Category: Politics 2009

Howard Kurtz asks if the American people have seen too much of Obama on TV; Mickey Kaus says we still don’t know him well enough to trust him. They may both be right; as Kaus notes, Obama simply lacks the kind of track record that could reassure Americans that he means any of the things he says when he’s claiming not to be a creature of the Hard Left. If this is starting to cause him problems, well, it’s not as if we didn’t warn you.

Only 58% of Hispanics in New Jersey are certain that Barack Obama is not the Anti-Christ.
UPDATE: Allahpundit, looking at the same poll, notes that 9/11 Trutherism is about exactly as prevalent among Democrats as the Birther stuff is on the GOP side. Which is consistent with years of polling on Trutherism, I should add; it’s not just this one PPP New Jersey poll. And which is worrisome, since while both are basically fringe ideas, the baroque conspiracy and nefarious motives one has to believe in are much greater on the 9/11 Truther side than in the case of a coverup of the location of one man’s birth. (And the 9/11 Truthers have a significant overlap with the Trig Truthers).

Mary Katharine Ham looks at the rhetoric and reality of the Democrats’ campaign to paint town hall protestors as dangerous, violent right-wingers. It’s worth reading the whole thing, especially on the “right-wing terrorist” nonsense, but this stuck out:

That’s the full list of documented violence from the August meetings. In more than 400 events: one slap, one shove, three punches, two signs grabbed, one self-inflicted vandalism incident by a liberal, one unsolved vandalism incident, and one serious assault. Despite the left’s insistence on the essentially barbaric nature of Obamacare critics, the video, photographic, and police report evidence is fairly clear in showing that 7 of the 10 incidents were perpetrated by Obama supporters and union members on Obama critics. If you add a phoned death threat to Democrat representative Brad Miller of N.C., from an Obama-care critic, the tally is 7 of 11.

As is usually the case when the Left starts attacking ordinary citizens to score political points, it’s a bit late by the time the truth laces on its boots, but it’s never too late to try. (Meanwhile, the people who practically got a hernia rushing to politicize the death of George Tiller are spluttering about the meaninglessness of this).

Jay Cost has a typically enlightening column on Obama’s present troubles and what he might do to fix them. H/T I thought this was a particularly useful observation: “no president in the last hundred years has won election to a second term with a smaller share of the vote than what he received for the first.”
That doesn’t mean Obama couldn’t be the first, since he does have a margin of around 3% to risk (larger if you count electoral votes), but it’s a caution: unlike Governors, Presidents rarely survive by gripping on solely to the coalition that elected them. Somehow, they need to reach out and persuade enough new people to make up for the inevitable loss of some former supporters who didn’t get what they expected.
Cost’s suggestion that Obama consider sacking Rahm is premature. But if the year closes out with no health care bill and no other significant legislative victories (e.g., cap-and-trade, card check, Son of Stimulus), then the rationale for retaining a brass knuckles get-things-done-and-f***-the-opposition Chief of Staff loses a lot of its force; the entire point of having Rahm around is that he can make the trains run on time and understands how to command the loyalty of all those moderate-district Democrats he helped elect, and if the trains are not running on time and the moderate-district Democrats aren’t cooperating, what’s the point?
Quin Hillyer is right, if overstated, that conservatives should not get complacent at Obama’s bad summer; there remains time for the worm to turn again. But the season of hope is running to its inevitable end; now is the season for Obama to deliver change or face his inability to do so.

Jonah Goldberg makes an excellent point about EJ Dionne that goes beyond just Dionne: the liberals complaining about media coverage of town hall health care protestors are the same people who just a few weeks ago were deliberately drawing attention to those protestors in an effort to discredit opponents of the health care bill. Uh, oops. The Administration did the same thing. And is now – not coincidentally – pushing the same line as Dionne.
Meanwhile, in California, a 65-year-old health care bill protestor had most of a finger bitten off by a MoveOn activist. Charming.

There’s been a lot of controversy about President Barack Obama’s plan to give a speech to the nation’s public (only public) schoolchildren on September 8 (the Tuesday after Labor Day), a controversy Caleb Howe comprehensively summarizes here. The problem isn’t the President giving a pro-education message to the nation’s kids, something that’s part of any president’s job; the problem is the specter of enlisting of public school teachers, already a core interest group supporting Obama, in indoctrinating kids in his agenda. The conservative uproar over the Department of Education’s proposed materials for the speech seems to have already scored a victory in forcing the Administration to scale back its plans.
But I’m from New York. When I mentioned this speech to my wife, her immediate reaction was that Obama wasn’t looking at the calendar: the New York City schools, public and private, aren’t even in session yet the day after Labor Day. Obama’s effort to roll this into a massive PR blitz with the following day’s health care speech to a joint session of Congress will fail in my neck of the woods because nobody paid attention to the school calendar.
I suspect Obama rushed to coincide the speech with a Bill Gates-produced back to school education documentary that Obama will be appearing on the same evening on a battery of cable channels (because really, what Obama needs is more press). But either way, I’ll be keeping my kids home from their (Catholic) school September 8 – because they don’t have school anyway.
UPDATE: Moe Lane points out that school’s not open in Boston or LA on the 8th either.

Despite my best efforts to find something positive to say about Ted Kennedy, CBS tabs me as an example of speaking ill of the dead. Well, at least I was concise. Well, the worst sort of disrespect one can imagine is finding humor in the death of someone you killed.
Caleb Howe has some related thoughts, which as usual are extensively documented.

David Freddoso points out that you can’t read the text of the House health care bill because there is no such text right now.

Heritage’s Brian Riedl crunches some of the still-staggering numbers on the Democrats’ spending spree, including the fact that the projected 2009 budget deficit is larger than the Bush budget deficits for FY 2002-2007 (the six years when Bush had a Republican Congress to work with) combined. A worthwhile fact to recall when dealing with liberals who cannot comprehend how one could be more concerned about Obama’s deficits than Bush’s (of course, as always my concern is with spending, not deficits – deficits are just a symptom of overspending – but even then, Reidl’s point that 43 cents of every federal dollar spent at present is deficit spending is pushing into worrisome territory, especially with important sources of funding drying up). He also walks through the usual budget gimmickry, like how 75% of Obama’s projected budget “savings” are from not having another surge in Iraq each year, which was never anybody’s plan (note that these are budget numbers that don’t include the cost of the health care plan, either).

This year, President Obama will spend a peacetime-record 26 percent of GDP….The 22 percent spending increase projected for 2009 represents the largest government expansion since the 1952 height of the Korean War (adjusted for inflation).

Digest this, as you consider how many of Obama’s massive spending plans haven’t even been passed yet:

Federal spending per household (adjusted for inflation) remained constant at $21,000 throughout the 1980s and 1990s, before President Bush hiked it to $25,000. In 2009, Washington will spend $30,958 per household — the highest level in American history — and under President Obama’s budget, the figure will rise above $33,000 by 2019.

Read the whole thing. H/T Mark Tapscott.
Remember: Obama was the man who twice looked the nation in the eye in the October debates and pledged a net reduction in federal spending.

It is traditional, upon the passing of an important and famous person – however controversial – to find some good words to say. This is not an easy task in the case of Ted Kennedy, a man whose personal life ranged from alcoholism to debauchery to sexual harrassment to (sadly, uncharged) second-degree murder, and whose public career entailed the embrace of nearly every foolish, ruinous and cruel political idea of the past five decades and whose most enduring legacy is installing the bitterly polarized modern Supreme Court confirmation process.
But a few words are nonetheless in order to recognize the man’s work. Ted Kennedy arrived in the Senate in 1962, as soon as he was Constitutionally old enough to serve; aside from a Korean War-era non-combat tour in the Army, it was his first real job. Kennedy was a young man with fame, glamor and a fair amount of his family’s natural charm, but had done nothing of distinction with his life to that point; he’d inherited the seat as effectively a family heirloom, and a review of his life to that point – such as being suspended from college for cheating and a reckless driving arrest for leading cops on a 90 mph chase while in law school – would hardly have suggested a man likely to take seriously the work of a United States Senator.
Kennedy at that point could have taken a number of different turns. He could have become a Senate showhorse, making the rounds giving speeches and national TV appearances and doing little real work. He could have become one of Capitol Hill’s time-markers, coasting to re-elections while using his office as just a prop for the exhausing, booze-and-flooze nightlife he pursued for so many years. He could have decided that fame and glamor meant he deserved to run for President at the first available opportunity, and stayed far away from any of the real and often controversial work of making laws.
To Kennedy’s credit, he did none of those things. He hired the most aggressive, competent staffs on the Hill and immersed himself in the daily business of making laws. Boring bill markups, blathering conferences, wicked hangovers; Kennedy took them all and kept working, working even to the end. He learned how the sausage was made and the deals done, and made quite a lot of it himself. He waited 18 years to run for President, and did so only after compiling an extensive record of actual accomplishment in the Senate.
Kennedy’s influence waned after his unsuccessful 1980 run; that year ushered in an era in which Republicans controlled the White House for 20 of the next 28 years, and more or less controlled the Senate (to the extent the Senate is “controlled” by the majority party) for the better part of 17 of those 28 years. But with key committee seats and an energetic staff, he remained a player in important legislative business to the end, whether forging successful bipartisan compromises (as with No Child Left Behind in 2001) or fighting for unsuccessful ones (the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill, which failed even with the backing of President Bush). The harshness of Kennedy’s partisan rhetoric never left him unable to figure out how Beltway Republicans ticked and how to get them to the bargaining table; Republicans who worked with him testify unanimously to his Irish charm and personal grace.
Kennedy’s career could have been a cautionary tale for our current president, who might not have found himself in quite the fix he is in at the moment if he’d followed Ted’s example, bided his years, spent more time in the trenches doing the unglamorous work of legislating and taking the hard punches that must be taken to sell the product to the public, learning how the system works, why it works and who makes it work. Most of the changes Ted Kennedy made in this nation over his career were change for the worst – but he did, over time, make real change because he worked at it instead of just saying the word “change” and hoping it would be so.

From last year:

H/T
Brian Faughnan has more on the Oregon case; Nat Hentoff has more on the current debate.

Ahem:

In a morning conference call with about 1000 rabbis from across the nation, Obama asked for aid: “I am going to need your help in accomplishing necessary reform,” the President told the group, according to Rabbi Jack Moline, who tweeted his way through the phoner.
“We are God’s partners in matters of life and death,” Obama went on to say, according to Moline’s real-time stream.

Partners. Not servants. Partners.
And if you disagree with the domestic legislative agenda being pushed by God and Obama, not necessarily in that order?
Treason.

One of the central selling points used by President Obama to push the Democrats’ health care plan is the notion that a comprehensive overhaul of the health care system will reduce costs. But costs to who, and how? Let’s step back a minute and try to figure out how Obama’s cost-cutting argument could possibly be so.
Prologue: Tax That Man Behind The Tree
First, a quick reminder of two reasons why cost-cutting is such an important selling point.
Number one, the core of what the Democratic base, in particular, wants from health care “reform” is universal coverage. You often hear statistics thrown around about there being 30 or 35 or, last I heard, 47 million people without health insurance, and the implication that these people are receiving zero or negligible healthcare. Debunking those statistics and assumptions is itself a cottage industry, but let’s leave that aside for the moment, because the fact of the matter is that in a country of 300 million people, when you strip out the people who (1) already have health insurance and expect to continue having it, (2) don’t especially want to buy health insurance, (3) are only briefly without health insurance and not worried about it, or (4) don’t or can’t vote, what you end up with is a very small slice of the electorate that would benefit from getting health insurance they currently lack or fear lacking. Now, voters don’t only vote their own self-interests on any issue – but the fewer people who benefit directly from legislation, the harder it is to drum up public support for a bill that may threaten the self-interest of others. So, it becomes politically necessary, if the bill is to be as sweeping and ambitious as most of the versions circulated have been, to sell it to the public on the basis of some argument above and beyond insuring the uninsured. That’s doubly so because if your goal was solely to insure the uninsured, much of what is in the various bills would be unnecessary.
Second, specific to the issue of saving money for the federal government, the Obama Administration and the Democrats have already severely tried the electorate’s appetite for massive expansions of federal spending, especially deficit spending. The explosion of new spending, most notably the pork-laden “stimulus” bill, makes prior complaints about spending under Bush look like complaints about the deck chairs on the Titanic and flatly contradicts Obama’s read-my-lips pledge during two of last October’s debates that his proposals would result in a net reduction of federal spending. The voters have noticed that they’re not getting anything resembling what they were promised. Thus, Obama has repeatedly pledged, with the same assurance as his campaign pledge on spending, that the health care bill would be “deficit neutral.” The Congressional Budget Office, typically a liberal redoubt, has repeatedly thrown cold water on the claim that any of the proposals on the table would be deficit-neutral. Clearly, to get there, cost savings would need to be found somewhere to completely offset outlays.
How’s that gonna work?
Let’s review the options. The Democrats’ main argument is that restructuring the entire health care sector will reduce the nation’s total (public and private) outlay for health care. When you boil it down, though, there are only three variables you can cut: reduce the amount of medical care provided; reduce what providers of medical care earn for their products and services; and reduce intermediary costs. All are problematic.
I. Less Medical Care
The most obvious way to cut spending on medical care is to buy less of it. That’s at the crux of the public’s worry about “death panels” cutting off care, about rationing; it’s why so many of the people showing up agitated at town halls are senior citizens worried about getting less medical care.
The “death panel” phrase was shorthand, of course, but it neatly captured the core of the problem: government already rations care, albeit not very efficienctly, in programs like Medicare and Medicaid (see, e.g., here – then again, the failure to do more rationing explains those programs’ exploding, budget-busting costs) and the end-of-life consulting procedures criticized by Palin and subsequently dropped by chastened Democrats are not the only way in which government incentives could or would be brought to bear on physicians to push patients from consuming health care to preparing for death or assisted suicide. More here, among many other places. But you don’t have to be looking at the end-stage to see that any plan premised upon cost-cutting by reducing the amount of care provided would, well, reduce the amount of care provided. And if the costs being cut are taxpayer costs, the power to do so would end up being vested in some sort of governmental entity, likely a panel of government-appointed “experts,” as Mickey Kaus notes was alluded to by President Obama himself back in April:

THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?
I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.
LEONHARDT: So how do you – how do we deal with it?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance.

One argument advanced by proponents of the various plans is that costs would be reduced by providing more care, because preventative care would prevent more expensive care from being needed. Even leaving aside the grim fact of human mortality (i.e., preventing heart disease at one age can just leave you to die slowly of cancer or suffer prolonged dementia later), Charles Krauthammer notes that studies in reputable medical journals have concluded that the need to offer preventative care to so many people to make sure you catch health problems early means that more widespread preventative care is more, not less expensive:

Think of it this way. Assume that a screening test for disease X costs $500 and finding it early averts $10,000 of costly treatment at a later stage. Are you saving money? Well, if one in 10 of those who are screened tests positive, society is saving $5,000. But if only one in 100 would get that disease, society is shelling out $40,000 more than it would without the preventive care.
That’s a hypothetical case. What’s the real-life actuality? In Obamaworld, as explained by the president in his Tuesday town hall, if we pour money into primary care for diabetics instead of giving surgeons “$30,000, $40,000, $50,000” for a later amputation — a whopper that misrepresents the surgeon’s fee by a factor of at least 30 — “that will save us money.” Back on Earth, a rigorous study in the journal Circulation found that for cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, “if all the recommended prevention activities were applied with 100 percent success,” the prevention would cost almost 10 times as much as the savings, increasing the country’s total medical bill by 162 percent. That’s because prevention applied to large populations is very expensive, as shown by another report Elmendorf cites, a definitive review in the New England Journal of Medicine of hundreds of studies that found that more than 80 percent of preventive measures added to medical costs.

Whatever else can be said for more preventative care, it is likely to offer no great cost savings.
Moreover, reducing the total amount of care provided contradicts one of the central premises of the entire project, which is that it will result in providing more care to tens of millions of people not presently receiving it. As Bob Hahn notes, if this is the case, it won’t just drive up costs but will create shortages:

If we added 47 million more people to the health care system, there would be lines. We wouldn’t even know how to send 47 million more people to McDonald’s without causing lines.
I’m unfamiliar with the details, but apparently there is some provision in Obama’s plan that expands the number of doctors, nurses, hospital beds, etc., to instantly accommodate 47 million more people. It usually takes eight to ten years to school a new doctor, so whatever the Democrats are doing here is a major advance.

The Democrats can’t have it both ways. One way or another, they either need to sell the public on the idea of sharply curtailing the amount of medical care provided, or stop claiming cost savings that can only come from less care.
II. Medical Care For Less Cost
The issue of shortages brings us to the problem with the second option: rather than reducing the amount of care provided, reduce the amount paid to the people who provide it: doctors, nurses, and pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Certainly on the Left there is a fair amount of sentiment for making it less profitable to provide care. But there is really no getting around the basics of supply and demand: if we make it less profitable to become a doctor, we will end up with fewer doctors. If we skimp on salaries for nurses, home health aides, and less-skilled care providers (e.g., people who work in nursing homes), we will exacerbate the existing shortage of nurses and other providers, which is likely to become more acute in years to come as the population ages. And if labor responds to financial incentives, capital is even more sensitive: slash the profit margins of drug companies and medical device manufacturers, and inevitably there will be less investor capital for those companies and less coming out of the pipeline in terms of drugs and devices that save or improve lives. The net effect will be the same as rationing care directly: cost savings will come only by reducing the quantity and quality of medical care.
III. Cutting Out The Middleman
With open advocacy of government rationing of care largely politically infeasible and reducing the profitability of health care providers economically impractical, the debate logically falls upon the middlemen, mainly insurance companies. Pretty much everybody hates insurance companies, whose business model by nature involves collecting more money than they lay out. And there’s empirical data to support the idea that we’re spending proportionally more of our health care dollars on insurance, rather than care, than we used to spend. To shift the discussion away from rationing care, Democrats are desperately trying to paint the insurers as somehow siphoning off more money to enrich themselves than they “should,” an effort that’s now leading to an especially vindictive crackdown by panicked Congressional liberals:

House Democrats are probing the nation’s 52 largest insurance companies for lavish spending, demanding reams of compensation data and schedules of retreats and conferences.
Setting a deadline of Sept. 14, the letters demand extensive documents for an examination of “executive compensation and other business practices in the health insurance industry.”

The main idea here, other than simply intimidating the insurers, is to try to sell the Democrats’ plan on the theory that the insurers are artificially inflating their overhead. The fact that they have to subpoena 52 companies suggests that this will not be as easy a case to make as in the case of a monopoly industry…and of course, a monopoly is the preferred solution of Democratic policymakers, elected officials and even Democratic base voters who essentially see the long-term goal as using a “public option” to plant the seeds for replacing this patchwork of private companies with a single-payer system of government monopoly insurance.
But let’s unpack here a little further the elements of the expense of a middleman. First of all, there’s the question of why have insurance at all. Most of us pay for other life essentials – food, clothing, shelter, transportation – directly, rather than buying, say, grocery insurance to make sure that an insurance company or government agency will give us groceries every week on terms acceptable to the insurer plus a premium. Now, unless you are seriously wealthy, insurance against truly catastrophic health care costs makes economic sense, so that the pool of the insured absorbs the individual occurrences of massive spikes in one person’s health care costs. But pretty much all the proposals on the table go far beyond purely catastrophic coverage.
The entire rationale of the Democrats’ proposal is to get more people to buy insurance or have it bought for them than is currently the case, thus increasing the proportion of our health care that is paid for through intermediaries rather than directly. That’s true of people who currently buy no insurance and get little or no care, or pay for it out of pocket; it’s true as well of people who currently get their care from emergency rooms. That’s exactly the opposite direction of where you want to be moving if cutting intermediary costs is your goal.
And in the existing health care market, Democrats (with the help of big-government Republicans) have been driving up costs for the past two decades by piling on mandates and “patients’ bill of rights” legislation that ever increases the number of procedures that the insurers have to be involved in. The Medicare prescription drug plan likewise expanded the scope of health care products and services paid for through a public intermediary rather than directly by consumers. And of course, subsidizing preventative care that may be presently paid for out of pocket does the same. So, not only are the Democrats proposing to have more people use health care intermediaries (public or private), but their proposals will inevitably continue the trend towards having more types of health care paid for through intermediaries.
Well, say Democrats, we will use more intermediaries, but we’ll be much more efficient in doing so, because the public plans won’t have a profit motive and expensive executives. Which is true. But it’s also true that government programs, even ones that start out fairly simple, tend only to grow and expand over time and grow less efficient as their competition is eliminated and the political power of those who draw salaries and contracts from them grows. Will unionized government workforces necessarily be less expensive than non-unionized private insurer workforces? History doesn’t suggest so. As one National Review reader posed the question:

If we can cut a half-trillion dollars from Medicare and Medicaid to pay for health insurance reform but if, as looks to be the case, healthcare reform won’t pass, why not just cut a half-trillion dollars from Medicare and Medicaid anyway?

The fact that it hasn’t happened and won’t happen should remind us that replacing a competitive private marketplace with a colossal, Washington-run bureaucracy is a bad bet to produce savings. The conservative answer in this situation is not to throw out the entire existing system on the hope that things will work out better than they ever have before.
The elephant in the waiting room is the other big cost driver of intermediaries besides the scope of coverage and the cost of having shareholders and executives: lawsuits. Precise figures are again a subject of intense dispute, but a goodly chunk of what drives the amount of ‘unnecessary’ care provided, the cost of providing services and the cost of intermediaries is the need to protect against and pay for the cost of medical malpractice and denial of coverage litigation. None of the Democratic proposals, however, seek to make any practical inroads against this source of costs. Replacing a private system with a public one could arguably do so if the trial bar is effectively precluded from bringing against the government many of the kinds of lawsuits now used against private insurers – but aren’t liberals in favor of keeping those kinds of suits viable? And how likely is it that in the long run they won’t provide other mechanisms to keep one of their vital constituencies in business?
We have pretty much exhausted the options for cost-cutting: less care (at a steep political price, at the cost of giving frightening power to the government, and at odds with the goal of providing care where none is now given); less money to caregivers, which would amount to the same thing; less use of intermediaries (which is likewise contrary to the whole thrust of the project); or less cost in using intermediaries (which is impractical and unlikely to pan out).
There will be no cost savings. There’s no sense in pretending otherwise.

Patrick Ruffini responds to Marc Ambinder’s contention that opponents of Obamacare will fail for the same reason that opponents of the Iraq War failed to dent President Bush’s popularity. Key passage:

When Bush was at 70%+, his prosecution of the war was first branded “divisive” because something like 500,000 anti-war activists were marching on CNN. And it was a short hop from branding the war “divisive” to branding it a disaster.
Much the same is now happening with health care. The public option is, at the very minimum, now perceived as divisive. As controversial. As anything but the sweetness and light upon which Obama uniquely depended on to govern.
In the long run, the side that most insistently believes in its own arguments usually wins. This neatly sums up the outcome of the 2008 election, and the current state of the health care debate. I don’t think every swing voter would categorically embrace everything that’s happened at the town hall meetings (on either side), but the fervor of one side over the other sends important signals to unaffiliated voters that the doubts outweigh the reassurances on Obamacare, and to armchair quarterbacks everywhere, that the President is on the defensive and dogged by opposition.

He also notes the impact on swing Congresspersons…one thing about Members of Congress is, they may swear up and down in public that the town hall protestors are some sort of paid shills, but the reality is that people who show up motivated at an August town hall in an odd-numbered year – or lay out money and organization to get others to do so – are surely going to do the same the next November. That lesson is never lost on vulnerable Members of the House or Senate.

Yes, of course, the TV networks and lefty blogs have been trying to discredit conservative opponents of Obamacare with…signs and rhetoric from Lyndon LaRouche supporters who think Obama’s plan isn’t far enough to the left:

H/T Caleb Howe – go to Caleb’s post if you can’t get the video to load here. I don’t even know at this point whether to attribute this to deliberate dishonesty or just plain stupidity, but it hardly matters.
(Of course, you could cure anemia with the irony of left-wing blogs discovering, on January 20, 2009, that it’s not nice to compare the president to Hitler – or even Democratic politicians saying so after years of things like this and this and this and this. Worse yet is the Democratic tendency to accuse conservatives of “carrying Nazi symbols” when they mean “calling Democrats Nazis,” as if to say that the protestors on the Right are in favor of National Socialism).
Par for the course.

NPR’s headline on yesterday’s town hall on health care by President Obama:

Obama Says His Health Plan Won’t ‘Pull The Plug On Grandma’

The NY Daily News had a similar headline using that quote in this morning’s print edition, as does this Reuters item; the NY Post less delicately shortens the headline to ‘WE WON’T PULL PLUG ON GRANNY’.
This is not the place the White House wanted to be in right now. Even George W. Bush, as many things as his opponents threw at him and as low as his approval ratings went at times, never felt compelled to … well, as Jake Tapper put it,

[I]f the president finds himself at a town hall meeting telling the American people that he does not want to set up a panel to kill their grandparents … perhaps, at some point, the president has lost control of the message.

I’ve previously covered one of the primary reasons why Obama is in this pickle: he doesn’t have a clearly defined, easily and consistently explained plan. There are still multiple bills, none of which has the unambiguous support of either the White House or a working majority in both Houses of Congress; the bills are massively long and complicated, yet for the most part they leave huge numbers of unanswered questions by deferring important decisions to vaguely-constructed and questionably supervised bureaucracies. Many of the worst things in the bills are not what they say they will do, but what by silence they would permit to happen. The absence of a ban on using federally-provided insurance funds for abortions is one example, as noted by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in explaining why the USCCB (long a supporter of more government funding for universal health care coverage) can’t support the House bill:

Some seemed surprised at [a previous objection by the Bishops], since abortion was not specifically mentioned in draft health care bills until recently. Those with longer memories may recall that the Medicaid statute doesn’t mention abortion either, but it was funding 300,000 abortions a year in the 1970s until we put a stop to that with the Hyde amendment. In any case, numerous amendments to keep abortion out of health care reform have been defeated in committee, and it is now apparent that some leaders have every intention of threatening the health care reform process by forcing Americans to accept abortion mandates and/or fund unlimited abortion in their health coverage.

Camille Paglia, also a supporter in general of health care ‘reform’ but a critic of Obama’s approach, connects the same dynamic to the debate over whether Obamacare would create “death panels” empowered to cut off treatment for those deemed not worthy of continued life, as we have seen happen in European systems:

I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a “death panel” under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin’s shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate’s unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.
Surely, the basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm. The present proposals are full of noble aims, but the biggest danger always comes from unforeseen and unintended consequences.

Even beyond the particulars of the present bills, what Obama and his Congressional allies are confronting is the legacy of their own party’s deliberately constructed image. And a part of that image that they may least have expected to haunt them is the ghost of Terri Schiavo.
Political parties are not born anew each election cycle. The average voter, having limited time to devote to politics, very prudently comes to rely upon the general reputation of a party to form an impression of what its individual members stand for. A reasonably informed voter will try to learn at least a few things about particular candidates, but even political junkies rarely know A to Z on where all their elected representatives stand on every issue of public consequence (quick: what does your State Senator think about immigration? capital gains taxes? the minimum wage? gun control?). Thus, a party’s image is important and carries the baggage, for good and for ill, of the high-profile debates in which it takes a prominent position. Moreover, a party’s image is built not only by its leaders but its supporters inside and out of public office. People can usually filter out the crazies on the margins, but the battery of media commentators and activists involved in any given controversy add to that overall image.
Indelible images are hard to shake. During the last election, Obama ran ads criticizing John McCain for opposing federal funding for stem cell research and being an anti-immigrant hardliner. These were blatant lies, of course – the polar opposites of McCain’s actual positions, laughably in the case of the immigration ads given that McCain had risked his political career over his support for the comprehensive immigration bill – but Obama obviously assumed that the ads would be effective because the audience would identify McCain with his party’s reputation on those issues and would be unaware of his actual record.
Which brings us to Terri Schiavo. Now, I have previously discussed the immediate political cost to the Bush Administration’s agenda of the Schiavo brouhaha in March of 2005. Commentators have debated for some years now how much political damage the GOP suffered with moderates from its identification with the movement (headed largely by committed pro-lifers, many of them religious) to prevent the State of Florida from, essentially, starving the brain-damaged Schiavo to death. That controversy was an unsettling one: the issue was what to do about a woman who had no medically realistic prospects for recovery, was consuming expensive healthcare dollars, and had left no reliable instructions on what her wishes would be in that situation, and a lot of people were very uncomfortable with either option, continuing to pay for her care or depriving her of nourishment. Public opinion at the time was hardly unanimous on what should be done (indeed, even some high-profile left-wingers sided with those who opposed removing Schiavo’s feeding tube). The conventional wisdom in the pundit class was that the damage done was all to one side – that the flap revealed the GOP to be in the thrall of religious extremists. I don’t doubt that some such damage was indeed done. But little attention was paid to the fact that the Right vs Left narrative of the Schiavo episode – one willingly stoked by Democrats eager to capitalize on precisely the “Religious Right overreach” angle – painted the Left as the advocates of ‘pulling the plug’ on Terri Schiavo. Another anecdote had been added to the public’s collective memory of what the two sides stand for – an anecdote, I should add, that is consistent with other pieces of the puzzle, as the Left has clashed with the same pro-lifers again and again on abortion, assisted suicide, and the destruction of embryos for stem cell research. Sarah Palin’s invocation of her Down’s Syndrome son Trig is another flashpoint: it is the Left that insists that it is appropriate to abort a child when prenatal testing reveals such a condition, and it was from the Left that we heard cruder jibes suggesting that Palin should have done just that. A coherent pattern emerges, forms itself and takes root in the public’s mind.
In 2006 and 2008, nothing happened – at least, nothing visible that would interfere with the Democrats’ march to power, as other issues were at the fore and nobody on either side much wanted to discuss euthanasia. But now, with health care legislation at stake and the end-of-life issues it poses front and center, and with “cutting costs” a core part of his mantra for “reform,” Barack Obama is running into the legacy of Terri Schiavo and those other pieces of the pattern. Schiavo’s name isn’t heard much, but it doesn’t have to be, because it’s part of the public’s memory. The American people know that the same people who wanted to pull the tube from Terri Schiavo want to be trusted not to pull the plug on grandma. Which is why they are appropriately skeptical of any hint that Obamacare would leave any power in federal hands to make those decisions.
Four years ago, the Left was proud of its stance on withdrawing not just medical care but food itself from Terri Schiavo. That was their choice. If the price to be paid is a public in need of assurance that President Obama and his plan don’t share those values and won’t encourage the same thing, well, choices have consequences, and the voiceless dead can still haunt us in ways we had never foreseen.

Michael Kinsley’s singularly ungracious column in the Washington Post yesterday took the occasion of the death of longtime Democratic Beltway lobbyist Anne Wexler to denounce that favorite scapegoat of liberals, the influence of lobbyists in Washington. But Kinsley is not serious about the influence of lobbyists, because unaddressed in his diatribe is the source of their power in the first place.
Kinsley notes Wexler’s background as a principled liberal, and bemoans how her work as a lobbyist strayed from that:

Wexler was a pioneer of bipartisan lobbying — the ultimate in cutting-edge moral neutrality — in which one firm supplies both well-connected Democrats and well-connected Republicans.

Kinsley then moves in to denounce the entire process of representing paying clients in advocating their interests before the political branches of government:

And what is wrong with this? After all, the Constitution guarantees each of us the right to petition our government for the redress of our grievances. Plenty is wrong. First, there is nothing in this list of services about determining which side of a legislative dispute happens to be correct before jumping in on the side that has hired you. Second, if the lobbyists’ claims about being able to affect the outcome of political disputes are even close to being true, this tilts democracy in favor of those who can afford to hire them. And third, what a waste of a lot of smart people’s time! What might Anne Wexler have accomplished for causes that she really believed in if she hadn’t spent the last three decades of her life taking on any cause that walked in the door with a checkbook in hand?

Kinsley is right that making a living this way is a departure from principled political advocacy – but so is most of what private-sector enterprises do. In the legal profession, for example, there are a variety of limits (some personal, some institutional, some legal-ethical) on what clients and causes a lawyer will represent, but fundamentally, the lawyer’s job, or the lobbyist’s, is to speak for the interests of the client before the power of the State. That may be neither as pure a cause as political activism nor as socially productive as private enterprise that caters to the public, but it is a necessary function and there is nothing dishonorable about it. In 2008, amidst a campaign season with even more than the usual huffing and puffing about the evil of lobbyists, both parties nominated presidential candidates who had themselves worked as lobbyists – Barack Obama as a “community organizer,” John McCain as a Capitol Hill “Congressional Liaison” for the Navy. Neither job involved representing private institutional interests, but both were basically lobbying roles: that is, special pleading before the elected branches of government on behalf of their clients, in Obama’s case the community interests chosen by his organization, in McCain’s case the branch of the armed services in which he served. People like Kinsley would no doubt argue that these are more virtuous interests to lobby for than private companies, but in many cases that depends on the merits of the issue – the very thing Kinsley bemoans as being disregarded when lobbyists put their clients’ interests first.
In any event, if Kinsley was serious about limiting the role of lobbyists, he would have to recognize that the explosive growth of lobbying as an industry unto itself in recent decades is a symptom, not the disease itself. The disease is the pervasive intrusion of the federal government into picking winners and losers in the economy, and that intrusion plays precisely the same role in the lobbying industry that the growth of litigation does in the legal profession. From the perspective of a corporate client, spending money on lobbyists only makes sense if lobbyists can deliver for their clients either (1) government favor, (2) protection from government hostility, or (3) the opposite results for their competitors. Prior to the New Deal, there were precious few lobbyists in Washington because the federal government’s role in doing any of those things to particular private businesses was much more limited. The growth of the regulatory state, the increasing complexity of the tax code, and the growth and specificity of the federal budget have all created vast opportunities for the federal government to make decisions that redirect profits and losses among private businesses with the stroke of a pen.
The Obama era in Washington is nothing if not an effort to vastly expand the role of the federal government in determining the favor or punishment doled out to companies and industries, greatly exceeding what is already an overgrown favor factory. The legislation pushed by this White House and Congress – and cheered by media liberals like Kinsley – presents an endless parade of new opportunities for the shaping of rules and the doling out of appropriations: who gets stimulus money, and on what conditions? Who gets a bailout, and will it be structured to benefit some interests (the cash for clunkers program essentially funnels taxpayer money to the automakers to institutionalize a bailout designed to insulate the UAW from the consequences of the industry’s labor costs and practices) and harm disfavored ones (used car dealers). How will the health care bill help or harm insurers, hospitals, companies that provide health insurance, unions, malpractice lawyers, etc.? (There was a report that Wal-Mart was supporting Obamacare because it expected the bill to put more costs on Target – even if that’s not accurate, it’s illustrative of how corporations will evaluate the bill and how their support can be negotiated). What conditions will attach to cap-and-trade provisions as they apply to varied industries? No serious adult should be so naive as to be surprised when the end product benefits powerful moneyed interests who know how to work the system. With government decisions reaching further into more industries, and the details of those incursions buried in thousand-page bills nobody reads, it can’t possibly be a better time to be a lobbyist.
Oh, of course, restrictions – many of them cosmetic – can be placed upon the how and the where of lobbying, but none will change the fundamental dynamic that as long as private businesses see government power as a determinant of their success, they will use every means at their disposal to influence the course of that power, and the nature of people in political power will always be to be susceptible to being influenced.
If you want money out of politics, get politics out of money. If you want to stop influence peddling, go after the influence, not the peddling. If Michael Kinsley was serious about thinking the growth of lobbying a bad thing, he would not be denouncing the symptom while cheering for the disease.

I know I link to a lot of RedState posts these days, but really, Caleb Howe has done it again with an extensively documented post examining efforts to pay for support for Obamacare, as well as rounding up more from other blogs on the same subject.
Debra Saunders also has more on the media coverage I referenced the other day:

When Boxer grilled Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about what personal price the childless Rice paid for the Iraq war, Boxer later boasted that she was “speaking truth to power.” But when angry voters try to do the same with elected officials, whether they’re heckling them or just showing up, Boxer wants the media to investigate.
It’s laughable: Democrats discrediting protests because – ooooooh – they’re organized. Last year, weren’t these same folks guffawing about Jesus being a community organizer?

+++

When anti-Bush protesters behaved badly, when Code Pinkers shouted and anti-war protesters brandished signs with swastikas, they did not rate nearly as much press scrutiny as the ObamaCare protesters. There seems to be the impression in my profession that comparisons of Bush with Hitler were to be expected, but not of Obama with Hitler. That’s below the belt.

Finally, Michael Barone unpacks why the whole Obamacare plan is designed to make a single-payer system inevitable.

Peggy Noonan, who has so rarely been worth reading the past few years, nonetheless nails the dynamics of the health care debate. FreeRepublic.com veteran Bob Hahn, who is always worth reading but far less frequently around to read, offers his own experience organizing conservative demonstrations and zeroes in on the specific double standard by which the Left and the media treat anger at Republicans as a sign of genuine, authentic popular discontent (think of the deification of the unhinged Cindy Sheehan once upon an August) while anger at Democrats about domestic politics is treated as a sign of dangerous extremism. Jim Geraghty asks what kind of dissent from Obama’s policies would be regarded as legitimate. David Boaz (via Instapundit) looks at knee-jerk Democratic accusations that opposition to nationalizing health care equal racism.
It seems to me that the Democrats are still, even at this late date, engaged more in assertion than argument:

If I came up with a health care plan that provided all Americans with universal coverage, protected the 45 million people without health insurance, did so without rationing treatment, prevented insurance companies from denying coverage, didn’t cut Medicaid and Medicare benefits for seniors, AND provided significant cost savings over the current system I’d be proud of it.
I would be out there everyday talking exclusively about my health plan, ignoring all other distractions. I’d sit down with every major network primetime news cast. I’d have my staff write columns and do interviews with every major print publication.
In an effort to explain my plan to as many Americans as possible, I’d go on daytime talk shows like Oprah and The View, I’d go on late night comedy shows like the Daily show and Redeye, and I’d sit down with political commentators like …Anderson [Cooper] and Bill [O’Reilly].
I’d have national hotlines, web casts, hosted chats and discussions. I’d push every Senator and Congressman to host open town halls, allowing the American people to voice their concerns, ask questions and get answers. I’d fill those town halls not with members of unions, political action committees, or cronies that support everything I do, but with ordinary people. Regular folks that might be confused or even worried about my plan. I’d have representatives stay, hours on end to ensure each question is addressed and answered.
But this isn’t what’s happening…

One of my RedState colleagues puts the matter starkly: if Democrats are so certain, in the face of noisy opposition and fretful poll numbers, that the public is overwhelmingly behind them and that all opposition is illegitimate, extremist, manufactured, and worthy of being reported to the authorities, why not just draw clear lines, vote and wait for the GOP to be punished at the polls? Which side in this debate is acting as if it is confident of public support?

Hunter Baker looks at a few of the arguments against national health care. The federalism point is an important one: TennCare was a failure, RomneyCare has been a failure. Why should we expect better results in imposing a complex system on a nationwide basis?
Megan McArdle has a longer essay, which of course begs the question of why she voted for Obama, but it’s worth reading. One of the particularly chilling ideas is that national health care in the US will help mask the failings of other national health care systems around the world, because there won’t be a place left with a vibrant, relatively free health care sector to make the government-run options look bad.

The health care fight is still fluid enough to make predicting the outcome a crapshoot, but Michael Barone has an excellent look at President Obama and why he has run into trouble on this issue:

We knew that day that Obama was good at aura, at generating enthusiasm for the prospect of hope and change….
But it turns out that Obama is not so good at argument. Inspiration is one thing, persuasion another. He created the impression on the campaign trail that he was familiar with major issues and readily ticked off his positions on them. But he has not proved so good at legislating.
One reason, perhaps, is that he has had little practice.

The result?

On the major legislation considered this year — the stimulus, cap and trade, health care — the Obama White House has done little or nothing to set down markers, to provide guidance, to establish boundaries and no-go areas.
The administration could have insisted that the stimulus package concentrate spending in the next year. It didn’t. It could have insisted that the cap-and-trade bill generate the revenue that was supposed to underwrite health care. It didn’t. It could have decided either to seek a bipartisan health care bill or to insist that a Democratic bill be budget-neutral. It didn’t — and it still hasn’t made this basic policy choice.

Obama’s mental and political framework is built around the left-wing, community-organizer notion that there’s a real majority out there that already supports all the things he believes in, if only you can get them to show up at the polls. (That includes not only the youth vote and low-turnout minority groups but also people who aren’t eligible to vote – felons, illegal immigrants, etc.) Thus, the bulk of Obama’s efforts are aimed at firing up the base, not at persuasion. (I should break in and note here that this is not so vastly different from the Bush/Rove strategy, which leaned heavily on getting non-voting evangelical Christians to the polls. I leave to the reader whether to take that as a compliment.)
The things he did do to try to reassure swing voters who flocked to his banner last fall after the financial crisis – promises of tax cuts and a net reduction in federal spending – are undetectable in his governing agenda. And Obama’s long-term strategy, as I have noted repeatedly, is not to win over the electorate but to alter it by changing the political system.
Obama simply never deals with the arguments against his policies seriously, only caricatures them and personally demonizes his opponents (the worst knee-jerk response we have seen from him in this regard was the whole Henry Gates episode, in which Obama reflexively attacked the Cambridge police on racially divisive grounds without bothering to get the facts). That’s an effective way to get things done when you have the public behind you already. But it also makes it very difficult to win back people once you lose them.

So President Obama called Mark Buehrle after Buehrle’s perfect game, and….

Buehrle explained after the call that Obama also “was taking a little bit of credit because he wore the White Sox jacket at the All-Star Game and I told him how surprised I was that he actually did it.

Yes, I know Obama was trying (unsuccessfully) to crack funny here, but in humor there is sometimes truth – of course, The One’s first natural instinct in making a call of congratulations is, “how can I claim credit for this?”
(As Ben Domenech asks, “how many perfect games have you created or saved today?”)

One of the most elusive concepts in politics is the notion of a mandate. Presidents love to claim them to bulldoze opposition (“the American people elected me to do this!”), but they can evaporate with astonishing speed, most famously in the case of the backlash against Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Court-packing” plan after FDR had won the most sweeping electoral endorsement for any party in a presidential election year since the dawn of the modern two-party system.
If there’s one essential characteristic of a mandate, it’s that the public support behind the president is solid because people know what it is they’re supporting. That’s how conservative presidents like Reagan and George W. Bush got mandates to cut taxes: they ran on a clearly articulated plan, everyone who cared to follow the race knew what the plan involved, and public support didn’t change dramatically once they got into office and their opponents started hitting back with the same arguments they’d used against the tax cuts during the campaign. A corollary is that when Members of Congress voted for the tax cuts, they could do so knowing that the arguments on both sides had been fully ventilated to the public, and the voters wouldn’t turn against them quickly for supporting the cuts.
Barack Obama is now pressing forward on health care on the theory that he was elected on a platform of doing something about “health care reform,” and therefore he has a mandate. Bill Clinton thought the same thing; so did George W. Bush after winning not one but two elections while promising Social Security reform. One can argue about their assumptions (that both Obama and Clinton won because of the economy, and Bush in 2004 because of war, social issues and the economy), and of course it remains too early to predict whether Obama will succeed in getting a health care bill to his desk. But of this much we can be certain: even if he does, his legislative strategy is designed to ensure that the bill is passed without the controversial details being sold to the voters. And if Congressional Democrats follow Obama’s lead, they may find next fall that they can’t hide behind any sort of mandate to justify their votes.
From watching him approach the votes on the stimulus and cap-and-trade proposals and now health care, we have a pretty clear picture of Obama’s modus operandi:
Step One: Lay out very general principles and trumpet the absolute urgency of immediate action on those principles. Obama is in favor of “health care reform.” He wants to lower costs and insure more people. A high level of generality. There was more flesh on the bones of his campaign proposals, but not nearly at the level of covering all the bases, and in any event Obama has not even tried to insist that legislation be crafted around his campaign proposal. Yet he has insisted that even if he can’t say what exactly is to be done, it has to be done quickly and without a lot of debate.
Step Two: Deflect all specific attacks by not having a single bill with transparent provisions. On the House side, we’ve had a bill coming together that’s fairly detailed, and as recently as this morning, Speaker Pelosi was simultaneously insisting that she (1) has the votes to pass it and (2) was going to cancel the August recess to hold Members in town long enough to get the votes to pass it. At a minimum, there seem to be a fair number of nominally conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats who might vote for the House bill if forced to but would really prefer to have a bipartisan compromise emerge from the Senate instead. The Senate side has been much murkier, with support as well for a liberal bill like the House version but also a number of Democrats who are balking at the House’s rigid demands and a number of Republicans who won’t sign on to the House version but have left the door open to something different. In any event, it’s impossible to debate exactly what an “Obamacare” bill is at present, because there’s no one bill the White House is willing to publicly stand behind. Much of the Administration’s communications strategy has been based on deflecting criticisms by denying that this or that controversial provision has been set in stone, using (1) the shifting nature of the various bills and (2) those bills’ ultimate vagueness in passing on key decisions to an amorphous, yet-to-be-established bureaucracy as cover to stay unclear on how the pieces of the puzzle will fit together.
Let’s consider, just as an example, one of the most radical changes in national policy that may end up in the final bill – public funding of abortions. For three decades, the Hyde Amendment has codified the policy under which the federal government does not provide taxpayer money to subsidize abortions. This is the ultimate middle-of-the-road compromise (for pro-lifers, just refusing to subsidize isn’t nearly enough), but it maintains the pretense that the federal government is pro-choice rather than actively pro-abortion (if you subsidize something, you’re actively encouraging more of it). Repealing the Hyde Amendment as a stand-alone piece of legislation would require a major pitched battle and be an enormous flashpoint for putative moderate Democrats from districts with a lot of pro-lifers; instead, it may get done as part of a huge, sweeping overhaul that brings in scores of other dramatic changes (tax hikes, huge funding increases, changes in the way insurance, medical care and malpractice are handled) all at once.
So, how does President Obama respond to criticism that repeal of the Hyde Amendment is a step too far? Here’s what he told Katie Couric:

Katie Couric: Do you favor a government option that would cover abortions?
President Obama: What I think is important, at this stage, is not trying to micromanage what benefits are covered. Because I think we’re still trying to get a framework. And my main focus is making sure that people have the options of high quality care at the lowest possible price.
As you know, I’m pro choice. But I think we also have a tradition of, in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government funded health care. Rather than wade into that issue at this point, I think that it’s appropriate for us to figure out how to just deliver on the cost savings, and not get distracted by the abortion debate at this station.

If Obama is serious about getting a public mandate for his bill, this isn’t at all an honest approach; either the final bill will continue to bar the use of public funds for abortions, or it won’t. But so long as he’s not defending any particular piece of legislation, he can keep doing this two-step.
The list of controversial issues goes on, almost endlessly. Much of the controversy focuses on the effects of various plans on existing private health benefits. And Obama can claim a strong mandate….against tampering with anybody’s existing health care. When John McCain proposed eliminating the favored tax treatment of employer-provided plans, Obama flooded the airwaves with ads hammering McCain for putting any sort of tax on anyone’s current health care. Obama may argue now that the various proposals are different – the main liberal plans don’t tax health benefits, they just use a variety of squeezes to try to drive them out of existence, but Obama’s (laughable) pledge to make his hugely expensive proposals “deficit-neutral” leaves the door open to the possibility that a final deal may incorporate any number of as-yet unspecified tax hikes (also in violation of other of his campaign promises). But then, McCain’s proposal also offset the taxes on employers with individual tax credits, and Obama pounced on him anyway, and ended up drawing substantial public support from people who – whether they knew that or not, having heard his barrage of ads – concluded that McCain would tax their health benefits and Obama would leave them in place. If proposals that tax or otherwise pressure existing benefits out of existence end up in the final bill, it will be quite a surprise to a lot of people who took Obama’s campaign ads and rhetoric seriously.
Step Three: Keep as many things on the hopper as possible. For much of the year, Obama has sought to simply overwhelm the Republican opposition by pursuing so many different things at once – the above-mentioned legislative agenda, the continuing parade of bailouts, the Sotomayor nomination, the overhaul of intelligence and detention policy – that undermanned, underfinanced and disorganized Republicans simply couldn’t get a hearing on all of them at once, and things could get done in Congress and the Executive Branch without a lot of scrutiny of the details. The apex of this strategy was the cap-and-trade vote that was buried in the news by the death of Michael Jackson.
This part of the strategy has broken down somewhat at the moment, as the President himself has now taken to talking almost entirely about healthcare. And that, in turn, has raised the political stakes, with Republicans openly declaring that health care is Obama’s Waterloo. From here out, it will be increasingly difficult for Obama to ram through a vote under cover of other events.
Step Four: Rush to get the bill into concrete form and passed with as little time as possible elapsed from Step Two. We saw this dramatically with the stimulus bill, which got passed without anybody in DC having read the whole thing and with hardly anyone having a firm grip on exactly what was in the bill that might later prove embarrassing to have supported. And predictably, the stimulus package is much less popular now than it was when it passed.
The rush to passage is effective for muting opposition. Pelosi’s desire to hold the House over August to vote would not only allow a rush to a vote, but would insulate her Members from spending a month in their districts hearing from voters while there’s a proposal on the table they have some chance of understanding. But it also means the Members vote before they have sold the public on the bill and everything in it. Even if you think that’s an appropriate way to make law in a democracy, as a matter of pure politics, it can be toxic later on. Even if the whole thing passed by the end of August, Republicans would have a year and a half to hammer on particular provisions of the bill ahead of the 2010 elections, and Democrats who voted for it could be caught offguard if they never spent a day guaging how individual parts of the bill would play in their states or districts.
Obama’s not worried about that – he can run for re-election on his personal popularity and the historic nature of his historic presidency. But Congressional Democrats won’t have that luxury – if you’re a white male supposedly moderate Congressman running for re-election in a district in Indiana or North Carolina where a majority of the voters are still old enough to remember when and why they voted for Bush in 2004, you need to be able to defend the actual policies you voted for.
Which may be why Obama’s hurry-up offense is at risk of a serious slowdown, with Harry Reid announcing today that unlike Pelosi, he’s not going to cancel the August recess or have a vote before then. Congressmen and Senators are nothing if not self-interested, and with Obama having burned a lot of political capital to get them signed on to the stimulus, the bailouts, and the cap-and-trade bill, and with polls showing sinking support for health care reform, many of them may be ready to decide that a full and open debate on the particulars of a particular bill, and some serious time discussing those particulars with the voters, may be necessary to get their votes on a final package. And that’s an outcome that can’t warm the heart of the White House.

If we were told one thing by the media from the 2008 campaign, it’s that telling Katie Couric you do not read a lot of newspapers is an absolute disqualifier for the presidency. (This is aside from how the media reacted to President Bush saying he didn’t pay much attention to the newspapers). So, when Couric confronted President Obama with criticisms in an uncharacteristically O-negative David Brooks column, what was his response? In the President’s own words:

Katie Couric: President Obama, there was a stinging column in the New York Times today written by David Brooks. He says Democrats are losing touch with America because, quote, “The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates. They have their own cherry-picking pollsters, their own media and activist cocoon, their own plans to lavishly spend borrowed money to buy votes.” He goes on to say that you have, basically, been co-opted by Nancy Pelosi. And you’ve differed to the, what he calls, old bulls on Capitol Hill.
President Obama: This was a really aggressive-[laughter]
Katie Couric: On issue after issue. [laughter] There was a pretty…
President Obama: Are we going to read the whole column here? [laughter]
Katie Couric: No, I’m not going to read – I’m not going to put you through that. But it was it was a tough column. And I’m just curious, A, have you read it? And, B, what’s your response?
President Obama: I, you know, I don’t spend a lot of time reading columns, Katie. The fact is that I am confident in the work that we’re doing.

Gee, could it be that chief executives actually have important jobs to do that preclude them from spending a lot of time reading newspapers? (Judging from circulation numbers these days, they’re not the only ones).
Obama’s supporters who made a big deal out of Bush and Palin saying basically the same thing owe some serious apologies. But of course, they were just point-scoring; nobody apologizes for doing that.

Jeff Emanuel looks at Obama’s deficit two-step on health care. I can’t pretend to be at all surprised at this, and realistically it’s hard to imagine anyone willfully naive enough to believe that the health care plan, if passed, won’t massively increase government spending, resulting in (1) large tax hikes, (2) large increases in the deficit and national debt, or most likely (3) both. It’s wasted energy on all sides to conduct the debate without frankly acknowledging this.

Leon Wolf rounds up here and here the latest battery of incidents reflecting how white Senate Democrats – the same people who blocked Miguel Estrada’s nomination to the DC Circuit out of fear that the GOP would put a conservative, highly qualified Latino on the Supreme Court – really think about African-Americans. Combined with this, the overall picture is an ugly one indeed. The logical inference here is that they feel essentially immune from the possibility of consequences, serene in the confidence that anything racially divisive helps solidify their political position, no matter how ghastly the underlying attitudes it reveals.
PS – On the second of the two Durbin exchanges, I love Sam Brownback’s utter incredulity at what Durbin was saying.

If there is a lesson to be learned from Sarah Palin’s withdrawal from public office, it is this: if you want to take out a female politician, you go after her children.
There is likely no one and single reason for Palin’s withdrawal, and she cited a bunch of them in her disorganized “you won’t have Sarah Palin to kick around anymore” speech. But two things seem to explain most logically Palin’s behavior: she was ground down by the unusually vitriolic campaign waged against her, and the aspect of that campaign that did the most damage was the attacks on her children. As Palin put it in her speech:

In fact, this decision comes after much consideration, and finally polling the most important people in my life – my children (where the count was unanimous…well, in response to asking: “Want me to make a positive difference and fight for ALL our children’s future from OUTSIDE the Governor’s office?” It was four “yes’s” and one “hell yeah!” The “hell yeah” sealed it – and someday I’ll talk about the details of that…I think much of it had to do with the kids seeing their baby brother Trig mocked by some pretty mean-spirited adults recently.) Um, by the way, sure wish folks could ever, ever understand that we ALL could learn so much from someone like Trig – I know he needs me, but I need him even more…what a child can offer to set priorities RIGHT – that time is precious…the world needs more “Trigs”, not fewer.

All national politicians take their share of potshots; it comes with the territory, and anybody who can’t take the heat, as Harry Truman famously said, should get out of the kitchen. And with that heat inevitably comes some spillover onto a politician’s family members – especially if those family members are politically outspoken adults, Washington lobbyists, or businesspeople involved in shady practices. But some grief will come as well to soft-spoken spouses and minor children. It’s the nature of the business.
But no politician in modern memory, not even Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, has faced the sort of ferociously personal assault that greeted Palin from the instant she set foot on the national stage, in many cases before her detractors even knew anything about her besides that she was female, attractive, pro-life and pro-gun. And while the pervasive crude sexual references to Palin were horrible, the assault on her family was the worst of all. Palin has worn many hats in her life – Vice-Presidential candidate, Governor, Mayor, Oil & Gas Commissioner, City Councilwoman, sportscaster, point guard, runner, beauty queen, moose hunter – but it’s clear that the role that defines her is her role as the mother of five children. And as James Taranto put it, “If you’ve never met or had a mother, the thing to know about them is that they tend to be very protective of their children.”
There is fairly widespread public and media agreement that criticizing, mocking or making more than glancing political use of President Obama’s two daughters is an absolute no-no. For the media’s part, the effort to spare the President’s children dates back to the Clinton years. Yes, there were mean-spirited jokes told at the expense of Chelsea Clinton, but Republicans who did so (John McCain, Rush Limbaugh) almost always immediately apologized, and Saturday Night Live eventually eased off on Chelsea. There was also regular vitriol from the left, mainly in the blogospehere, aimed at Jenna and Barbara Bush, and no apologies of any kind. But much of that was under the public radar. (John Kerry and John Edwards both bringing up Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter in the 2004 debates wasn’t, but at least Mary Cheney is an adult). We have simply never seen anything like the targeting of Palin’s children, under a variety of flimsy pretenses that no mother would ever accept as a basis for going after her kids.
One must attribute at least part of the vileness of these attacks, among left-wing blogs, to how very few of the leading left-wing bloggers have children of their own – were conservatives tempted to mock Obama’s daughters, they would at least have to face their own daughters and sons at the end of a day of doing so. A political movement of the childless has no empathy for children. Empathy for other human beings requires human decency, and decency breeds hesitation – a hesitation the Online Left has never displayed. Were any of these people capable of shame, they would be feeling it. Instead, they have been gleefully dancing on Palin’s political grave ever since. It is worth considering what the “New Politics” has looked like when applied to Sarah Palin, because it presents a cautionary tale for Republicans with families.

Continue reading Sarah Palin and the Scum of the Earth

Even the Associated Press notices that Obama hasn’t bothered trying to comply with his no-new-taxes-for-95%-of-Americans pledge:

Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress have already increased tobacco taxes – which disproportionately hit the poor – to pay for extending health coverage to 4 million children in working low-income families.
Now, lawmakers are looking for more revenues to help pay for providing medical insurance to millions more who lack it at a projected cost of $1 trillion over the next decade.
The floated proposals include increasing taxes on alcohol, which could raise $62 billion over the next decade, and a new tax on sugary drinks such as soda, which could raise $52 billion.

H/T This is beyond the colossal taxes incorporated in the “cap-and-trade” bill. As the AP notes and others have noted lately, the explosive growth of current and future spending under Obama is basically designed to force tax increases down the line.
Yes, we told you so.

Really, if you have not read Iowahawk’s California memorial piece, go now.
It remains a fierce competition between California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Massachusetts as to what state has the worst, most dysfunctional government. California’s budget disaster is a tough one to top, but then again it hasn’t had anything to match New York’s out-to-lunch State Senate or Illinois’ Blagojevich saga.
Such are the joys of blue-state government.

I had meant to link earlier to Francis Cianfrocca’s piece on the cap-and-trade bill and how – from what little anyone knows of what’s in it – it vastly expands the federal government’s role in doling out rewards and punishments to particular private businesses, a role that inherently brings with it a cesspool of corruption. Also worth noting is the Democrats’ strategy of trying to blitz through Congress as many things as possible at once so as to minimize the possibility of public debate (the cap and trade vote being held while the press was covering the Michael Jackson story).

Pejman looks further at the growing scandal involving the Obama Administration’s purging of Inspectors General who deliver bad news. John Kass explains why this is completely consistent with Obama’s Chicago background.
Seriously, anybody who expected Obama wouldn’t behave like this needed their head examined.
This whole flap, by the way, underscores one of my longstanding arguments, which is that the various Inspectors General and periodic should be replaced by a single Cabinet-level official charged with investigations of public integrity. A strong, prominent IG would have a couple of institutional advantages: harder to fire by virtue of his or her prominence, yet still directly accountable to the President; able to bring the perspective that is lacking in ad hoc special prosecutors; able to remove public integrity cases from DOJ, freeing up the Attorney General to focus on less politically-charged law enforcement priorities. Granted, this means yet another Cabinet department, but even aside from the issue of eliminating departments, you could make room by combining a bunch of the currently redundant departments, like Commerce and Labor or Interior and Energy.

Perhaps the most telling moment in the past few days’ controversy over South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s absence and subsequent revelation that he’d been visiting his mistress in Argentina came during the period when his staff was putting out the story that Sanford was hiking the Appalachian Trail, and the Democratic National Committee rushed out a press release blaring that the Trail had received stimulus money, and therefore Sanford – as an ardent opponent of the stimulus bill – was a hypocrite for walking on ground that had been touched by Obama’s pork-barrel bill. Once the reach of the federal fisc had touched that ground, no possible alternative is permissible but to agree with the political dictates of the hand that holds those purse strings.
The incident speaks volumes about the peril the nation faces to its way of life, and the depth of the trust Sanford breached by engaging in a reckless affair at a time when he was one of the small handful of people in the country well-positioned to do something to stop it.

Continue reading Sanford Steps Out, But The Battle Continues

This is from Obama’s press conference yesterday:

President Barack Obama on Tuesday squared off with the insurance lobby over industry charges that a government health plan he backs would dismantle the employer coverage Americans have relied on for a half-century and overtake the system….
“If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality health care … then why is it that the government, which they say can’t run anything, suddenly is going to drive them out of business?” Obama said in response to a question at a White House news conference.
“That’s not logical,” he scoffed, responding to an industry warning that government competition would destabilize the employer system that now covers more than 160 million people.

As usual when Obama has to respond to a serious criticism, he acts like a snarky left-wing blogger rather than a serious adult, throwing off a one-liner that seems to his die-hard supporters like a clever parody of Republican arguments but doesn’t stand up to even the most minimal of scrutiny. Typically, it’s pointless to debate whether Obama is being astoundingly ignorant or deliberately mendacious; the point is that no sane person could defend his response. Daffyd offers a long list of screamingly obvious ways in which the private sector would be unable to compete with a government plan even though the government plan is inefficiently run, including the obvious-to-everyone-but-Obama fact that a profit-making enterprise has to make a profit, whereas a government agency or government-sponsored entity can afford to lose money pretty much indefinitely (Francis Cianfrocca points out to me that the proposed new healthcare GSE, which he refers to as the Consumer Health Management Corporation or “Charlie Mac,” would start with something on the order of $10 billion in capitalization, many multiples larger than the market cap of even large insurers, and with an endless credit line from Uncle Sam). There is even – you may know this, but presumably Obama does not – a whole body of antitrust law dedicated to preventing large companies in certain circumstances from driving competitors out of business by undercutting their prices to sell at a loss, then jacking prices up when the competition is dead and buried. Profit-making private entities don’t actually act like that very often, for obvious reasons: but governments can and do, at the taxpayer’s expense. As Phil Klein notes, one of the main arguments by supporters of the government plan is that it will use its vast size to obtain cost savings at the expense of health care providers (doctors, hospitals, drug companies, all of which are presumed to continue providing the same level of goods and services without regard to profit motive), cost savings that far smaller private insurers could not obtain. That’s an argument Obama himself has made repeatedly, yet he now professes ignorance of it. Because, of course, he retains at all times the confidence that nobody will ever call him on this sort of thing.

My always-worth-reading New Ledger colleague, Christopher Badeaux, has the definitive and exhaustive profile of Andrew Sullivan’s work and the obsessions that have defined him as a writer and wasted so much of Sullivan’s prodigious writing talents. You’ll want to print this one out and digest it at leisure. Here’s the opening:

Continue reading Through The Looking Glass With Andrew Sullivan

Obama’s press secretary can’t name a single country where a single-payer health care system actually works well.

Mary Katherine Ham on Obama’s inability to let go of the media not being unanimous in its fawning adoration of him.

High on the list of states where the GOP needs to rebuild its credibility and has a realistic chance to do so is Wisconsin, whose two-term Democratic Governor, Jim Doyle, is seeking a third term in 2010 (no Democrat has ever won three terms as Governor of Wisconsin). The state of Tommy Thompson’s Governorship was part of the great ferment of GOP reform in the Upper Midwest in the 1990s, and despite Democratic sweeps of the state in the past decade, many statewide races have been very close (George W. Bush lost Wisconsin by a razor-thin margin in 2004). If the climate has turned against the Democrats by 2010, this is a state that should be a prime target. For his part, Doyle pushed for billions in new taxes in 2007 after running on a no-new-taxes campaign in 2006, and now faces huge budget deficits. CQ reports that the polls are showing his weakness:

Continue reading Third Time The Charm?

In the wake of the shooting at the Holocaust Museum, there’s been something of a mad rush by left-wing bloggers to use the shooting to validate the now-infamous Department of Homeland Security report on “right-wing extremists.”.
There are two noteworthy aspects of this effort. One, it continues the DHS report’s willful misidintification of people like James von Brunn, the museum shooter, as “right-wing.” And two, it ultimately embraces the concept of profiling in law enforcement, in ways that liberals used to deplore.
The initial problem with this effort, as Leon and Pejman have detailed, is that von Brunn had more in common with left- than right-wingers: he railed against Christianity, “neocons,” President Bush, John McCain, and Bill O’Reilly, peddled 9/11 conspiracy theories, and had in his possession the address of another possible target: the building that houses The Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute, the nerve center of neoconservatism. Like the DHS report itself, the left-wing commenters simply assume that “racist” = “right-wing,” and therefore lump together conservatives with racists who reject, root and branch, virtually everything conservatives believe in. (This is the historical fallacy used to designate the Nazis as right-wing, when – as Jonah Goldberg details exhaustively in his book Liberal Fascism – they were thoroughgoing economic statists, marketed themselves as a socialist worker’s movement, pushed a platform with numerous planks that could come straight from modern-day liberals and did in fact come from 20th century American progressives, were obsessed with health food and anything “natural” or “organic,” and campaigned persistently to undermine, subvert and replace the authority and legitimacy of Christianity, among other family resemblances to the Left.)
We can see the same effort to link racial hatred to strains of actual right-wingery in the DHS report:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

One wonders if these guys would qualify on the first half of that definition.
The second point of interest is the left-bloggers’ embrace of profiling. Now, let’s back up a bit: law enforcement officers generally rely, in identifying possible suspects in the absence of a direct tip, on their own experience and the institutional knowledge of their departments in identifying who might be a criminal. Profiles are a part of the second half of that equation, one that’s been formalized in recent decades as a regular feature of law enforcement agencies. Profiling principally involves profiles of behavior indicative of various kinds of criminal activity – bank fraud, prostitution, serial killing, drug smuggling, etc. None of this is controversial. What is controversial is including things that aren’t prelude-to-crime behaviors in a profile, whether it be inherent characteristics (race, gender), or what are generally thought of as protected activities (religion, political affliation).
The conservative view on profiling has generally been to treat it as disfavored but not necessarily rule it out entirely, while liberals spent years making a cause celebre of racial profiling (Barack Obama made an anti-profiling crusade one of his priorities as a state legislator). Profiling, if done carefully and drawn narrowly from factual experience, can be a useful law enforcement tool. The problem with profiling people based on general characteristics, especially things like race and religion and political affiliation, is that it tends to feed into stereotypes, be grounded in overbroad generalizations rather than hard evidence, sweep in too many innocent people into a law enforcement net, and as a whole encourage dangerous and usually sloppy law enforcement.
The DHS report was all that, and any liberal worthy of the name would not be defending its sweeping generalizations. And still less would liberals be rushing to validate it based on individual shootings in a nation of 300 million people. Imagine if the DHS report had focused on African-Americans as especially likely to commit murder: how many shootings by lone African-Americans would be enough to justify profiling on the basis of race? More than one or two, I’d bet – certainly I wouldn’t tolerate profiling on such a basis.
Federal surveillance and vigilance against actual groups of potentially violent political extremists, whatever their political stripes, is of course reasonable. And conservatives, being believers in the virtue of experience as the basis of knowledge, should not turn up our noses at efforts to draw profiles of other possible groups based on experience with existing ones. But we can and should demand something more rigorous than sloppy generalizations in venturing onto the dangerous turf of profiling political opponents of the current Administration (the same Administration whose Attorney General has previously raised the temperature of otherwise peaceful political debate by threatening to criminally prosecute members of the outgoing Administration over policy differences).
But liberals who are cheering this sort of thing ought to be deeply ashamed of themselves, if they ever meant anything they said about racial profiling.

Jim Geraghty notes that Gov. Palin has brought ExxonMobil to the table in her signature policy effort, the natural gas pipeline, defying critics who didn’t think she could make the big energy companies blink and cut a deal. Meanwhile, President Obama faces the first defection from his effort to drum up support for nationalizing health insurance, as the AMA comes out against the so-called “public option” of government health insurance.
It’s far from the end of the journey for both these initiatives; Palin still faces other hurdles, and Obama retains a strong position (the NYT notes how he can put the screws on the doctors: “If the doctors are too aggressive in fighting the public plan, they risk alienating Democrats whose support they need for legislation to increase their Medicare fees.”), despite the powerful arguments Karl Rove outlines for marshalling opposition. But it’s encouraging to be reminded that sometimes, governing is actually about doing things rather than just talking.

Cafe Hayek has a graphic illustration of how the unemployment numbers have been worse with the stimulus than the Obama team projected they’d be without the stimulus.
Whether or not you assign the Obama Administration any responsibility for making things worse four-plus months into the new president’s term, and whether or not you blame Congressional Democrats (who took over under much better economic conditions over two years ago), the simple facts are:
1. The direct costs of the stimulus are known.
2. The projected benefits have not materialized as promised.
The primary reason, of course, is Crank’s First Law of Government Financial and Economic Projections: they are always, always wrong. Nothing is ever accurately forecast by the government, because forecasting is hard even for the private sector experts, there are tons of variables, and there are too many incentives to shade the truth. The proponents of the policy, bearing the burden of defending it, have their work cut out for them in explaining why we’re better off than if nothing at all had been done.
Reason and experience told anyone familiar with the issue that the stimulus was, on balance, a colossal expenditure of taxpayer money – money that really could have been used in the credit-starved private sector right now – that was going to pay zero dividends in the short run, and only small dividends greatly outweighed by its costs in the long run. But then, the point of the exercise was never about hepling the economy anyway, as any serious adult had to know.

Whether or not Republicans can ever get a meaningful mandate to significantly cut government spending, the political climate has unmistakably shifted to one in which one of the great domestic issues of the day is simply putting the brakes on runaway expansion of government and the concomitant diminution of the true private sector. Frank Luntz thinks that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is making headway in selling the message that it has to stop somewhere:

H/T
Unfortunately, a court order from the South Carolina Supreme Court may cost Sanford this round in the budget fight no matter what the public thinks. But the battle to win public opinion never ends.

Jon Corzine promises that if he’s re-elected, NJ will not invade Iraq. As Jim Geraghty notes, a guy with a 36% approval rating needs something better than “I’m not Bush” to defend the corrupt and dysfunctional status quo in Trenton, where Democrats have ruled unchecked for years with predictably familiar results.
Chris Christie’s victory in yesterday’s GOP primary is good news. Christie’s the best shot the GOP had, and he’s had a spectacular record of hunting down corruption in the state (granted, in New Jersey that’s like hunting cows).
One of the interesting potshots from Corzine’s speech was focusing on John Ashcroft. I know why he did it: Christie is close with Ashcroft and has drawn some fire for appointing him as a federal monitor as part of plea deals with corporate defendants. It’s a silly charge; while I agree broadly that the entire monitor concept is something of a racket, it’s been used widely by prosecutors of both parties (it was a similar arrangement that got Deval Patrick hired at ExxonMobil), and it’s fairly ludicrous to argue that a man who’d served as Attorney General, Governor and Senator was not qualified for the job.
But what makes it politically interesting is the assumption that Ashcroft is universally unpopular with moderates; I’m not so sure that’s true anymore. Ashcroft’s DOJ was a model of professionalism and aggressive law enforcement, and only looks better compared to his famously inept immediate successor, and if anything moderate voters have heard a lot since 2004 about some of the settings in which Ashcroft’s pushback established the outer legal limits on some of the more controversial Bush Administration anti-terror policies (an unpleasant, but necessary role for the AG to sometimes perform). We’ll see if using Ashcroft as a boogeyman is effective, let alone effective enough for New Jersey residents to decide that they’d prefer more of the same disastrous tax-spend-steal policies to electing a guy who knows John Ashcroft.
UPDATE: Geraghty also notes that the centerpiece of Corzine’s campaign in 2005 was a promise to cut taxes, which – like all such promises from Democrats – he broke, leaving the state with the nation’s highest tax burden.

George W. Bush, on being thanked for his AIDS initiatives in Africa: “Don’t thank me, thank the taxpayers of the United States of America.”