“If Obama’s efforts to create a viable regulatory framework in which individuals can buy private health insurance (a) pass congress, and (b) turn out to work well and be popular, then you can imagine a version of Ryan’s plan being put into place. But in the absence of that kind of reform, I just don’t see how you can do this, which is presumably why the implementation is delayed all the way to 2021 which helps Ryan avoid needing to think about implementation details.” ~ Matt Yglesias, writing about Rep. Paul Ryan’s alternative budget

I think Yglesias actually makes a pretty strong point here.  While I’m overall fairly sympathetic to Ryan’s budget – he does, after all, balance it (at least according to the CBO report [pdf]), something virtually no other politician is willing to even propose – I think there is a fundamental flaw with implementing a healthcare voucher program without first fixing the broken, dysfunctional health insurance market.  The exchanges created in Obamacare would be one way to do this. 

What Yglesias does not point out, however, is that Ryan’s budget proposal also puts an end to the tax exemption for employee benefits.  Simply coupling this tax reform with the ability to purchase insurance across state lines creates an entirely new health insurance market.  Suddenly people on the individual market are given the same tax preference as people who receive their insurance from an employer.  Health insurance drifts away from employers and becomes personal and portable.  People wouldn’t lose coverage when they left their jobs.  Meanwhile, insurers would lose their long-held local and state monopolies and be forced to compete nationally, driving down costs both through added competitive pressures and by the better bargaining powers that these large, national firms would have, with their much larger, national cost-sharing pools.

Of course, the hard questions in healthcare will center around two inextricably linked concepts – pre-existing conditions clauses, and individual mandates.  Almost all modern democracies have some form of universal coverage, and the only way that it has been achieved with any semblance of a free market has been by doing away with pre-existing conditions clauses and implementing some sort of individual mandate.  If the former is done without the latter, nobody would buy insurance until they were sick – defeating the purpose (and the viability) of insurance to begin with.

Other alternatives exist, of course.  My personal preference is a model along the lines of Singapore’s healthcare system, which mandates health savings accounts and then picks up the tab on any costs above a certain flat percentage of income.  This puts healthcare directly in the hands of the consumer (cutting out insurance companies altogether) and provides them with catastrophic coverage if something should go wrong.  Furthermore, by placing costs and transactions directly in the consumers hands, it keeps costs from skyrocketing.  The mandated savings would be flat, but the catastrophic coverage functions progressively, covering less and less as income rises.

Either way, before any privatization of Medicare and Medicaid can occur, the private insurance market must be transformed.  Paul Ryan has shown true grit in crafting a budget that is actually balanced, but the possibility of backlash to cuts in entitlements is very real if the systemic problems in our healthcare system aren’t taken care of first.  Both Yglesias and Ezra Klein see this budget as a sort of draconian rationing of benefits for seniors and poorer Americans. If the insurance market could actually be fixed, however, then the system of vouchers which Ryan proposes would be adequate and possibly even better alternatives to the status quo.

I understand what Jamelle is trying to say in response to E.D.  I do.  But I think Jamelle is fundamentally misreading the GOP and the nature of what can make something meaningfully ”bi-partisan” (much as that word sends chills down my spine).

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 →]

Justin Gardener points out the obvious (something the mainstream media seems incapable of doing): [Read more →]

I don’t understand how Conor can say this with a straight face:

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.

Alex Knapp takes a look at the GOP’s newly proposed set of principles by which all GOP candidates would have to abide to receive GOP funding and shows how they are not only incoherent but would also define many unquestioned conservatives out of the party entirely. [Read more →]

I live in Virginia (albeit one of the commonwealth’s few liberal strongholds*) and got my start in the blogosphere as a Virginia politics blogger, so if you’ll forgive me, I’m going to indulge my roots a little with a quick post on yesterday’s election.  As far as I can tell, the conventional wisdom about yesterday’s election is that it represents a “shot across the bow” from independent voters worried about heavy spending and deficits.  The election wasn’t a referendum on President Obama’s performance, but it was a sign that independents are increasingly uneasy with the liberal direction the country is taking.

As you can probably guess, I think this is complete bunk.  For starters, self-described “independent” voters are often anything but; when pressed by pollsters, most independents will admit to leaning in one direction or another.  In Virginia, it seems that most independents lean to the right – a poll from this summer suggests that the vast majority of independents identify as either moderate or conservative.  If you were to ask independents who voted in yesterday’s election whether or not they supported John McCain in last year’s election, I’m fairly confident that a solid majority would say that they did.  In fact, if you were to ask yesterday’s voters whether they supported John McCain, a majority would say yes – 51 percent, in fact.  The problem for pundits trying to argue that the election was indicative of a broader national trend is that those who turned out to vote were older, whiter and more conservative than the average voter, and certainly the average Obama voter.  Here’s a quick graph I made using the exit poll data:

The vast majority of the electorate was older and white, the overwhelming majority of whom supported McDonnell: 67 percent of all white voters went for McDonnell, and the total is similar for voters aged 45 and older.  What’s more, 34 percent of total voters were white Republicans and 25 percent were white Independents, the vast majority of whom supported McDonnell.

To keep this analysis short, insofar that this election is indicative of anything it’s of stuff we already know: that the majority of voters in off-year elections are old, white and conservative, and conservatives are super-energized.  I doubt that even a super-competent campaign could have turned out enough young and minority voters to help Creigh Deeds overcome this kind of demographic disadvantage.

* The People’s Republic of Charlottesville

Update: What the readers request, they shall receive! Here’s a graph made with data form the 2008 Virginia exit polls:

The differences are immediately apparent.  For starters, white voters – while still a large majority – aren’t an overwhelming majority.  What’s more, the percentage of older white voters is significantly lower in 2008 than in 2009, with the difference made up by more younger white voters (a near-plurality of whom supported Obama).  Minority voters, who make up a large chunk of the Virginia electorate in 2008, gave the vast majority of their votes to Obama.  Above all though (and what’s not in the graph) is the fact that in 2008, 37 percent of voters were self-identified Democrats, in stark contrast to yesterday’s contest, where only about 20 percent of the electorate identified with the Democratic Party.  Again, comparing 2008 to 2009 is about the same as comparing apples and oranges, but far less delicious.

Rep. Virginia Foxx thinks that the health care bill is “worse than terrorism“: [Read more →]

At the risk of sounding overly nitpicky, I think E.D. is being a little imprecise when he attributes minority voting preferences to simple “populism”:

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.

By Kyle (of Vogue Republic)

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.

[Read more →]

As much as I hate to say it, Newt Gingrich does have a point here:

Through my experience as Speaker of the House and building a Republican majority in 1994, I have learned that if America wants a conservative majority in Washington, parts of that majority are going to disagree. I was elected Speaker because a number of moderates voted for me. They gave us control of the House for the first time in forty years, allowing us to balance the federal budget, cut taxes and reform welfare for America.

My endorsement of Dede Scozzafava in the special election for New York’s 23rd Congressional District is a means of regaining a conservative majority in America.

[...]

My number one interest in the 2009 elections is to build a Republican majority. If your interest is taking power back from the Left, and your interest is winning the necessary elections, then there are times when you have to put together a coalition that has disagreement within it. [Emphasis mine]

Not too long ago, Rod Dreher observed that there isn’t really a liberal equivalent to the epithet “RINO,” and he’s right.  Democrats generally understand that a (D) is a (D), and that while it might be difficult to corral an ideologically heterodox party into supporting specific legislation, the ideological compromises are  – by and large – worth it.  That is, for all the complaining liberals like to do about Blue Dog Democrats (and I count myself among the complainers), it is simply a fact that the majority of seats won over the past two election cycles have come from conservative districts.  And while this hasn’t been great for moving forward on liberal initiatives, it does have the advantage of allowing liberal Democrats – who make up most of the leadership – to set the legislative agenda.

There are two big things I think conservative activists are missing in their relentless campaign against Republican moderates: the first is that those moderates are a necessary part of building a nationally viable Republican Party.  The simple fact is that in a large democracy, there can be only so much ideological coherence in a two party system.  Newt Gingrich, to his credit, understands this and realizes that in order to build a stronger GOP, the leadership is going to have to do far more to accommodate moderates within the Republican coalition.  What’s more, Gingrich also seems to grasp that this isn’t a zero-sum game for conservatives.  At the moment, most of the GOP’s leadership is reliably conservative.  Successfully retaking Congress, even if it requires empowering a few moderates, means that those conservatives are once again in a position to control the legislative agenda.

The simple fact is that conservatives need moderates to pass conservative legislation.  And while hyper-ideologues might not particularly like that, they are going to have to live with it.

*Yes that is a reference to that terrible Linkin Park song.  No, I will not link to it.

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.

In his column today, David Brooks makes an error which I think is pretty common of conservative commentators who look to Great Britain for political inspiration.  But first, Brooks:

The Conservatives have treated British voters as adults for a year now, with a string of serious economic positions. The Conservatives supported the Labour government bank bailout, even though it was against their political interest to do so. Last November, Osborne opposed a cut in the value-added taxes on the grounds that the cuts were unaffordable and would not produce growth. It is not easy for any conservative party to oppose tax cuts, but this one did it. [...]

Osborne and David Cameron, the party leader, argue that Labour’s decision to centralize power has undermined personal and social responsibility. They are offering a responsibility agenda from top to bottom. Decentralize power so local elected bodies have responsibility. Structure social support to encourage responsible behavior and responsible spending.

If any Republican is looking for a way forward, start by doing what they’re doing across the Atlantic.

What Brooks doesn’t seem to get in his analysis - and what Matt Yglesias does seem to get in his - is that even with the considerable differences between the Conservative and Labour parties, there still exists a fair amount of consensus in British politics, especially regarding first-order concerns over the role of government.  That is, on a foundational level, British liberals and British conservatives still agree on the basics: government can serve the better the welfare of its citizens, the state is empowered to provide a minimum level of safety and security, etc.  Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are usually grouped together as contemporaries, but for all of her reactionary rhetoric, Thatcher wasn’t on a crusade to undermine the welfare state.

Reagan, however, was.  This might be boilerplate for most everyone here, but it’s worth reemphasizing: the Reagan Revolution didn’t just herald the end of the New Deal coalition, it also heralded the end of the New Deal consensus.  Reagan’s rise and victory signalled the end of a Republican Party that was – at core – in broad agreement with the Democratic Party about the role government.  With Reagan at its helm, the GOP transformed into a conservative movement dedicated to doing as much as it could to undermine and dismantle the welfare state.

Now, on some level, this was a necessary correction to the excesses of the 1970s.  But, when thinking about contemporary politics, it leaves the GOP in a much different place vis a vis the Democratic Party than the Conservative Party is vis a vis Labour.  Osborne and Cameron can use government to pursue conservative policy ends because the Tories never abandoned the idea that government can serve to improve the lives of its citizens.  The real disagreement between British liberals and conservatives is in the extent to which government should.  By contrast, Republicans have explicitly rejected the idea that government can be a force for good.  Which, policy wise, leaves them in a bit of a bind: not only does it encourage an almost criminal negligence to the operation of government (see: Bush Administration), but it virtually eliminates the space for certain kinds of policymaking.  For instance, Yglesias mentions that the Conservative Party fully signed on to the idea that climate and energy are issues which Britain must tackle (the same is true of center-right parties on the continent).  From there, he suggests that the GOP would have a bit more success electorally if it could do the same.  And I think that’s true.  But when you have a near-resolute opposition to government, it’s a little difficult to tackle problems which require government intervention (I’m oversimplifying a bit, but you get the picture).

The problem with Brooks’ recommendation then isn’t that it is a bad one, because it isn’t.  The Republican Party – and the country – would be better off if it adopted a pragmatic, flexible and mature approach towards governing.  No, the problem with Brooks’ suggestion is that it ignores the reality of the contemporary conservative movement, its near-death grip on the Republican Party, and its absolute opposition to the idea of government.  The GOP can’t build a Cameronite consensus with the Democratic Party because, at this point in time, there really isn’t much of a consensus.