Obama! Obama?

Even government-mandated health care enthusiasts probably can agree that, whatever the arguments in favor of universal coverage, it's a stretch to sell ObamaCare as a program that helps restore fiscal responsibility, and it's downright loony to claim that ObamaCare will stave off U.S. bankruptcy. (What's next, it'll help capture Osama Bin Laden, too?). I voted for Obama, but his shameless campaign-mode rhetoric has started to wear thin. Another reason he's starting to wear thin: in 2008 when he needed to attract voters like me, he took positions that placed himself in the reasonable-sounding center on issues, like opposing government mandated health insurance. I'm sure his about face on this issue makes the left happy, but making the left happy is like making the right happy, we get the same old stale politics, with the same old problems. This is why, in 2008, it sounded like change we could believe in for Obama to support health care reform while resisting shoving it down our throats.

Fast forward to 2010, and now it's Big Government Obama (which is change that's hard for over half of the country to believe in, if we believe the polls). But Big Government Obama makes Obama a Big Idea guy (even if ObamaCare is a bad idea, it's a Big Idea). Smart, effective government puts him in the nitty-gritty weeds month and month, year after year. Big Government Obama grabs the headlines, and creates a legacy that gets the historians' ink flowing. Oh well.

Healthcare Humbug from Mathews

Chris Mathews slipped in a puzzling comment on Hard Ball last night, that he's in favor of "ObamaCare" because he thinks people should "take responsibility" for their health care. This is an odd invocation of the concept of responsibility. Why should being forced to purchase something be thought of as "taking responsibility"? I have a friend, for example, who's in his mid-twenties and hasn't been to the doctor in years. He's not happy about adding another line item for expenditures each month, because frankly put, he's not worried about getting sick. If he did get sick I suppose he'd pay out of pocket if it wasn't too serious, or go to the emergency room if it was (I didn't ask, but I suspect I'd receive these types of responses). In short, he doesn't want to purchase health care, because he's healthy. He wants to spend his money on other things (say, giving to the Red Cross for disaster relief, or, okay, buying nice stuff). He wants to take responsibility for his own purchasing decisions, you might say.

So this is the point: Mathews' line about purchasers of mandatory insurance "taking responsibility" is humbug, because the concepts of "responsibility" and of "coercion" are naturally at odds with each other. When we tell our children to "take responsibility" say, for cleaning their rooms, we typically mean that we are tired of reminding them, and that we want them to internalize the value of it without us threatening them with punishment. Likewise, when my friend resists spending money on a health plan for himself, on grounds that he's healthy and wishes his money to be put to other uses, he is taking responsibility for his health care; he's saying "I'm not interested in making the purchase at this time", which is making a decision based on his circumstances and his judgement about his needs. It's therefore silly to claim that he'll be "taking responsibility" for his healthcare, just as soon as it's made compulsory. Downright humbug.

That $%#@$ Stupak!

WSJ reports that Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak, who has been targeted by antiabortion folks after voting for the health care bill, is now in the crosshairs of the prochoice camp, furious because he voiced concerns about abortion funding in the legislation in the first place (translation: even if you voted for it, Stupak, you talked about not voting for it first, damn you). Says Elizabeth Shipp, political director of NARAL Pro-choice America:

"This one's personal. For us and a lot of our members in his district, we're going to do what we can to make that man leave office and retire."

Love the "that man" thing. But Shipp's threat is worlds better than the messages Mr. Stupak has been receiving from the antiabortionists, who've expressed their displeasure with his vote with suggestions that he get diseases, bleed out of orifices, and die (really).

Oh, well. Sucks to be you, Mr. Stupak. Perhaps we should modify Lincoln's famous aphorism about only pleasing some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time, to something about pleasing no one, ever.

Health Care's Many Voices

Katrina vanden Heuvel writing for the Washington Post assures us that the Health Care bill--now law--is a good start, but does not go nearly far enough on the road to government-managed medicine. Holman W. Jenkins writing for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) explains why insurance companies--supposedly the "evil" players in health care--are quite happy about ObamaCare (hint: if everyone has to have coverage, there are lots more people to stick with skyrocketing costs).

David Brooks writing for the New York Times (NYT) observes, convincingly, that we're not really wrestling (yet) with the enormous costs we're incurring as a country, health care the latest charge on the card:

"This country is in the position of a free-spending family careening toward bankruptcy that at the last moment announced that it was giving a gigantic new gift to charity. You admire the act of generosity, but you wish they had sold a few of the Mercedes to pay for it."

One of my favorites, moderate Tom Friedman, also writing in NYT brushes aside the partisan "yes we did" (Democrats) and the "OMG, they did?" (Republicans) on the health care debate in favor of an interesting discussion about fixing government, making it work better for all of us. As he puts it, we need a "tea party" for the middle of the country.

And my opinion? Oh, who knows? It's too early to tell. Punt.

Those Polarizing Bloggers

Law professor Cass R. Sunstein argues in Infotopia that blogs tend to create group polarization, where political views become more radical (so, if you're conservative and read conservative blogs, you become more so, and so too with liberal views and liberal blogs). Of course everyone wants to pretend that their view is just "the reasonable one", but the truth is that having a point of view will tend to put you somewhere on the political spectrum. Case in point: if you believe abortion should be legal--if you support the Roe ruling, for instance--you're almost ipso facto socially liberal, as few if any social conservatives are pro choice. On the other hand, what makes people so interesting is that many of us have strange amalgums of liberal and conservative views. One might, for instance, be pro choice and "pro military", in the sense that one doesn't support spending reductions in the military, supports the war in Afghanistan (I guess the war in Iraq was "won", by the standard that the media doesn't talk about it anymore, leaving it to historians), tough foreign policy on Iran, and so on.

Anyway, following Sunstein, we would do well to read a range of blogs to avoid polarization (which he argues is bad, as one might have guessed, since it tends to reduce the amount of available information in groups, which means there's less chance of making an informed decision).

The Big Idea Guys

I shelled out 10 bucks this Sunday before it was even noon (though the morning was further along than I realized, due to daylight savings time). Four bucks for a triple grande latte, and six bucks for the print edition of the Sunday New York Times. Swell.

So, failure to blog is not an option. Here goes.

The New York Times (NYT) today, in Week in Review, wonders "Is Failure Forgivable?", referring to Obama's "all-in" strategy on health care. A more interesting question, to me, is why modern American presidents seem almost irresistibly drawn to the Big Idea (or "Big Agenda"), which, if it fails, tends to fail "big", too. It's "all-in" these days for our President, whomever he is, whatever the party, it seems. Reagan served two terms on the idea of winning the Cold War (is that big enough?), Bush Sr.--the exception that proves the rule--left out Big Ideas and managed to lose to an unknown former Southern State governor (didn't we try this with Carter?), who himself devised a Big Idea strategy, including health care reform, in his first term. (Of course we all know Clinton decided the middle of the country was safer after the "HillaryCare" debacle, and ran as a centrist for his second term).

Bush Jr. took office as a "don't rock the boat" Compassionate Conservative early in 2001, and seemed a bit at sea, until September 11 galvanized his Presidency and gave him his Really Big Idea, democratizing the Middle East, aka his "Freedom Agenda".

Obama, of course, wants universal health care, ideally, or at least some sweeping changes to status quo health care if the former proves unattainable. He wants bold action on cap and trade, a revamping of No Child Left Behind, a troop surge in Afghanistan (this is a Big Idea if you're a Democrat), an overhaul of immigration policy, and on and on. And his words these days do nothing to dispel the Big Idea label. Speaking to an audience in Pennsylvania last week, he pointedly noted that the issue about health care reform "should be what's right, not the politics" (quote from NYT). Translation: "I don't care what the polls say, this is my Big Idea, and I think it's right, so we're doing it." Sound familiar, anyone?

And so it goes. All the way back to those Big Idea Presidents who wanted to fight a war with England for independence, who fought a civil war to preserve the Union, who plunged the U.S. into the fight against Nazi Germany, who gave us the New Deal, a man on the Moon, the Great Society, and a botched, anemic rescue attempt of hostages in Iran (oh, wait, skip that one). And of course into the modern era we go with "Tear Down That Wall", "Saddam and His Brothers Must Get Out" (of their own country), and Health Care for Everyone (this really is a Big Idea in America, because unlike in Western Europe, the notion that health care is a fundamental right is still very much debated here).

Well, good then. That's the job, apparently. Win the Presidency, and win the right to set the agenda with your very own Big Ideas. If you're a President worth a historian's ink, you'll have only one agenda, the Big Agenda. You'll have an agenda that makes everyone take notice. Your agenda will make everyone talk about your Big Ideas. No room for wimps in the White House. The most powerful American must also have the biggest ideas (if not in substance, in their consequences for the rest of the world, at least). Why? Because it's America, that's why. The American President embodies America itself: he's larger than life, he has an implacable optimism for the future, and dammit he has SUV-sized ideas. He's a Big Idea Guy.

If this sounds a bit scary to psychologically conservative types, remember: for small idea, petty politics, we still have the Congress, after all. Just ask our Big Idea Guy.

The Hypocritic Oaf

Politicians talk a lot, and it's fair to say that most of their verbiage has the overarching purpose of getting us-- the American people, that is-- to agree with them; with the rightness of their actions and agendas. Securing our agreement is important, of course, because in democracies the collective approval or disapproval of the citizenry gets politicians hired or fired. As Senate Republican newcomer Scott Brown pointed out in a debate in his now successful Massachussetts Senatorial bid: "With all due respect, it's not the Kennedy's seat, it's not the Democrats' seat, it's the people's seat". And so it is.

One unfortunate consequence of talking so much, of convincing so much, of arguing so much, however, is that politicians tend to fall in and out of tensions and contradictions, almost daily. This has the unfortunate consequence of pulling the rest of us into this sorry state of affairs, so that pundits and media people and ordinary political junkies sympathetic with the latest views espoused by Democrats or Republicans routinely end up arguing points that we ourselves denounced weeks or months ago. The contours and lines of our political debates keep forming and reforming around the different things the politicians say.

Take Chris Matthews, of "Hardball" fame on MSNBC, for instance, who has recently been warming up to supporting Senate Democrats' apparent intention to use reconciliation--the budget procedure that relies on simple majority vote (51%) to pass legislation in the Senate--to pass health care reform. On January 25, Matthews excoriated Congressman Alan "keep Florida weird" Grayson for proposing reconciliation for health reform. Said Matthews, with all of the loud confidence of someone absolutely convinced of their own rectitude: "You can't create a program through reconciliation" (he might have added, given his tone, "and everyone knows that!"). Matthews then further clarified for the Democratic Congressman the proper application of reconciliation, that it allows one to change only "fiscal numbers", by using it either to "raise taxes", or "to cut program spending".

Matthews, circa January 25, put forward a view that many lawmakers have agreed with, at one time or other anyway, and that seemed to provide a simple heuristic for determining when reconciliation might be acceptable. Former Senate leader Bill Frist, for instance, writes in the WSJ that he supported use of reconciliation for tax refunds in 2001 (he points out that there was a budgetary surplus at the time), yet opposed it when Republicans tried to use it to extend prescription drug coverage in Medicare, presumably because program expansion is not the proper application of budget reconciliation. (The Medicare Modernization Act, which Frist supported, passed "through the normal legislative procedure" in 2003.) So it seems that there is, in fact, a reasonable criterion for determining when to use reconciliation. It's for budgetary adjustments (including, it seems, tax rates); it's not for programs, new or expanded, like health care.

Yet, almost amazingly, as if one needs to first rub one's eyes to make sure it's the same person, Matthews returns to reconciliation when talking to Andrea Mitchell (MSNBC), on the day of the Health Care Summit, February 25, 2010. Now, just one month later, Matthews is confident that health care reform is "not a program". He assures us that "it is basically a financial question, it's not a health question. How do we finance, at the federal level, health care?". So this is New Matthews. It's not that reconciliation would be used for program expansion (which we all know, courtesy of Matthews last month, that this is not what reconciliation is intended for, and everyone knows that), it's that the Health Care bill currently debated in Congress is not a program-level discussion at all, according to New Matthews. Presto! It's now some obscure budgetary concern, and we ought therefore to use reconciliation after all.

Now, if this magic trick was played only by Chris Matthews--who sometimes exudes a school boy eagerness to prove to his guests and viewers that he knows how politics works, and other times seems interested only in generating the sort of heat that increases ratings--and maybe a few desparate Democrats in Congress, we might hold out hope for some fact, some objective Truth about Reconciliation we could use to decide between Old Matthews and New Matthews. We might hold out hope for a way to move forward. But, depressingly, digging further one discovers that statements about the proper use of reconciliation over the years are even more contorted than Matthews, and likely to encourage yet more cynicism.

For instance, in April 2005, Democrats in Congress, discussing tax cuts proposed by the Bush administration, seemed almost enraged by the suggestion that reconciliation might be used at all, for tax cutting or anything else. Then Senator Obama, for example, warned ominously that use of reconciliation might "change the character of the Senate forever", resulting in "majoritarian absolute power on either side", which is "not what the Founders intended". And Hillary Clinton castigated President Bush about his reconciliation plans, warning against his foolish, childish, and sure to be destructive desire to just "change the rules, do it the way I want it done". It's a "bridge too far", she fulminates. "Restrain yourself". New York Senator Charles Schumer joins in, taking up the dire "our Union is at stake" tone struck by Senator Obama: "We are on the precipice of a crisis, a Constitutional Crisis. The checks and balances which have been at the core of this Republic, are about to be evaporated, by the Nuclear Option". And, interestingly, no less than current Senate leader Harry Reid weighed in on this dangerous technique, arguing against reconciliation (again on deep Consitutional grounds), pointing out that the "filibuster serves as a check on power and preserves our limited government".

Okay, history lesson over; back to our present concern, health care. On this issue Mr. Reid says flatly, as early as November last year, that "I’m not using reconciliation", which squares with his zeal for supermajorities and filibusters back in 2005, but fast forward a few months, and his office now announces that it's a "real possibility". And it seems President Obama has recovered from his grave concerns about majoritarian government thwarting what the Founders intended, and is now apparently preparing for the reconciliation process with House leader Pelosi and Reid. Of course, Left-leaning Schumer now supports reconciliation (again, he's recovered from all that "Constitutional crisis" business that had him apoplectic in 2005), and while Ms. Clinton is out of the line of fire on domestic issues as Secretary of State, it's reasonable to assume that she's much more sanguine about the Congress, and the Administration, controlling itself and resisting the stupid "my way or the highway" urge to improperly use reconciliation that she had to endure in the Bush years as Senator of New York. My, how times do change.

At any rate, my central thesis here is that politicians say a lot, and much of what they say is contradictory, and that if we're not careful, the rest of us will get sucked into cheerleading for them (and so the rest of us will end up promulgating contradictory views, like Old and New Matthews, which is bad). Exactly how all of this happens, again and again, is somewhat of a mystery to me. For instance, how is it that partisan politicians and their supporters seem always to believe that only the Other Side has these embarrassing problems with consistency and hypocrisy, never them? How is it, for example, that liberal blogs like Think Progress can finger point at Republicans who used reconciliation in years past, but who now oppose it with health care (as if Think Progress had ferreted out the one true case of inconsistency in the current debate). Such analysis of course blithely disregards the reasonable-sounding distinction between past uses of reconciliation for budgetary matters (including taxation rates) and the current interest in its use for social program expansion. It ignores moderate Democrats who express concern about the use of reconciliation for health care. It ignores the dire concern of Democrats, including Obama himself, when discussing reconciliation not five years ago. Think Progress doesn't seem concerned about any of this, because the hypocrisy is all over there, with the Republicans, you see. There's no need to think about it any further.

So, it's hard not to get cynical. Who cares what they say? The debate just keeps moving along, contradictions, hypocrisy, and all. As Left Wing comedian Bill Mahrer recently asked on his "Real Time" show on HBO, revealing marvelous ignorance of the history of reconciliation: "what's wrong with a simple vote?". What is wrong with a simple vote, anyway? Perhaps he might have asked Mr. Obama that in 2005.