Is Obama being bipartisan enough?

Keith Hennessey has a post comparing the domestic legislation of Bush 43 and Obama, and maintains that the former had more bipartisan success. It's an interesting and educational post, though I think some of his analysis badly misses the mark. It's amazing to me how an informed person could write this:

On health care [Obama] undercut Senate Finance Committee Chairman Baucus, whose bipartisan “Gang of Six” had the best chance to negotiate the core of a bipartisan compromise. [...] No Senate Republican can now have confidence that any Democratic committee chairman has the authority to negotiate a binding deal.

I'm pretty sure the reverse of this is true, but it misses the point regardless. I hope Hennessey wrote this because he wasn't paying attention when Grassley and Enzi were bashing the bill they were helping to write while they were writing it, and now one of them brags about having delayed the process and making it more difficult. The other Republican on the committee, Olympia Snowe, voted for the Finance Committee bill before voting against the mostly identical final Senate bill, on the grounds that the nearly yearlong process was moving too fast for her. Among the three Republicans most interested in health care reform, there are numerous signs of bad faith and deception. That has to be factored in.

Hennessey also misses the biggest reason why Republicans are doing what they can to obstruct Obama's plan: the Tea Party movement. I am not quite sure what proportion of the Tea Parties are sincere, angry people (compared to the portion that are obviously cranks), but it's pretty clear that a significant chunk of the GOP hates the elite representation of their party (albeit at a very superficial level), and has both the motivation and means to punish Republicans that deviate from their interpretation of conservatism. There are a number of Republicans who are moderate and/or interested in governing but who will not do so for fear of being primaried or subjected to a third-party challenge, which is a very real possibility, as the Tea Parties have already collected a few scalps (Scozzafava, Crist) and have very rapidly become the central force in the GOP, with no real equivalent on the left as yet. I tend to think that they'll flame out pretty quickly once the economy starts improving, but if one wants to understand the increase in polarization in this Congress, this is a good place to start.

Ultimately, I think the Tea Parties are a waste. Forget the lack of a single, coherent message for a moment. Right now, there are a number of problems with the right: an aggressive, hypernationalistic foreign policy mindset; a self-defeating economic policy; a cynical elite that doesn't keep its promises and manipulates its followers, just to name a few. The Tea Party people could have generated leaders to make a specific and thorough critique of the conservative movement and to try to change it. Instead, they have mostly been captured by the elites that know them so well, and been made to serve mostly as examples of GOP media narratives. The GOP does not believe in cutting spending or shrinking government, and if they regain power they will certainly not do these things. But they will almost certainly blame this on the Democrats and get their voters to the polls by frightening them with stories about the American flag being burned or what have you. The Tea Parties could use leaders that see the world clearly, figure out what needs to be done and articulate their message well, like William F. Buckley. Instead they have Sarah Palin and Marco Rubio. The extent of their message is anger, and while that plays now it will not last forever.

The Brown Backlash

It's happening, just as I predicted. I suppose this wasn't too hard to see coming. Scott Brown's off-year assembly of virulent tea partiers and dissatisfied "radical center" types (many of whom voted for Obama and still approved of him) was never going to hold. He's going to have to give his electorate something else to vote for come 2012.

Where we are today

I've been away for a while, not paying extremely close attention to politics. Every once in a while I just need to take some time off from this stuff. But I came up with a little game: which passage is from Fox News and which is from the AP? Here are their two main items on health care.

Here's item one:

Starting over on health care, President Barack Obama knows his chances aren't looking much more promising. A year after he called for a far-reaching overhaul, Obama unveiled his most detailed plan yet on Monday. Realistically, he's just hoping to win a big enough slice to silence the talk of a failing presidency.

The 10-year, $1 trillion plan, like the current Democratic version in the Senate, would bring health insurance to more than 31 million Americans who now lack it. Government insurance wouldn't be included, a problem for Democratic progressives. Republicans are skeptical about where the money would come from — and about Obama's claim that the plan wouldn't raise the federal deficit.

Here's item two:

The White House issued proposals Monday for health care reform that have won kudos from several Democratic lawmakers, a sure sign, say Republicans, of how little GOP input is in the plan.

Republicans have agreed to show up at the White House Thursday for a summit on health care, but are heading there with a dim view of the outcome.

Hmm...it's interesting. Item #1 sounds embarrassingly opinionated and antagonistic, with plenty of weaselly turns of phrase and elision of simple facts that it makes it seem more like a hacky rightist op-ed than a real news story. By comparison, the second item seems positively journalistic by comparison. So, which is which? The answer, of course, is that item #1 is the AP (and item #2 is Fox). Evidently not even Fox News is that embarrassing.

Obama's political support

This interview with Charlie Cook is notable for a rather obnoxious comparison of Obama's fiscal policy with Bush's Iraq fiasco, in a way that almost seems a deliberate attempt to make him seem like a creep. But it's worth reading as a primer on the conventional wisdom regarding Obama and the Democrats right now. He even resuscitates the wine track, beer track idiocy that the media obsessed over during the primaries.

What should be noted is that what is happening with Barack Obama's popularity is not unprecedented. It's almost exactly what happened with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s. Both took office thanks to a recession that occurred on their predecessors' watch, and when they couldn't immediately fix the economy, their popularity dropped quickly. It restored itself when the economy began to perform better. Reagan's party, of course, suffered big losses in 1982 but that didn't matter with respect to the outcome in 1984.

It's true that the Republicans are poised to make some nontrivial gains this year. Probably more than the seven I predicted some months back. But the question is what they actually plan to do with this power. I suspect both parties have come to believe their own spin on the nature of power in Washington. Democrats spent most of 2009 talking about having a mandate, which was fair enough, but there was also a sense among some liberals that the Republicans were just done after the Bush years. That nobody would vote for them, that this was a transitional moment, that they had bought the loyalty of the electorate. This was not at all correct. What the Democrats got in 2008 was a chance to govern. Republican failure convinced the public to give the Democrats a shot. Indeed, there is no evidence whatsoever to support the idea that the Republicans have gotten more popular over the past year--the public still doesn't care for them. But the Democrats have lost some ground because they haven't done much to earn support or loyalty just yet. The Republicans have no loyalty left, as even the teabaggers claim not to have much use for them, and they are relying solely on free-floating anger to carry them through. But like the Joker's metaphor of a dog chasing cars, I strongly suspect that Republican congressional leaders don't really know what they'd do with power, and if they actually won a chamber of congress and forced spending cuts through the system, it would damage the economy and leave the Democrats with a simple narrative against them in 2012. (More likely the GOP would not try this, and just blame Democrats for not being bipartisan enough on cutting spending. Their followers generally aren't fazed by failure, it seems.)

And this is what I'm getting at. If the Democrats take action on health care, climate change, and immigration while the economy mends, they will gain more loyalty. But the Republicans don't really seem to understand how to build sustainable support. They rail against spending opportunistically while not supporting Paul Ryan's (admittedly very unpopular) plan that would do just that. They seem to think that the public will vote for them because they are not Democrats, and they might...once. But what modern history tells us is that while the public will often give the other party a chance if the ruling party fails, defining yourself as not them reaps only short-term benefits. Reagan built a large coalition by dealing with communism, taxes, and crime to the public's satisfaction. FDR built a bigger one by taking direct action to rebuild the economy and ending fascism. The Republicans now have no solutions to any problem America faces, and it seems that they've forgotten how quickly the tides of populist anger turned from George W. Bush to Obama and the Democrats (albeit to a lesser extent so far, as Obama's numbers are much stronger than Bush's during his second term). This should be interesting.

See also: Jon Chait

Will the public think the stimulus worked?

Kevin Drum shares this poll response from a few weeks ago:


He asserts that this proves that, contra Megan McArdle and Reihan Salam, that the right does believe that the stimulus didn't work. I think it proves something else, too. For all the liberal complaining about how the stimulus has been presented by the Administration and the media, I think this mostly shows that the public's views on the stimulus aren't entirely unrealistic or unreasonable, if you look at it from their point of view. A year ago, the risk of a financial apocalypse was decent. It's not terribly likely right now, and because the stimulus has been working since then, a good percentage of people are willing to believe that it kept the situation from getting worse. But the economy hasn't completely turned around, so not that many are willing to say that it improved conditions. It undoubtedly has, but I think it's a question of perspective. Wonks and experts would compare the results with the stimulus to a projection of what might have happened without one, and concluded that the stimulus added a point or two of growth and thus improved conditions from what they might have been. However, if in your day-to-day living you still know people getting laid off because there's not enough money in the economy, you're probably not going to think that conditions are much improved from what they are. If, however, unemployment drops to under 9% this year, people might begin to figure that things are turning around, and the stimulus will begin to be seen as having made the difference.

It has been amusing to see many of the same liberal blogs lamenting the ascendance of conservative media that several months ago were talking about how irrelevant cable news is. I tend to agree with the latter view, and I think that the recent electoral bad news for Democrats has had a lot to do with a very public, very ugly meltdown after Scott Brown's election. I'm pretty convinced that the public's attitude is about correct from their point of view, and the better the economy gets, the better the Democrats will do at the ballot box. This doesn't excuse the surprising ineptness of the White House Communications Department over the past year, but I don't think these numbers are terrible, and I think it's safe to say that the president's recent statements put him at the center of this particular debate right now.

The Reagan Divide

Ex-Republican John Cole still defends Reagan:

I think Democrats should realize that anyone coming to their party from the GOP who is over the age of 30 probably still has a warm spot for Reagan. I know I do. I still have my “peace through strength” buttons. I still recall all the stories about Reagan and Tip O’Neill. He was a charismatic guy, and for a lot of people like me, even though we know his policies may not have worked out for the best in the long term in every situation and in some cases were criminal, we still have a fondness for him. Sue me.

More importantly, it is worthwhile to examine how much worse the current GOP is. Reagan may have been a lot of things, but I never perceived him as a hater. Yes, he pandered to the Base elements of the base, but all Republicans have to in order to get elected. Put it this way- which would you take- any one of the potential Republican nominees in 2012, or Reagan?

The comments section is interesting, with a variety of different Dem-leaing views on Reagan (and they're not all bad, though quite a few are). And I definitely agree with John--I'd take Reagan over the 2012 Republican hopefuls.

My personal assessment is basically this: Reagan certainly did some reprehensible things in his time in office (ignoring the AIDS crisis, for example) and his administrative style and "deficits don't matter" business were immensely damaging. But I think it's fair to say that he exceeded expectations overall. He was realistic and clearly grew in his views on foreign policy over the years. I don't really have a lot of bitterness toward him, though I understand a lot of people who were older than four at the time probably have deeper and more negative feelings about the guy. I really can't say. To me, it could have been worse.

But I will say that the Republican Reagan fetish is revelatory. It's a statement not that they're out of ideas, but rather that the movement isn't really animated by ideas, but rather by personalities. Even now, conservatives still can't quit George W. Bush. He's a good guy, remember? But Obama is bad, despite continuing more of Bush's policies than I would have hoped. Reagan? Good. Carter? Bad. Carter wasn't quite conservative, but there was plenty of conservative stuff in his platform, and he of course got challenged by Ted Kennedy. That doesn't prove he wasn't left-wing? At this point, the notion that Reagan's name alone can sell policies to conservatives (especially ones that Reagan himself opposed!) doesn't indicate that the GOP is out of new ideas. It means that ideas are irrelevant to them right now. And it means that conservatives can be so easily manipulated by the likes of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and the rest of the coven that so completely destroyed their party.

Evan Bayh stole my fruit loops

I don't even know what to make of this Evan Bayh business. But I found Erik Kain's response to Matt Yglesias's glad-to-see-the-back-of-him screed interesting:

Nevertheless, in the progressive narrative Bayh is a wicked ne’er do well, coldly calculating whichever political move will do the most harm, with a “callous disregard for the impact of his decisions on human welfare.” After all, voting Republican basically ensures that millions of people will die. Doesn’t Bayh understand this? Millions of people.

The way I see it is this: Evan Bayh is a conservative Democrat, and basically always was a conservative Democrat. He was elected by an electorate which knew he was a conservative Democrat. They’d elected him once before as their Senator, and before that as governor. They expected him to vote as a conservative Democrat – not a progressive – much as Maine voters expect Olympia Snowe to vote as a fairly moderate Republican. This is the curse and the blessing of being an elected representative. Bayh has to represent the people who elected him, not just do things which please progressive bloggers – even if that means they’ll call him names and imply that his every move including, ironically, he’s throwing in the towel is an act of villainy.

To be honest, I found Yglesias's remarks overblown. Stepping down from the Senate is not really a betrayal of the world, even if it is inarguably a betrayal of his party. Matt can be rather melodramatic when it comes to these sorts of things, to be sure.

But Kain's argument isn't very compelling. Matt wasn't speaking about Bayh's voting record, which is among the most conservative for a Democrat, and about in line with what voters in his state might expect. He was speaking specifically about the parting kidney punch Bayh threw on his way out, whether it was intended that way or not. Yglesias has criticized Bayh's voting record on many occasions, compellingly to my mind, mostly by calling Bayh out as a hypocrite for styling himself as a deficit hawk as well as a major proponent of budget busters like estate tax cuts, wars, and Medicare Part D. These actions have had extremely negative effects on our national standing. Indeed, Bayh's record is largely that of an unimaginative, corporatist centrist who leaves behind hardly any legacy outside of Indiana and who will not be missed, even if his seat may be by Democrats. Dan Coats seems a weak GOP candidate, though if this turns out to be a strong GOP year electorally it might not matter. Martha Coakley won her current job in 2006, after all.

But I think that the larger point isn't compelling either. For one thing, it vastly overstates the influence that progressive bloggers actually have with people like Evan Bayh. Indeed, the notion that Bayh is retiring because of abuse by progressive activists seems positively silly, considering his enduring popularity among establishmentarians, who are more influential and more visible in Bayh's world in any event. It is not unreasonable to point out that he represents a conservative state as a reason for his conservative record, and I suspect that this very fact is frequently taken into consideration by Senate leaders when whipping him for votes. But it is not improper for party activists to push reluctant party members to move baseward, and it is not improper for someone like Matt Yglesias to point out the vacuity of Bayh's principles.

I guess I don't really see what point is being made here. I'll agree that Yglesias went too far in his comments, but how exactly does Kain see the role of activists in American democracy? Should they not be active? What about the donors and activists that have helped the Democrats make big gains in Indiana over the past few years? Bayh is a Democrat, and when one considers how money moves around in national politics, it's quite possible that every Democratic donor to some degree or other has a stake in Bayh's campaign.

I guess I just wonder why, after a Senate career which included vote after vote for disastrous Bush-era policies that Erik himself would no doubt concede weren't particularly conservative--after a run in office that saw Democrats like Bayh offered no vision, no effective opposition to Bush, and ultimately no heart--does he think that Bayh's problem is that he's been criticized too much? In my opinion, it's centrists of both parties that failed us the most during the Bush years. How did Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins vote when the Iraq War came up for a vote? They voted for it, of course, and then never recanted that support. Where were Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh when the PATRIOT Act was rolled out? I mean, it would be one thing if these folks had principled reasons for their votes on this stuff. But all these folks mostly went with the flow, and have had to face exactly zero accountability because they failed along with everyone else. So on the broader point, I must agree with Matt.

Billy Tauzin has left the building

He's no longer the PhRMA chief.

Update from California

Our government is still dysfunctional! We deserve some attention from Ezra Klein too! Seriously, though, the Schwarzenegger vs. Democrats stuff is as amusing a political soap opera as one can find.

White House predicts slow recovery?

Story here. There is a technical term for what the White House is doing here. I believe it's called...wait, it's on the tip of my tongue, you know, what candidates do before a debate...oh, yeah: managing expectations. Which seems sensible enough to me after they completely screwed up predicting economic measures last year. But it seems very strange to me that the White House would make a big deal out of a fairly ho-hum prediction. I'm guessing that they want to be able to say in nine months that recovery has gone better than expected.