Some things that deserve attention but not a post of their own...
+ Looks like I've got the filibuster thing all wrong. Invoking cloture (i.e. ending a filibuster) is an affirmative process that requires the majority to show up and deliver 60 votes. The only time the side working to sustain the filibuster needs to show up is if and when that number is reached. Then and only then can they be forced to hold the floor by reading from phone books and such. It's not Sen. Reid's fault; its the rules.
+ If you want to understand why the debate over health care reform will be different this time, read this. And this.
Must read from Ezra, who writes in reaction to EJ Dionne:
Politics is not the simple application of ideology. The model many seem to have of Obama's decision-making process holds that he examines the pool of possible applicants, chooses the individual whose ideas conform most closely to his own, and names them to the position. As such, beliefs are the relevant qualification. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
Rather, experience has come first in most of Obama's choices. What unites Daschle, Gates, Emanuel, Jones, Clinton, Summers, Geithner, Orszag, Rice, Volcker, Schiliro, and Biden is not ideology. It's relevant experience. That means that most of the choices come from either the Clinton administration or the upper echelons of the legislative leadership, as that's where the relevant experience lies. Thus the ideology of the choices reflects the beliefs of those establishments, and neither was notably liberal.
This has led to a lot of talk about Obama's embrace of Clinton's people and policies, but the more relevant interpretation is that it's evidence of a rejection of Clinton's main mistakes. The traditional liberal critique of the Clinton administration is ideological: It was too centrist, too quick to compromise, too eager to triangulate. Obama's critique seems slightly different: It was too inexperienced, too ineffective...
Put another way, imagine Obama's policies are 75% as liberal as some would want, but his administration is 100% effective at passing this agenda. Would that be better or worse than an administration that's fully liberal but has only a 40% success rate?
Most people are covered through the workplace, so when they lose their jobs, they lose their health benefits. On average, for each jobless worker who has lost insurance, at least one child or spouse covered under the same policy has also lost protection, public health experts said.
A few weeks ago, a friend who works at a major hospital mentioned that a different kind of patient was increasingly showing up at the emergency room. In addition to the uninsured and underinsured, who'd always been coming, he was seeing more patients who might be best described as "pre-uninsured"--that is, people who were about to lose their jobs and, as a result, their insurance coverage.
Sometimes, he said, they would request treatments not just for their medical emergencies but also for other, longer term problems--figuring they might as well get the treatment while they still had insurance. In other cases, though, they would actually avoid treatments--and tests--because they didn't want their files to show they had pre-existing medical conditions, making future purchase of insurance more difficult.
Either way, we agreed, it wasn't a terribly efficient way to administer medical care. But, then, when had American health care ever been efficient?
Here's the thing: There is absolutely no logical reason why health insurance should be tied to employment. It's a strange historical artifact that is unique to the United States, and it causes all kinds of unnecessary complications and inefficiencies. One of Andrew Sullivan's readers highlights the one that has always bothered me the most:
Job lock is one of the under-discussed characteristics of our health care situation in the US. The economy benefits when the mobility of its workers is maximized, when workers can easily shift to positions where they're needed most. Having my health care tied to my employer and my state is a giant impediment to mobility and entrepreneurship. Of the factors the Kauffmann Foundation recommends for stimulating entrepreneurship, only education reform exceeds health care reform in importance.
Employer-based health care makes both the employer and the employee less economically efficient. The rest of the world figured out decades ago that it makes no sense. What the hell is wrong with us?
Via Hilzoy and Andrew Sullivan, check out what conservatives are saying about health care reform:
"Recently, I stumbled across this analysis of how nationalized healthcare in Great Britain affected the political environment there. As Norman Markowitz in Political Affairs, a journal of "Marxist thought," puts it: "After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party when health care, social welfare, education and pro-working class policies were enacted by labor-supported governments."
Passing Obamacare would be like performing exactly the opposite function of turning people into investors. Whereas the Investor Class is more conservative than the rest of America, creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, who first found that wonderful Markowitz quote, puts it succinctly in a recent blog post: "Blocking Obama's health plan is key to the GOP's survival.""
Pethokoukis and Cannon claim that if Obama succeeds in passing health care, then people who might have been conservatives will like it, and will be more likely to vote for the people who passed it. This is unexceptional. An honest conservative might accept this claim and say: well, I guess our ideas are unpopular, so we'll just have to make our case more persuasively.
But that's not the conclusion they draw. Pethokoukis and Cannon say: because people will like health care reform, if we do not block it, our party will lose support. So precisely because people would like it if they tried it, we need to make sure that it fails.
Amazingly, this is precisely what conservatives said back in the 1990s when we were trying to pass HIllaryCare. Gingrich frequently admitted that if it were to pass people would be happy with the care they received, and that as a result, small government conservatism would be at a distinct disadvantage. And that's one of the reasons it had to be killed.
This isn't about principle for them, at least not first and foremost. It is about power. Keep that in mind over the next two years as this fight unfolds.
UPDATE: I knew I should have Googled this one. It wasn't Gingrich who made it explicit. It was Kristol. Similar enough, but still.... must be accurate!
+ The Economist shreds the conservative movement here. And I mean shreds. Key graf:
Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world. The movement has little to say about today's pressing problems, such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research.
+ Henry Waxman dethroned John Dingell as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. If the environment and climate change are your top issues, this may be the best news you get all year. Windy explains why.
+ When Forbes is singing the praises of Britain's fully socialized National Health Service, you know things have changed.
+ Speaking of health care, as a means of heading off comprehensive reform, the insurance industry has offered us a deal! If we are willing to mandate that everyone in the country buy insurance, they are willing to sell it to us. How noble of them! If we are willing to pay, they are willing to sell. Why didn't anyone think of that before?
+ Do big bonuses make for better workers. No, they do not. I can't say I'm surprised. In my own experience, large bonuses do one of two things, neither of which are good. Either they ratchet up stress levels to the point that people are much less happy along the way to achieving them, or they ratchet up stress levels along the way to missing the bonus, a misery that is compounded by feelings of bitter disappointment down the line. Of course, I've never worked for or been around companies that pay out Wall St. styled bonuses, so maybe that's different. Although this research would certainly suggest not.
+ Esquire magazine has just republished the "seven greatest stories" their magazine has ever told. "The School" by C.J. Chivers made the list, as it should. It's one of the best magazine pieces I have ever read, and if you haven't read it, you should stop whatever else you are doing and fix that now.
I know I promised to stay out of the secretary speculation game, but.... When I heard Tim Geithner might be the new Secretary of the Treasury, my first thoughts went to a speech he gave last June to the Economic Club of New York calling for a serious, fundamental rethinking of our entire regulatory structure. So my first reaction was that this was very good news.
UPDATE: While I'm at it, Peter Orszag's appointment to head OMB is also very, very good news, particularly for those of you focused on health care reform. Ezra explains.
Its been a nearly a week since I last posted, and in that time 150 items have built up in my clippings folder. But at this point I've fallen so far behind that I don't think I'll get to most of them. Rather than just delete them all, I'm going to run them all as short updates here:
To Realign, Or Not To Realign:
This is one issue I plan on writing a lot about over the next few months (and maybe even years!), but for now three posts worth highlighting.
One:Andrew Sullivan is dead on when he writes that it is Obama, and not "the Republican leadership and "conservative" intelligentsia," who gets to frame the political debate for at least the next year or two. This means that in many ways he will get to frame what it means to be a "liberal" and a "progressive." And that means that by extension he will get to frame what it means to be a "conservative." That is one of the major lessons of realignments - or at least realignments as I understand them. More on that later.
Two:Nate Silver writes something that is closer to my understanding of realignments than anything that I have personally written. And so that I don't lose it, I'm going to quote it here:
What ultimately distinguishes the elections that are considered to have been realignments is the efficacy of the governance of the rising party, rather than the force with which said party took office. Ronald Reagan and FDR, famously, had coattails -- but so did Warren G. Harding, who brought the Republicans a net gain of 123 (!) seats in the House in 1920. One might likewise have been tempted to consider the combination of the Democrats' landslide in the 1974 midterms and Jimmy Carter's ascendancy in 1976 a 'realignment'. Reagan and FDR, however, were effective Presidents, whereas Carter and Harding were not, quickly managing to relinquish most of what they had gained. Barack Obama, perhaps, may be the first President since Reagan in 1980 to have an opportunity to realign the country; whether or not he'll do so is another matter.
Three: I take Matt's point about Mayhew's critique of realignment theory, but... with all due respect to one of the giants of political science, I think Mayhew's analysis is so focused on the trees that he misses the importance of the forest. I've promised many times over many years to get back to this, and soon I will - I promise! - but for now I have to limit myself to this: If political eras didn't matter, Republicans wouldn't still compare themselves to Reagan, and liberals wouldn't still compare themselves to FDR. And its not just that they were exciting presidents. They very clearly cast a shadow over future presidencies, and that must be explained. The problem with realignment theory is that it attempts to do it first and foremost by looking at patterns in voting behavior. And yes, that's wrong. A much, much, much better way to work is to follow Skowronek's approach and start with the presidents themselves. And that's why I think Nate's take is so important. Realignments are, I believe, driven by presidential rhetoric and action.
Health Care Reform:
Don't let the economic doom and gloom fool you - health care reform is still very much front and center on the national agenda. We're just 10 days out from the election, and already there is serious movement here. For those who haven't been following along this week, start with Krugman, then head to KDrum, and then dig deep into Ezra, Cohn, and Yglesias. That will get you up to speed on the latest from Sen. Baucus, who will be one of the key players in the Senate as things start to move forward.
If you're looking to keep up to speed with the latest from the right, go read Ezra and Yglesias for an update on what rising star Gov. Jindal has been doing. And I'm with Ezra on this one (shocking!): It is striking how similar Jindals "conservative" solution is to Britain's truly socialized NHS.
I'll be following this closely over the coming year, but since its not my area of expertise, I'll be relying heavily on these guys throughout.
The Future of the GOP:
Much, much more on this over the coming months. But for now, just this. Or rather, its not this:
Executive Privilege Forever:
I respect Charlie Savage immensely, but the idea that a former president could use executive privilege claims to block actions of a current president is crazy. There's not a court in the land, not even the conservative SCOTUS, would uphold that claim. Not...gonna...happen.
Proposition 8:
On the night of the election, I made the offhanded comment to my wife that in the long run, the outcome of the vote on Prop 8 might actually good. It was just a hunch, but my thought was that in the aftermath of the vote two things would happen. First, given the historic nature of the Obama win, people on the fence about the issue in California might wake up embarrassed about what their supposedly progressive state had just done. Second, the pro-equality people might finally get serious about creating a broad-based movement to support their goals. Put these two things together and I thought you might get some serious change. What I didn't think was that the movement would come together this quickly.
First, there was the early evidence, for example here, here, and here. But then, by this weekend, the movement had gone national, holding rallies not just coast to coast but around the world. Check out Andrew Sullivan's site today and you'll see what I mean.
Gay people generally aren't the placard-waving, bomb-throwing, chaps-wearing, communion-wafer-stomping radicals we're made out to be by the Bills O'Reilly and Donohue. Most gays and lesbians are content to be left to alone; many gays and lesbians go out of their way to ignore political threats and political activism and political activists. Only when gays and lesbians are attacked--only after the fact--do gays and lesbians take to the streets.
Remember: the Stonewall Riots were are a response to a particularly brutal and cruelly-timed (we'd just buried Judy!) police raid on a gay bar in New York City; ACT-UP and Queer Nation were a response not to the AIDS virus, but to a murderous indifference on the parts of the political and medical establishment that amounted to an attack.
Most gay people grow up desperately trying to pass, to blend in; most of us flee to cities where we can live our lives in relative peace and security. We don't go looking for fights. And most gay people walk around without realizing that they've internalized the dynamics of high school hells some of us barely survived: it's better to pass, to stay out of sight, to avoid making waves, lest you attract negative attention, lest you get bashed.
Pride parades might get all of the media attention, but they are no more representative of the gay community than the Mermaid Parade is representative of Brooklyn.
The Buffalo Commons:
I love the idea of creating a massive new National Park out on the Great Plains, but the idea that you would fund it by selling off most of the federal land in the Mountain West is nuts. Sell it to who? And for what use? 85% of Nevada is owned by the federal government because unless you are a cow, 85% of Nevada isn't anyplace you would want to live or develop. And I say this as someone who has enormous affection for the Nevada deserts. Just... no.
Liberals on My TV:
Once again, if TV news truly had a liberal bias, it would all look and sound like this:
Responding to Megan McArdle:
She's right, we shouldn't compare a comprehensive alternative energy plan to the Manhattan Project. That's silly. But it seems to me comparing it to the Apollo Program makes tons of sense. In 1960, the idea of landing men on the moon by the end of 1969 was fantasy, and yet we did it.
Relatedly, Megan points out that 4 of the top 10 cars sold in Europe last year were made by American auto manufacturers, and then writes:
People who criticize Detroit for insisting on making only gas guzzlers have to ask themselves: why weren't these cars made here?
Our tax and regulatory structures made SUVs an enormous profit center for people who make and sell cars. In Europe, the tax and regulatory structures are set up to favor smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles. That's not the only answer - nothing this complicated is ever mono-causal - but it is an important one. And I'm fairly certain its not the answer Megan was looking for.
Back tomorrow with some broad thoughts about where I'll be taking this blog over the next few months...
