The Failure Wasn't Obama's

You can't miss the hand-wringing: Obama once again gave away too much, Obama could have cut a better deal, Obama governs as a moderate conservative.... And there's truth to all of that. But still, we're speaking of legislation. Remind me again, how many votes does the President get when a bill is being considered by the House or Senate? If a better bill was out there, where is it? I don't even recall one being advanced by a majority of the Senate - sure, such a bill would have been subject to a filibuster, but wouldn't it have been helpful had the Democrats put together a sane, solid proposal and announced to the world, "Here's the wonderful bill you could have if only John Boehner could get his Tea Partiers under control." Even after the deal was struck Boehner had to scramble to keep them in line. Two meetings to convince the inmates that even if they run the asylum, it's best not to make that fact too obvious.

Where does the Democratic Party stand? That has been a fair question throughout Obama's Presidency and the answer has too often been, "In the path of the President's agenda." Obama has been politically cautious from the start, seeming hesitant to even speak publicly on an issue that is before Congress unless he is apt to receive a favorable vote. That is not something that particularly distinguishes himself from his predecessors, and you can see from Bill Clinton's experience with healthcare reform or G.W.'s experience attempting to partially privatize Social Security how much damage a President can do to himself if he takes a strong position and can't obtain support for his agenda even from his own party. Obama thought he had his party's support for healthcare reform, something that has been on the Democratic agenda for decades, something that Republicans feared could devastate their future at the polls, something that had been discussed and debated to death. He made some ugly up-front deals to get the major special interest groups out of the way, turned to his party and said, in effect, "Now produce a bill," and... Congress, in particular the Senate, bungled it.

Thanks to delays resulting in no small part from ineffective Senate leadership, the bill almost died in the face of an onslaught of Republican misinformation and demagoguery, and even after that it almost died due to the huge giveaways demanded by a handful of self-serving Senators. Had Senators Nelson, Lieberman, Landrieu and their ilk been willing to set aside their self-interest, can anybody dispute that we would have had a better bill? By a similar measure, had the Blue Dogs been willing to act responsibly as legislators, rather than echoing Republican talking points, voting against the bill and even running against the bill, could they not have supported the legislation while explaining to their constituents how they made it a better bill through their demands and contributions? After all, fat lot of good it did them to brag about voting against their party and President.

The same is true for the stimulus bill. For energy policy and climate change legislation. For immigration. The Democratic Congress had ample opportunity to put together and pass meaningful reform bills, but instead watered down the stimulus, sold out on healthcare reform, and got all wobbly in the knees about passing any other significant legislation. Their well-known reward was the loss of control of the House and coming close to losing control of the Senate. Good job.

So imagine you're the President and assume that, like most politicians, you wake up in the morning and ask yourself, "What do I have to do to get reelected?" Do you say, "I'll do the same thing I did with stimulus and healthcare reform legislation, back when my party controlled both chambers of Congress, and help my party put together a bill that my own party will insist be watered down, and even assuming I can get a bill with majority support in the Senate ignore the fact that any bill with the Democratic imprimatur will be rejected out-of-hand by the Republican-controlled House and filibustered by Senate Republicans?" Or do you take a look at the political environment, the near-useless media coverage, and your own party's internal divisions and say, "The people say they want a balanced budget, the people say they want government cuts, opinion polls show that a ridiculous number of people believe that government spending causes unemployment to rise. My party can't put together a progressive bill, or even a mediocre bill that would pass in the House. I can work with the Republicans, get a bill that will pass, prevent the economic catastrophe of default, legitimately claim to have engineered a bipartisan compromise, and get a deal that I can point to in the next election to say, 'I'm the adult in the room who's working to balance the budget.'" (Now imagine on top of that, that you personally believe in the virtues of leaner government and a balanced budget.)

Listen to the leaders for the Republican nomination yammer about this vote and you get a good sense of the pathetic state of political media coverage in this country. The Republicans most likely to win the nomination assume that the voters are politically ignorant, speak to them in a manner that an informed voter should find offensive, and expect their demagoguery to carry them into the White House. Yes, the argument can be made that the President could do more to educate the public and attempt to lead opinion, but the reality is a bit different. The President has no chance of winning over the Tea Partiers or making a significant dent in Republican opinions, and the media already knows the true story. The President might try to convince those within his party to support more progressive legislation but that's apt to earn him the same type of criticism from the left that he's received on pretty much every piece of legislation he's signed, not actually get him any more votes for his legislation within his party, and will do nothing to change the fact that the Republicans control the House and can filibuster in the Senate.

The roots of this bill lie in the Democratic Party's perception that their 2008 victory was their opportunity to cash in, as opposed to an opportunity to govern responsibly and pass important legislation. Speaking cynically, that's about what you would expect from politicians. But you might have thought that the Democratic Party would have some memory of how it behaved during the first two years of Clinton's Presidency and how Clinton, having barely survived, became a cautious poll-watcher and triangulator who fastidiously avoided thorny issues for the remainder of his Presidency. They say that those who don't know history are destined to repeat it, but what does it say about you when you do know the history and choose to repeat it?

Wrong on the Economics, Wrong on the Justification....

But there's something to be said for approaching chronic unemployment in a different way.

Ben Nelson is taking some heat for his comments and voting stance on extended unemployment benefits, "At some point, it ceases to be an emergency. It’s ongoing… I think the bill should be paid for." In terms of the fact that we have very high national unemployment, an economy that's at best in a fragile state of (jobless) recovery, and the amount of money at issue is not (by federal budget terms) substantial, Nelson is wrong. But there's something else to consider.

Prior to the current recession we have had states, cities and regions of the country with long term high to very high unemployment rates. In theory, states could provide extended unemployment benefits within such areas. In practice that hasn't happened. Once unemployment benefits ran out, if they could not find work the people in those areas had to find other ways to get by. The current jobs situation is different, as historically (at least in theory) people could move from high unemployment areas to lower unemployment areas in search of work.

As a society we didn't feel much sympathy for those who couldn't get their act together, whether to learn new job skills, to relocate, or to take an unpleasant, low-paying job. Ben Nelson and those making similar statements aren't displaying a new sentiment - they're simply extending society's traditional view of long-term unemployment to a larger population of the chronically unemployed.

At the same time, those ignorethe realities of the job market in favor of a perpetual series of extensions of unemployment benefits aren't addressing the underlying issues. Yes, to the extent that the extensions help bring money into local economies and sustain local businesses, prevent evictions and keep people out of foreclosure, it may be sound public policy to extend unemployment as part of a recovery plan. But if the problem of long-term unemployment is not simply a shortage of jobs, but reflects a structural change in the job market, the extensions are a band-aid solution. It's fair to say that in an economy like this we shouldn't just cut people off, but it's also fair to question whether the chronically unemployed are likely to ever be reintegrated into the job market. Can they compete even for entry level, minimum wage jobs against people who are not just twenty or more years younger than they are, but who have grown up immersed in the technologies that are part of pretty much any modern workplace?

If you take a look at the data and find that a big part of the "chronic unemployment" problem is structural, the appropriate response is to evaluate whether you can take steps to remedy the structural problem and, if not, how to best address the plight of a population of people that are likely to remain chronically unemployed and underemployed for the duration of their working years. If you wait long enough the statistic may disappear - the unemployment rate among other groups may rise to a level that it masks the continuing problem of chronic unemployment - but that's not a solution. If your objection to Nelson's stance is that it's cruel, cutting off unemployment benefits to such a population would not be any less cruel when a lower unemployment rate hides their plight than at the present.

If They Cared....

And, as they don't, it's purely hypothetical.

If the Senate cared about passing relatively progressive bills, or advancing President Obama's agenda, there's a pretty obvious way to break through the Republican Party's childish obstructionism. Give them a choice of two bills:

1. A reasonable bill addressing the issue; and

2. A compromise bill that, should the other bill not pass, will be passed into law through reconciliation.

For example, in the context of healthcare reform, they could propose a reconciliation bill that simply expands Medicaid coverage for lower wage earners, and provides for a Medicare buy-in for anybody over 50 who wants or needs to do so. They won't even have to pander to Joe Lieberman or bribe Ben Nelson to get 51 votes for the reconciliation bill. If the Republicans don't play ball, the Dems can pass what will be a very understandable and ultimately popular reform - and it's really hard to imagine either party letting a Medicare buy-in expire given the demographic involved.

The problem is, that won't get them the pork they want. And how do you get fifty-one votes for a progressive bill if the trough is empty?

Similarly, the Dems could pull the same sort of ploy the Republicans used in relation to the filibuster - "Join us in doing X or we'll exercise 'the nuclear option'" - Doing X in this case could be as simple as "join us in a debate over filibuster reform that will end gridlock - or, via the (your) nuclear option, we'll just do away with the entire thing."

That's an even bigger problem. The powers that be - the Senate leaders - are able to insert huge amounts of pork into bills in the name of 'getting sixty votes', and with that supermajority requirement a Senator like Lieberman can assure himself of millions of dollars by insisting that progressive elements (supported by 59 of his colleages) be stripped, and a senator like Ben Nelson can similarly block a bill unless he is granted a windfall for his state.

Doing away with the filibuster would mean that much less pork, and so many fewer special interest dollars flowing directly and indirectly into their pockets. Unthinkable!

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

I appreciate the push-back coming from the left on the gutting of the healthcare reform bill. It's a shame that the bill has been gradually stripped of elements that could constrain costs and increase competition due to the disgraceful conduct of certain members of both political parties. I don't have a great deal of sympathy for the idea that we should accept a bill full of table scraps as reform. But if the good outweighs the bad, passage of a seriously flawed bill is better than doing nothing. Howard Dean, the new public face of "the present bill is crap" movement, has made that point.

Michael Tomasky lists provisions that he believes will be in the final bill and asks why anybody on the left would oppose a bill that includes those provisions. If those provisions are all that are in the bill, he's right - the political left should embrace it as a starting point for reform. But add in poison pills, such as a mandate to buy overpriced, inferior insurance,¹ or various elements that can be exploited by employers to increase the cost of insurance beyond what their "less fit" employees are able to pay, and the calculus shifts. It's unreasonable to attack people for not seeing the benefits of a bill that has not been finalized, and with each passing day is stripped of provisions that would benefit significant numbers of Americans.

A word for those on the left who supported Hillary Clinton in the presidential campaign and have stated or implied since that time that she would be a better President, and use healthcare reform as an example, remind me again... which of the remaining reforms were passed into law during President Clinton's push for reform? That's right - none of them. Really, get off the idea that the President has magic powers that can make Senators with secure seats (that is, virtually all of them) fall in line.

For those who howl, "You should have used reconciliation" every time something negative happens in the legislative process, think about it. There are provisions in the current proposed legislation that could not be passed through reconciliation, even assuming the Senate had been willing to pursue that path - and it wasn't. So again, if there's enough good in this bill that it's worth passing, stop whining about how reconciliation would have been better, and start pressing for a follow-up bill that fixes this legislation's most serious problems (to the extent possible) by reconciliation. It's not as if we pass a bill and then the Earth stands still.

I'm with Paul Krugman in relation to the attacks on those who would favor passage of a flawed but helpful bill as being "just like the 'liberal hawks' who supported the Iraq war". Even if we assume that there were no good reasons to support a war in Iraq (and I for one thought the probable downside outweighed the possible upside), there's no meaningful parallel. It's a dubious tactic - poisoning the well. If you want to argue that people are wrong, fine, but if you can't do better than that - if you can't logically substantiate your analogy - what do you think you're accomplishing?

On the other hand, I disagree with Krugman that just because the passage of any healthcare reform seemed like an impossible dream after Bush's reelection, we should just the current bill by comparison to nothing. It's a profound disappointment that the Democratic Party, particularly a handful of shameless self-aggrandizers and opportunists in the Senate, have not worked hard to make this the best possible bill instead of being so self-absorbed, so dim-witted, and/or so in the pockets of industry that serious concessions had to be made from the outset and we continue to shed helpful provisions from an what has gradually become at best a mediocre bill. Robert Reich has a more accurate assessment, that "We are slouching toward health-care reform that's better than nothing but far worse than we had imagined it would be".

Frankly, the behavior of the Republican Party, from top to bottom, has been disgraceful. The party of "no" - no ideas, no cooperation, no cost savings... A handful of Republican Senators could, right now, come across the aisle with a set of serious cost-savings measures and, as long as they were willing to accept the majority of the terms of the present bill, could squeeze the obstructionists like Lieberman and Nelson out of the picture. Instead they obstruct and obfuscate, and openly hope that the bill fails because they anticipate that its failure will bring them political advantage. Screw the people. "The uninsured don't vote for us anyway".

To get a sense of the significance of even what's left of the reform bill, take a look at some Republican commentary on the subject. First, after pretending to be thoughtful, David Brooks gives his inevitable "thumbs down" - like the liberal critics of the bill, he doesn't need to see a final version of the legislation to know that he opposes it.

If you pass a health care bill without systemic incentives reform, you set up a political vortex in which the few good parts of the bill will get stripped out and the expensive and wasteful parts will be entrenched.

So what do you think he and his party offer up as an alternative? One joke after another? The Republican Party presently offers little more than a head count: forty Senators, at least thirty-seven of whom (and arguably all of whom) are stuck in their "terrible twos".

But at least Brooks has enough self-respect not to pull this trick, Matthew Dowd begging us not to throw the Republican Party into the briar patch. Aw, shucks, it's always wonderful to have a Republican operative tell the Democratic Party, "Don't let your lying eyes or Michael Steele's lying words deceive you - if you pass healthcare reform, you'll only hurt yourselves." Wow. The only way that sort of caution might be more credible is if it were penned by Karl Rove or Bill Kristol. I mean, that would be convincing.

Come up with a health-care bill that draws real bipartisan support.

Remind me again, Dowd, what brilliant initiatives the Republican enfants terribles in the Senate have brought to negotiations for bipartisan reform? I mean, even if they didn't recognize the joke earlier, that zinger would push it over the top for pretty much everyone, no?
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1. I recognize the importance of a mandate to reform, but the quality of insurance available to the public must be at least adequate for that to be a fair requirement - there's potential that people will be forced to choose between paying a penalty or overpaying for garbage.