This is an easy one: while I suppose it’s vaguely possible that Republicans could raise reconciliation as an issue in the fall, it’s about as certain as anything could be that it won’t affect any votes. First of all, no one knows what reconciliation is; I mean, shockingly few people know what a filibuster is, really, so it’s pretty clear that no one knows what reconciliation is. Be sure to read this great anecdote from Chris Bowers (and a related one from Matt Yglesias). But beyond that, no one cares. Really.

I can understand why Bernstein, Bowers, and Yglesias feel the way that they do, but not surprisingly I’m inclined to counsel against being too dismissive. Without taking on the issue of whether reconciliation is the correct course of action in this instance — and I’m inclined to believe that it is — the fact that it is procedural or arcane or that there is a perception that no one understands what it is or what it’s for does not mean that it won’t be an issue in the election should the Republicans choose to make it one.

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Let me start by saying that I mostly agree with Jamelle when he says that”

There is almost nothing in recent political history to suggest that the Republican Party is anything but hostile to health care reform.  And if not hostile, then indifferent.  Republicans had nearly four years of uninterrupted dominance with which to tackle health care reform, and neither President Bush nor congressional Republicans proposed anything. 

I think “hostile” is too strong, but indifferent is probably about right.  Certainly, health care reform is a very low priority for the GOP and to the extent it’s a priority at all, it’s only because it’s so front and center an issue for Dems and liberals. 

Saying something is almost universally a low priority for Republican politicians, however, is not the same as saying that all Republican politicians will be reflexively opposed to any health care reform at all.  It has, for instance, become cliche amongst liberals to say that the McCain health care proposal was worthless and a joke.  Yet the primary difference between that proposal and Wyden-Bennett, which is popular with economists and many movement liberals, solely has to do with the amount of regulation of the individual market – not exactly an irreconcilable chasm. 

My key disagreement with Jamelle comes from this paragraph, however:

Last year, Democrats offered Republicans the chance to make their mark on health care reform.  Yes, it would happen within a liberal framework, but Democrats were more than willing to compromise and scale down if it meant GOP support.  Republicans were repeatedly offered the opportunity to alter the bill to their liking; if Republicans wanted market-friendly reforms, they could have gotten them.  If Republicans wanted something modest and limited, Democrats probably would have delivered.  But they didn’t.  Despite that, Democrats produced and passed a bill that is moderate and bipartisan in everything but name.   

(My emphasis).

The disagreement I have here is that it makes the assumption that altering the scope of a major proposal rather than adjusting its framework is an inherently worthwile effort at bi-partisanship.  In some cases, that may well be true, to be sure.  But it’s not true when the principal objection from the opposing party’s base is the framework itself, which is precisely what the objection has been here almost from Day One.  [Read more →]

The first thought arose from reading the following quote by Andrew Sprung, linked to by Andrew Sullivan, about Webb’s comments around health care reform following Scott Brown’s win,

We have one party that has not got the brains to govern. Will we now learn for certain that we have another party that hasn’t got the guts?

It doesn’t strike me as entirely fair to suggest that this failure to recapture Kennedy’s seat and the potential failure of health care reform is due to Democrats being “gutless”. Rather, I think what it points to is the fact that the Democratic Party is a deeply divided institution and those divisions lie along significant fault lines of principle about what it means to be a “liberal” today. [Read more →]

You’d think after rightly complaining about the Bush Administration’s unprecedented irresponsibility for eight years, leading Democrats would understand that we’re trapped in a terrible hole, but instead they just keep digging, figuring that while they’re in power, why not lobby for a massive new health care entitlement, game its scoring to make its cost seem more palatable to voters, and pay for it by pretending that it won’t cost any more than what we currently spend. […]

Republicans may be full of it when they promise that if returned to power they’ll cut spending and pay down the debt, but at least they recognize the need for those measures, and that they’re an appropriate priority.

The reflexive, evidence-free dismissal of the CBO scores (High Broderism at its finest) at the beginning of Conor’s post is enough to convince me that he isn’t actually interested in hearing liberal ideas for bringing the United States back on a firm fiscal footing. That said, it’s worth reminding Conor that in the three decades since the Republican Party became the dominant political coalition in American politics, the deficit has been reduced exactly once, and that was during Bill Clinton’s presidency. All three Republican presidents of the “conservative era” – Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush – were responsible for significant increases in the deficit, and in the case of the latter, a tremendous increase in the overall national debt.

Here’s a graph that illustrates the point (I found the data here):

Moreover, it’s not even really accurate to say that Republicans recognize the need to reduce spending, and Democrats don’t (by implication). The Obama administration’s central conceit on health care reform has been that absent systemic change in the way we deliver and pay for health care, the United States is facing fiscal ruin. As such, the only real requirement the administration has for health care reform – as per Peter Orszag – is that it “bends the curve.” We’ve heard more about cost controls and deficit reduction from this Democratic administration than we did in eight years of the previous Republican one. Indeed, if there’s been anything notable about nearly every major Democratic policy proposal we’ve seen this year, it’s that both congressional Democrats and the White House have been adamant that they pay for themselves at least in part.

I hate to be super partisan about this, but it’s one of those situations where you can’t actually avoid it. The simple fact is that while neither party is perfect, Democrats at least have something of a claim to the mantle of “fiscally responsible.” President Clinton was the first president in a generation to balance the budget, and President Obama’s economic team shows an obvious concern for the long-term fiscal viability of the United States. They’re just also concerned about not letting the United States fall into economic ruin, hence the various stimulus-related deficits.

On that note, I want to make one last point: when considering Republican and Democratic deficits, you can’t make a one-to-one comparison without also thinking about the actual content of spending. Or, to borrow from a post I wrote a long time ago at my own blog:

Spending trillions of dollars financing a massive reinvention of our transportation infrastructure – an unquestionable public good – is a lot different then spending trillions on say, video games. Which, while awesome, aren’t exactly a wise investment (I’m looking at you Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear). The real measure of fiscal responsibility isn’t deficit spending as much as it is the return on said spending. If President Obama’s spending puts the country on a sustainable fiscal footing in the long-term, even if it is significant, it will be far more “responsible” than President Bush’s comparatively smaller, but overall disastrous, spending.

I think a lot of minority voters aren’t so much “progressive” as they are in favor of more direct government assistance, something Democrats have promised to do better than Republicans.  A lot of minorities and union members also happen to be staunch social conservatives.  Support for things like gay marriage is very low among black and Hispanic populations.  Union members and minorities just have populist tendencies when it comes to economics.

Two things: first, E.D. is underestimating the extent to which minorities (and particularly African-Americans) have a fairly strong ideological commitment to an activist federal government.

At least in the post-war era, the federal government has played a critical role in advancing and protecting the civil and economic rights of racial minorities. Not surprisingly, at least among African-Americans, this has had a pretty significant impact on black political thought.  Generally speaking, African-Americans take a positive view of the federal government, and as Reihan pointed out in our podcast, this makes them more likely to find some form of liberalism salient.  It’s also worth noting that insofar that African-Americans/minorities more generally are socially conservative, the focus isn’t really on gay marriage or abortion (which is what E.D. seems to be suggesting) as much as it is on family stability and community development, which has a different set of political implications.

The other piece is that E.D. is definitely underestimating the extent to which respect has a significant impact on minority voting.  Simply put, even if Democratic policies had a negligible effect on the material well-being of minority voters, I still think that you would see large-scale minority support for the Democratic Party, if only because Democrats are the party that takes minority concerns seriously.  More often than not, Republicans are either dismissive of or actively hostile to minority interests.  With that kind of record – and a relatively friendly Democratic Party – it really shouldn’t come as any surprise that minorities are reliable Democratic voters.

In the grand discussion of where should Conservative leaders lead and where do they go, it’s important to get a good lay of the land, a solid bearing of where Republicans and Conservatives are, and an accurate reading of where the competition is. Building off of Mark’s exploration of the relationship between the base and wonks and E.D. taking that ball and running with it, I hope to add another piece to the puzzle.

In talks about conservative dissidents, conservative wonks, what we really need to talk about are conservative elites, of which some of the former are included. Elites are, leaders, columnists, idea-mongers, and purveyors of vision.

In that sense, Rush Limbaugh, reviled though he may be, is certainly an elite but not a dissident nor wonk. What he does do, is project an image of what conservatism is and just as importantly what is not. Some elites are dissidents, quite a few are wonks but they are – for better and for worse- leaders of conservatism.

The conservative base and its elite leaders are fractured unlike their competition, Democrats, progressives, and/aka liberals. The very strong alignment between the liberal base and liberal elites forms an iron binary, a group whose fundamental agreement on issues joins them inviolably. Their broad agreement on social and economic issues allows them to work – more or less – in harmony. By contrast, the right has a fairly sizeable disconnect between both. For example with the bank bailout and gay marriage there are sizeable chunks of the conservative elite who either support them or simply don’t care at the same time that the huge chunks of the base have been positively apoplectic over them. There’s a reason you see one of the most prominent conservative lawyers in America working for marriage equality but zero liberal lawyers seeking to overturn Roe.

Another contrast between the two, effective signaling between elites and the base allows liberal elites to organize for health care and channel the energy of a strong base into focused issues of consensus whereas tea parties and town halls reflected a base only enough organized enough to be a disorganized mess.

We saw this contrast as early the 2008 presidential primary. The Democratic candidates came in all regions, genders, and colors but basically agreed on 90%-95% on their policy. The Democratic contest was a contest of packaging not direction or political identity.

The Republicans were the exact opposite. They were all wealthy, white, men but their ideas couldn’t have been more heterodox. Giuliani, Thompson, Huckabee, Romney all presented very different visions of the future of the Republican Party and consequently conservatism’s role within the party. The only candidate whose selection and platform amounted to tinkering around the edges rather than changing directions was also the one least offensive to the most number of people, John McCain. This is also why he suffered from an enthusiasm gap until he picked Palin.

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This is a good point (via Cogitamus):

As long as there was still a good distance to go before a bill was passed, Business Dog Dems could afford to be Business Dogs – to maintain the charade of being Democrats by being on the side of passing something, while watering it down to please the people who write their campaign checks, and hoping that the bill would die a quiet death amidst all the wrangling.  So they didn’t have to think much about how it would play out in 2010 if the bill passed, because that was a pretty damned big ‘if.’

Not so much anymore.  So now they’re having to think about passing a bill that they can defend to their constituents when the GOP tries to put the worst face on it that they can.  And that means strengthening the bill so that the GOP doesn’t have much to work with.

I made a similar point to my boss earlier this morning.  In terms of their opposition, the GOP has all but thrown caution to the wind and adopted a high-risk/high-reward strategy, both politically and legislatively.   Successfully shutting down Barack Obama’s health care reform effort would have dealt a crippling blow to his presidency and virtually guaranteed significant Republican gains in next year’s elections.

The huge downside of course, is that if Democrats do pass health care legislation – and that’s looking increasingly likely – then it becomes that much harder to run against them in next year’s elections.  What’s more, and as we’re seeing now, the flip side to obstinacy is that your interests won’t be represented.  Even moderate Republican input into a health care bill would have yielded one significantly more conservative than what we’re likely to see.  Democrats seemed to have genuinely wanted a bipartisan bill, and I’m fairly certain that a right-leaning “compromise” bill would have been quickly shepherded through Congress.  As it stands, not only do Democrats not have any incentive to take Republican input, but the logic of the situation is pushing them in a more liberal direction.  That is, and as low-tech cyclist points – with a bill looking very likely, even conservative Democrats recognize that their best bet for winning reelection involves strengthening the bill to make it a better deal for their constituents.  And on top of that, liberal activists are pressuring the Democratic leadership to include a public option and there seems to be a sense that liberals will actively turn against the leadership if a public option isn’t included.

The funny thing about all of this is that by categorically opposing reform, Republicans have made it far more likely that they will suffer a serious legislative loss in the form of a solidly center-left health are bill, and that in turn makes it far more likely that they suffer politically in next year’s elections.

The other day, I struggled to think of a single unifying characteristic for the various strains of dissident/reform conservatism and blamed the lack of such a characteristic for the fact that the conservative agenda nowadays amounts to little more than “we’re not liberals.”  Beyond that, though, what unifies these strains of dissident conservatism is that the dissidents are almost all drawn from the conservative elite: they’re wonks, not foot soldiers.  Moreover, it increasingly seems that what unifies the old conservative wonk class is that they’re almost all dissidents.  The set of non-wonkish dissident conservatives is close to null, as is the set of wonkish conservatives who maintain close ties to the base.

One area where Freddie has taken a bit of heat is for going after so-called reform conservatives for being unwilling to try to fix the problems with conservatism.  For a long while, I thought this heat was deserved and that Freddie was being quite unfair to people who were clearly trying to do exactly that.  And while two Ordinary Gentlemen do not a trend make, I read enough liberal blogs to see that their opinions are shared by quite a few on the Left, so while liberals may not have the disdain for the reformers that they have for the hardcore movement types, the reformers are hardly respected by liberals. 

Meanwhile, the hardcore movement conservatives truly cannot stand the reformers, who they view as RINOS at best and traitors at worst.   This animosity is even understandable since, to the extent the reformers even try to interact with the base, it is more often than not to criticize it for extremism in rhetoric or style. 

This question has perplexed me for months: how is it possible for a group of well-intentioned conservative wonks to be so reviled by the Left, despite sincerely opposing the worst of the Right’s extremism and attempting to make the Right serious about governing again, and the Right, despite sincerely opposing most all of the Left’s agenda?  It’s not as if these people are just squishy centrists and moderates – they almost always have a pretty clear set of principles underlying their actions. 

Reading Jamelle’ s post, though, the answer finally became clear: the conservative wonks simply aren’t doing their jobs.  What they are doing is picking apart liberal proposals, picking apart conservative proposals, attacking the low-hanging fruit of conservative extremism, and occasionally making suggestions to liberals on ways of either improving liberal proposals or making those proposals more palatable to conservatives.  What they are not doing, and largely are not even trying to do, is to drive the GOP agenda.  They are, in effect, content to leave the GOP agenda as little more than “vote no on everything” and tear down whatever the liberals do.

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“I now put the chances of a substantial health care bill passing at 75%, and the chances of the Democrats losing the house in 2010 at about 66%.” ~ Megan McArdle

Megan’s second estimate is absurd.  The 75% chance of health care legislation passing seems about right.  (By what statistical analysis?  Why – my gut of course!)  But really, does Megan honestly think that the Democrats will lose the House in 2010?  She predicts this will happen at a staggering 66% – based on what exactly?

I think that ramming through the bill on a party line vote makes it very likely that the Democrats will lose the house in 2010; the American public doesn’t like uniparty votes, especially on something this controversial.  A lot of liberals have gotten angry at me for saying this, but it’s not a normative statement; it’s an observation.  IF the Republicans had been willing to push forward on a controversial bill with no Democratic cover, we’d have private social security accounts right now.  But they weren’t, for a reason.

Again, sheer nonsense.  I’m the first to say the current proposals are no good (without major changes), but A) those changes might still happen, and B) the effects of any reform won’t even take place by 2010, at least not in any meaningful way.  So the public backlash over any ill effects won’t occur until at least 2012, and the public is so overwhelmingly anti-GOP right now that I can’t imagine a sudden anti-Democratic backlash because they “rammed it through” without bipartisan consensus. [Read more →]