply the psychological aberration of a flawed genius. She feared, for good reason, what lesser minds might do with the intellectual dynamite of her work when divorced from its philosophical context. The prophetess of “the virtue of selfishness” made rigorous demands of herself and all her followers to live self-consciously “heroic” lives under a virtual tyranny of reason and self-mastery, and to reject every imaginable natural and supernatural limitation on personal responsibility for every action and its consequences. Take all that away–take everything away that Rand actually cared about–and her fictional work represents little more than soft porn for middle-brow reactionaries who seek to rationalize their resentment of the great unwashed. This is why Rand was so precise about the moral obligations and absolute consistency demanded both of her fictional “heroes” and her acolytes. She hated “second-handers,” people who borrowed others’ philosophies without understanding or following them.

Read the review at Democracy.

Stephen Hadley’s Revisionism on Afghanistan

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Bush administration National Security Adviser Stephen HadleyStephen Hadley, George W. Bush’s national security advisor, has set forth some rather appalling revisionist history in this morning’s Washington Post. Though he supports President Obama’s surge, he effectively tries to wash his hands of any culpability for the entire Afghanistan mess.

Sorry Mr. Hadley, but that just won’t fly.

Hadley believes that everything was going just swimmingly until mid-2006, when those darned Pakistanis went and screwed the whole thing up:

As to security, the U.N. Security Council authorized an international military force in December 2001, put it under NATO command in August 2003 and expanded its writ to all of Afghanistan in October 2003. Afghan army and police forces were being recruited, trained and equipped. Most of the country was free of violence.

But in 2006, the situation deteriorated. Suicide bombings and attacks using improvised explosive devices spiked. Corruption and poppy production grew dramatically, and the central government failed to establish an effective presence in the provinces. The planned Afghan security force was simply too small to handle the escalating violence.

In September 2006, Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan embarked on a series of well-intentioned but ill-fated deals intended to entice local tribes to support the government in Kabul. The tribes were supposed to expel al-Qaeda and end Taliban attacks in exchange for economic assistance and the withdrawal of Pakistani troops. Instead, these badly executed agreements strengthened the terrorist havens.

Then, Hadley explains, Bush’s buddy Pervez Musharraf went and had himself a little constitutional crisis, which really put the well-meaning and allegedly competent Bush administration behind the eight ball:

Then Pakistan plunged into an 18-month political crisis, beginning in March 2007 when President Pervez Musharraf fired the country’s chief justice and ending with Musharraf’s resignation in August 2008. Consumed by political chaos, Pakistan could only watch as al-Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban allies launched attacks not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan — including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Some argue that America could not respond to the deteriorating situation because its attention and its troops were all focused on Iraq. Yet despite troop demands for Iraq, President George W. Bush and our coalition allies launched a “quiet surge” in Afghanistan to meet the new challenge.

See? Isn’t it amazing how well the Bush administration handled everything and we just never knew about it?

Spare me. What Hadley chooses to selectively ignore is his administration’s failure to capitalize on Afghanistan’s relative calm in the 2001-2006 time frame. True, the initial Afghanistan war plan was successfully executed, and violence was significantly down (compared to, say, 2009 levels) across the country.

But instead of building on that initial military success by focusing on enduring security, infrastructure, and civil service capacities, Hadley shares responsibility for diverting America’s attention to a war of choice in Iraq launched under thin pretexts. In the process, billions of dollars and countless man-hours at the Pentagon, State Department, and White House (including Mr. Hadley’s NSC) that should have been spent stabilizing Afghanistan in 2003 were shifted westward.

The 10,000 additional troops that Hadley crows about later in the article are an embarrassingly weak and tardy prescription for an aggressive viral problem that was getting out of hand.

Too little, too late, Mr. Hadley. You should be ashamed.

Tea Party Party?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Republicans’ favorite polling outfit, Rasmussen, sure gave the GOP a toxic little gift this week, in the form of a “generic ballot” for Congress listing the Tea Party Movement (hypothetically organized as a political party) as an option. The Tea Party brand outperformed the GOP 23 percent to 18 percent (Democrats lead the pack with 36 percent).

The Tea Party movement has been around for roughly 10 months, compared to 156 years for the Republican Party.

Unsurprisingly, another political parvenu is being closely linked to this third-party talk. On Friday, Sarah Palin was pressed by a conservative talk radio host to rule a third-party presidential run in 2012 out or in. She responded: “If the Republican party gets back to that [conservative] base, I think our party is going to be stronger and there’s not going to be a need for a third party, but I’ll play that by ear in these coming months, coming years.”

Palin nicely sums up the real meaning of the Tea Party threat. It is exceptionally unusual, not to mention counter-intuitive, for a major party to move away from what is generally perceived to be the political “center” and become self-obsessed with ideological purity immediately after two crushing general election defeats. But the Republican Party has been doing just that; it is a far more conservative party, in terms of its overall message, than it was going into the 2008 election cycle. But it’s not conservative enough just yet for a lot of activists, and for those Tea Party participants who really do think “looters” and “loafers” elected Barack Obama and are busily constructing a totalitarian society. Palin’s telling the world the rightward trend needs to continue, or she’ll be pleased to act out the GOP’s worst nightmare in 2012.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Popular Dissent “From the Left” On Health Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Nate Silver has a post up at 538.com that is sure to get a lot of attention. Looking closely at an IPSOS/McClatchey poll that asks supporters and opponents of health care reform their underlying concerns, Nate notices that about one-fourth of those opposing current proposals think they “don’t go far enough to reform health care,” and suggests there’s a little-discussed segment of the electorate that might either grow if reform is further compromised, and/or might eventually come around if and when legislation is on the president’s desk.

This is an argument that Jonathan Chait made a couple of weeks ago at TNR, based on earlier polling.

Both articles are important refutations of the common assumption of conservatives that there is monolithic majority opposition to health care reform, and also a monolithic majority of Americans happy with the status quo in health care.

Beyond that, of course, this argument will be catnip to those progressives who are searching for ways to convince the White House and the congressional Democratic leadership to abandon or greatly toughen its endless negotiations with Senate “centrists” and the odd Republican, particularly over the public option. A majority of Americans, they will argue, either likes the current bill or wants something with more and more generous coverage, and a stronger public option. This is, of course, a subset of the ancient debate among Democrats between the strategy of seeking a majority coalition by peeling off “centrist” independents, or by solidifying and energizing the presumably liberal party “base” (along with “populist” independents).

There are, however, two problems with excessive reliance on the “progressive majority” analysis on health care reform. The first is that the polling numbers are based on some pretty vague ideas about what would constitute “doing more” on the health care front; it’s not entirely clear “more” means “more” of what progressive opinion-leaders want. And the second problem, more to the immediate point, is that in a Senate with a sixty-vote threshold for enactment of major legislation, a handful of Democratic and Republican senators, who represent not the nation as a whole but their own states, have the whip hand on the details of health care reform. I don’t think many progressives would want to abandon health care reform if a durable majority did, in fact, favor the status quo; this is a complex issue that’s not exactly good material for a plebiscite.

The more useful observation about the existence of a “dissent from the left” on health reform involves the wrath that Republicans (and obstructionist Democrats) may well inherit if nothing happens this year, and health care premiums, along with insurance industry abuses, continue to get steadily worse. We will then be talking not about a constantly shifting and poorly understood thing called “Obamacare,” but about one party that sees a major national challenge and wants to do something about it, and another that’s fine with an increasingly untenable status quo.

The diversity of opinion among those unhappy with the present legislation is, to be clear, an excellent argument for increasing the frequency and volume of claims that said legislation really will accomplish a great deal, if not everything it should or could achieve. All the news that’s been made about compromises on health reform over the last few months, along with reform advocates’ efforts to reassure seniors and others that they won’t lose anything worth caring about, have undoubtedly “undersold” the extent of change that even a “weakened” bill would make happen. A reform effort that’s marketed as a tepid bowl of porridge won’t satisfy much of anybody.

The Incredible Hulk in Copenhagen

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Among some members of the chattering class, it’s become something of a meme to assert that the Obama administration is too deferential to its opponents — whether Tea Partiers arguing about health care or Senate Republicans attacking on Afghanistan. The charge has especially been taken up by his critics, who seem to delight in attacking the president they’re beating up as a president whom, well, they can beat up. In September, for instance, Fred Barnes wrote in the Weekly Standard, “There’s the Obama who defers, the one who dithers, and the one who’s out of touch. The Obama presidencies have one thing in common. They’re all weak.”

These critics should be silenced, at least for a while, by the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) announcement today formally declaring that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant, paving the way for its regulation under the Clean Air Act.

On the cusp of meetings in Copenhagen to discuss an international climate treaty, the announcement has huge significance. It essentially enables the administration to circumvent climate obstructionists in Congress. Under the rules announced today, the administration can not only directly regulate carbon — it can exceed the limits contemplated by current Senate and House bills that would cap carbon dioxide emissions by 17 to 20 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels.

It seems unlikely that the EPA will actually act unilaterally to regulate carbon; the most administrable policy will probably remain market-based solutions such as cap-and-trade and similar proposals, rather than a command-and-control approach. However, the announcement today has political and strategic significance beyond its legal effect — and shows that the administration has just opened a brand new offensive playbook on carbon.

Two things are clear from the announcement today. First, the EPA decision puts the president on an unequivocal and strong footing for his visit to Copenhagen in a little over a week. The president will now be able to assert leadership on the issue on the basis of a clear authority to act.

Second, with today’s announcement, Barack Obama has placed a big stick on his desk in the Oval Office. His opponents in Congress and in industry will be pounding their own desks in outrage. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-OH) immediately released a statement today, for instance, saying, “The EPA claims its process is dictated by science, however, it’s conveniently timed to push its politics.” Yes, that is a plaintive note you detected in Sensenbrenner’s statement. That’s because the president’s opponents will now have no option but to play on the president’s turf on carbon.

Cap-and-trade passed the U.S. House earlier this year. As it stands, cap and trade — originally a market-based, Republican-friendly program — faces a very uncertain fate next spring in the U.S. Senate. But with his move today, the president has told Senate opposition that he has the upper hand, and that if they do not act to cut carbon, he will. On climate change, where the president will certainly be faced with Tea Party-ish opposition every day of his administration, the Incredible Hulk-like transformation (green meeting muscle) comes just in time.

Weekend Papers Detail White House Afghanistan Review

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the wake of President Obama’s West Point speech announcing the administration’s new strategy for Afghanistan, the White House must have been concerned that lingering charges of warmongering (on the left) or dithering (on the right) were going to dominate the public debate. Why would there be major weekend stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times to set the record straight?

Coming from sources as wide-ranging as National Security Advisor Jim Jones to “more than a dozen senior administration and military officials who took part in the strategy review,” these newspapers’ accounts of the strategy sessions show a president asking careful questions to redefine the mission in a way that protects the country while limiting open-ended commitment.

Last week, I was in the offices of a certain 24-hour cable news channel that’s nice enough to put my ugly mug on the air. I overheard one of its regular pundits exclaim breathlessly, “I just don’t understand why Obama just doesn’t do what his commanders on the ground tell him.” This weekend’s trio of articles paints the best picture I’ve seen of why not.

Here’s the short version of that answer from the NYT:

The decision represents a complicated evolution in Mr. Obama’s thinking. He began the process clearly skeptical of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops, but the more he learned about the consequences of failure, and the more he narrowed the mission, the more he gravitated toward a robust if temporary buildup, guided in particular by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. …

The group went over the McChrystal assessment and drilled in on what the core goal should be. Some thought that General McChrystal interpreted the March strategy more ambitiously than it was intended to be.

And the longer version from the WaPo:

In June, McChrystal noted, he had arrived in Afghanistan and set about fulfilling his assignment. His lean face, hovering on the screen at the end of the table, was replaced by a mission statement on a slide: “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.”

“Is that really what you think your mission is?” one of those in the Situation Room asked. …

“I wouldn’t say there was quite a ‘whoa’ moment,” a senior defense official said of the reaction around the table. “It was just sort of a recognition that, ‘Duh, that’s what, in effect, the commander understands he’s been told to do.’ Everybody said, ‘He’s right.’ ”

 

“It was clear that Stan took a very literal interpretation of the intent” of the NSC document, said Jones, who had signed the orders himself. “I’m not sure that in his position I wouldn’t have done the same thing, as a military commander.” But what McChrystal created in his assessment “was obviously something much bigger and more longer-lasting…than we had intended.”

Whatever the administration might have said in March, officials explained to McChrystal, it now wanted something less absolute: to reverse the Taliban’s momentum, deter it and try to persuade a significant number of its members to switch sides. “We certainly want them not to be able to overthrow the government,” Jones said.

On Oct. 9, after awaking to the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama listened to McChrystal’s presentation. The “mission” slide included the same words: “Defeat the Taliban.” But a red box had been added beside it saying that the mission was being redefined, Jones said. Another participant recalled that the word “degrade” had been proposed to replace “defeat.”

Already briefed on the previous day’s discussion, the president “looked at it and said: ‘To be fair, this is what we told the commander to do. Now, the question is, have we directed him to do more than what is realistic? Should there be a sharpening . . . a refinement?'” one participant recalled.

Said a senior White House adviser who took extensive notes of the meeting: “The big moment when the mission became a narrower one was when we realized we’re not going to kill every last member of the Taliban.” [emphases mine]

Separately, a few other nuggets, like on troop numbers (NYT):

On Oct. 9, Mr. Obama and his team reviewed General McChrystal’s troop proposals for the first time. Some in the White House were surprised by the numbers, assuming there would be a middle ground between 10,000 and 40,000.

“Why wasn’t there a 25 number?” one senior administration official asked in an interview. He then answered his own question: “It would have been too tempting.”

And from the LA Times‘ piece on the date of withdrawal:

Gates was also persuaded by Petraeus and others that announcing the date would help create an incentive for the Afghans to act, he said this week.

The proposed date also would make it such that the withdrawal of troops would begin just as the campaign for the 2012 presidential election was heating up.

Still, it was crucial to Gates and other military officials that Obama not announce a specific drawdown plan. Doing so could embolden militants, Defense officials said. Gates and others wanted to make sure that the pace of the drawdown would be based on the security situation — not a set timetable.

“Ultimately,” said a senior Defense official, Gates “wanted conditionality, and got it.”

All three articles are must-reads to anyone who wants to understand the complexity of the White House’s decision. In sum, it seems that the review sessions narrowed the goal, and resourced it as robustly and quickly as possible.

I understand that the administration needed to fix a date for beginning withdrawal as a political concession to the progressive base, and I still remain uncomfortable with that notion, even as these articles do a good job clarifying that the withdrawal’s pace is subject to the security situation.

No Free Lunch when It Comes to Bending the Curve

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you’ll forgive me for egregiously mixed metaphors, I want to draw attention to an implicit assumption among many health care reform advocates related to controlling healthcare spending: that if not for the politics involved, it would be fairly easy to rein in costs.

That’s because, the argument goes, there is easily identifiable inefficiency in the way we currently spend health care dollars. There are enormous regional disparities in, for instance, per capita Medicare spending. What is more, these differences are apparently unrelated to differences in the health of the underlying populations, and they don’t produce better outcomes. Rather, the differences reflect the ways that health care providers diagnose and treat patients in different parts of the country. So say the much-revered Dartmouth College health researchers, whose findings have been fairly uncritically embraced by many on the left.

Politics aside (the difficulty is that one person’s wasteful diagnostic test is another’s life-saving intervention), I always was suspicious of this argument. If there are excess profits to be made, then why is it that providers in only some parts of the country go after them or successfully extract them? Then a fascinating study came out that was mostly ignored but that should have raised questions about the Dartmouth research.

A potential problem with the Dartmouth research is that if there are unmeasured differences in health between patients who go to different providers, then the finding that greater spending is unrelated to outcomes could simply derive from people in worse health being very expensive to treat. The Dartmouth researchers use relatively crude measures to statistically control for these differences (because they are the only ones available).

MIT economist Joseph Doyle got around this problem by looking at patients who needed emergency care while they were visiting Florida. Because there is no reason to expect that unhealthy tourists are more likely to end up in higher-spending ERs, any differences in outcomes between those who went to high-spending hospitals and those who went to low-spending ones should reflect only the spending difference. Doyle found that higher spending did produce better outcomes.

Disparities in Data

Now MedPAC, the panel that monitors how Medicare reimburses providers and makes recommendations to Congress, has released a study that shows that disparities in Medicare spending are quite a bit smaller when other important factors — such as regional differences in wages and extra reimbursement related to medical education — are taken into account (hat tip to Mickey Kaus). If one looks only at per capita Medicare spending, high-spending areas of the country have costs that are 55 percent higher than low-spending areas of the country (I’m talking about the 90th and 10th percentiles, for those of you statistically inclined). After making MedPAC’s adjustments, however, that difference shrinks to 30 percent.

Thirty percent might still be considered a big number — in a perfect world adjusted spending shouldn’t differ at all — but other evidence in the MedPAC data gives reason to question the precision of any of these kinds of comparisons. I put the figures for all 404 geographic areas into a spreadsheet (which you can get from me if you’re interested — data wants to be free!) and looked at the top and bottom quarter of adjusted spending.

High-spending areas are dominated by the South, particularly the states stretching from Florida across to Texas and Oklahoma. They also include 15 of the 30 biggest metropolitan areas, including all of the biggest southern and midwestern metros, save Atlanta and Minneapolis, and none of the biggest northeastern or western metros, save Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, and Pittsburgh.

On the other hand, low-spending areas are dominated by the West, particularly Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and most of California (with the exception of Los Angeles and San Diego). Also overrepresented are small metropolitan areas in the upper Midwest and Dakotas, in New York, Maine, Virginia, and Georgia. None of the biggest ten metropolitan areas are represented in the bottom quarter, and only four of the biggest thirty are (San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Sacramento).

Compare these findings to those of the Dartmouth folks (Map 1). While many of the same conclusions show up in their map, there are some notable differences. Most importantly, California and the Boston-Washington corridor look like they spend a lot more in the Dartmouth map than they do in the MedPAC data (and the Mountain West states look like they spend a lot less).

Fixing Inefficiencies Not a Silver Bullet

If different sets of rankings differ as notably as these two do, then that says to me that there is a lot of noise in these rankings and that perfectly adjusted spending figures would potentially produce a distribution of areas that would look different from either set. In particular, I suspect that it would show that the vast majority of spending variation could be explained by factors that had nothing to do with inefficiencies.

The point is that even discounting the political difficulties of enacting policies that rely on comparative effectiveness research to weed out inefficiencies in healthcare spending, it’s not at all clear that regional variation in healthcare spending is proof that such inefficiencies exist. That’s not to say that there are no inefficiencies, but weeding them out won’t be as simple as making Florida providers act like Minnesota ones.

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

Left-Right Convergence?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The latest intra-progressive dustup over health care reform displays a couple of pretty important potential fault lines within the American center-left. One has to do with political strategy, and the role of the Democratic Party and the presidency in promoting progressive policy goals and social movements. I’ll be writing about that subject extensively in the coming days.

But the other potential fault line is ideological, and is sometimes hard to discern because it extends across a variety of issues. To put it simply, and perhaps over-simply, on a variety of fronts (most notably financial restructuring and health care reform, but arguably on climate change as well), the Obama administration has chosen the strategy of deploying regulated and subsidized private sector entities to achieve progressive policy results. This approach was a hallmark of the so-called Clintonian, “New Democrat” movement, and the broader international movement sometimes referred to as “the Third Way,” which often defended the use of private means for public ends. (It’s also arguably central to the American liberal tradition going back to Woodrow Wilson, and is even evident in parts of the New Deal and Great Society initiatives alongside elements of the “social democratic” tradition, which is characterized by support for publicly operated programs in key areas.)

To be clear, this is not the same as the conservative “privatization” strategy, which simply devolves public responsibilities to private entities without much in the way of regulation. In education policy, to cite one example, New Democrats (and the Obama administration) have championed charter public schools, which are highly regulated but privately operated schools that receive public funds in exchange for successful performance of publicly-defined tasks. Conservatives have typically called for private-school vouchers, which simply shift public funds to private schools more or less unconditionally, on the theory that they know best how to educate children.

Now clear as this distinction seems to “New Democrats,” there are a considerable number of progressives who think it’s largely a distinction without a difference, in education policy and elsewhere. And we are seeing that fundamental divergence on opinion on other, more prominent issues right now. On the financial front, the Obama administration reflexively pursued a strategy of regulation and subsidies for the financial sector, without modifying the fundamental nature of financial institutions, even as critics on the left argued for nationalization (at least temporarily) of key financial functions. At the more popular level, critics of TARP from the left joined critics of TARP from the right in deploring “bailouts” of failed financial institutions, even though the two groups of critics held vastly different views of the right alternative course of action.

Similarly in the health care reform debate, the Obama administration pursued legislation that utilized regulated and subsidized private for-profit health insurers to achieve universal health coverage. This approach was inherently flawed to “single-payer” advocates on the left, who strongly believe that private for-profit health insurers are the main problem in the U.S. health care system. The difference was for a long time papered over by the cleverly devised “public option,” which was acceptable to many New Democrat types as a way of ensuring robust competition among private insurers, and which became crucial to single-payer advocates who viewed it as a way to gradually introduce a superior, publicly-operated form of health insurance to those not covered by existing public programs like Medicare and Medicaid. (That’s why the effort to substitute a Medicare buy-in for the public option, which Joe Lieberman killed this week, received such a strong positive response from many progressives whose ultimate goal is an expansion of Medicare-style coverage to all Americans).

Now that the public option compromise is apparently no longer on the table, and there’s no Medicare buy-in to offer single-payer advocates an alternative path to the kind of system they favor, it’s hardly surprising that some progressives have gone into open opposition, and are using the kind of outraged and categorical language deployed by Marcy Wheeler yesterday. As with the financial issue, there’s now a tactical alliance between conservative critics of “ObamaCare,” who view the regulation and subsidization of private health insurers as “socialism,” and progressive critics of the legislation who view the same features as representing “neo-feudalism.”

To put it more bluntly, on a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. They can’t both be right, of course, and these critics would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance. But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.

For those of us whose primary interest is progressive unity and political success for the Democratic Party, it’s very tempting to downplay or even ignore this potential fault-line and the left-right convergence it makes possible. It’s also easy to dismiss critics-from-the-left of Obama as people primarily interested in long-range movement-building rather than short-term political success; that’s true for some of them. But sorting out these differences in ideology and perspective is, in my opinion, essential to the progressive political project. And with a rejuvenated and increasingly radical right’s hounds baying and sniffing at the doors of the Capitol, we don’t have the time or energy to spare in dialogues of the deaf wherein we call each other names while getting ready for the elections of 2010 and 2012.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Republicans Are Incumbents, Too!

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

An explosive political scandal in my home state of Georgia serves as a reminder that in state elections in 2010, there are many Republicans who are currently in control of statehouses, and could suffer the vicissitudes associated with malfeasance in office and a surly, wrong-track-dominated electorate.

Georgia’s Republican House Speaker Glenn Richardson resigned today, a few days after his ex-wife in a television interview said she knew for a fact that the conservative solon had conducted an extramarital affair with a utilities lobbyist even as he championed legislation highly beneficial to the lobbyist’s employer.  What made this charge political dynamite is that House Democrats had filed an ethics complaint against Richardson in 2007 making that exact charge, which was briskly dismissed by Republicans.

The story was made more lurid by the fact that Richardson had obtained considerable public sympathy last month by disclosing he had attempted suicide out of depression over the dissolution of his marriage. His ex-wife took to the airwaves in part to charge that the “suicide attempt” was in fact no more than an act of manipulation aimed at controlling her–and presumably, her mouth.

Georgia Republicans, of course, quickly handed Richardson an anvil, but it may not be so easy for them to avoid collateral damage; the scandal is already bleeding over into the borderline-vicious GOP gubernatorial primary for 2010.

One candidate, Secretary of State Karen Handel, has already reminded Georgians that one of her rivals, former state senator Eric Johnson, chaired the ethics panel that peremptorily dismissed the Democratic complaint against Richardson, which now appears to have been entirely legitimate. Another of her rivals, state Rep. Austin Scott, was one of Richardson’s strongest allies in the legislature.  Moreover, the blame-game over Richardson’s sex-and-corruption scandal can’t help but remind voters of the cozy relationship between the GOP and corporate influence-peddlers.

With two Democratic candidates for governor, former Gov. Roy Barnes and Attorney General Thurbert Baker, both looking reasonably competitive against the fractious GOP field, Republicans may not have much of a margin for error, even in this conservative state. Power has its privileges, but in this particular day and age, being the incumbent party comes with handicaps as well.

This piece is cross-posted at The New Republic.

More on the Public Option as Symbol

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over at The Democratic Strategist, PPI Senior Fellow Ed Kilgore responds to my post on the public option. The impetus for my piece was the blogger Digby’s claim that the public option has “long since gone way beyond a policy to become a symbol.”

Ed notes that my post missed something important: that Digby is treating the public option as a symbol largely because that is what its opponents have done. Even in its weakened state, the foes of a public option have kept bashing away, transforming it into “a matter of pure power politics” that progressives like Digby believe the left must engage. From there, Ed argues that there is, in fact, less dividing progressives on the issue, that “if and when it’s sacrificed, it will be a matter of relative indifference to some of the ‘robust’ PO’s strongest supporters.”

I hope he’s right. For my part, my concern regarding the politics of the public option springs not from the fight over it but from what comes after passage. After acquiring such outsized status on the left, the absence of a public option — or the presence of a version barely recognizable to its supporters — in the final bill could well send progressives into despair over the administration and its achievement.

And that would be a shame. As Ezra Klein notes today:

It might have been a necessary thing from an activism point of view, but convincing liberals that this bill was worthless in the absence of the public option was a terrible decision, wrong on the merits and unfair to the base. The achievement of this bill is $900 billion to help people purchase health-care coverage, a new market that begins to equalize the conditions of the unemployed and the employed, and a regulatory structure in which this country can build, for the first time, a universal health-care system. Thousands and thousands of lives will be saved by this bill. Bankruptcies will be averted. Rescission letters won’t be sent. Parents won’t have to fret because they can’t take their child, or themselves, to the emergency room. This bill will, without doubt, do more good than any single piece of legislation passed during my (admittedly brief) lifetime. If it passes, the party that fought for it for decades deserves to feel a sense of accomplishment.

Mike Lux at Open Left also touches on this in a post today, posing the crucial question: “The deal on health care is about to get done: will progressives come out of it feeling like we got the first major progressive policy since the 1960s passed, or feeling like they got sold down the river?” If the public option becomes the standard by which health reform is judged, and there is a weak one or none at all in the final bill, then the latter seems likely. It would be nothing less than a tragedy if the progressive backlash against Obama and this Congress were to come on the heels of the passage of the most consequential progressive legislation this country has seen in decades.

Confidence-Building in the West Bank

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Last week, Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu issued a unilateral 10-month halt to Israeli settlement construction in parts of the West Bank. The moratorium is riddled with loopholes — it excludes projects in East Jerusalem, as well as those already underway, and exempts public buildings like schools and synagogues.**

Furthermore, cynics believe that Netanyahu proposed the suspension at a time of Palestinian political weakness, putting the onus to respond on a divided Arab leadership that has become increasingly fragile in the wake of President Mahmoud Abbas’ announcement that he will not seek another term as Palestinian president in next year’s already postponed elections.

That’s why this moment is so critical: The Obama administration could play a pivotal role in facilitating some sort of coherent Palestinian response — something (anything!) more than a quick dismissal. It could be the smallest of gestures — even issuing an official statement of acceptance of Israel’s freeze and pledging that the next Palestinian government would like to work with Israel on the peace process — but it must show the world some measure of Palestinian unity and resolve to move forward.

That’s how confidence-building measures work, and the Obama administration should help the Palestinians to remain unified enough to issue a coherent response.

**If you’ll permit a bit of a digression, that last loophole reminds me of an infamous rumor attributed to the Australian Embassy here in D.C. A few years ago, the staff apparently requested funding from Canberra to build a bar in one of the embassy’s back rooms. Twice rejected because Australia’s Foreign Ministry didn’t want to further its diplomatic corps’ rowdy reputation, the staff remained undeterred, and merely switched “bar” to “chapel” on the funding request’s third — and successful — attempt. The moral here is that you can call a facility whatever you want, but its use is the only thing that counts.

The Neoconservative Pere et Fils

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI Senior Fellow Mike Signer has written a piece in Dissent magazine on Irving Kristol, his son, Bill, and the morphing of neoconservatism from an ideology of skepticism to one of hubris. An excerpt:

NEOCONSERVATISM, AS formulated by Irving Kristol, originated in privation, intellectual combat, and a reckoning with the harsh practical consequences of dangerous ideas. Irving Kristol’s parents were Eastern Europeans who arrived in America in the 1890s.  His father was a garment worker and later a clothing subcontractor; his mother gave birth to Irving in Brooklyn in 1920. When he was sixteen years old, he enrolled at the City College of New York (CCNY). Instead of paying much attention to classes, however, he dove into the extempore debate among the students.

The 1930s were a fervent time to be a student at CCNY. Fascism was taking hold in Italy, and communism was surging in the Soviet Union. The sometimes cheerful, sometimes angry clashes among students who were trying to decide where the world should go at this momentous period helped to launch an intellectual movement that was skeptical about the applications of pure theory.

Though it took decades for it to become “neoconservatism,” the roots of the movement lay in the young intellectuals’ effort to steer America away from the shoals of Stalinism, the horrible outgrowth of what had begun, decades earlier, as an ambitious political theory. This may help explain why Irving Kristol’s own political theory, for all its lushness and bombast, often counseled caution and modesty.  In a lecture he gave in 1970, he pronounced that “moral earnestness and intellectual sobriety” were the “elements . . . most wanted in a democracy.” Strikingly, he applied this ethic of restraint to democracy itself. In 1978, he wrote, “It is the fundamental fallacy of American foreign policy to believe, in face of the evidence, that all peoples, everywhere, are immediately ‘entitled’ to a liberal constitutional government—and a thoroughly democratic one at that.”

By contrast, in the years to come his son fixed neoconservative foreign policy on abstractions and evils—on metaphysics rather than physics—particularly when it came to democracy. As a result, the striking feature of Bill Kristol’s political theory is not the ideas but the extravagance surrounding them.  In a now-famous 1996 Foreign Affairsarticle co-authored with Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol wrote that Republicans should endorse a policy of “benevolent hegemony” that was “good for conservatives, good for America, and good for the world.” “America,” he added, “has the capacity to contain or destroy many of the world’s monsters, most of which can be found without much searching.”

Read the whole thing here.

Atlanta Mayoral Election: A Dog That Didn’t Bark

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Given the enormous attention that was paid by the chattering classes of Washington to gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey last month, you’d think any significant election would be deeply analyzed for possible national political implications. But earlier this week, one of America’s major cities, Atlanta, had a mayoral election that largely passed notice at all outside Georgia.

As it happens, state senator Kasim Reed, a Democrat, narrowly defeated city councilwoman Mary Norwood, an independent, in a runoff called when Norwood fell a bit short of a majority in the general election on November 3.  (note: Norwood has demanded a recount, but virtually no one outside her campaign believes it will reverse the outcome).

Had a thousand votes changed hands, and Norwood prevailed, I suspect we’d be hearing a lot from national Republicans about the significance of this election. After all, Reed was endorsed by the Georgia Democratic Party, whose 2010 gubernatorial front-runner, former Gov. Roy Barnes, cut ads for his fellow-Democrat.  Moreover, Norwood’s candidacy was fueled initially by her opposition to a local property tax hike, which could have made her a player in the Right’s national tax revolt narrative.  On a more sinister level, some conservatives might have played with a racial angle: Norwood was the first viable white candidate for mayor in Atlanta since 1981, while Reed is the protégé of outgoing African-American mayor Shirley Franklin, herself the protégé of the first two black mayors of the city, Andrew Young and the late Maynard Jackson.

The vote did in fact break largely (though not strictly) on racial lines, though in part that’s because the ideological differences between the candidate actually diminished during the runoff campaign.  Norwood displeased some early Republican backers by claiming to have voted for every Democratic presidential nominee since 1992, and also sought to outflank Reed among Atlanta’s sizable GLBT population by announcing her support for gay marriage.

We’ll never know for sure what sort of spin might have been applied to the results on Fox News had the result been different.  But there’s another mayoral runoff on tap December 12 in another southern sun belt center, Houston, with a similar racial angle, but with different ideological dynamics.  As in Atlanta, a white female candidate, city controller Annise Parker, ran first in the general election, and an African-American man, former city attorney Gene Locke, came from back of the pack to finish second.  Both candidates are considered progressive Democrats.  But the crucial difference from Atlanta is that Parker is an open lesbian, and Locke is flirting with an alliance with hard-line conservatives who warn that Parker’s election (along with that of two openly gay city council candidates) would represent a “gay takeover” of the city.   We’ll see how that one turns out, and whether any national dogs bark.

The Public Option as Symbol

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In recent days, there seems to have been a shift in the progressive community over the question of whether the public option, in its current state, is still worth fighting for. Some on the militantly pro-public-option left aren’t responding well to the weakening front.

Over at Hullabaloo, the influential Digby gives the game away. She cites Ezra Klein, who wrote today:

Having something called a public option is not, in the end analysis, as important as achieving the goals of the public option, and at this point, the policy itself is getting so watered down that it might be worth attempting to achieve its goals in a more straightforward fashion.

But Digby is having none of that:

Ezra believes that if the votes aren’t there for a decent public option then the horse trading should be around getting something good in return for giving up the public option rather than negotiating the terms of the public option. That would make sense if the public option were just another feature of the health care bill. But it is not. It is the central demand of the liberal base of the Democratic Party in this rube goldberg health care plan and has long since gone way beyond a policy to become a symbol.

Perhaps that is wrong on policy grounds. People will argue about that forever. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is no longer a matter of policy but rather a matter of political power. And to that extent it cannot be “bargained away” for something like better subsidies, even if it made sense. “Bargaining away” the Public Option is also the bargaining away of liberal influence and strength.

[…]

Again, as a matter of policy I don’t know that the public option actually means much anymore. But as a matter of politics, it’s very important.

Let the boldness – and the destructiveness – of that declaration sink in. On the most important progressive policy achievement in a generation, Digby says forget the policy – it’s the symbolism that matters.

Digby argues that the implications of the public option extend far beyond health care, that “powerful people” are “desperate that the liberals are not seen to win this battle.” Funny, because I thought the way that progressives win this battle is by making health care accessible and affordable to millions of Americans who currently don’t have it. According to some very smart people, the public option is playing a steadily diminishing role in achieving that goal. But don’t tell that to Digby, whose position now boils down to: Why bother with policy advances when we can have symbolic victories (or, heck, defeats)?

From the start, PPI has argued that the fixation on the public option has been distracting us from the more important conversation we could be having about making the exchanges more robust. Paul Starr, in an op-ed for the New York Times on Monday, said as much in a column titled “Fighting the Wrong Health Care Battle”:

[G]iving the exchanges the necessary authority to regulate private insurers could solve many of the problems that motivated the public option in the first place. Strengthening that authority and accelerating the timetable for reform are what liberals in Congress should be looking for in a deal.

But Starr is, of course, commenting on policy. For Digby, that’s no longer what the health care debate is about.

Obama’s Afghanistan Speech

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama’s speech last night was — to state the obvious — a tough one to give. Just think of the many constituencies the president had to address: not only the American public, but the military who have been in need of some direction, the Democratic base, terminally cranky Republicans, the Karzai government, the Pakistani government, and Bozo the Clown to boot. No one constituency would be fully pleased.

We all know that President Obama gives a wonderfully inspiring speech. I had a hunch that this address would not fall into that category. Rather than inspiring the public to work towards a distant American nirvana (as he did in the March 2008 Philadelphia race speech), West Point was more of a sales job.

With all that in mind, I was looking for the president to discuss five major topics:

1. Make a case for why we were in Afghanistan.

2. Explain our forces’ mission.

3. Address how he would work with the Karzai government.

4. Clearly outline the strategy for Pakistan.

5. State his interpretation of an exit strategy.

To put a “grade” on it, I’d give the president 3.5/5. Here’s why.

First, I thought he made a compelling case reminding Americans of why we’re there. He spent the first several paragraphs going over the history of what led us to this point. That’s been the toughest issue for much of hard left to grapple with — America has clear national security interests in Afghanistan, and it is unfortunate, but necessary, to enact a robust strategy to ensure the country’s safety.

It’s a rationale that has been so difficult for some to accept. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Garry Wills says:

[Obama] said that he would not oppose war in general, but dumb wars. On that basis, we went for him. And now he betrays us. Although he talked of a larger commitment to Afghanistan during his campaign, he has now officially adopted his very own war, one with all the disqualifications that he attacked in the Iraq engagement. This war too is a dumb one.

But it’s not a dumb war. It’s a necessary one, and I struggle to understand why Mr. Wills has become so disenchanted with President Obama over this decision when even he acknowledges that the president campaigned pledging a “larger commitment” to Afghanistan. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Second, I didn’t think the president went far enough in explaining the counter-insurgency strategy that American forces would be undertaking. To me, he missed an opportunity to explain that our forces are there to promote peace by protecting the Afghan population from the Taliban. So only half a point there.

Third, I was impressed with the president’s emphasis on working with and around the Karzai government. His particular emphasis on “Afghan ministries, governors, and local leaders” indicated the White House’s recognition that bypassing Kabul is an effective part to regional development across the whole country. A full point from me.

Fourth, the Pakistan strategy was certainly mentioned, if not emphasized, as one of the pathways to a successful disengagement. Sure, as the president said, we will “strengthen Pakistan’s capacity to target those groups that threaten our countries, and have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear.” Yes, we know it’s necessary, but I have a nagging sense that the “how” hasn’t been worked out yet. The White House’s overture on a comprehensive partnership deal with Pakistan is encouraging, but only part of the solution – a half-point.

Ah, and finally, that exit strategy. I would have preferred that our exit from Afghanistan be measured in terms of progress, not calendar dates, which merits a half-point deduction. I think David Ignatius came very close to summing up my feelings:

Obama thinks that setting deadlines will force the Afghans to get their act together at last. That strikes me as the most dubious premise of his strategy. He is telling his adversary that he will start leaving on a certain date, and telling his ally to be ready to take over then, or else. That’s the weak link in an otherwise admirable decision — the idea that we strengthen our hand by announcing in advance that we plan to fold it.

For a speech that was sure to please no one entirely, I thought it was a brave attempt at explaining a tough, unpopular, but ultimately correct decision.

Welcome to Progressive Fix!

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I am pleased to announce the launch of Progressivefix.com, the place for independent-minded progressives and progressive-minded independents.

Here’s what you will find at our address: Lively political commentary informed by rigorous analysis and evidence. Inspired wonkery – a constant stream of bold ideas for solving big public problems. And a distinctly progressive point of view grounded in a spirit of radical pragmatism.

ProgressiveFix.com is the new face of an outfit that’s been around for two decades: the Progressive Policy Institute. Younger readers may not know that PPI was the main purveyor of policy innovations to Bill Clinton’s New Democrats – break-the-mold ideas that also migrated to Britain and other democratic countries around the world under the rubric of the “third way.”

Those ideas are now woven into America’s civic fabric: national service; a social policy that expects and rewards work; a “shared responsibility” model for universal health care now embraced by President Obama; performance-based and fiscally responsible government; a “second generation” of environmental policies that move beyond command-and-control regulation; public charter schools and accountability in education; and a tough-minded progressive internationalism that harnesses America’s strength to defend liberal democracy.

Getting Real About Governing

But that was then. What now?

PPI’s mission, modernizing progressive politics, hasn’t changed. What has is the political context in which we operate. At our founding in 1989, progressives were in the political wilderness. Now we’re in power. In fact, we may even be present at the creation of a new progressive majority in America — but only if we govern effectively.

Given our ultra-partisan, polarized and paralyzed politics, that won’t be easy. Taking our cue from Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, progressives must make our democracy work again. That’s different from winning elections. It requires tempering passion with pragmatism, expanding, not narrowing, our appeal to the electorate, and standing up to special interests, even on our own side.

In practical terms, President Obama has to manage a heterogeneous party that includes moderates and liberals, and even a significant smattering of conservatives. Republicans may march in lockstep — and have certainly suffered for it — but Democrats can’t afford to indulge demands for ideological purity.

We don’t have much use for the self-appointed political commissars who have commandeered the blogosphere and cable TV. You can sputter all you want against, say, Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, but the fact is Ben Nelson is a Democrat in a state that’s comprised of people who might have different views than the average liberal blogger. If you think a Nebraska Democrat should always vote the same way as a Vermont Democrat, then you probably don’t know much about politics and even less about building a progressive majority.

We’re struck by a paradox: The web has given millions of Americans a new way to participate directly in political discourse. That’s great. At the same time, however, the online conversation often seems hobbled by a stifling intellectual conformity. People flock to sites that validate their political preconceptions and prejudices, rather than encourage them to think for themselves.

Enriching the Progressive Debate

That’s where P-Fix comes in. This will be an intellectual free-fire zone that expands the boundaries for what is “permissible” for progressives to think and debate. We won’t hunt for heretics, nor will we allow partisan cant to trump intellectual honesty. We are determined to be a force for counter-polarization. Our arguments will be addressed not just to committed liberals, but also to progressive independents and open-minded moderates who hold the balance of U.S. politics. Without them, progressives can’t govern or build a durable majority.

But our distaste for the doctrinaire doesn’t make us mushy moderates. P-Fix believes that our country’s founding ideals are deeply radical. The history of progressive reform in America is the story of recurrent cycles of political upheaval, as reformers seek to reconcile those ideals with new economic and social realities. We urgently need a new burst of such “creedal passion,” in Samuel Huntington’s phrase, to cope with a new set of challenges to America’s democratic experiment.

Unlike some on the left, who look to European social democracy for inspiration, we favor a homegrown progressivism steeped in the classically liberal precepts of the American creed: individualism; social egalitarianism; equal opportunity, not results, within a system of competitive enterprise; a healthy skepticism toward central authority; civic self-reliance; and the conviction that America must be a beacon of liberty and democracy in the world.

In more specific policy terms, look to P-Fix for concrete ideas about how progressives can put security first and nurture liberal democracy abroad; spur entrepreneurship and economic innovation, wherein lies America’s comparative advantage in global competition; rebuild the middle class by building a modern energy and transport infrastructure for our country; restore fiscal responsibility in Washington, so that we don’t mortgage America’s future to foreign lenders; radically redesign our public schools – the great equalizer in American life — around principles of choice, autonomy, rigorous standards and customized learning; and promote ideas for political reform and transparent government to repair the public’s trust in our democracy.

Finally, P-Fix isn’t just about us. It’s an online home for a wider community of people who generally share our outlook. We will aggregate the best in pragmatic-progressive thought and research, not just from our network of contributors but from like-minded think tanks and publications as well. On P-Fix, you’ll find a wide variety of intriguing and insightful content – blog posts, policy memos, reports, book reviews, discussions, and podcasts – from an eclectic collection of established names and rising stars in the progressive community.

More than anything, P-Fix is about you. Give us your reactions, your criticisms, your own best ideas. Send us a check! But let us hear from you.