Jim Jones

Well, that would be good news. The best news in what we have seen so far is that it doesn’t look like he is picking a combination of martinets and sycophants.
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It continues to strike how low a bar Bush has set.

Peter Pace-now there is a crew cut I do not miss.
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Another impressive pick it seems.

Can we just forget “Team of Rivals” now, and instead start using “Best and Brightest”?

Or, how about “Best and Brightest All-Star Team Rivals”?

KT-
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Did you see this bit by Benen:
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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_11/015770.php
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It harks back to Kristol’s famous memo that health reform has to be stopped, because it will work, people will love it, and the middle class will be lost forever to the conservatives.
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A statement that effective policy that is net beneficial is bad politics for conservatives seems to be worth exploring. Especially given the comparative success of the US and European models over the last 15 years.

That Best and the Brightest thing didn’t work out too well.
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This looks more like the Art of the Possible to me, which I’m generally happier with than the hubris that surrounded the Kennedy cabinet.
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I remember when a guy I was taking a course from said “Back when Jim Tobin and I were running the economy…” That belief didn’t work out so well.

KT here–

Interesting piece, Jayack. What I’m hoping is that the pragmatism that we are seeing in other early moves by this administration-to-be will also govern the health care reform effort.

KT here–

How about “the best and the brightest among people who actually know what they are doing”?

And therein lies the rub. Pragmatism. Who decides what that is?
For health care under reaching may be more legislatively doable but is it more pragmatic in the sense of solving the problem?

What I’m hoping is that the pragmatism that we are seeing in other early moves by this administration-to-be will also govern the health care reform effort.
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Yeah. Except sometimes there is no middle ground. I really don’t see an effective solution that includes the insurance companies in their current for-profit gatekeeping role. And I can’t imagine a “pragmatic” person concluding that such a big player could really be swept out.
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Edwards’ ideas came closest. An effective government option would eventually eliminate the insurance companies, as the need for a subsidy to allow medicare hmos demonstrates. But I assume the insurance companies are aware of this, and will seek similar subsidies.

How about “the best and the brightest among people who actually know what they are doing”?
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That’s good too. I still feel like the dewy eyed bride on the third day of the honeymoon too.
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We’ll see.

Has anyone seen hydroplane races?
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I ask that because it seems that the Obama plans a similar running start on Jan 20th. I’ve noted that all of his appointements are hard nosed organizational types.
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I have the feeling that when most of his team is in place, he will turn his attention to shaping and codifying the most important bills ready to be presented on the House and Senate floors the moment he takes office. The ‘hard nosed’ aspect of his operatives is for making sure that things go smoothly on the Dem side of things.
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He’s set the table with his move with Liebermann and his conferences with moderates in the GOP and they know what’s coming, maybe not in detail, but in general. When Jan 21 comes, the ball will be in play. The Dems will know, the GOP will know, and the far right will know what’s coming and they will not be able to stop it.
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Obama’s going to play his high cards early.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t think of any instance in modern US history (even back to the Depression) when a president has had so much political momentum.
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He has the House, 59/58 in the senate (domestic/defense) at least, and a popular mandate of his own. Has that ever happened before?

“and the far right will know what’s coming and they will not be able to stop it.”
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They may have given up trying 53. I just looked at The Corner and it appears the biggest issue is the Sarah Palin turkey video. They are going to show everybody how tough they are by eating turkey. Or something. It’s hard for me to understand to be honest.

As far as momentum as it translates to mandate I think bush showed us that mandates are demanded. He came into office with arguably the least amount of momentum and a split senate and he was able to push through his tax cuts rather easily.

PNNTO:
Yeah, and blood-spattered holiday greetings to you too! I could not get over just how bizarre that was.
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I think Obama knows he’s got an extremely rare, if not unique, opportunity. He’s essentially subducted Hillary’s machine and has incorporated it into his own. I know a lot of people don’t like what he did with Liebermann (some won’t speak to me now because of my stand) but he sure seems to be stacking every advantage he can in his favor.
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I seriously doubt that he even expects Liebermann to lockstep on the FP issues, either. He just wants Lieberman for his domestic policy votes, because that’s what he’s going after early.
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At the same time, the Jim Jones and other FP appointments are going to be smoothly revving up. There was a guest on one of Rachel Maddows’ shows that commented that Hillary isn’t really that far apart from Obama on foreign policy, and I think the unspoken thread is Obama’s plans on how to deal with Israel. Look for a LOT harder shove from Obama than GWB ever gave.
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“Center Right” my eye!
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He’s going to go left of center domestically (which is what is needed) and move the US closer to the Rooseveltian “walk softly and carry a big stick” approach.

“He came into office with arguably the least amount of momentum and a split senate and he was able to push through his tax cuts rather easily.”
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I agree to an extent PNNTO. But one thing he did have was a majority in the House and Senate, not of the present quality, but a majority nonetheless. He also had the wind at his back economically. My memory isn’t clear, but I think even the dotcom debacle occurred after he took office.
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For him, though, the similarities disappear in that his popular mandates were very narrow, and fraught with skulduggery.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t think of any instance in modern US history (even back to the Depression) when a president has had so much political momentu
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Johnson in 1964.

I agree that as stinky as the Lieberman stuff was there will be benefits on the domestic side. But sweet Hay-Zeus I cannot stand Joe. i hope you were joking about people not speaking to you over that.
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I think what I was saying, poorly, is that a President Obama needs to be bolder rather than more cautious right out of the gate. If bush was able to perform as he did than all the more reason, with the current conditions you point out, for BHO to Go Big.
If Rahm was being straightforward than that is exactly what he will do.

And, no, while Bush was aggressive, he wasn’t effective. The Rumsfeld death watch was on. There was talk of a one term presidency. 9/11 made Bush.

jayack:
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It’s interesting that Johnson and Obama have a common denominator here, namely a left of center agenda and civil rights. What Obama could do with that 68 to 32 bump in the Senate, instead of having to cobble one up with Liebermann, et al.
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PNNTO:
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I take these appointments as a signial that he will. He’s really putting together a shadow government, made all the more effective by Bush & Co’s de facto abdication of the throne.

KT here–

53_3: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t think of any instance in modern US history (even back to the Depression) when a president has had so much political momentum.

Two words (that you are going to hate): Ronald. Reagan.

jay,yes, he wanted tax cuts and got them. That was the sum and total of what he desired. At that point anyway.
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I just looked back a review on his first 100 days, which I thought we were discussing, and that was about all he was trying for. That and embarrassing our country with China.
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By the end of summer he was Mr One Term (recall his having to go to Crawford to ponder Stem Cell position? Oy) and of course then 9/11 made him.

“There was talk of a one term presidency. 9/11 made Bush.”
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Yeah. His political armor was such that even Hillary felt compelled to vote for the Iraq war. A lot of other Dems did, too.
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That’s why I’ve never really held it against her.
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He used that political capital to every advantage, and the first major test, Katrina, was accompanied by the naked display of politically motivated spin meant to surpress any disagreement and to shift the share of blame for that debacle away from the GOP and the administration. The dichotomy of world opinion vs. what we heard here was rooted in reality, not ingorance on the part of outsiders.
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Obama on the other hand, doesn’t need that type of political capital. His appears to be genuine.

KT here–

Also, interestingly enough, a parallel that Obama seemed to see as well in his “60 Minutes” interview.

Collins in the NYT today wants Bush to make it a de jure abdication 53.

KT:
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This is an interesting learning session, and when I put my memory together with what I found, it’s clear that Reagan didn’t have the kind of mandate Obama has.
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Reagan, throughout his presidency, had to work with a Dem majority in the House which was never less than 56%, which likely forced him to moderate his agenda. He never had any numbers in the Senate which even approach what Obama has now.
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I think like Bush, Reagan benefitted from outside events. In his case, that was the collapse of the USSR, which, though some like to claim that as his victory, the collaps of the USSR began long before he took office.
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Think ‘solidarity’…

Also, as an aside on the Reagan claims to have stimulated the economy, I think that the extremely rapid growth of IT as it matured into the major economic sector it is today, probably had more to do with the recessionless growth that took place between the early ’80s to the dotcom debacle in 2000 (2001? Maybe I’m wrong, and the dotcom debacle did take place during Clinton’s tenure…)

“Why does HE always get credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union? It happened on MY watch”-george herbert walker bush
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USSR 1922-1991

KT here–

54_3: Here’s why I think there’s a parallel. Reagan was elected with a mandate for change, and while he didn’t have a majority in the House, they were so shaken by this victory and what it represented that he was able to get his agenda through them. (Gramm-Latta, for instance.) It lasted for two years (and the midterm elections), until the economy sort of took him under. That, however, didn’t prevent him from winning in a landslide in 1984.

PNNTO:
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Wouldn’t that be grand! Hand over the reigns now and slink back to Crawford in shame.
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What an epitaph that would be for the GOP…
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KT:
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I keep coming up with peicemeal recollections, so sorry, but here’s another:
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The recessionless growth from the early ’80s to 2000 was also due to the entry of the small investor into the stock market, as well as the entry of pension funds.
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Tax cuts had very little to do with the economic growth (credit for which only exists in the heads of supply siders, anyway), and Reagan can’t even claim that.
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He did introduce us to divisiveness, the use of propaganda to influence domestic politics, and, of course, my pet peeve:
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The “angry white male” persona.
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Sorry, nix on Reagan…

KT here–

Also interesting is that Obama and Podesta are very consciously patterning his transition on Reagan’s, which was considered the smoothest and most successful handoff of power from one party to another in recent times.

The number of cable news readers like Alex DeWit(less) on MSNBC, who imply that Obama has been irresponsible for not just taking over the reins has been pathetically comical. Although moving up the inauguration is being discussed more and more.

P-nnto-I love Gail Collins. Especially today when she suggested we make sure Cheney resigns first, to be on the safe side. And imagine- Pelosi would be the first woman President, if only by default.

Two words (that you are going to hate): Ronald. Reagan.
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If you mean 1984, yes.
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53_3
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Got some new Lieberman hate to share that isn’t exactly about him but about a similar situation with a guy named Rep Collin Peterson. Weak Sauce just like we saw earlier this week
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Shout out to kagrox yet again. Might be the only guy on the net with more Lieberman hate than me
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/11/22/1202/1350/234/664894
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And I have to include this clip because Jon Stewart does just about the best “Droopy Dog” impression that I have heard in a long time
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http://crooksandliars.com/silentpatriot/daily-show-stewart-slams-lieberman-a

I agree that the most effective way to do it is to let the HMOs die on the vine.
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Killing them in one fell swoop might be nice, but it would simply be too disruptive. A government plan that competes hard on service and price would be the best option. Insurance companies would be allowed to stick around, if they cut executive perks, salaries, stock options, dividends. (Yeah, good luck with that). Otherwise they would be priced out of the market. Medicare is much more efficient when it comes to administrative costs. I see no reason why this wouldn’t be the same in a general health care plan.

Reagan had a functional majority in congress in 81. There were enough proto blue dogs, the Richard Shelby types in the dem coalition still to mute the effectiveness of their majority.

KT:
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Granted he did have the popular mandate, so yes, there is a paralell there. But the he just didn’t have the full-spectrum mandate that Obama has.
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Plus, I noted that when Reagan was elected, there were no wild celebrations. This is small stuff, KT, but the imperitiveness of the change both represented were far apart in their roots in the populace.
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I think that also, he intends to out-Reagan Reagan in that case. The abrubtness of the chane resembles an extinction horizon. The political territory held by the GOP has been abandoned even before the transition has taken place – and I see no precedent in that anywhere.

KT here–

SG: I thought of you when I saw this linked on RCP (warning: do not click on this link if you are currently being treated for high blood pressure);

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2008/11/22/2008-11-22_barack_obama_doesnt_fear_the_enraged_imp.html?print=1&page=all

Now I’ve got to sign off and go shopping. It’s my patriotic duty.

Bill Kristol better be unemployed in January when his contract is up. His two great ideas were the Iraq war and killing Health Care Reform because people might like it.
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Can’t we exile him or something?

It’s interesting that Johnson and Obama have a common denominator here, namely a left of center agenda and civil rights. What Obama could do with that 68 to 32 bump in the Senate, instead of having to cobble one up with Liebermann, et al.
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The parallels are really closer to Lincoln and FDR. Country in crisis following a disastrous previous administration. Course, we could be getting Buchanan following Pierce vs Lincoln following Buchanan
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The civil rights agenda wasn’t new. Kennedy just couldn’t move it. Wouldn’t have been able to either. His assassination, ironically, made that possible.
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FDR rings stronger, though, because it cam after a period where the industrialists had really taken over. FDR trying to pack the supreme court was a response to that. Despite a huge increase in productivity, flat wage levels means that the terms of trade have turned badly against workers. Adding to the industrial, for lack of a better word, exploitation of workers, we’ve also had sort of a national company town with the way credit markets have been run.
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The trouble is that I think the forces intertwining state and corporation are much more tightly wound, and will be hard to pick apart.

sg, Collin Peterson is a total Blue Dog (founding member!) worthless congressman from Minnesota. Sadly he is also likely congressman for life.

trifecta Kristol was already extended another year by the NYT.

KT-
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You MSM folks aren’t getting it. Of course, re that link, Obama doesn’t fear the netroots. The netroots are powerless wrt Obama. We weren’t part of his base. He didn’t support him the primaries. He’s regarded with wariness.
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The netroots also can’t deliver a traditional power bloc inside the democratic party framework. There is no equivalent to La Raza who can claim (falsely to my mind) of delivering votes to the candidate.
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What this is, again, is the media trying to diminish the role the netroots is playing in affecting political discourse. We are competing with La Raza. We are competing with the Daily News. Saying that Obama doesn’t fear the netroots is like saying Obama doesn’t fear the Daily News.
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This isn’t true downticket. We can and have influenced congressional and senate races. But, no, we have no pover over the president. Not possible. No lever.

you are kidding me Paul? Why? He isn’t a good conservative writer. What has Kristol done other than make googly eyes at Sarah Palin this year?
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trifecta
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Kristol is done, fershure. I knew that when the public editor response was WTF? The first two columns removed all doubt. Why they would hire an operative is beyond me. Bobo may be a partisan, but he is not an operative.

KT
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I know you are probably gone but that was the worst hatchet job of an article in a long time. The guy cut and spliced Markos’ quote about Lieberman to make it seem like he was flying off the handle all on his own. The quote actually comes from a politico article that pointed out that Joe Lieberman himself said he wasnt sanctioned. and the full quote from Markos starts off with “He is right, They didn’t sanction him. That article sucked big time

trifecta:
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True, but we have Blue Dogs today in about the same proportions. They will be a problem, and that is the only part of the Obama agenda equation I worry about.
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sg:
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Thanks for the hate! My humor cup runneth over, at least until Rachel Maddow gets ahold of Sarah Palin’s ghoulish holiday greetings.
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It does remind me that there are risks with what I think Obama is trying to do. And I’ve never denied that…

Okay I may have stepped on my you-know-what, trifecta.
I was told by a historically good source yesterday that Kristol re-upped but I just looked for confirmation and couldn’t find anything. Checked Google and E&P.
Sorry I should have sourced it before posting.

Cliff Shecter is effective and entertaining. Yet he doesn’t get a gig. Since Mike Murphy is on a vacation it seems, how about some Cliff.

By the way here is my latest on Kristol and McConnell with just a little bit of Lieberman but not much
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/11/22/103940/33/44/665092

The smart netroots knew that Obama wasn’t their candidate. But there’s a lot of disillusionment in the comments on TPM and OpenLeft. In the primaries, the adoration of Obama was amazing. It wasn’t as common on Swampland – that’s one reason why I posted here; I found the Hillary Hated/Obama Love on other sites too much – but it was a real phenomenon, although largely confined to commenters, not prominent bloggers.
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And I know this is fighting a losing battle, but the idea that pragmatism and ideology are competing with each other is way too simplistic. Ideologies are in their form, if not always in their substance, pragmatic. They provide intellectual structure. Pragmatism isn’t a rejection of ideology, it’s a recognition of the value of different ideologies.

“The trouble is that I think the forces intertwining state and corporation are much more tightly wound, and will be hard to pick apart.”
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This is going to be a very tough nut to crack, but the severity of the economic situation may help him with that. Obama at least is making a show of trying to distance himself from oligarchic forces.
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And, overall, I agree, FDR and Lincoln are better models for the Obama presidency. I have the feeling that in Obama, we have a student of history, which is a welcome change.
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In being a student of history, instead of trying to rewrite it like the GOP did in order to “blow through the doors” of political opportunity, Obama will hopefully learn from and use the lessons history has to offer to avoid the pitfalls of others in his position.
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That’s why I think he is trying to cross the starting line like hydroplanes do in a race.
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He just doesn’t want his boats to beat the start gun to the line…

“The smart netroots knew that Obama wasn’t their candidate”
And I thought I knew how to condescend.

53_3
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Just something for you to think about when it comes to Liebeman
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Don’t you think its curious that when asked their opinion, the people on the left meaning Democrats progressives and liberals are all split up in opinion about whether allowing Lieberman to keep his gavel was a good move or a bad move but 100% of republicans/conservatives when asked about it think it was a GREAT idea to let him keep the chair? Keep that in mind. By the way Lieberman will be on Meet the Press in the morning though I doubt Brokaw will ask him any tough questions

Back to the Reagan deal. Reagan is the one that changed demos in to r’s. Even the press went in the tank for him. He could do no wrong. When he fired the controllers even the unions tanked. He was a very sad time for liberals and progressives.

Momentarily in between son’s lacrosse games, but I just want to say what a glorious day it is here to be alive, and under the strong and nasal leadership of Joseph A. Lieberman. Back to the games now.

Completely OT –a small plane is flying over downtown Minneapolis right this second with a Ron Paul banner waving behind it.
I have no earthly idea why.

Completely OT –a small plane is flying over downtown Minneapolis right this second with a Ron Paul banner waving behind it.
I have no earthly idea why.
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We wouldn’t need Senate recounts if we were back on the gold standard.

pourme
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BITE ME! lol

heh trifecta, Ron Paul’s conventioneers were the most fun I observed all summer.

P-NNTO, sorry for being so elitist.

sg:
Yup. I noted that, but of course, what they overlook is that Liebermann is decidedly liberal on the domestic side. He may get them into the wars they crave, but I think Liebermann is such a vapid noodle that they won’t like him either after we fork him over.
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Pourme:
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I never thought of Joe Liebermanns “leadership” “qualities” as “nasal”, but, now that you mention it, it’s an apt description.
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With decidedly unknown implications…

In terms of historical political mandate from an election, I don’t think you can point to FDR or Reagan; I think you need to point to Carter. Yeah, that’s right; I said Carter. The bear markets and economic malaise of the early 70′s, a rejection of Nixon and his corruption, an unpopular war, wholesale takeover of both houses and the presidency by a fresh face, there are uncanny parallels. Yup, it’s Carter.
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Carter was able to produce some real successes, including the Camp David accords between Begin and Sadat, that were completely overshadowed by domestic strife, including the oil embargo, and then the hostage situation. He was never able to fulfill the mandate and promise of his election.
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That’s where we are now, watching whether the promise will be fulfilled. I hope Obama is indeed a student of history because the problems he faces are huge and could indeed overwhelm him. The other lesson is that domestic stability trumps any foreign success. It’s still the economy, stupid.

PNNTO:
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It might be of interest to know that there were a lot of Ron Paul signs in Aberdeen and along coastal Washington during the summer.
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When I went there again in October, it seemed that the Obama fairy had poofed them all into Obama/Biden signs. I only saw two McCain/Palin signs.

53–
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The recessionless growth from the early ’80s to 2000 was also due to the entry of the small investor into the stock market, as well as the entry of pension fund

Oh my. Do you have it wrong. We had a nasty, nasty recession in 1981-82 “The recession was the most serious recession since the Great Depression” see this: Early 1980s recession – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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and another very nasty recession in 1990-91 see here Early 1990s recession – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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Clinton policies brought us out of the early 90′s recession into a booming economy throughout the rest of his presidency. The next recession hit with Bush and his economic policies. What IS it about these Republicans? They are just so fiscally irresponsible. Their economic theories are consistently disastrous.
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Don’t be misled by Republican revisionism. Those recessions are a matter of history.
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nibbly:
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I have often held Carter in higher esteem than most others, and I think in the end, his policies will be recognized.
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The problem with Carter is the same as the problem with Clinton and also Black Americans:
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All 3 have been targets of GOP spin villianizing and dehumanizing them. Most of the Clinton and Carter haters were “taught” to think that way, by dint of the omnipresence of GOP propaganda.

James:
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“Don’t be misled by Republican revisionism. Those recessions are a matter of history.”
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It’s actually a matter of just simply forgetting. I don’t remember these clearly but I do think it strengthens my arguments against Reagan being a great president. He wasn’t, by any means.
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The 1981-2 recession seems to lend me yet another argument against Reagan, where people might credit his tax policies, I would be more inclined to look at what Microsoft and other IT entities were doing as well as the entry of slmall investors into the market. That’s worth a study right there…

53–
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I’m totally with you on Reagan being a disaster of a president. Much, much misery during his tenure, which the Republicans would like everyone to forget. He imposed taxes on the unemployed (taxed their unemployment income, which had not been taxed previously) and imposed an 8% tax on waiters and waitresses income on the theory that they would be getting at least 8% tips on food served. In addition, he fiddled with unemployment figures to make it look like unemployment was lower than it really was. Not to forget the firing of air traffic controllers in PATCO, putting every air traveler at risk for years.
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AND let’s not forget the Savings and Loan debacle that was under his watch. AND let’s not forget the BCCI scandal or Iran-Contra either, another scandal that enabled criminal Republicans to get away scot-free.
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You are right, Republican propaganda has largely erased the memory of those miserable years.

53_3: I hate to disagree with you, but I don’t foresee any rehabilitation of Carter’s administration. Fair or unfair, the economy never got better under his term and that colored everything. On the brighter side, Carter has managed to have perhaps the best post-presidency of any president ever; he was obviously the model that Clinton and even Gore have been following.
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One other thing, somebody above credited Reagan with somehow transforming the economy. That’s wrong; it was Paul Volcker who fixed the economy in the early 80′s through toughness and pain. He made the hard decisions that Reagan never had the guts or brains to make. (It should be noted that Volcker was appointed by Carter!) Back then Volcker was reviled for the harsh correction our economy had to go through, but he held strong. He was the anti-Greenspan. The fact that he is currently advising Obama allows me to sleep well at night.

Ah yes, nib, but let’s not forget that the runaway inflation during the Carter Administration was largely precipitated by Nixon’s wage and price controls. Another Republican fiscal debacle.
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That’s why it is so laughable when people fall for that “fiscal responsibility” platform of the Republican Party. Every single economic disaster since WWII has been under Republican watch and as a direct result of Republican fiscal policy.
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James and nib, Howard Dean said it best years ago-”Don’t trust republicans with your money”

PNNTO,
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I loves me some Howard Dean!

James, LA
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Actually Nixon and Burns caused the problem earlier when they tried to accommodate the oil price rise due to the embargo, by going off gold, juicing the money supply and covering up the recession with inflation.
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trifecta.
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This is an hour of Schecter and me:
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http://www.blogtalkradio.com/virtuallyspeaking/2008/06/27/Virtually-Speaking-with-Jimbo-Hoyer
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One of the things we talk about is why they won’t have him on.

ON reagan, james, you left out that by raising FICA, lowering the personal income tax, and lower the highest marginal rates, Reagan significantly reduced the progressivity of the federal tax structure.

Just to remind everyone, remember how close we came to getting Reagans likeness chiseled into Mount Rushmore!
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nibbly:
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I was talking rehabbing his legacy in historical terms. We are only just emerging from the post-GOP-propaganda years and it might be 20 to 30 more years before Carter’s administration is lit by objectivity.
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I’m very encouraged by the exit of the supply side and globalization economists. Neither had a good picture of what really goes on. I didn’t like the supply siders simply for the fact that their economic model never worked, and they tried to steal the limelight away from the growth of IT, the entry of small investors, and other drivers to shine it on their tax policies as the sole cause.
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I’d say that tax policies only affected the economy to a minor extent. Except of course, the gap between rich and poor, where I guess, if you are rich, you could make that claim…
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I don’t like the globalists, either with their constant bellowing that “Globalization is inevatible!” and telling us that we might as well sit back and accept a lower standard of living. To them, I say:
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Yeah, life isn’t fair, but I don’t have to volunteer for it!

Surely the netroots is not one organised group like some unions, and they are not into organsation the way the DLC or DNC is. Backing Obama was easy: hope and all that. Maybe I put too much emphasis on change and now see that practical issues face Obama as he builds his Cabinet. He did tell us he was going to reach across amd reaching out to some Democrats means going centre-right!

Perhaps as the first Cabinet gets to work Obama will move centre left as conditions allow, gradually. We may look for some Congressional legislation for signs. And which President-faced this financial catastrophe in recent memory? I am a post-the Great Depression lad.

James: Exactly. The legacy of a prolonged bear market, and price controls, a reaction to OPEC’s oil embargo, and the continued price shocks of the 70′s.
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Is it any wonder that we are now warring for oil? Oil brought down Carter, and oil sanctified Reagan. More than the arms race or Reagan’s tough talk, more than Gorbachav’s perestroika and glasnost, it was the oil glut of the 80′s and the collapse of the oil market that brought down the Soviet Union.

But there’s a lot of disillusionment in the comments on TPM and OpenLeft
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Can we have some links, please? If you’re talking about Sirota, he was certainly never deluded. He was mad before the primaries, during the primaries, during the general, and now. They’re just fitting this stuff into their “divided dems” narratives. And as Bowers said last week, you can find any position you want out there, regarding Obama, his plans whether they suck, they don’t suck, they may suck but don’t say so, OF COURSE they suck, but don’t say so, they suck, I told you they’d suck and let’s all calm down and wait and see whether they suck.
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IOW, no message control. Which means that if the tradmed wants to find evidence for any one of those dfh positions, they can.
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But, of course, that’s the whole point of an open medium for discussion.
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If you’re talking the anti-Clinton forces there, well, there’s something to that. But that was an ugly time, pretty much everywhere but here and the eschaton comment threads.
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Speaking of which, i need to go see Taylor marsh again. haven’t been there since the election. her views on the security people being selected is something I should be reading.

Forgive me for being rather ignorant about netroots, I’m not really sure who they are. I do know that Darcy Burner (D) lost to Dave Reichert (R) in our 8th Congressional district, and she had a lot of netroot support.
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At the risk of being cyberally and serially slapped for a tastless demographic joke, couldn’t Obama create a virtual post to appoint a netroot to?

jayack and nibbly are right and I didn’t list every transgression of Republican policies that have caused our economic misery since WWII. Thanks for reminding me of further points on their bill of particulars. I suppose we could go on and on about the disastrous Republican administrations that have completely mismanaged our nation’s economy.
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But on a brighter note, it took a Democrat to clear up the Reagan-Bush debacle, and I expect that the Obama administration will be similarly successful.
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I’m gonna write this up at greater length today.
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There is, however, one clear message from the netroots that underlies all the complaints and is almost universally shared. Elected officials are failing to represent their constituents. They are representing interest groups, lobbyists, supposed proxies for ethnic groups, the MIC, the foreign policy thinktank apparatus etc. That is the only resonant theme of the netroots, that politicians need to be responsive to the needs of the broad populace, and not to narrow groups in Washington.
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That’s why you see unanimity about Lieberman, FISA, Iraq, net neutrality, Guantanamo, universal health care, shrinking of the military industrial complex, decommissioning Blackwater and putting Bush and Cheney in stir.
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ALL the debate is about how best to accomplish the goal of a more representative, and a less captive government.

I do know that Darcy Burner (D) lost to Dave Reichert (R) in our 8th Congressional district, and she had a lot of netroot support.
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Yeah. And Donna Edwards won her primary.
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What’s your point?

sevenoaks07: The hyperbolists in the MSM like to compare today to the Great Depression, but we are not even close to that. We are still *only* at 6.5% unemployment rate, which is not good but not anywhere near the 25% of the Great Depression.
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We are much closer to the 70′s which were pretty damn bad for people who remember. The way Bernanke is currently flooding our economy with dollars (from helicopters, so he threatened), so if we don’t fall into deflation, we will see some pretty serious inflation soon enough. NYC right now is headed for the threat of bankruptcy, as it did in 76. Auto companies sales plummet like in the 70′s. The rise of the price of gold, which last hit an inflation-adjusted $1200 back in the early 80′s. The similarities are profound.

“That’s why you see unanimity about Lieberman, FISA, Iraq, net neutrality, Guantanamo, universal health care, shrinking of the military industrial complex, decommissioning Blackwater and putting Bush and Cheney in stir.”
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I have a vague idea of who these people might be, but I do have to say that these are all issues that I am concurrent with them on.
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As a matter of fact, this may be finally the entity (or a portion thereof) that is capable of opposing the trend toward a pseudodemocratic oligarcy.

“What’s your point?”
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The point was that I have heard about netroots but am not clear on who they are.

Backing Obama was easy: hope and all that.
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sevenoaks–
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Backing Obama in the general was easy. So would it have been to back Clinton. Or Biden. It wasn’t about hope. It was about more and better democrats. Or as Markos said on the daily show once, “I like the one with a D next to the name.” that’s first. Although Obama was never a top choice in the DK straw polls, in the general, he was who everybody was working for. Like 2004, Dean was our hero, but we worked for Kerry.
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Part of the media dirty effin’ hippie message is that these are wild, crazy lefties trying to drag the party over a cliff.
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This is not so. This is an attempt by the tradmed to marginalize the netroots not as a political force, but as a reliable communications medium and information source. The netroots is extraordinarily pragmatic and focused on winning, first. Tester would not have had netroots love if we were purity trolls. Schweitzer wouldn’t be prized, and Rahm despised if this were so. Schweitzer is probably a little to the right of Rahm, but Schweitzer represents his constituents, while Rahm tries to manipulate issues to gain power.

The point was that I have heard about netroots but am not clear on who they are.
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I am gonna write this up tonight, 53. I’ll post a link here.

53 it is a pretty loose term as far as I am concerned. Here is a short explanation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netroots

“…we will see some pretty serious inflation soon enough.”
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I think the deflation threat is overrated. None of the prices of staple godds and products are going down.
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I think that the risk is much more along the lines you intimate, and soon enough, too. Inflation is going to make itself felt, and the only question is for Obama to solve is how much?

53 wiki has a general description -I just tried to link in a comment and it disappeared.

Jayack makes the point: diverse voices agreed on specific things we opposed, but we have no organisational stucture to bring pressure to bear at just times like now: when Cabinets are being built. I am not sure we are structured to do this. We are able to send dollars here and there. But we are pretty weak once elections are over.But, boy, we can wax eloquent on lots of subjects because as a collective we have a lot of knowledge on tap. (Steady on, old chap, modesty, you know!!!)

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Now that we have enough D’s in public office, methinks our next task is to get a better Majority Leader in the Senate. Anyone with me?

NYC right now is headed for the threat of bankruptcy, as it did in 76.
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Source for that nibs?
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NYC has not had the residential housing crash. CRE may be in deep shite shortly, but the cratering of the residential market has not only not happened, but prices are holding.
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Jobs are leaving the financial sector which has a ripple effect. Should hit retail this holiday season. But we’re still getting a huge tourist influx. And the bailout is going to preserve bonuses that would have been lost.
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The bailout was just the opposite of Ford’s “Drop dead.”
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Not arguing the bailout was a good thing, just that NYC benefited. And that we are not facing the worst of it–homeowners under water.
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A guy who runs a small financial advisory firm explained why this is. Most real estate in NYC that you can buy is in co-operative apartment buildings (like the one I live in). While banks were not enforcing downpayment minimums, co-ops were. So there are very few zero or five percent downpayment homes here, and so there is less downward pressure on prices. Also, Europeans are, I’m told, in the market for new construction of condos.
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Property tax revenue should hold. Income tax revenue will drop. But Bloomberg dealt with a “financial crisis” when he came in. I’m actually not worried about New York.

PNNTO:
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Thanks. I’ll go look at it. Do you suppose that now that I’ve been released from spam purgatory, that the Gods of The High Sheriff have decided to imprison you in my place?
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Because, for a while there, I could not post a link, no way, no how. My comments dissappeared, never to be seen again to be even resurrected by KT, in her savior mode!

Prisoner exchange,53? Boy have they traded down!

James:
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I never really liked Reid or Pelosi. I don’t even think they belong in the order Vertabrata. Who knows, they might be either stem or crown group Cnidaria (jellyfish) for all I know.
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Their ancestors split off from the rest of us some 680,000,000 years ago, in one of the earliest radiations of kingdom Animalia.
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We need women and men willing to put on a game face on game day…

53_3: Well, you can’t really trust the government numbers on this because they are rigged (this is not a fringe belief; it’s pretty much understood in the financial world). Deflation is somewhat of a problem in the way it is currently measured, because there is a definite contraction of prices as demand is falling. You only have to look at the commodities market to see that. That said, because of Bernanke’s study of economic history, he will do anything to prevent deflation, including have the printing presses run 24-7. In fact, he has released $2trillion of liquidity into the market, through the Fed window, a fact that has gotten very little play. People are astonished enough at the $700billion bailout number, but what Bernanke is currently doing dwarfs that.
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Of course that means that once Bernanke and Paulson succeed in stabilizing the market, the inflation bugaboo will rear its head. They figure they can cross that bridge, and boy will we.

“Prisoner exchange,53? Boy have they traded down!”
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I look at it more like that you musta broke me out and got caught!

53_3: I can’t yet defend Reid, but how can you say that Pelosi has no backbone? Did you see how she masterfully engineered that bloodless coup of the Energy Committee this week? That was a Big Deal. She just shanked Dingell out in the prison yard, everyone saw it, and now she’s got both sides running scared. She is MoFo #1 on the Hill.

Reid is sort of like Daschle to me. Parliamentarians better suited to be in the minority.
Pelosi’s more of a mixed bag. If she was the muscle behind getting Dingle out then she had a good week.

House GOP just spit in McCain’s face AGAIN! lol gotta love it
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http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/22/16152/806/383/664753

Hey I agree with nib! And nib seems smart.

53–
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I’m not that fond of Pelosi either but she *can* deliver a vote, unlike Reid who is oh, so collegial with his Republican colleagues, but of course had nothing but hostile, dismissive treatment for Dodd last winter. He’s a slavering weakling and I’m not optimistic about ANY of Obama’s important legislation getting through the Senate on Reid’s watch.
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sg I like that they spit in Boner’s face. As much as the Democrats like their in fighting the republicans are going to go nuts on each other in the coming months.

mibbly:
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Yup. I’ve complained more than once about how inflation is figured, and one of the worst problems is that we use CPI. CPI implies that inflation is the same for everyone, but it isn’t.
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Jayack did indeed correct me on some issues concerning that index, but the fact remains that it isn’t symmetric with respect to income. This means that inflation is effectively much higher for lower incomes, and can approach the CPI stated value somewhere in the middle income bracket, and gets lower the farther one goes up the income scale.
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Deflation is an odd one, because the only two drivers currently are housing and oil. For housing, even though deflation is being expressed in the decreasing value of homes brought on by the forclosure wave, rents are not going down. They are going up, instead.
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Oil? Well, that is the only place deflation is taking place for all incomes, but it paralells the assymetric character of inflation, in that lower incomes to a point (those who don’t have cars don’t feel it) feel it more, and higher incomes feel it leas.
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Bernanke et all are chasing lizards into the rocks – and wasting money to boot!

nibbly, James:
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“but how can you say that Pelosi has no backbone?”
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I might be a bit to critical of Pelosi. I didn’t follow the Dingell coup that much. I havn’t followed her too much but from a distance and I just didn’t get any great impression of her in the past. I’ll plead ignorance on this one.
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I’ll remove Pelosi from stem or crown-group Cnidaria and place her back in Vertabrata.

I’ll say one thing in Reid’s defense (and he better thank me with some flowers) and that is, there’s nobody who can control the Senate. Half those a-holes have more seniority than Reid and most of them think they are God. As long as the power in the Senate lies with the committees, and the chairmen who run them, Reid or anybody else has no leverage. It’s like the football commissioner and the owners. It’s like Goodell trying to call the shots. Yeah, only if what he says is what the owners want.
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I’m not happy with what happened with Lieberman, but the minute Durbin and Kerry stood up in Lieb’s defense, Reid had to go along.

nibbly:
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It’s my hope that Rahm Emmanual will surgically implant a spine in Reid.
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Might be a rather lengthly operation, but it surely won’t be nearly as bloody, bizarre, or gruesome as watching Palin’s bloodsoaked Holiday Greetings!

53_3: The Fed doesn’t look at CPI or PPI too much; they look at the GDP price deflator as a better gauge of inflation.

Hey Paul, just read post 100. Took me a while to catch that cuz I move my lips when I read. Thanks!

nibbly:
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Ok, thanks for that. I am not a good enough economist to really get into the depths of these things, and on those grounds, I guess my commentary could be tossed, but I do try to reconcile it with the realities I see in everyday life.
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Not a great defense, I’ll admit, but it does seem to appear that the only things deflating are real estate and gas, and everything else is going up.
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On another note, why are Obama’s teeth blue and why does he remind me of a beaver?
http://www.cnn.com/POLITICS/

KT here–

J,LA et al–One thing to understand is that Pelosi (or any Speaker) simply has far more power, institutionally, than Reid (or any Senate Majority Leader) does. She has almost complete control over what comes to the floor, and under what conditions, which amendments are allowed, and whether there will be any amendments at all. There is no such thing as a filibuster; she can use the Rules Committee to cut off debate any time she wants to. She can hold a vote open while she twists arms. The Senate Majority Leader has a very weak hand, and his only power is persuasion. Any single member can ball up the works.

nibbly:
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In fact, he has released $2trillion of liquidity into the market, through the Fed window, a fact that has gotten very little play.
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You mean that he’s done other things besides just tinker with clause 382 of the USTC?

KT
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Then can you explain how the Republicans pushed through the tax cuts and the Patriot Act the second time so easily?

By the way, I don’t know if you have seen this but MediaMatters is none to pleased with the transition coverage over here at TIME
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http://mediamatters.org/items/200811210013?f=h_top

Oh hell whilst Im at it I might as well point out how they take Hitchens to task also
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http://mediamatters.org/items/200811210008?f=h_top

53_3: I don’t know who is responsible for that clause. It’s a sneaky one.

Can we have some links, please?
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jayackroyd, actually the most recommended blog on TPM cafe is someone exasperated with all the criticism of Obama (I recommended relaxing a little, basically. This is all normal). Anyway, if you look at blogs from TPM and OpenLeft – the two sites I’ve happened to visit recently – you’ll find a lot of disappointment with Obama in the comments. Especially in the immediate aftermath of the HRC at State news. And no, I’m definitely not talking about Sirota and Bowers. There’s no disillusionment there; My apparently insensitive comment about the smart netroots was referring to the gap between the people like Bowers, and many of the people commenting. This is a phenomenon of the comments sections. And of course it’s balanced by many people arguing back that Obama’s doing great, and this kind of internal questioning is a disaster (like the TPM blog). Although it seems that a high proportion of the people who are “defending” Obama are relying on the argument that he’s ran his campaign brilliantly, and this is all part of some wider plan to advance progressive policies that we can’t understand. So they may be heading towards disillusionment.
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It’s been clear throughout this campaign that Obama would be a huge improvement over Bush or any Republican, but that he’s not going to radically reorient politics towards progressivism. He’s not a more charismatic and inclusive Ralph Nader. Some of the netroots (again, I’m including commenters in that term) didn’t understand that.
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Anyway, I don’t mean to imply that before he won there was universal praise of Obama among the netroots. It’s just that there has been a growing trend of disappointment, not just criticism, with Obama. I hadn’t noticed it at first because I’d only looked at Swampland’s comments since the election, but then last week I had a horrible flu so I was checking the blogs (a good way to use free time!) and I was surprised by the change in tone.

KT here–

SG: They were able to do it because both things were politically popular, and politicians knew they had more to fear at home for voting against them than for voting for them.

A few more things about the Senate, which are kind of obvious, but worth noting again: Six year terms make individual Senators more immune to pressure. Also, we are living in an era–thanks to television, and campaign finance laws and a whole host of things–where the parties and their leaders are relatively powerless to enforce discipline on individual members. Politicians simply don’t need the parties as badly as they used to.

Just to get a sense of how LBJ did it, real this from Evans and Novak in 1966. You can tell that this was from a pre-television era:

Reporters Rowland Evans and Robert Novak described the “Johnson Treatment” in their book Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power (1966):

Its tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint, the hint of threat. It was all of these together. It ran the gamut of human emotions. Its velocity was breathtaking, and it was all in one direction. Interjections from the target were rare. Johnson anticipated them before they could be spoken. He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos, statistics. Mimicry, humor, and genius of analogy made The Treatment an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless.

But we have no organisational stucture to bring pressure to bear at just times like now: when Cabinets are being built.
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As soon as I get off the net, do some stuff, make some dinner (farmer’s Market!!) I will write up some stuff related to this.
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But.
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The netroots, or any other broad-based citizen movement, will not have any influence over the president. Pachachutec over at FDL posted this weird thing pre-election saying “How are YOU going to hold Obama accountable?”
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I said, aside from the silliness of scale (“Me?”) here, I can’t. It’s possible for groups with narrow interests to lobby the president on particular issues. Difficult, but possible, if votes are needed on particular pieces of legislation. It’s also possible for the president to make essentially symbolic appointments to the cabinet that reassure the representatives of interest groups. “Whew,” say the Hispanics, “We got Bill Richardson in there.” And “Thank the Lord,” say the women “there’s Hillary.”
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But that’s just stupid, and does deep disservice to the citizens these groups purport to recommend.
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You don’t want to eff with the Cabinet. You don’t want to treat the executive branch as your lobbying venue. That’s stupid. If you forcet the POTUS, by calling in markers, to put in somebody incompetent, then you’ve just doubly marginalized yourself. You’ve called in your markers, and gotten nothing for it. You’re better off with an effective advocate who is not of your ethnic group than you are with someone ineffective who is of your tribe.
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And this is the frickin point of the Obama presidency.

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It’s not about tribes. Unless, of course, you get more money, personally, if one of your subtribe is put in place.
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This is, again, what this netroots thing is about.
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Sarah Palin was chosen using the identity politics, over substance justification.
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Just sayin’

KT
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I would think that univerrsal healthcare is pretty popular now but some how I doubt it will be easy for the Democrats to get it passed

Oh hell whilst Im at it I might as well point out how they take Hitchens to task also
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I love the range of Hitchens’ criticisms of HRC. She apparently single-handedly delayed intervention in the balkans, yet she has no real foreign policy experience.

Hitchens is likely right about one thing, I think the republicans do view Senator Clinton as a status quo type

jayack
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I don’t think its as cut and dried as saying NO broad based citizen’s movement will have an effect. The Latino people vetting candidates for Obama’s cabinet are a broad based citizens movement if there ever was one. The truth is the reason why the netroots don’t have that kind of sway YET is because the liberal blogosphere is factional. You got your firedoglakers, your atlanticers, your kossacks, your thinkprogress people, your open lefters, your tpmers, your politicoers, your greenwalders, your slaters, your motherjonesers and on and on and on. And many times people who frequent one of those places don’t frequent others. But the netroots CAN wield that kind of power and one only need look at the nation wide protests last weekend over prop 8 and all the other bans on gay marriage that were voted in on November the 4th. The netroots are good at ocming together to organize promote and cover stuff like those protests but they are not as good as doing it when it comes to trying to pool their collective audiences in order to put pressure on our elected officials. The netroots are also GREAT fundraisers for progressive Democrats even though they rarely get the attention they deserve for the work that they do in that regard. One off the things that was tripped out to me was these fundraisers kos would have on fridays where tens of thousands of dollars would be raised over the course of just a few hours. Truly the netroots are akin to a Baby Huey right now. Massive and powerful but unaware of its own strength. What they need to do is come together and have a big boss of bosses sit down together and map out a way to marshal their collective audiences to enact progressie agendas and put directed and calculated pressure on select elected officials in order to push through those agendas. But until that happens it will be like a swarm of mosquitos that don’t work together and are easily dispersed instead of a swarm of killer bees which are deadly precisely becaue of their hive mentality.

PNNTO
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I have said this once and I will say it again, every time the republicans is pissed about something Obama does I will be OVERJOYED about it. Every time the republicans are happy about something Obama did then I am PISSED!

KT here–

SG: It depends on how it is perceived. The idea was popular in 1994, but the particulars of Hillary Clinton’s plan were not. The key this year, as Hillary Clinton has often said, will be doing a better job of bringing the stakeholders aboard as you sell a particular plan to the country. I think that business, for instance, now has a very different attitude toward the idea, given that health care costs are practically sinking many industries.
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I think the political climate around health care has changed a lot, and I talked about that with Hillary Clinton in an interview I did with her in January of 2007:
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TIME: Listening to you talk about health care, you seem to be a lot more open, at least than I can recall you being, to single payer, the kind of government-run system they have in Canada. And I was also struck on one of your stops, about an employer mandate, where you said that if employers were required to provide health care to their employees, a lot of employers would say goodbye. In 1994, people argued that, and you didn’t seem to believe that was the case. Could you talk about your own evolution in your thinking as to what is the right policy here? Obviously, this is still a work in progress with you.
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CLINTON: What I’m trying to do is to outline clearly for people what our options are. And I think at one of those events I said, really, there are three big ways, either individually or in combination, that we can get to universal coverage, and universal coverage my goal, and I think increasingly, there’s political consensus for it, which there wasn’t back in 1993 and 1994. There wasn’t even the means of getting there. There wasn’t really an agreement that we needed to go there. And that has changed.
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So what I’m trying to do, in a straightforward way, is say, look, I know how difficult this is. Probably nobody knows better how complicated the politics are. I’m ready to get out there again. I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and work with people. But this time, I want to be sure that we have a political consensus about what we can accomplish together, because there will be a tremendous amount of pressure from those who don’t want to change the system as we know it, because they do well by it. So we have to go into this with our eyes wide open and with sufficient political will to be able to overcome the opposition.
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I’ve watched what happened in Massachusetts, and what is now happening in California. That’s why I think it’s exciting that the states are serving as laboratories of democracy. So I’m not going to be saying, here’s the only way to get there. I want to set the goals. I want to set the principles that I believe have to undergird the achieving of those goals and I want to set forth the different means of realizing them, and then really have it be part of the conversation, and as I go forward, talking about what I think would work better than other options to get where we need to be. But this is more about setting the goal and mustering the political will that will enable me to hit the ground running in January 2009, with I hope an even bigger Democratic majority in Congress to try to actually get it done.
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TIME: I noticed that when you polled your audiences on the three different approaches to get to universal coverage, both times I saw, single-payer won, hands down. Would that have been the case if you had asked that same question in 1993?
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CLINTON: I don’t think so. Back then, when I used to speak about health care, there were a lot of people who honestly didn’t know Medicare was a government program. I remember being stunned by that the first time I encountered it, and then it happened on several occasions.
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People know a lot more about how health care is delivered now. They know a lot more about what they pay. People were insulated from costs in many instances, because it was just something their employers did, and they weren’t really even asked to contribute much and global competition wasn’t that big a deal for well-paid, well-insured workers. So the last 14 years has caused a lot of serious thinking by all kinds of folks. The number of doctors who come up to me and say, I wish we had done what you wanted to do back in ’93 and ’94. There’s an openness to considering different approaches that never would have been viewed as viable before.

So just to make sure I understand this correctly. You are advocating creating an entity that would be the equivalent of the far right Republican base that forces Republicans candidate to stick to adhere to a far right agenda or not be able to win primaries only with far left policies? Does anyone see the parallel here or am I alone in this?

KT
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So you aren’t buying the story about Bill Kristol’s memo which directed all members of the Republican party to vote against the health care reform?

KT here–

SG

What’s the story? That they did it because Bill Kristol told them to? No, I think that’s ridiculous.

Dee
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I was having this conversation on another blog and for sh!ts and giggles I would like to have it here too. Define “far left” principles to me. I can give you my religious right principles by the way. They are as follows
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They don’t want abortion of any kind, they don’t want any sex education other than abstinence, they don’t want any special rights afforded to LGBT peoples, they want to be able to keep their tax exempt status while doing whatever they want including endorsing candidates, they are against any candidate who is not a professed and confirmed mainstream christian, they want very tough penalties on drug offenses even on first time offenders, they are staunchly against embryonic stem cell research because they think it will lead to killing babies for the express purpose of using their tissues for experimentation.

Jayack, et al:
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I think this pretty well helps me to understand netroots. It makes sense, but I also wonder if maybe the decentralized nature isn’t a blessing in disguise in that you won’t get unity on any given issue unless the pros and cons become imperitive.
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There is some commonality between the cohesiveness of the Dems and that of the netroots in that there is no guiding force other then a sense of right and wrong.
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One could say that they have an ideology, but I havn’t really seen any such ideology in anything but the airiest descriptors i.e. “progressive”, “equity based”, “liberal” etc etc.
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On the other hand, you have a cast-iron codified ideology like the Bush Doctrine…

Halperin is trying to get back into Drudge and Hewitt’s good graces again. It’s painful.
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15885.html

KT here–

SG: And by the way, it strikes me that Obama already is avoiding one mistake that HRC made in 1993. He is letting the Hill take the lead in writing the legislation. Many key lawmakers (Henry Waxman, Dingell and Pete Stark in the House, for instance) felt completely shut out of the process back then, and I think they would have seen the landmines better than the White House task force did.

KT
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I posted my blog about it up thread but I will link to my info on it here. Supposedly Bill Kristol distributed a memo to the Republican party explaining how disasterous it would be for the party and the conservative movement if universal health care were to be enacted because everyone would actually like it thus killing their small governement meme. There was a new article written yesterday in US News and World reports restating the same thing really. Here is my blog again
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/11/22/103940/33/44/665092
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And here is the source link
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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_11/015770.php

trifecta
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Sully was gushing over Drudge yesterday too. Sad really.

KT–
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Thanks for the synopsis on Senatorial Majority Leader power, Karen. However, I think that someone other than Reid could do a lot better. Part of the job is bringing political power to bear, which is not Reid’s forte. He is weak with his own party and his ability to manage the media message is almost nil. He is still acting like a craven minority leader, and we’d do well with someone else with a stronger leadership style. McConnell eats Reid’s lunch, and I expect he will continue to do so.
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I won’t forget how he undermined Dodd, refusing to recognize his blocking of the FISA extension, while allowing the minority to block every. single. piece. of. legislation the Senate took during the 110th. He’s weak and a terrible leader.
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I think that one thing is very clear:
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Obama is trying to drive a wedge between the far right and the moderate GOPers.
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I’ve noted also that Rush Limbaugh has become very muted. Did he, perhaps as have others, gotten courtesy visits from the Secret Service about inciting hatred?
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Maybe?????
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I do not think Rush, Hannity, et all, are really fair people under the skin and are just being “realistic”…

James LA
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Amen!

I am conflicted about what Obama is doing. He never was that liberal to begin with is the first thing people forget. I love how he was a Marxist the day before the election according to conservative gasbags, then the day after they said he ran as a centrist. That was more accurate of course. Not too many of Obama’s big positions have less than 50% support, so why does anybody think they are liberal other than the success of the right wing talking points that this is a “center-right” country. Compared to old Europe we are. Compared to what is hatched at Heritage and AEI, the country is comprised of flaming socialists. It’s a nuanced difference, and we don’t do nuance well.
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I do wonder why Obama hasn’t made even a half-hearted effort to put a serious liberal in his administration. I think Edwards would have been the closest thing to one if his genitalia didn’t get in the way. I know Broder, Hiatt and the rest of the gang would have screamed about a liberal in a democratic administration but so what? Liberals were the ones knocking on doors, making calls, and more importantly they have been right on issues that are now accepted by the mainstream such as Iraq, health care, the environment, infrastructure, green economy.
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It is reminding me back in the days when Iraq debates on cable news were between hawks who still supported the war, and hawks who changed their minds after it went south. This was because only “serious” people could be allowed to talk.

SG — I’m not sure that I can define far left principles as succinctly as you described far right. I’m assuming that its absolutely anti-war, no government infringement on civil liberties, complete equality for LGBT community, complete divorce of religion in the public square and an immediate shunning of Joe Lieberman (okay that last one was just for you .
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Now this is not to say that there are anything wrong with these goals. I’m just concerned because if my memory serves me correctly the right as reprehensible as I find some of their policies, they weren’t as bad in 1980 as they are today. that’s how power worked and if we are advocating for this powerful far left that can decided the fate of candidates we will inevitably create a similar system that brought us Sara Palin on the left.

You are welcome nib. When the subject is economics I sit back and let you all talk and try to get what I can out of it.

53_3
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Rush muted? Since when? If you are talking about in the last week I believe he was on vacation or something seriously

Lets see how a President Obama governs.
If in two years we are out of Iraq, a real reform of health care has passed and is signed, GITMO is gone, the economy is improved and unemployment is down then I would say whether liberal or centrist that would make most of us happy.

sg, Dee:
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“I’m not sure that I can define far left principles as succinctly as you described far right.”
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I think that goes back to the codified nature of rw ideology, aka the ‘Bush Doctrine’ as opposed to the vague description of the ideals of the left.
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trifecta:
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I think Obama is headed for pushing through a distinctly liberal agenda. Health care, the bailouts, his new work program, and other ideas are definately from that portion of the spectrum. I think the reality is that he is going to run left of center domestically with a sprinkling of ideas from the right in order to protect businesses, and no closer to the right than the center on foriegn policy.

Last I read Rush was HIGH on the idea of voter fraud in Minnesota.
But honestly outside of Ana Marie Cox I have no idea who pays him any attention anymore.

Dee,
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See. that’s how far Republican propaganda has affected our public discourse. There is no “far left” of any note whatsoever in the US. What you describe as “far left” is actually liberal. “Far left” is generally understood to be socialist and communist, anti-capitalism with government ownership of the means of productions. There is no significant group in the US advocating socialist or communist, i.e., “far-left” policies.
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Really strange that recognition of the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States of America, and the body of legal decisions upholding those principles, is viewed as a “far left” principle.
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That’s what the Republicans have done to this country.

I’m assuming that its absolutely anti-war, no government infringement on civil liberties, complete equality for LGBT community, complete divorce of religion in the public square and an immediate shunning of Joe Lieberman (okay that last one was just for you .
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No, no, yes, not sure what that means exactly, and not necessarily (I think the Democrats should have extracted a public promise to support Obama’s efforts on health care reform).
We’re not talking about litmus tests, but there’s nothing wrong with promoting progressive policies. Also, the key difference between progressives and the Republican base is that – as Kristol points out – progressive ideas would generally be successful and popular, so a more progressive Democratic party would probably be a more electorally successful Democratic party. On the war, health care, climate change and the need for better economic regulations, progressives were right.

“Last I read Rush was HIGH on the idea of voter fraud in Minnesota.”
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sg, PNNTO:
I havn’t heard him attacking Obama nearly as much, and my brother in law listens to his radio show when he drives to Centrailia (a 2 hour ride) and has told me he hasn’t been running his ‘magic negro’ skit either.
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He might be high on Minn, but even though I doubt that he is into a shred of truth, it is more legit than being high on Oxy…

Dee
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Not as bad?? Uhmm they were WORSE in 1980. If you think they were bad about abortion now what about when clinic bombings were common place like back then. If you think the LGBT opposition is bad now back then they didn’t want gays to have ANY rights including not allowing them to use equal opportunity hiring laws to their advantage. If you think they are bad now remember they at LEAST have a very few stem cell lines going. In the 80s that would have been unheard of. The truth is the Right Wing HAS gotten somewhat better by sheer necessity bu they still have a LONG way to go.
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Now to go back to your first points about the far left, other than the opposition to gun rights I really don’t see how the rest of what they advocate for is a problem. Please remember that the “conservates” are supposedly all about following the constitution ot the letter. HOWEVER they are vehemently opposed to the ACLU for some reason whose SOLE purpose is to defend the constitution. All of the other things you mention are strictly constitutional issues and should take precedence if you ask me.
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Now to the larger point NO I don’t think its wrong to want to have a consolidated front for liberal and progressive causes that hold our politicians feet to the fire. Are we so cynical that we allow our politicians to make promises on the campaign trail and then argue against people holding them to those promises? Whether you realize it or not there is already a Blue Dog lobbying party and its called the DLC. They promote Democratic candidates with conservative principles so why can’t progressives do the same thing? Why should we be the only ones without a seat at the table? I would love to know the answer to that!

rose83:
“(I think the Democrats should have extracted a public promise to support Obama’s efforts on health care reform)”
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I think this has been my point, and I agree that know one really knows how the agreement with Liebermann was structured.
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My point has been that that is likely what was part of the agreement. The disagreement between some of us stems from separating the trust of Liebermann (none) from the trust in Obama’s judment in making such an agreement with him (subject to debate).
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Of course, I’m one of those who is of the opinion that Obama is a very thorough operator and knows what Liebermann can/will/might/won’t do and has taken it into acount.
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Others, like sg and others, beleive vehemently otherwise.
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I can understand both sides, though.

“when he drives to Centrailia (a 2 hour ride)” poor guy. He should look into Sirius/XM.
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And this isn’t my discussion but if by 1980 Dee meant the elected D.C. republicans there certainly were more moderates back then. You know, compared to the 3 there are now.

53 are you certain that sg has weighed in on Lieberman? If so I missed it.
(ducks)

In the previous one and way way up at the top of this thread, there was discussion about the Repug need to prevent passage of health care reform. Jay linked to Benen’s piece that I linked to earlier. KT responded: “Interesting piece, Jayack. What I’m hoping is that the pragmatism that we are seeing in other early moves by this administration-to-be will also govern the health care reform effort.”
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Benen concluded with: “With that in mind, the right will likely aggressively resist healthcare reform because, as a matter of electoral strategy, conservatives probably don’t have a choice.” The repugs are going to fight this with every tool that they can use. Which means that pragmatism is utterly irrelevant.
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The Dems need to fight this one to win it. They need to make an issue of the clear repug history on this “we don’t care about public policy, we care about power”- AND THEY ALL NEED TO MAKE IT A TALKING POINT EVERY SINGLE TIME HEALTH CARE REFORM COMES UP.
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Sorry for shouting. But I’m sick of seeing the RW steal a march on messaging. You can’t read the paper or watch the tee vee without seeing “it’s a center right nation” stated by RW operatives and largely echoed by pundits. It’s a lie, but everyone is talking about it.
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We need to have everyone talking about how the repugs will try to kill health care reform to block Democrats from winning a historic victory even though it will undermine the public’s needs. Every time Kristol is on teevee, his ’93 memo needed to be shoved in his face. The pieces by U.S. News’ James Pethokoukis and Cato’s Michael Cannon need to be brought up constantly.
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My wife says it’s dinner time. Bye.

53_3
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Let me help you out then
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http://mediamatters.org/items/200811120011?f=s_search

pnnto, sgw has forgotten all about droopy.

Broken clock rule-
Tweety from sg’s link re/Rush saying we are in an “Obama recession”
“some of the bitter sore loser’s rhetoric we are hearing from the right these days.”

I think this has been my point, and I agree that know one really knows how the agreement with Liebermann was structured.
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53_3, any promise from Lieberman is meaningless unless it’s public. He wasn’t even loyal to his running mate.

PNNTO:
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“He should look into Sirius/XM.”
He’s told me he listens to him to keep an eye on what the “other side” is up to. I believe it to be true and occasionally listen too. Would you believe that he is one of the few Black NRA members?
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Make no mistake, he does not like the Republicans as they have stood, but he is one of those that I point to when I tell others that the Black community is not monolithically liberal.
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“The truth is the Right Wing HAS gotten somewhat better by sheer necessity…”
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I remember the days before and the days following the ERM bombing. The days before, the GOPers had many rabidly antigovernment, antiabortion, and antiminority websites. How to kill government employees. How to make bombs. Hit lists for doctors (one still exists, I think…), and of course, all the stuff I’ve posted links to time and again.
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Obama’s tenure in my opinion will finally places hate rhetoric outside the spectrum reperesented by a “diversity of opinions”.
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I remember the days when we used to be called fascists for suggesting that hate rhetoric should be placed outside that spectrum…

53_3
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What I disagree vehemently with you on isn’t how thorough Obama is. Its in the fanciful thinking that there “must be” an agreement that nobody knows about and thats why they let him keep his gavel. They have NOTHING to hold over Lieberman now so any secret agreement is moot and void anyway. But what bothers me most about that kind of thinking is that I have heard it before. I have an email list with my cousins and our friends and I was the only one who was vehemently opposed to the war in 2003. I kept pointing out the fact that if there were WMDs in Iraq we ALREADY have weapons inspectors there to find them. If we were really concerned about WMDs then we would have left the inspectors there indefinitely until they either found them or said there were none. The only plausible reason that we would kick demand that the inspectors leave so that we could attack Iraq was because Bush FEARED that the truth would come out that they did NOT have WMDs and thus he would lose any justification he could possibly have to go to war. But you know what I kept hearing? Everyone of my friends and family who were from the DC/MD area and thus were still greatly influenced by 9/11 kept hitting me with the statement that there “must be” WMDs in Iraq otherwise why would Bush be sending us into a war. Even when all evidence made public refuted Bush’s statements on Saddam they still said there “must be” some secret evidence that nobody knows about and thats why we are going to war. After the war started and the WMDs weren’t found at first they told me there “must be” some WMDs there and they are just well hidden otherwise Bush wouldn’t have sent us to war.
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Now I am not trying to compare letting Lieberman keep his gavel to us going to war but I am trying to illustrate what can happen when we start making assumptions based on nothing but “good feelings” that a decision that looks on its surface like a dumb ass move is really a stroke of genius.

Nothing gets the dupes of the Washington press corps and other members of the Democrat party as excited as the four or five retired flag officers (out of over seven thousand living, retired flag officers) who adore the thoroughly unqualified, terrorist-fraternizing community organizer. Expect to see Jim Jones on the covers of Time, Newsweek, the New York Times magazine, US magazine, People magazine and Sports Illustrated within the next couple of weeks after he gets done with the fawning “interviews” on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, MSDNC and NPR.

What’s the story? That they did it because Bill Kristol told them to? No, I think that’s ridiculous.
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No, of course nobody is saying that. What this memo story says is this was an issue on which they were willing to expend every bit of ammo they had. That universal health care was the end of the conservative movement if it passed, because all of the middle class conservatives (“Reagan Democrats”) would have bolted, as they did in Britain.
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The more extreme position on this is that the entire, scurrilous, baseless and (many would say) continuing attacks on the Clintons was about stopping universal health care.
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I do know that the Republican party’s opposition to making sure that every American has affordable health care is implacable. And I would appreciate it, KT, if you would ask them, especially the Senators, why this is true, and how they justify it.

sg:
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I was referring to Limbaughs’ direct appeal to racial hatreds. I’m aware of this, but it’s so ridiculous and outlandish it’s being taken for what it is:
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A steaming yellowish brown poopsicle…
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PNNTO:
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That is a low blow. You aren’t trying to be divisive now are you? Capitalizing on divisions within the Democratic party for your own pleasure?
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I don’t need to have sg pissed at me all over again…

That’s interesting 53. Sounds as if he listens to Rush for the same reason I look at The Corner. And the wildly fluctuating Andrew Sullivan.
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As far as the hate rhetoric being eventually pushed out of the mainstream I hope you are correct. When Newsweek spends paper on people thinking the President-elect is the anti-Christ then I think we are still a long way away.

Yes SG when you look at individual policies some on the right might seem worse back in the 80′s than they do today. And perhaps its just my perception because the atmospherics aer so much worse now. But I think when I look at the totality of the GOP policies in the 80′s they had a less destructive impact than the right wing agenda today. There was still a powerful centrist Republican wing, and there clearly wasn’t as much demonization despite it being the beginning of the Lee Atwater era. Of course considering all that has come after we would probably all say it would be a good thing considering his transformational administration if Reagan had not been elected — nevertheless the truth is in today GOP primaries Ronald Reagan probably wouldn’t get the nomination.
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As to the far left — I don’t disagree, the GOP has won the battle of semantics and have succeeded in turning the word liberal into the same thing as left wing crazy. Some of this is the fault of Democrats because for too long they failed to articulate a coherent agenda for liberals and allowed the term to be used by anyone for any reason. And rather than fight the right they cowered in the corner and called themselves anything but liberal.
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But that was not the point of my avenue of inquiry. I don’t think there is anything wrong with any of the policies I mentioned and while I didn’t include universal health care I am all for that too. I simply question not the right or the logic but rather if we are bringing to the debate sufficient nuanced thought to prevent us from turning into to a mirror image of the side of the GOP that we have come to loathe.
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Do we not have those on the left that can easily turn into a leftist version of Rush and Hannity? No offense but Jane was sounding a little Ingramesque to me. I am all for political empowerment, but if we are going to rebuild this democracy don’t we owe it to the generations coming behind us not to make the same mistakes as the one we are following? Just a thought…

and what rose83 said at 6:37

what’s wrong teste? Bad day? Month? Election cycle(s)?

sg:
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I understand clearly what you have said. I honestly do not know what agreement exists between them. I can see some upsides to it, though if he does to the line on domestic policy.
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I’m trusting Obama’s judgement on what happened. I really cannot say what the actual agreement was, but I trust Obama I guess more than I distrust Liebermann.

Dee
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Jane was sounding Ingramesque when?

PNNTO:
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Texte’s brain froze at precisely 11:14:30 PM PST 11042008.
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I think it was a virus or something…

53_3
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I have been saving this up for a time when I am arguing with someone who I don’t agree with on most things but unfortunately most of those people haven’t been posting a lot the last few days so I am going to have to do it now. You say you trust Obama’s judgement on such things right?
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What about Obama’s judgement not to distance himself from Rev Jeremiah Wright after the youtube clips came out? Didn’t you think there must have been some kind of gentlemens agreement between the two of them then whereby Wright would knock it off until after the General Election? I mean surely he “must have” had an agreement with Rev. Wright since he allowed him to still be featured on his website as his mentor and pastor. I mean he DOES have great judgement. Right? How did that work out for Obama?
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I apologize in advance!

SG — I’m talking about the whole spiel that they really hate you. why is it that if what she wants is not followed to the letter it means that you are now the enemy isn’t that the way the wing nuts react?

PNNTO:
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He is a mix of socially liberal and christian conservative values. He is personally anti-abortion but doesn’t believe in legislating that for others. A very interesting guy.
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I’ve leaned a lot from him.
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As for the hate rhetoric, I’m in agreement with you, sg, Dee and others in that they have a long way to go. I was just emphasizing just how bad the GOP was and what it had evolved into just prior to the ERM bombing.
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But in truth, for the Average White Guy, whoever that might be, this election cycle does provide a lot of food for thought.
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And most of it runs contrary to the GOP’s positions in the past on race…

KT here–

SG and Jayack: I tried to post this comment and it didn’t go through. So I apologize if you get a similar comment twice:

The importance of that memo–or any such conspiracy theory–is vastly, vastly, vastly overstated. I was there for the train wreck of 1993-1994. The reasons that effort failed were complicated and much bigger than that. Haynes Johnson and David Broder wrote a very good book that subject. But since I know that commenters here would not accept David Broder’s word, here’s Brad DeLong’s, looking at the Broder/Johnson book from his own perspective of having been there:

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/system.html

OT
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For all college football fans. How equally stupid do both the University of Michigan and their new coach Rich Rodriguez look for them getting rid of Lloyd Carr and he accepting the job to replace him without having them promise to pay his 4 million dollar buyout clause

Dee–
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Difference of course is 1) Rush, Hannity and Ingraham have a national platform on the mainstream media, and Jane does not.
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In addition, Jane’s positions on the issues are actually quite nuanced, as just about any contemporary progressive position is. What you are objecting to, I assume, is that you thought Jane was too shrill. That’s a completely different question than whether these positions are as “far left” and simplistic as to be considered as equivalent to those on the extreme right, like Rush and Hannity.
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Obama is putting his communication team together. Robert Gibbs is press secretary and Ellen Moran from Emily’s List is communications director. The interesting thing to me is that Linda Douglass is not mentioned at all. I have known of her for years, living in LA she used to work for the NBC affiliate before she went national.
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She jumped the line from reporter to press flack for Obama during the campaign. Now that it appears she isn’t going to work for him, I wonder what happens next with her.

Dee
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Again I am asking you what statement of hers are you basing that on. i can’t comment on a generality because I myself havent seen a quote of hers where she sounded remotely wingnuttish. And yes I know thats not a word lol

KT here–

SG and Jayack–One key paragraph of the DeLong piece (which I will sanitize to get it past the filter).:

Ira Magaziner responded to these criticisms not like a policy planner building a consensus but like a management consultant. Instead of bringing the Clinton Administration’s economic (and social!) policy analysts and cabinet secretaries on board, he posed his and their positions to the President as sharp alternatives. And in early September 1993 the Peresident ruled in favor of Magaziner–and against Rubin, Bentsen, Shalala, Panetta, Rivlin, Tyson, and company, who had argued that the “so-called premium caps would be viewed, correctly, as proxies for price controls–and congress despised price controls… that the alliances were too regulatory… the overall plan too bureaucratic… that Magaziner had stacked the deck against them in the briefing papers….” Joining the policy analysts in opposition to Magaziner were the White House media affairs people: as Johnson and Broder say: “‘The plan itself is disastrously complex’, Bob Boorstin said, days after it was presented to Congress…. ‘Somewhere, somebody… should have come in and said, “We cannot send this f—r up to the Hill.” George or Mandy or Stan or myself or somebody should have gone to Ira and Hillary and said, “This isn’t a working document.”‘”

I have read Brad Delong’s take in the past. It’s one of the reasons I was skeptical of the Hillary candidacy. We also have a good reason not to trust Broder. It’s not simply left wing paranoia. I went back and wrote his Watergate reporting on Nixon compared to his treatment of Clinton. It’s a stark difference.
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Yes, Health care reform was fouled up. But, that does not mean that Bill Kristol wasn’t out to get it.

53_3 your brother sounds like a Commweal Catholic I know. That’s a compliment if you don’t get the reference.
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“But since I know that commenters here would not accept David Broder’s word”
KT knows her readers!

KT here–

More:

The reaction once the Magaziner plan was made public should not have been unexpected. Conservatives feared that the requirement that all firms pay for their employees’ health insurance would cost jobs, and nearly everyone feared that the extremely tight price controls would compromise the quality of care. Magaziner’s belief that it was sufficient to roll over the economic and social policy planners and win the confidence of the President meant that the plan when issued had no effective defenses against those outside the Administration who had similar concerns.
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More important, the Democratic members of Congress and their staffs felt betrayed. The way that David Abernathy, staff director of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, put it was as follows: “I have been doing this all my life and I just marveled at the chutzpah of the administration coming out with these numbers. It begs the straight-face test to think that you’re going to cover thirty-eight-and-a-half million new people and not spend any more…. They just went out and told the American people, ‘Don’t worry. This will be very easy’” (p. 172). As a result, the congress had been “boxed in” because “that son-of-a-bitch Magaziner” had made “… their plan look cheap” and “screwed us.” If the congress adopted more realistic estimates of likely savings, then it would have been the Democrats in congress–not the President–who had proposed raising taxes to pay for health-care reform. If the congress scaled back the benefit package to avoid tax increases than that would have been their responsibility too.

KT
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Thanks for the link but that article focused on the Democrats without ever talking about the Republicans who were in point of fact in control by the time healthcare reform came up. Then there is the problem of the article published yesterday by US News in which a GOP strategist echoed the same sentiments expressed in Bill Kristol’s memo. So how do you counter that?

sg:
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Actually, I don’t think that one must preceed the other. Rev. Wright was involved in Obama’s life for a considerable length of time before HRC launched her attacks.
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They both were political events, I agree, but I don’t think I have to interpolate my reasoning back to any purported “agreement” that may have been in place then.
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I think that Rev. Wright felt felt blindsided by the whole thing. I know I would have. When he came out again to stir the waters, he was acting in response to a situation that really was unfair to him. After all, Obama was in self preservation mode when he distanced himself from Wright, and his “non-scariness” as a Black man was put in jeopardy by HRC’s actions.
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So basically, I think I understand pretty well what happened during the Wright fiasco and what was involved. I understand the contexts and historical underpinnings of Wright’s sermons (some have tried to portray this as “Black Liberation Theology”) and I understand the quandary that Obama was in.
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I don’t think it means that my arguments are dependent on drawing a paralell between the two events at all. They have as many differences as there are similarities.
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Apology accepted…

KT here–

SG: No, the Republicans didn’t come into power until January, 1995. By then, health care reform was dead.

PNNTO:
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You are right! Can I ftp you a cigar?
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He is Catholic, as is my wife.
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I’m a protestant.
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We would SUCK in Ireland, I’m afraid…

There were 44 Republican senators in the 103rd congress though. They needed to peel 5 for cloture.

KT here–

SG: I’m just trying to tell you what actually happened. Resurrecting some memo as the explanation for this debacle just doesn’t make sense to those of us who spent over a year watching it happen.
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As for what some GOP strategist has to say at a moment when they are out of power, I’m just not impressed. The challenge for the Democrats–as Hillary said in that interview–is to build a plan that gets the political support it needs at every step of the way. And Obama is getting off to a good start by making sure the Hill–when now as then is controlled by the Democrats–is involved from the beginning, rather than turning it over to technocrats who have no political instincts.

KT: “No, the Republicans didn’t come into power until January, 1995.” What was the repub plus BlueDog count?

KT here–

WVNG: That wasn’t the problem, either. Look, the bill went to FIVE different congressional committees–chaired by FIVE liberal Democrats. Only ONE OF THEM (Teddy Kennedy’s, though I don’t recall off the top of my head whether he was chairing it then) passed it. It never got to the floor of either house.

KT
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But you just said that the memo Bill Kristol allegedly sent would have been when the Republicans were out of power too. I can honestly say that I haven’t made up my mind whether its real or not, but I am trying to take all of the information in and process it and I just get the impression that you might be dismissing out of hand because as you said you were there watching it happen. I definitely am not trying to say you are wrong, I am just asking if you could be open minded about it and consider the implications if there WAS such a memo. Kristol sending that memo is a lot more plausible to me than Obama making some secret deal with Lieberman to get him to vote for his healthcare plan.
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Yep had to slip some Lieberman hate in there

KT here–

WVNG: My definition of “liberal” here is on this issue. Dingell, for instance, is a huge proponent of health care reform from way, way, way back. His father, who was a congressman during the New Deal, was called a communist by the AMA for favoring nationalized health care. Dingell took the seat on his father’s death in 1955, and vowed to carry on the cause.

KT
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The minority can’t block a bill in committee? I am asking because I really don’t know

KT here–

SG: Senate Finance was a huge problem, because the party ratio was so tight, and there were a lot of conservative Dems on it. But a better bill could have gotten through the other four, I think, or at least stood a better chance. It simply was a plan that was tone-deaf politically.

Now, I need to sign off soon. For once, we actually have plans on a Saturday night. Woo-hoo! You guys get me going on health care…

KT here–

SG: And I don’t deny there was such a memo, I just don’t think it was very important.

53 that’s pretty funny, and you two would be fine in todays Ireland (I think)

53_3
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Since election day both Obama and Axlerod have came out and said that all of Rev Wright’s sermons were supposed to be vetted prior to Hillary every using them against Obama. This was never done, but the reason they wanted to vet them wasn’t on just some whim. Obama knew that Wright had said some things that might be controversial and he ORDERED that the vetting be done but it never was. Once the sh!t hit the fan he had every opportunity to distance himself from Rev. Wright right then and there. And if he didn’t he had every reason and right to go to Rev. Wright and ask him to lay off until after the election and if Rev Wright said he wasn’t going to be able to do that he should have cut him off right then and there in my opinion. Now mind you I have defended some of the things Rev Wright said before when it wasn’t necessarily popular to do so. But by the same token in the sense of a political move, Obama not distancing himself from Rev. Wright intially without getting an agreement out of him to lay low until after Nov 4th was in fact a dumb move in my opinion. And it shows that yes Obama can make a dumb move. Kinda like the whole guns or religion quote. Kinda like the Rezko land deal, kinda like trying to run against Bobby Rush back in Illinois. Thats all im saying

Have fun KT
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goodnight

sg:
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I entirely agree that Obama can make a dumb move. And if you’ve noticed, I have never dismissed, nor denied, nor belittled yours and others’ contentions that he could make dumb moves, or the risks involved in this one.
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How about we dissappoint PNNTO and not keep boxing (joke-stuff doesn’t come out sometimes on the web). We probably in reality think the same way about Liebermann, but just differ on how Obama should have approached it.
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I think it will boil down to waiting for time to pass to see who’s more clairvoyant – and I won’t be stupid enough to say that I must be the one…

A President Obama will make mistakes. It may or may not be the case with Lieberman the thing I will be watching for is what happens after the errors.
Wright, Rezco, Bobby Rush, “guns and religion” were all small potatoes despite a lot of effort by some to make them important.

I’ve gotta go. One last thing:
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PNNTO!
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You’se a doity, doity dog! You scoundrel…

PNNTO is always disappointed 53. Now Eeyoe there is a proper outlook on life.

53_3
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I am pretty sure that PNNTO knows we arent really boxing because he has been around when I was in troll whacking mode. Whenever I debate a point with someone who is willing ot engage in an honest debate then I press my point forcefully but I also try to do it respectfully. I realize that the internet is the worst place ever in terms of trying to read someone’s tone or mood but I hope that while you can see the passion in my words you don’t see any anger because there isn’t any. When I disagree with someone who has been disrespectful to me or is making a point that is totally nonsensical the cuss words will come out and it won’t be pretty at all. So its always easy to know if I am “boxing” because if I am not calling somebody a dumbass then I am probably not mad at all

I have read that Gingrich echoed Kristol’s theme at a repub leadership retreat in 1993. Ponnuru made the same point early this year. The pieces by U.S. News’ James Pethokoukis and Cato’s Michael Cannon just repeated it.
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I think there are enough independent lines of evidence to say that key repub thinkers and strategists see real health care reform as a strategic threat to their political power. A threat that they should do all they can to fight. There is every reason, and it is not rude, to call them all on it at every opportunity to put them on the defensive and force them to take a position. Starting now.

SG; James, had to walk the dogs sorry about that. I’m not saying that Jane=Ingram. What I see is a tone of late partly brought on by forgiveness of Lieberman and partly because of so many Clintonistas in the white house — I don’t think she likes Rahm. Most of here focus is on the Senate. But my concern is not what she is today, but who she has the potential to become.
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And for the Record, even Laura Ingram didn’t start as nutty as she is now. Frankly, I doubt she believes half of what she says or rush for that matter because they’re radio personalities no different from Howard Stern who sounds to most women like a pig but wasn’t that way in real life. In fact, the few times I’ve seen Rush in restaurants in DC and he seemed rather introverted.
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I’m just playing devils advocate here. And rather than just say Jane its okay to dismiss this new politics of forgiveness Ala Lieberman as nothing more than a “kumbaya moment,” I want us to ask the question continuously are we acting in mirror fashion to the right as they emerged in 1980 to realign the country.
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As a student of history I can’t help but see some similar parallels and I would be remiss if I didn’t consider them in conversation. Moreover, if its not something up for discussion it seem that would make it even more like the right cause lord knows you can’t criticize those folks either.
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As an analyst the one thing I am absolutely sure of is that the American voter on the left or the right has the ability to hold two completely diametrically opposed views at the same time. voters rarely fit neatly inside boxes of right or left yet we constantly insist that our political leaders do. I think it was a profound mistake that the right made by making their base so powerful that adherence to their wishes forfeit the vast middle. Look at the maps and the only significant Republicans growth were only 5 states in the deep south Appalachian belt that either produced the same or slightly more Republcians voes than in 2004. Even in the red states that Obama lost he had significant Democratic gains across the breadth of red states from 5 to 20 points depending on which states you look at.
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http://politicalmaps.org/maps-of-the-2008-us-presidential-election/

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Republicans are going to be a minority party for some time to come and they deserve it. I just want to make sure we are paying sufficient attention to our own movement so that we don’t repeat their mistakes.
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And by the way SG — the original health care debate was lost because no one in Clinton land n=knew how the senate worked and the just like any club they rather health care failed than let an outside come in and dictate to them how things will run — after all nothing is more important than tradition.

KT, take your family to “Bolt.” It’s a hoot.

PNNTO
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Those things were small potatoes because they were not properly utilized. I know I keep harping on this and as of yet I still havent seen the any youtube clips from the special but that Lee Atwater special showed me EXACTLY how those things could have been used to string Obama up. For instance, John McCain tried to use Ayers to portray Obama as a terroist sympathiser. But he missed the low hanging fruit and that was the money trail. He could have tied Obama to Ayers to money going to Wright and money going to Pfleger and to money going to Rezko in an earmark and then the fundraising shenanigans and instead of making him into something as unbelievable as a terrorist, he could have simply made him into a crook. Not to say I think he is a crook, but I think a lot of people have an easier time seeing a politician as a crook than they do seeing him as a terrorist. And thats just ONE example of how it could have been used.

SG – I know KT is right that the Kristol memo back them probably didn’t make much of a difference — but that doesn’t mean it can’t make a difference now. If I were the left – oh yeah I really am, I would use both memos as talking points as a preemptive strike against the GOP so that while voters are holding such a dim view of the GOP we should be doing everything we can to show them for the vile political ideologues that they are. This is perfect to illustrate how the Democrats were ahead of their time on health and the GOP was exactly where they are today. It doesn’t really matter if the memo was the cause of the health care derailment what matter is that ideologically they wanted it derailed and still do. And it even has the added benefit of making Obama look even better when stretches out a hand to these wingnuts he will look more magnanimous and no one will listen to their rhetoric against health care.

Dee–
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I get that you are concerned about the tone. I just ask that you be more precise and not confuse actual positions on issues with tone.
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I’m not really a fan of that tone either and I think it reduces the chance that the progressive view actually gains a platform in the national media and in the halls of our Congress.
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There are more constructive ways to go on those levels, and I am one who believes that engaging the msm is the more effective way to go. But it takes time and a level of access that we in the blogosphere don’t really have.

Dee
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I hate to pull a Katie Couric on you but I am still trying to evaluate your statement about Jane. You are still speaking in generalities but thats not advancing the issue. For me to say Jane Hamsher has the potential to be anything like Lauren Ingraham (and I disagree with you that she doesn’t believe what she is saying) I would need to see any statement of hers that would give me that impression. The things she said after the Lieberman debacle were quite frankly spot on. And she was the only one on the Howard Dean conference call who actually talked about Joe Lieberman’s dismal record as the chair of HSC ie not investigating Katrina as being the primary reason why the netroots wanted him gone. Lauren Ingraham in a similar situation would have taken the opportunity to either stretch the truth or out and out lie in order to try to get her point across and I don’t see Jane doing anything like that. My primary disdain for the wingnut radio heads has nothing to do with them criticizing Democrats but it has EVERYTHING to do with them using lies and smears in order to criticize Democrats and I think that thats the reason a lot of liberals and progressives hate the Rushs, and the Ingrahams and the Hannitys of the world.

Dee
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There is an x factor in the healthcare debate from back then that I myself don’t remember and that I want to ask you and KT about which might make the Kristol memo more or less relevant. What was being said to the masses both by the left and by the right during those times in reference to health care? What I am getting at is did the Republicans demonize universal healthcare then like they are doing now? The reason I ask is because I am thinking that if the people in this country were really clammoring for universal health care then although Clinton might have botched the handling of the legislation, they still would have found a way to get it done because they ran on a promise of implementing it and the country would have ran them out on a rail for not delivering that promise. What was the reason that Clinton failed to get universal health care passed and yet for the most part was unscathed by that failure?

“Those things were small potatoes because they were not properly utilized.”
You may be right but they WERE utilized by the Clinton campaign and the republican party and I would say historically those are two very strong, uh, competitors.
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I’m not confident that between those to camps your thoughts weren’t discussed.
Who knows? They may have thought a) they have more “problematic” money problems than what you laid out or b) voters eyes tend to glaze when the steps involved are more than 1.

Okay perhaps I’m being a bit too esoteric. I don’t mean literally as much as positionally. As to not believe what she is saying I meant Ingram and Rush not Jane. Not to say that Ingram and Rush are not right wing but they are also both shock jocks who found out they could make more money by being bomb throwers than my being reasonable or thoughtful.
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I know we are never going to agree about Lieberman and that’s okay because we hold so many similar views I wouldn’t think any less of you because you disagree with me in fact I like it because it challenges me. My fear is that Jane and by that I use her to symbolize a tone that is stuck in my mind, perhaps I should have just said some in the left wing bloggersphere to me more accurate, will begin to exact the same kind of loyalty requirements to win primaries as the right (the fact that the policies are polar opposites is irrelevant – this is about process not substance).
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First let me assure you I am not saying that these people are or will even become like the right but the potential is always there for the communicators to hijack the movement. I’m simply asking are we are aware of the potential for this to happen?” Is this also part of the discussion? Do we recognize that this is how the right was eventually marginalized but more importantly this is how they were able to do so much damage before they were marginalized?
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I understand how you feel about the tactics on the right and I agree that play a particular brand of dirty pool. However, I would also say that most of them don’t think they are telling lies, it saddens me to see such stupidity among my species but there are an awful lot of them who can not distinguish between the rhetoric of the shock jocks and reality. They can be so vindictive and when I start to hear on our side a smilar desire for that pound of flesh it frightens me quite frankly. What about next time? is this going to be the new modus operandi — if you don’t tow the line and agree with our way of thinking will we want to destroy you? Now I grant you that Lieberman deserves it – but the problem is once a taste for blood is developed who will control it and where will it end?
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At first the GOP just devoured Democrats but in the end they ate their young. I just want to make sure that we recognize how easy it would be to turn into the same thing and by that I mean exercise power in the same way even if the issues are different and undoubtedly better for the world. Over the long term power corrupts so putting in the safeguards now by always examining the methods, the process when we are on top could prevent us from traveling a similar road even though at the moment we think we are from two different planets.

Dee
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Here is where I we are diverging. I see absolutely NOTHING wrong with people like Jane Hamsher wanting the elected officials that she supports to follow the will of the people because that is supposed to be what they are there for. There is no way ANYBODY will convince me that if you took a poll the majority of people who voted for Obama wanted him to allow Lieberman to keep his gavel (I took my own poll on kos and it was like 140 against to 14 for him keeping his gavel). And its not about towing the company line as much as it is throwing the line over board connected to an anchor while the rest of the party is still holding on to it. Again I point to the fact that Jane did NOT rail about Lieberman’s voting record nor did she rail about him campaigning for McCain. She railed against his record as chair of HSC and his campaigning for two downticket Republicans which may help to keep the Dems from getting 60 seats in the Senate and making it easier to push their agenda through. That to me is as reasonable as you can possibly be. And maybe the biggest reason I endorse her speaking out about it is because I spoke out about it also. Now I don’t have a following like she does but if I did I would have spoken out even louder because in my opinion what they just did was no different from Bush allowing Gonzales to stay as AG for as long as he did when he knew full well he no longer deserved the job and he also knew full well the American people no longer wanted him to have that job.
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Now yeah the party in power always runs the risk of getting drunk on that power but people like Jane aren’t trying to carry Obama’s water like the right wing pundits do and they aren’t out shilling for elected officials to kow tow to them. They are asking, nay demanding that the officials actually do what they promised to do on the campaign trail and they are holding them accountable when they dont. And thats something you have never and will never see from the Rush Limbaughs and the Lauren Ingrahams of the world. They are TOTALLY different animals.

Not that it matters a whit but I am ashamed to say that I know her name is Laura rather than Lauren.

There was a real desire back then among the working poor and those just trying to make it to the middle-class to have something done about health care and have a patients bill of rights. but there was not the same sense of urgency among the business class, health care professionals etc. This was also before welfare reform and for many voters universal health care was also seen as just one more thing to give away to people who didn’t work or (didn’t work hard enough). Now there was a great concern that health insurance companies and particularly HMO’s were out of control — which was why tort reform couldn’t get off the ground, people wanted to be able to sue the HMO’s. The problem was that no one knew what the fix could or should look like so the right didn’t really have to demonize with the same vitriol they do now. They just had to roll out Harry and Louise an average Mr and Mrs Joe the plumber to question if this was the right thing to do or would this make matters worse.
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Of course the same kind of subtle approach wouldn’t work today the same way that Joe the plumber didn’t work today because things are just too bad. When it was only about the uninsured and few people were stuck in HMO’s that seemed detrimental then there wasn’t the same clarion call as it is now when much more of the middle-class is falling in the same traps as the working poor were feeling in the early nineties.

As for Lieberman and why progressives and liberals cant stand him. Check out these clips from two years ago that were WELL before he endorsed John McCain or said nasty things about Obama at the RNC
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and another one
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this one was right after the election. Notice the parallels from two years ago
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Now after watching those clips watch this one which preceded both of them and notice how the mood changed from this clip to the ones above. Thats what I predict will happen on the Lieberman subject to a lot of people by this time next year
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Dee, care to weigh on on why folks in the media like Sanjay Gupta chose to nitpick the details of Sicko and not engage in it substantively? I was really struck by that.

SG – I love your passion but I would bet if you polled all of Obama’s voters you would find that only about 20 percent, and I am being generous, even remember who Lieberman is and what he did that was so wrong. I know that activists who are really engaged are much more focused on this issue but not voters overall. And while the liberals voted for Obama and undoubtedly made the difference in the primaries, they couldn’t elect him in the general – hence my concern, because that is exactly what happened to the GOP. Half the crap McCain was saying he didn’t give two cents for but he had to say it to win his base and we know that it cost him with independents and moderate Republicans.
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I’m just saying the left could do exactly the same thing because it is the more activist voters that can make a real difference in the primaries and when I hear them say we got him elected it gives me pause because we are talking about a smaller slice of the electorate(albeit this primary season is an outlier because participation was much higher than it is generally). African Americans made a huge difference in the primary in Mississippi — but were only able to reduce the overall GOP lead in the general by a few points.
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If the left succeeds in only allowing those who tow the line then we will get flop-floppers like Romney of folks who can’t win the general. Most voters hold too many divergent views to fit so neatly into any of these labels. And while I don’t think it will happen right away, if the meme continues that the left has been betrayed because Obama didn’t do exactly what they wanted and mind you he’s not even in yet so we don’t know if he is going to do what you want, we only know he may not be doing it using approved personnel and tactics, then they will try to exert even more control over primaries in 2010.

sgw, I would suffer through watching your Lieberman videos, but for some reason this computer still doesn’t want to see YouTube vids. My laptop is fine on the same network.
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This is a brand new problem, started this morning. Any ideas?

wvng — I tend to think that msm doesn’t tend to engage in much of anything substantive most of them time. but I will hazard a guess that its probably because it sicko doesn’t adhere to an established narrative. In other words either they don already hold the view and its not seen as conventional wisdom or the messenger is not an established credible source they respect. I heard Johnny apple say once that the news media is not in the business of informing the public they are in the business of mirroring the views the public already holds.

And while I don’t think it will happen right away, if the meme continues that the left has been betrayed because Obama didn’t do exactly what they wanted and mind you he’s not even in yet so we don’t know if he is going to do what you want, we only know he may not be doing it using approved personnel and tactics, then they will try to exert even more control over primaries in 2010.
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So far Obama is doing precisely what he said he was going to do. He is not backtracking on anything substantive that is not conditions based (like possibly delaying the tax increases on the well-to-do). If people projected their wildest progressive dreams on him, then they may be disappointed. But if they want the substantive progressive change for America that he began outlining with his marvelous speech at the DNC and has consistently described going forward – I think they will see that. He is putting people into office who can get things done. And they will be working for him to enact his agenda.
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I say Hurray!

Dee
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Lieberman was only the VP candidate in 2000 when ya know we had that big recount thingy in florida….Some how Ill bet people remember who he was and if they didnt remember before after the past two weeks with the MSM bringing it up and there being an HBO documentary called “Recount” starring Kevin Spacey they would know what he did.

“If people projected their wildest progressive dreams on him, then they may be disappointed. ”
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I see that a lot in the media and elsewhere. Who are these people and what *exactly* are those dreams? If they are of the “pay back” variety I don’t really care, are there policy dreams? Iraq? Tax policy? Investment?

Dee
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Ask yourself a question. Who do you think was doing the door to door canvasing and the phone banking for Obama? Do you think it was more likely to be rank and file Democrats or liberal bloggers? A lot of people only think about the liberal blogosphere when it comes to this election in terms of the actual bloggers. They forget that those bloggers were major fundraisers, fact checkers and GOTV workers for Obama. Many of them were also people who registered new voters also. And don’t forget that is the liberal bloggers who not only pushed for Obama to win but also supported a lot of the dwon ticket Democrats to help futher the numbers advantage the Dems have in congress now. Remember the ridiculous fundraising that happened right after Michelle Bachmann made her infamous appearance on the Chris Matthews show? Mind you the guy didn’t win in the end, but the liberal blogosphere with their fundraising in one weekend made him a viable candidate. The impact of the liberal blogosphere on this election can not be measured by their sheer numbers. Trust me

SG– I get it Lieberman is a scum bag. but you are expecting that [people who may no longer even be able to afford cable and didn’t see recount on HBO, he11 very few people who have HBO saw recount. Most folks just aren’t interested in this stuff. We’re lucky we got more folks to come out and vote this time. They may remember the name from 2000 maybe but what happened to his 2004 presidential bid — people didn’t know him from a whole in the wall and that’s what stated all of this crap. Lieberman felt slighted that he was the heir apparent but the voters had no affinity with him and name recognition was crap. Now you want them to remember him in 2008?

wvng
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The videos are clips of “the young turks” shows from 2 years ago. The first ones are post election, the last one is pre election. It is very interesting to see how the tone of discourse changed over time. Cenk kept his same stance on the issue though the whole time. He had sized Liberman up early on

Who are these people and what *exactly* are those dreams? Not sure I know for sure, but I see plenty of complaining that he is not hiring real liberals, that he is not talking enough about rolling back Bush’s worst abuses to the Constitution, and that he seems little interested in prosecuting violations of the law by the Bush administration.

An on-topic comment I made on TPM: And where did unity get the Republicans? Their party has become intellectually dormant and intolerant of political diversity. Maybe if their genuinely conservative members had spoken out more on issues like spending and the problems with an insanely interventionist foreign policy, the Republican party wouldn’t be in such disarray.
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Dee, I mostly agree with you on the tone thing, and the risk of some elements of the progressive community becoming as dogmatic and intolerant as the Republican base. (KO, for example) But Hamsher? Her interview with Dean was completely reasonable. Lieberman did betray his party (in 2000 and 2008) and work to limit the number of Democratic seats in the Senate. That last point cannot be overemphasized.
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I generally supported not expelling Lieberman from the party, so I don’t even entirely agree with Hamsher. But I can’t see any way in which she’s equivalent to Ingram. Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but it seems that you’re saying it’s dangerous for progressives to strongly criticize Democrats because it could lead to litmus tests in primaries. It may not always be productive – although sometimes it could be very productive; if the Democrats can be pushed towards progressive and pragmatic policies, that will help everyone – but maximizing the electoral strength of the Democratic party isn’t everyone’s sole objective.
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the fact that the policies are polar opposites is irrelevant – this is about process not substance
But if progressives are pushing sensible policies – like universal health care, a New Deal style investment in the Green economy, a smarter policy on terrorism that incorporates things like genuine border security, and a mortgage aid plan – then wouldn’t they be helping the Democratic party? The Republican base was pushing stupid policies, while progressives have a great track record of being on the right side of history. (BTW, that’s not an attack on conservatism. Unfortunately the vocal Republican base is not genuinely conservative.) And, most importantly, there’s no indication that the processes are equivalent. Someone who voted for the Iraq war got 50% of the vote in the primaries! And even Obama was fairly pro-war in the Senate.
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In the past week I’ve seen a lot of worrying about the Democratic party self-destructing by criticizing some of Obama’s decisions, and pushing for more progressive policies. But isn’t the worrying almost a cliche? The people unhappy about HRC and Rahm actually seem less worried than the people who feel that this criticism is a death omen for the party. All this criticism and questioning is normal. People disagree, they will criticize politicians who don’t do what they want and they will suspect politicians’ motives and honesty. This is democracy!
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Anyway, I’m worried by stupidity, intolerance and dishonesty in the progressive community. Which is why I’ve called KO the Democratic Bill O’Reilly. But Hamsher? There’s nothing worrying about her.
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And on Lieberman, it’s irrelevant if people don’t know who he is (although I think the figure is way higher than 20%). There are three main concerns: a. there’s no deterrence against Democratic politicians doing the same thing in the future b. he’s disloyal and unreliable. Big problems. c. they’re actually rewarding him for campaigning for Republicans in down-ballot races. I’m not vindictive, but that seems really weird.

SG – Please don’t think I am trying to diminish the role of liberal bloggers. Quite the contrary the whole point of this discussion is that I see them as a powerful influence that will continue to grow and I want us all to be thinking how we exercise that power. I remember the Reagan revolution and wide eyed conservative idealist in the 80′s turned into the I hate anybody who is not exactly like me ditto head in 2008. I am not saying that’s who liberal bloggers are or will become, but the potential is there so we should never lose sight of that the same way you don’t want Obama supporters to think he could never make a mistake.,

We’re lucky we got more folks to come out and vote this time. And even then not nearly enough people voted, when you think about the enormous problems our country faces. How anyone, under these conditions, could not be engaged at least enough to pay some attention to issues and to vote floors me.

Dee
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I am sure there are some people who are living in a cave right now and have been over the last two years. But it would have been hard to miss the story that McCain REALLY wanted to pick Lieberman but had to settle on Sarah Palin for VP. I mean it was kinda a ya know big deal. And Lieberman was pointed out over and over when he spoke on McCain’s behalf. But I guess in theory some folks might have missed it every single time it happened.
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Now check this video from two years ago. The first part will tend to support your statement that nobody cares about Lieberman but then watch the reaction from some people already in California to a picture of Joe Lieberman
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And suddenly my YouTubes are working. Did you do something sgw? Wave a magic wand maybe?
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On the topic of videos, I would be interested to see jay’s take on the optics and vocal attributes of Obama’s Saturday address video. I remember him complaining last week that Obama was using the “wrong voice”, not intimate enough. I thought the set last week was too sterile, and this week’s was much more welcoming. The substance both times was excellent. As Robert Reich said today: “By putting his economic team in place barely three weeks after he was elected, and telling the nation what he plans to do immediately after he takes office, the President-Elect is asserting leadership at a time when the the Bush administration has all but abdicated.”
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But still no puppy.

Thanks for the answer wvng, I think I am smelling way more smoke than fire. It may have something to do with BHO NOT being president yet.

sgw – you need a “I Despise Lieberman” website to house all of your stuff. It is already more substantive than the material for Bush’s library.

already should have been all the way. Too. Much. Blogging lol

Rose I can’t disagree with a thing you’ve said and I believe I clarified my Jane comment as more symbolic of the liberal bloggers because her tone just stuck in my head in the fixation on Lieberman. Lately it feels (not you of course SG because we just agree to disagree) that if you are not opposing the Lieberman forgiveness you are not a real liberal. Moreover, this is not an accusation of anything that is happening now,what I am saying that as this conversation moves forward and this movement continues to grow that this is something to keep in mind.
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I know its hard to believe now, but the conservatives thought their movement was helping the planet too. and the country agreed and realigned after 40 years of Democratic dominance. I’m just saying that it could just as easily happen to us if we don’t study the history of the last movement, similarly as Obama studied previous administrations so he wouldn’t make the same mistakes. You know if you do what has always been done you will get what you always got.
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the point about Ingram is not comparing the two personalities – its about comparing the position as a female blogger. I know its probably hard to imagine but Laura started out much more reasonable. In fact most people who were conservative were reasonable in the presentation of their ideas. Just as Jane is promoting reasonable arguments now. the point is Laura changed and so can she. Now I think Laura changed because increasingly in order to get market share she had to throw more bombs, although the coulter’s arrival on the scene probably exacerbated the move toward nuttery. The point is not that these people are their it understanding that the spectrum and how people move along it, what are the drivers towards extremism and most importantly – no one starts out thinking their position is extreme they just end up there anyway.

PNNTO – I think you are right. I watch people on some of these boards complaining and I just don’t understand. I am thrilled beyond measure to have a serious, pragmatic person who cares about government and governance and people and the idea of America heading to the White House. I’ve even started capitalizing the word President again.
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btw, in case KT checks in after her exciting night out, I heard from Suzie in MD. She hopes to make it to the inauguration, and wondered about a Swampland get together. I told her that KT suggested a Swamplander get together at a little French restaurant around the corner from her office and across the street from Ford’s Theater. Seems they have a wine bar upstairs. KT didn’t say when that might happen. So, hey, KT, is it still on? 4 million extra people in town might make any getting togethers rather difficult but still worth a try.

wvng
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At this point what gets me is a. Harry Reid still has his job and b. So many people who know this was ridiculous are willing to let it slide simply because they think Obama sanctioned it so it must be right. Not saying that applies to you Dee, but it does apply to some others and thats kind of irritating to me. If Bush had done it those same people would be PISSED but since Obama did it that makes it ok? I don’t think so, homie don’t play that.

Dee
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Honestly I DON’T think conservatives ever thought they were helping the planet. I think they always have been about power, getting it and keeping it. And that came from their leadership and trickled down.

Dee
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Question. Did Laura Ingraham start “changing” before or after she joined FoxNews?

“I watch people on some of these boards complaining and I just don’t understand”
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I hear you wvng but it really helps to know the players. Some are have developed concerns and some have had concerns all along.

Let it go SG just let it go. Lieberman is taking up entirely too much space in your head and he’s clearly not worth it. I know its hard to forgive but when you do its not about the person you are forgiving its always about getting them the he11 out of your head. If you feel your blood pressure rising at the thought of Lieberman you might want to give forgiveness a try –nothing says you have to forget so you can keep your video log on Lieberman’s traitorous rhetoric.

She definitely got worse after she went to fox but she started changing before the move fox news – it was clearly a money thing because that’s when Rush and his ilk started really taking off. Of course she was still conservative but there was a time when she at least has some logical points to make now she’s just plain nuts like the rest of them.

PNNTO, here Jane Hamsher on the topic we have been discussing. Obama and a Paucity of Progressives

Ahh Dee let the man have his fun. SG is very good at it and goodness knows Joe deserves it.

Thanks wvng Jane is saying what I have been saying, only in an articulate way.
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“His isn’t the administration I’d pick, but the proof will be in what he actually does”
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That’s it in a simple declarative sentence.

Honestly I DON’T think conservatives ever thought they were helping the planet. I think they always have been about power, getting it and keeping it. I don’t know. There was a time in my youth (50s, even 60s) when they seemed ok. The present bunch is the culmination of years of assiduous culling of anyone with a thoughtful, non ideological bone in their body. And I would never call the current incarnation of republicans conservative. Their actions are as radical as they can be.

Dee
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First of all we can actually say hell and ass now lol
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Secondly I vent about Lieberman online but he doesn’t take up space in my head at all. Joe Liberman is really not the problem. Harry Reid and the Senate Dems are the problem because the represent everything about why I changed from a Dem to an independent in 2004 after that weak sauce John Kerry refused to fight for the votes in Ohio. Its hard to support a party that has the right policy stance most of the time but seem to take pleasure in getting their teeth kicked in. And let me say this also. Forgiveness is one thing, appeasement is another. I don’t hold a grudge against Joe Lieberman, he is free to say and vote how every he wants to. But actions can and should have consequences. If I sell someone something and their check bounces should I just forgive them and move on? If I hand someone a knife and they stab me with it should I forgive them and hand them another knife? If my best friend sleeps with my girlfriend should I forgive him and introduce him to my new girlfriend? See I believe in forgiveness but I don’t believe in stupid. And allowing him to keep that gavel was stupid. If you clicked on the video I posted up thread you would notice that he pulled the same “I will switch parties if they don’t give me a chairmanship” crap after he got elected in 2006 AFTER he promised the people of CT that no matter what he would caucus with the Dems if they voted for him. And THIS is the guy that Harry Reid thinks should be in control of investigating the government after he had the gavel two years and never investigated a damn thing. Again just so much WEAK SAUCE that its sickening really

wvng
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thanks for that link
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Dee this is for you from that article
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money quote
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Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to help keep the obstructionists off his back and push him to fulfill his campaign promises to end the war, pass health care legislation and the Employee Free Choice Act, clean up the environment, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, repair our infrastructure, create good jobs and restore the middle class.
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That’s what he promised us, and while I’m obviously not wild about the dearth of progressives in his administration (while anti-choicers like Hagel and Lugar are evidently a-okay), I’m less concerned with who he chooses to implement his policies than with his ability to ultimately do so.

PNNTO, I also liked how Jane ended her post: “Look, for people who convinced themselves that Obama was the second coming of Saul Alinsky — wake up. He never was. He may, however, be the most progressive person we could have possibly hoped to elect as President of the United States. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to help keep the obstructionists off his back and push him to fulfill his campaign promises to end the war, pass health care legislation and the Employee Free Choice Act, clean up the environment, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, repair our infrastructure, create good jobs and restore the middle class.”
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Think about her list of tasks. Quite a list. If he manages all that he gets a spot next to Zeus. I, frankly, will be happy to see a respect for the law, a respect for American ideals generally, return to competence in government. And I would really like to see Karl Rove and David Addington (among others) frogmarched out of a three way with Jeff Gannon straight to prison – News at 11.

wvng
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Great Minds

Well I don’t know about the rest of you but I pretty much want the congress following — They proved they know how to do that with Bush, now that we have someone with a brain coming in the door I would hate for them to all of sudden start feeling their leadership potential. That’s what they did with Clinton and we didn’t get anything done when we had a Democratic majority. I for one don’t think the cops program, welfare reform, or NAFTA did most of us any good.
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Anyway SG feel free to vent about weak Dems Just make sure you have a bag handy if you feel any shortness of breath Well its been great talking with you all but my dogs are calling me again so i bid you all good night.

Dee, I agree about the good intentions of (some) people in the conservative movement. I guess where we’d disagree is that I’d say the problem is they left their conservative principles far behind. Laura Ingram is probably less of a conservative than I am, which is saying a lot! These people pandered to prejudice and took advantage of stupidity so they could gain money and power. I hope if people stick to their core progressive principles they can avoid that slow decline into intolerance and stupidity. You have to have principles…

Hey Rose before I go just note that power corrupts so principles will be the first thing out of the door – we must remain vigilant so that we don’t wake up one day and be Laura – Oh god what a thought. night night.

The Times Editorial board sounding like bloggers:
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It’s encouraging that the president-elect recognizes that to make the changes he’s promising — and deliver a government that will protect and help its citizens — he will need energized, rather than alienated, federal workers. His aides will have to circumvent or dump any Bush burrowers intent on sabotaging that effort.

Have a good one Dee

sgw – yup.
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Here’s Steve Clemons:
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I’m back in the U.S. and can report that enthusiasm for Barack Obama throughout Europe is off the charts.
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Closing Guantanamo and holding someone, anyone, responsible for America’s use of torture against combat detainees, and putting forward a global climate change proposal may get a number of nations asking Obama if he can be their president too.
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Let’s hope that Obama gets a lot of constructive work done before the reality of our stressed world hits and his bubble bursts.

wvng
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Did you hear about that hack Halperin admonishing the media for Obama bias? This is the same guy who had to stop Joe Scarborough from piling on Obama a couple of times. I swear he is beyond useless and yet he gets his own Drudge lite page here at TIME magazine. Whats wrong with that picture?

KT
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I am not saying anything nearly so stupid as because Bill Kristol wrote a memo, or mre broadly that because the right was deeply, implacably opposed to universal health care, that was why the Clinton effort failed. In my view it failed because Hillary screwed up, big time, in a very difficult political environment, with a very difficult policy proposal. i read the thing. It was a disaster. A too clever by half, in my opinion, disaster.
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My point, wrt the Kristol memo, is that Republicans regard good public policy (not Clinton’s still nascent plan, but public policy that on balance benefits people) on health care as bad for Republicans, even when it is good for Americans, that Republicans are implacably opposed to good public policy that benefits Americans for political reasons.
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I also note, though do not think it can be shown to be true, that there are people who believe that the entire scurrilous campaign against the Clintons, the great right wing conspiracy (and, honestly, was there ever a time in the past when it was claimed that a president murdered somebody, dealt cocaine etc?) was motivated by this. As I say, I don’t know about that. I do know that I do not recall as nasty, extensive and as baseless a media campaign against a sitting president. One could argue that the media campaign against Nixon that started around 1972 was as nasty, but it wasn’t baseless. And one could also note that a media campaign against Bush would have been very soundly based starting about 2003 and never happened.
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But, no, I don’t think that Kristol’s memo sunk Clinton’s plan. She had to hit a home run, at least a triple, in that environment to pull this off. But she hit a squibber to the right side, in the event. That doesn’t change the fact that Republicans are opposed to policy that makes American lives better.
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sgw, yeah, I heard that. Maybe he is in competition with Lil Debbie Howell as a media balance troll. That he is advancing the Obama bias argument weeks after The Politico utterly skewered it is impressive in its hackery. I suspect Drudge is ruling his world again.

So, will SNL have a Palin turkey skit tonight?

I have read Brad Delong’s take in the past. It’s one of the reasons I was skeptical of the Hillary candidacy
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While I didn’t form this opinion from DeLong’s analysis, it was the health care plan episode that led me to oppose Clinton for president during the primary period, preferred she not be selected for VP and don’t like the idea of her at SecState. she’s been a fine senator, better than the senior member of our delegation. But I think she has demonstrably failed as an executive.

What jay said, needs to be repeated by every Dem at every opportunity:
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“My point, wrt the Kristol memo, is that Republicans regard good public policy (not Clinton’s still nascent plan, but public policy that on balance benefits people) on health care as bad for Republicans, even when it is good for Americans, that Republicans are implacably opposed to good public policy that benefits Americans for political reasons.”
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“Nice day, isn’t it?” “Ayeh, sure is. BTW, did you know that that Republicans are implacably opposed to good public policy that benefits Americans for political reasons?”
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jay, I asked you a question a ways up thread about Obama’s video today. Last week you though he needed to change his approach. Today?

Speaking of venal Repugs and, really, when are we not, this from TPM:
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“National GOP groups are accusing Dem Senate candidate Jim Martin — whose daughter was abducted as a small child — of being soft on violence against children.”
TPM Election Central | Talking Points Memo | National GOP Groups Accuse Crime Victim Of Being Soft On Crime In Georgia
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Classic Rovian politics.

errorist-fraternizing community organizer
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hahahahahaha
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[pointing]
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Sorry. missed it first time. still funny to see though. Like a brachiosaur slipping on a banana peel.

wvng
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I missed the video. I’ll find it. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Obama has improved his game. One of the most admirable things about him is that he seems to be okay with people telling him that he has not done as well as he could, and improving things thereby. This is very rare among senators, and almost non-existent among presidents.
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Sorry i didn’t note your earlier link to Benen at the Monthly.
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it is antithetical to how i was brought up, but I cannot get over the conclusion that so many republicans are just, well, bad people.

And one could also note that a media campaign against Bush would have been very soundly based starting about 2003 and never happened.
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It’s pretty effed up when you quote yourself, but I want to note that Keller at the NYT actually killed a story in 2004 of the president unquestionably breaking the law. I simply cannot imagine the NYT in 1996 doing the same thing.

I haven’t read the notes on Jane carefully, so if I miss something key I apologize, but it is late.
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The thing you have to keep straight is that people like Rush and Laura Ingraham have an agenda that is not solely about their policy positions. Rush does not actually believe all garbage he spouts. He’s a performance artist. He’s also part of a coordinated message machine that is part of the Republican party.
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Jane is outside the message machine. She is trying to get in, not part of it now. I’d note that Howard Dean demonstrated this week what you have to do to be part of it. if Jane wants to be inside, then she’ll have to be willing to do what Dean did this week, and run out the party line.
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One thing that is different about how the right and left manage their messaging is that the right uses their extremists to move the Overton window, while the left denounces its extremists. For quite a while, the left has been criticized by their extremists for doing this. They’ve had a point because the window of acceptable “mainstream” discourse has indeed moved to the right over the last 20 years, to the point that it is substantially to the right of actual mainstream discourse. People like Pat Buchanan and William Kristol are on the teevee while people like Noam Chomsky are not.
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But the downside of doing this is now apparent. McCain was afraid to run a centrist campaign. His advisers refused to let him move to the center with his VP pick. They made him run a sure to lose campaign, because the alternative was, in their view, a surer to lose campaign. The Congressional republican delegation is far from the American center.
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Sarah effin’ Palin is regarded as a real possible power base in the Republican Party. This is the side effect of moving the Overton window. IN the party, these people are regarded as reasonable centrists, not loons. Or mooses. Or something.
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So, Jane may be destined, like many of the DFHs, to remain a gadfly, rather than an insider. However, that does not change her and our goal to pressure the members of the party, and the government, to respond to citizen needs, and not lobbyist needs.

One final thing. I just read Benen (no diss to Kevin, but I’m finding Steve decidedly meatier, and much more Washington Monthlier). He remarks on progressives complaining (like those dang hispanics!!) about no Cabinet seats. Benen remarks that it looks like Obama is going to be what Obama has seemed to be, a technocratic, wonky, pragmatist, not an ideologue. So he’s due to pissing off David Sirota for some time to come.
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Two things. First, Cabinet member shouldn’t be flaming ideologues. Those who have been have sucked, and, just by the way, have mostly been republicans.
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Second, if progressives are right (and I think they are) technocratic, wonky solutions that reflect reality are going to be progressive as well. It’s like the national health care discussion above. Or dealing with global warming. The only answers that make sense and are based in reality are progressive.
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The real danger, frankly, is corruption and graft undermining the technocratic wonks. And other than Daschle, I don’t see that risk in these appointments.

That’s a great wrap-up on Dem messaging wrt Jane et al, Jayack. I agree completely. However, I’m much more focused on gaining access to media platforms than having direct impact on the politics part. Both are necessary, but they are completely different goals. I’m very comfortable with the direction the Obama administration is taking, bringing in evidently supremely competent people. I’ve been agnostic on the Lieberman issue, and I don’t think it’s going to be all that helpful to gain the 60th seat, given the number of Blue Dogs anyway. By my count, we had only 25 Senators who were fit to hold public office, and it remains to be seen how much we will have built on that.
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But gaining a couple more progressive voices in the mainstream media — that’s a whole other kettle ‘o’ fish. Maddow’s doing great. We need a lot more of Maddow too, on TV and print. We need to be working towards that as well, IMHO of course.

KT here–

SG and Jayack: Wow. This thread has gone all over the place, but if you’re still around.

Earlier, Jayack says: My point, wrt the Kristol memo, is that Republicans regard good public policy (not Clinton’s still nascent plan, but public policy that on balance benefits people) on health care as bad for Republicans, even when it is good for Americans, that Republicans are implacably opposed to good public policy that benefits Americans for political reasons.

I think you guys are not looking at the right part of the equation here. There were Republicans (Newt) who saw HRC’s health care plan as a weapon that could be used to win back Congress and nearly destroy the Clinton presidency, and they used it. But there were also Republicans (John Chafee) who struggled heroically to come up with a plan that could actually pass. The real key to passing health care reform is not assuming there is a conspiracy and basing it on a very silly Kristol memo from the early 90s. The key is doing precisely what Hillary spelled out in my interview with her:
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1. Devising a good plan.
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2. Making sure you have all the stakeholders on board.
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3. Making sure you explain it to the American people and bring them along.
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None of those things happened in 1993 and 1994. If that had happened, the Republicans couldn’t have afforded to oppose it. And there were plenty of Democrats–in important positions–who hated her plan as well. Pat Moynihan, then-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, used to bring a pen that JFK had used to sign the law that deinstitutionalized the mentally ill to every Senate Finance Committee hearing on the HRC plan. He would wave that pen and warn about “unintended consequences.”
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Finally, don’t forget, it was Mitt Romney who passed the first truly universal health care plan in any state. People may not like how it is working in all its respects, but he deserves enormous credit for getting it passed. And as a political model for getting this done, it deserves some study. I’ll post another link to my story about it:
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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1680168,00.html

KT here–

And finally, finally:

It’s probably worth pointing out that Arnold Schwarzenegger tried awfully hard to get universal coverage in California, and even Newt has some interesting ideas on the subject these days that he has worked on with–gasp!–Hillary Clinton.

With regard to Mitt Romney, the gang of 500 loathes him though. Part of it is justified. He is oily. Yet, you had a technocratic Republican in a time when Republicans could really stand for some competence and he got unfair coverage during the primaries.
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(This is where I typically would insert a long rant about Ron Fournier)
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Fournier was unfair to Romney before he started bashing Obama and Hillary. Anybody who stood in McCain’s way was a target. People forget that Romney was in for the treatment first.

In regards to Newt, sometimes he does come up with creative ideas. Other times he is batsh!t crazy and most importantly, he often hasn’t thought things through. Al Franken of all people in one of his books details one of Newt’s crazy ideas about this plunger to use for heart attacks that was based on faulty research on it’s efficacy. To Newt’s credit, at least he tries to have actual ideas.
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I would have never thought of hunting giraffes if it weren’t for Newt. This may not be a good idea. I might sit athwart his chest and do terrible things.

I had forgotten what a tool Pat Moynihan was during all of that. More concerned about scolding the poor than dealing with health care.
“I don’t want another vast social program that makes no difference to the fact that our cities are becoming unlivable,”
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“we don’t have a health care problem, we have a social problem.”
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There is a reason that George Will loved the guy. Made his name decrying the state of African American families. He sure made comfortable white people feel more comfortable. Benign Neglect indeed.

George Will loved Moynihan, Bill Buckley loved him some Lieberman. Anybody notice a pattern?

That both Pat and Joe would rather feel smug than help their country? Pats on the head from the “smart” conservatives feel good?

@KT,
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While your response to SG and Jayack points up the trouble of overexrapolating or overgeneralizing, if you wish to explore the topic of “instances where a political party has deliberately harmed the country as a whole in an effort to benefit their own power base” then all the relavant examples are going to be from the post-Reagan Republicans. Even the McCain campaign’s efforts to paint Obama as too scary to be CiC have done permanent damage to his freedom to act and ability to govern effectively. Fortunately Obama seems quite comfortable operating within ‘acceptable’ parameters and seems intent on demontrating very early that everything that was said about him was absolutely false. This is reassuring to those who thought that ‘change’ meant a return to merit based hiring and sanity. To those who thought that ‘change’ meant an actual fresh look at the assumptions that underlie the US projection of power, their disappointment is understandable, but unsurprising.

I think 1964 with the Daisy ad was the last time the democrats have sunk that low. The Republicans continue to do it. Saxby Chambliss won a seat on it. The democrats run scare ads on social security that at times are slightly exaggerated, but the fear mongering about threats to our very existence has been a GOP forte for several decades especially since the Lee Atwater era.

Dee wrote: As an analyst the one thing I am absolutely sure of is that the American voter on the left or the right has the ability to hold two completely diametrically opposed views at the same time. voters rarely fit neatly inside boxes of right or left yet we constantly insist that our political leaders do. I think it was a profound mistake that the right made by making their base so powerful that adherence to their wishes forfeit the vast middle.

I have a question for this group–who is the “we” who insist that our political leaders fit into neat political categories? Is this an MSM construction? I know the RW likes to paint things as starkly as possible (four legs good, two legs bad; with us or against us). Has this kind of polarizing infected the MSM as well? Traditional nighttime TV broadcasters have to deliver the news in bullet points–24 minutes does not an informed delivery of the news make. But cable news has 24/7 and they fall into the same trap sometimes. NPR does a better job with their format but their impact is not as big as TV.
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So, naive as it may be, I wonder how to counteract the systematic neatness of political pigeonholing. Is it the media? Is it systemic to our political system? Does the public REALLY want political leaders who earn perfect scores from either conservative or liberal organizations?

KT here–

PD: I just think on health care, it is wrong to go into this exercise deciding in advance who your enemies are. Getting it done is going to require political consensus, which means making sure the VOTERS are on board. Everything else can follow.

Also, if you look at how closely Romney and Kennedy worked together in Massachusetts, you get a good model going forward. Please read that part of my story that I linked to.

But is Jones too blunt? And this can’t be a accepted well by conservatives…

http://www.political-buzz.com/

Deep Thought: What if Obama picked Hillary as a shiny ball to distract Broder, Matthews, Dowd, etc. They go pavlovian and discuss her bra size, pantsuits, Clinton’s wee-wee all day and night, while Obama gets things done while they aren’t looking.

KT here–

Here it is:

Someone else took notice as well. No one has fought longer and harder for universal health coverage than Senator Edward Kennedy; he introduced a national health-insurance bill back in 1970. But he and the Governor were not exactly allies. Romney had challenged Kennedy for his Senate seat in 1994 in a nasty race. Reading the first outlines of Romney’s plan in the Boston Globe, Kennedy decided the Republican Governor was serious about the issue, and he told his staff to reach out to Romney’s advisers. Before long, Romney was in Kennedy’s office in Washington, taking his PowerPoint slides with him. “Had Senator Kennedy said, ‘This is a lousy idea, and I don’t want anything to do with it,’ I would have been back at square one,” he admits.
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Kennedy was sold, and both men turned to the question of how to pay for the plan. Part of the money could be shifted from the existing $1.1 billion fund through which hospitals had been compensated for the care they were providing the uninsured. But to fund universal coverage, they desperately needed to persuade HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson to allow Massachusetts to keep the $385 million in Medicaid funds that Washington was threatening to take away. The money would also give them leverage back home with health-care providers and businesses, two powerful constituencies and potential opponents of reform.
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Their talks with Thompson went right down to the wire. The HHS Secretary signed the deal in a marathon negotiation with Romney and Kennedy that ended on Jan. 26, 2005, his last day on the job, while his going-away party was getting under way. The agreement stipulated that the commonwealth could keep the money but only if it passed a universal-coverage law.

AND THEN THIS PART:
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On a Sunday morning in February 2006, Romney personally taped handwritten notes to the doors of senate president Robert Travaglini and house speaker Salvatore DiMasi, begging them not to let this opportunity die. The speaker, for one, wasn’t impressed. “A cheap publicity stunt,” DiMasi says. Recognizing the limits of his own influence, Romney turned to Kennedy once again. “I asked for his help on certain legislators: ‘Could you give a call on this one?’” Romney says. On March 22, 2006, Kennedy did more than that. He went to the floor of both the house and the senate on Beacon Hill and spoke in very personal terms about the battles with cancer his son and daughter had faced. “This whole issue in terms of universal and comprehensive care has always burned in my soul,” Kennedy said. The Federal Government had failed the country on health care, he told the politicians , but “Massachusetts has a chance to do something about it.”

As this post, along with most of the discussion this, has been on BHO’s Cabinet nominees I found this to be a good read. Sort of the anti-Doris Kearns Goodwin.
An actual look back on Lincoln’s Team of Rivals.
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“There is little doubt that Abraham Lincoln was a great president. But not much of what made him great can be discerned in his appointment of a contentious, envious and often dysfunctional collection of prima donnas to his cabinet”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/opinion/20oakes.html?_r=1

Doris Kearns Goodwin should collaborate with Joe Biden on a biography of Neal Kinnock. That would be funny.

Good idea trifecta! Mike Barnicle could review it.

wvng wrote:
Speaking of venal Repugs and, really, when are we not, this from TPM:
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“National GOP groups are accusing Dem Senate candidate Jim Martin — whose daughter was abducted as a small child — of being soft on violence against children.”
TPM Election Central | Talking Points Memo | National GOP Groups Accuse Crime Victim Of Being Soft On Crime In Georgia
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Classic Rovian politics.
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I’m so proud to live in Georgia. (Groan.)

The key is doing precisely what Hillary spelled out in my interview with her:
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1. Devising a good plan.
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2. Making sure you have all the stakeholders on board.
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3. Making sure you explain it to the American people and bring them along.
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First, this is a null set. There is no good plan that has the insurance companies on board.
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Second, are you saying that if Clinton had simply advocated a state-based single payer plan (which is what her proposal amounted to, in my opinion. The rest of it was too clever by half cover for that agenda.) openly, and aggressively, she would have been successful?
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Third, if not, can you outline what would have been a good plan at the time that would not have involved a single payer, at the state or federal level? The sticking point on any health care reform is that if it includes for-profit gatekeepers, where profits increase when care is denied, the system is inherently flawed.
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The current system exists in response to the previous system’s perverse incentives. The out of pocket outpatient/MajorMedical inpatient system led to providers performing, sometimes entirely unnecessary, inpatient procedures rather than outpatient.
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If you really believe in market forces, which I do, you have to recognize that one of the stakeholders in the current system needs to be removed, or so dramatically altered as to be unrecognizable.
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As for the harry and louise ad campaign, and its political use by Gingrich, it’s important to keep in the mix that the campaign was, well, a lie. As for “Look! There’s John Chafee.” I don’t see him anymore.
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It is not hyperbolic to say that the republicans have consistently opposed good public policy, at least in this millennium. Their motives for that are, I suppose, in question. But we are talking about a party that would not let a beef producer who tested his entire herd for mad cow disease to put a label on his product that said so.
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By “good public policy” I mean policy in the interest of the general public.

Great discussion here, leavened by KT stepping in from time to time. Shakespeare: your point about 24 hours cable. Sometime ago a friend made the point that one would have thought that with all news channels all day subjects will be treated in depth. A lot more time would be devoted to an issue and viewers would come away informed. All we have had is repitition. mindless shouting by strategists, and a dumbing down. This was a great opportunity but dollars and attack ads took precedence. All those gasbags who keep complaining about politicians should be looking around their immediate neighbourhood and asking themselves why they have stopped smelling the manure.

KT, SG and jayackroyd,
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You seem to be talking past each other. It seems that yes, there was/is a significant part of the Republican establishment that saw political danger in a successful Democratic health care plan. But at the same time that’s not why health care reform failed.
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IMO, the long-term survival of the Republican party in something resembling its current form depends on successful health care reform. The health care problem will just get worse unless something is done, and if health care problems dominate an election, the Democrats will win. Health care reform is in the Republicans’ interest, because then we can go back to talking about who we’d rather have a beer with. Would Bush II have won if Clinton hadn’t improved the fiscal situation?
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Also there is a crisis within the conservative movement about health care. The reasonable conservatives – like David Frum – know that health care reform is necessary, but they can’t yet find a way to justify it in terms of their (poor and inadequate) understanding of Adam Smith. It’s provoking an intellectual crisis. Health care reform would make revitalizing the conservative movement much simpler.

KT
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On the issue of healthcare I don’t think I nor jayack is advocating not working with the Republicans. I won’t speak much for jay because he definitely can speak for himself but I think that what we are talking about is going into the negotiations with eyes wide open. The Mitt Romney Universal Healthcare plan actually illustrates what I am saying. Its the power inherent in passing universal healthcare thats at issue here and which party actually does it. John McCain if you will recall was trying to sell his plan as being close to universal. Bobby Jindal right now is working on a form of “universal” healthcare. But of course THEIR ideas for universal healthcare will be based on THEIR “core” conservative principles. For them I believe it will actually be a coup if they get to take credit for coming up with a universal healthcare plan that is not single payer. But I also believe that the Democrats need to be ready to push back forcefully if the Republicans start bad mouthing universal health care again. And the reason being is exactly what you have already pointed out. THEY KNOW WE NEED UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE! So the question has to be asked if Mitch McConnell starts coming out against the health care plan and calling it socialist or “another big government solution” from the tax and spend liberals, what is his real motivation for demonizing universal health care? And that is what I mean about how that memo could have made a difference back then not necessarily as much in the Congress but in the pr war. I don’t know if you read my question from up thread but I was asking if you could remember what tone the Republicans were taking in public about the proposed Clinton plan. If they were coming out demonizing the plan then to me that could have been a crucial aspect of universal healthcare not being passed. The one thing that I believe helps now is that the majority of people actually WANT universal healthcare and they will demand that somethign gets passed. But if the Republicans manage to demonize universal healthcare again in terms of saying its going to have the effect of raising taxes and driving the country into a depression and of course the great fallback that its going to be “spreading the wealth” they may take a lot of that momentum away. I am all for passing bills in a bipartisan fashion because I think its whats best for the country. It usually means both sides arent all that happy with the bill but they have made compromises for the good of the country. But I also think that if the Republicans are going to block universal health care or try to hijack it to put “free market” conservative principles in it the Dems need to call them out for it and if necessary take the bill to the floor and slug it out with them to get it passed. Unfortunately I have NO confidence that Harry Reid will actually hold their feet to the fire. KT what do you think about the WhiteHouse saying it was all the Democrats fault as to why the auto bailout didnt get done last week? Now I know its pretty predictable that they would do that at this point buut to me Harry Reid gave them that opening to be able to sell it as the Democrats fault

Health care reform is in the Republicans’ interest, because then we can go back to talking about who we’d rather have a beer with. Would Bush II have won if Clinton hadn’t improved the fiscal situation?
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If that were true, Rose, then they should have accomplished it on Bush’s watch, the way Clinton did on his watch.
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I think Kristol’s remark is even more true today. If Obama gets through a health care plan that clears one bar–one bar–that people no longer worry about losing not their job, but their health care coverage, then Democrats will be looking at a couple of decades of popularity. They are gonna fight this, tooth and nail.
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KT–
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Sorry, the VOTERS are already clearly in favor of a government run program. Just as with the other netroots issues, voters’ will is being thwarted by narrower interests in Washington.
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The VOTERS couldn’t have said more clearly that they wanted out of Iraq, for example.
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I’m in the middle of my lengthier than expected netroots primer. TK.

sgw–
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What is true is that in 1994, to say what KT was saying ina different way, the post-Civil rights act effects had not worked their way entirely through the Congress, especially the Senate.
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Back then there were indeed more moderate republicans. Among Newt’s goals was the marginalization of those moderate republicans. This was also the impact, if not the goal of the post 1990 census gerrymanders, with safe ethnic seats exchanged for safe republican seats.
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rose83
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I agree with everything you said except one thing and thats the reason why the Republicans and conservatives are struggling with the issue of universal healthcare. To me I think their biggest roadblock is that they are not just trying to find a solution. They are trying to find a solution that fits into their philosophy. So they are basically discarding any idea, even if it has the potential to work, if it involves having to spend more money or if it invovles having to regulate the health care industry more heavily, or if it involves creating a single payer set up which would come across like socialized health care (basically because it is). When you shut down any solutions to the problem of healthcare that are liberal or progressive solutions you aren’t left with much to work with and that will continue to hurt them in their quest to try to come up with an alternative to the Dems.
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To that end Mike Scherer had a post up the other day about Huckabees new book. I noticed that a lot of people seemed to only read the excerpts that Scherer posted instead of clicking on his link to go to his actual story that had a lot more passages from the book. Well one of the things that Huckabee was spot on about was how the Republican party puts their candidates through an unrealistic purity test. The particular thing he was chaffing about was how they demonized him for raising taxes when in point of fact there are times when you HAVE to raise taxes in the interest of the public good. They didn’t care that when he raised taxes he helped to get his budget under control. All they cared about is that he raised taxes and that was enough for them to shun him because of it. I think that tenet works across the board for the Republicans. If a Republican comes up with a solution that isn’t conservative in nature he doesn’t get credit for being innovative in the Republican party, instead he gets marginalized for being a RINO. And thats why intellectuals were marginalized so much this year by the Repubs

One more thing, Rose. I think you underestimate the degree to which most republicans despise the Social Security program. They really do see it as socialism, as fundamentally at variance with American principles, and to be eradicated. They don’t, even after all these years, recognize how successful it is, how much it has helped families deal with their parents’ old age, and allowed people independence from their children.
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They don’t see that. Really. There’s no other explanation for Bush trying, one more time, to eliminate it. There’s no other reason for the constant lies about it being insolvent.

By the way if I am silent for awhile its because I am watching Meet the Press and Joe Droopy Dog Lieberman is scheduled to be on. So I might be furiously typing away if he gets on the show and laughs at the Dems AGAIN. Just giving notice

yeah, sgw. I think that’s fair. They’re looking for a health care system that they can label “free market.”
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Part of the problem in finding common ground is that the two parties are on opposite sides of the problem. Republicans see it as a cost problem, and want to stop people using so much health care. Democrats see it as a coverage problem, that people aren’t signing up who should, and that people who need and want to sign up can’t.
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(This assumes honest dealing, of course.)
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The lesson of Europe is that there is no market solution. Just as there is no market solution to any number of infrastructure needs, like public roads, public transit, and, frankly, telecommunications.

jayack
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Dont forget to throw Medicare in that discussion too. Now Medicare does have some boondoggles in it like the Medication component but if you ask anybody who is on Medicare they will tell you if you try to take it away from them then you will be putting your life in mortal danger! This is the same program that Ronald Reagan the contemporary Republican Messiah said would bring on the end of our country as we know it. It was hilarious thinking back to Reagans words about Medicare 20+ years ago contrasted with how hard McCain pushed back on ANY allegation that he would be cutting back on Medicare services.

I really think that one very powerful thing health care reform has going for it right now is that financial crisis. There is the sense that the whole public/private universe is being radically rearranged and one side effect of that is to lift some of the taboos that inhibited tinkering with the health care system. It’s like convincing a girl that the world is ending tomorrow: no guarantees, but it puts you in a favorable position to score.

Found this frontline documentary online and indeed it reinforces the notion that a free market solution to healthcare reform either doesn’t exist or hasn’t been thought of yet.
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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/video/flv/generic.html?s=frol02p101&continuous=1

Tom Brokaw showed Liberman at the RNC, not saying Obama defunded the troops but that Obama is a great orator but not the right choice as an example of him attacking Obama. Unbelievable.

To me I think their biggest roadblock is that they are not just trying to find a solution. They are trying to find a solution that fits into their philosophy. So they are basically discarding any idea, even if it has the potential to work, if it involves having to spend more money or if it involves having to regulate the health care industry more heavily, or if it involves creating a single payer set up which would come across like socialized health care (basically because it is).
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sg, well said.
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If that were true, Rose, then they should have accomplished it on Bush’s watch, the way Clinton did on his watch.
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jayackroyd, I think I was a little unclear. They don’t want to fix things. They want to complain, and distract people with irrelevant culture wars. That’s difficult to do if everyone’s obsessed with finding affordable health care for their families. So the dream scenario for Republicans is for the Democrats to introduce universal health care, so then the Republicans can complain about the details – and of course there will be problems – without having to propose their own solutions. Also, the belief in the power of inertia (I know that make no sense in terms of physics) is a key factor. Voters were never that worried Bush II would eliminate Social Security – it seems unimaginable. And they’re kind of right: Bush II had little success on Social Security. I’m not saying there’s no danger of Social Security being dismantled, just that it would be very difficult. If they actually succeeded in eliminating it the party would completely collapse. Similarly if there were a real universal health care policy, dismantling it would seem unimaginable.
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The Republicans need health care fixed so they can talk about meaningless things again, and they can’t fix it themselves because a. they don’t know how (for the reasons SG outlined) and b. they wouldn’t be able to complain about it.
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And now I should really start focusing on my looming deadlines..

Lieberman just confirmed again that Harry Reid did NOT punish him AND he said Harry Reid asked him to give up the subcomittee chairmanship in order to give it to an incoming freshman senator NOT to punish him and he went as far as to say and I quote “people may have voted for it THINKING some what differently and thats ok” For those tuning in at home he is DIRECTLY refuting Harry Reid’s characterization of what went down. Oh AND he sold Obama out and quoted Harry Reid as saying Obama called him and said Reid must do “Whatever it takes” to keep Lieberman in the caucus. Excuse me while i go throw up

KT here–

SG and Jayack: (#283 and #289): Hoo-boy, you guys are asking a lot of me on a Sunday morning when I was out late on a Saturday night.

First of all, let me say that everything I have said earlier on this thread comes with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. None of this was obvious to me when I was covering this back then, but I’ve really spent a lot of time thinking about it since.

What might have worked in 1994? Joe Klein thinks the Chafee idea–basically an individual mandate–could have passed. I’m not sure. (Chafee, for those of you who don’t remember him, was a moderate Republican from Rhode Island, a passionate believer in the need for universal health care, who was the father of Lincoln Chafee.) In the political climate that prevailed back then, I think that a more incremental solution, that wouldn’t have required people in employer plans to give up what they had, would have had a better chance.
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In today’s environment, where the problem is worse and people who have been dealing with insurance company bureaucracies aren’t so afraid of government ones any more, I think there is the potential for building the political will for a more radical solution (though not as radical as the one HRC proposed back then). In part, that is because employers themselves are more likely to support it than they were back then. (See the leading role that companies like Safeway are now playing in the drive for reform, as well as the fact that a couple of Republican governors have tried to lead the way.) But it will require working through things carefully and deliberately, building political support and making allies as you go.
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I also worry that, in this economy, the resources may not be there to do it as quickly as I would like to see. Obama said he would pay for his plan by rolling back the Bush tax cuts. In today’s papers, we are seeing talk that he would instead let them expire in a few years.

Who knew Newt Gingrich had a gay half sister?
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http://thinkprogress.org/2008/11/23/gingrich-sister-reacts/

I put up the primer I promised.
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http://kroydblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/netroots-primer-part-1.html
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I realized from something 53 said yesterday that not everybody knows what the netroots thinks it is. Sounds borg-like, but it’s more like an anthill.

Netroots primer
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Something 53 said yesterday made me realize that “netroots” may not be a well defined term for many people.

KT here–

SG:

This from 1996:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/1996/11/outspoken.html

To me I think their biggest roadblock is that they are not just trying to find a solution. They are trying to find a solution that fits into their philosophy. More explicitly, they are trying to find a model that makes money for their friends. One of the most striking moments in Sicko was a tape of a Nixon adviser selling Nixon on HMOs – Kaiser Permanente. The sell was that it wasn’t about health care, it was about profits, and Nixon said: “well then you betcha.”
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Nothing has changed. And I think rose is completely wrong in arguing that repubs want health care fixed and off the table so they can go back to the culture issues. The core point is that an actual, functional universal health care system in this country proves that government programs work. And the idea that government programs can actually work to better the lives of actual people is antithetical to the core message of the current incarnation of the national GOP. Remember, they want to drown the government in a bathtub. When Ponnuru and friends say that the republican party must prevent passage to prevent their permanent slide into the minority, they are not kidding. And they are not kidding because they are absolutely right.
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Nothing has changed. Someone will bring up NCLB as Bush enlarging government, but he didn’t fund it! A more rational interpretation of NCLB is that Bush wanted to harm public education and increase support for vouchers. Someone will bring up the prescription drug benefit. But that program was designed to make more money for big pharma. Just as the HMOs were designed to make money.

what wvng said.
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But, KT is right that there did exist republicans, like Chafee who were concerned about good public policy. Those guys have been marginalized, and then expunged.
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Now it’s just about crony capitalism. And exploit fear and racism to attain power. That’s it.
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This is not a formula for political success, my friends.

Hey KT. Late last night I posted this:
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btw, in case KT checks in after her exciting night out, I just heard from Suzie in MD. She hopes to make it to the inauguration, and wondered about a Swampland get together. I told her that KT suggested a Swamplander get together at a little French restaurant around the corner from her office and across the street from Ford’s Theater. Seems they have a wine bar upstairs. KT didn’t say when that might happen. So, hey, KT, is it still on? 4 million extra people in town might make any getting togethers rather difficult but still worth a try.

what jay said:
Now it’s just about crony capitalism. And exploit fear and racism to attain power. That’s it.
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Yep, that’s it. And also about sticking sharp sticks into the eyes of anyone who disagrees with them. That’s why Palin is such a hit. John Deans’s book Conservatives without Conscience should be required reading for anyone who seeks to understand the mindset of the party.
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/07/john-dean-and-authoritarian-cultism_23.html

And I think rose is completely wrong in arguing that repubs want health care fixed and off the table so they can go back to the culture issues. The core point is that an actual, functional universal health care system in this country proves that government programs work.
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Social Security works. The NIH works. And aren’t we all grateful for bank deposit insurance? That program works. How many times do progressives need to prove that government programs can work? They already work! Once a real universal health care plan is finally introduced, there will be just one more example of a government program that works. Somehow I doubt that will finally end the Republican obsession with the inability of government to manage anything productively (except civil liberties of course).

KT here–

Jayack: That is unfair to say it is just about crony capitalism, or to suggest that the Republicans–even today–operate as a monolith who care about nothing but destroying the Democratic party. They are a party very much in search of its soul, and struggling to figure out a way forward. And there are Republican leaders today–especially governors, like Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger–who are actually leading the way in GETTING IT DONE. To demonize and label them all (or to suggest that stupid Kristol memo was a master plan for an entire party) is to give up the opportunity for the kind of consensus building that is going to be crucial to making health care reform happen.

KT here–

Wvng:

As for the Swampland Inaugural Brawl, I’m still up for it. Late afternoonish makes the most sense to me. I’m going to scout out the little French restaurant and make sure they don’t have anything else going on, and then I’ll set a time.

rose, I don’t disagree with what you said. There are lots of government programs that work. But for some reason many many Americans don’t think so, which is why the “no new taxes” mantra works so well here “cause what did the government ever do for me anyway.” I know it makes no sense, but that is in part because the repub message machine is so effective and efficient. Remember a few years ago in Britain when a conservative (don’t remember who) ran on lowering taxes. He was crushed, precisely because the Brits understand the benefits their taxes deliver to them. The same would be true in almost every other first world nation. Except ours. I hope the skilled orator about to enter the White House will help our citizens develop a more mature, adult understanding of these issues. I also hope the msm will stop playing stenographer and stop simply transmitting RW distortions that poison honest dialogue.
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I also want a pony.

KT-
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Look at the delegation today. I notice you only mention governors.
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I defy you to point to one accomplishment of this administration that was in the public interest. Other than ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan.
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Even the AIDS funding came with a no condoms string attached.
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Also, you’re framing my argument needlessly pejoratively. Kristol DID write a memo. A number of republican operatives did indeed carry out a campaign to cut off the proposal at its knees, demonizing the party as a party of socialists in the interests of the midterm 1994.
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I never said the republican party is a monolith. It’s fracturing before our eyes.
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As for consensus-building and compromise and bipartisanship, I’ve been told by a reliable source that these are synonyms for date-rape.
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On the brawl, I’ll let you know whether the atriots thing comes off.

KT here–

Jayack: I think the governors are more relevant to the future of the GOP than the House and Senate Republicans. That is, if the Republicans are smart.

And do you want a crony capitalism list? It starts with Blackwater and Haliburton, extends to AIG, and has lots and lots in between.
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I grew up republican. I worked on a republican us senate campaign. The party has been destroyed by incompetence, graft and greed.

KT: And there are Republican leaders today–especially governors, like Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger–who are actually leading the way in GETTING IT DONE. To demonize and label them all (or to suggest that stupid Kristol memo was a master plan for an entire party) is to give up the opportunity for the kind of consensus building that is going to be crucial to making health care reform happen.
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Absolutely true. If the pragmatic wing of the repub party as reflected in some of their governors became the model for the national party, many things would be possible.
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As for “making health care reform happen”, if the debate is on “care” instead of “insurance” we will already be half way there. Another striking thing about Sicko (yeah, I keep bringing it up) was the extent to which each of the countries profiled focused on care. As exemplified by the American ex-pat in a Parisian restaurant who described enrolling in the French system. Had to fill out enrollment forms (of course), and he swallowed hard when he came to the preconditions part. Turned out that in France, they wanted to know about preconditions so they could decide on the best way to deliver care.

Sure, because governors have to, well, govern. They’re constrained by laws requiring them to balance budgets. But I do not see how the republican party is going to be reconstituted by blue state governors.
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I don’t see how a rising young politician like, say, Chafee would choose to be republican. It’s going to be a death knell. Did you not see their unfavorables are STILL rising? I’ve never seen that before, post presidential election.
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Even on the governor’s side, Brian Schweitzer would probably have been a republican in 1990. I honestly think the party may be finished, that Romney/Bloomberg/Arnold may start a third party.

KT, if the Republicans are smart? Gallup: Palin Tops The GOP’s Dream Ticket.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/23/9403/7514/747/665398

KT here–

Jayack: I don’t see the relevance of Blackwater et al to health care reform. And the Dems have had a few problems with that in the past, which is one of the reasons they got turned out in 1994. (Rosty, Jim Wright, House Bank…) Parties get smacked for this by the voters. It has happened again and again. Afterward, they correct course. To suggest that all of this is static is simply wrong. As is the suggestion that the GOP has been “destroyed.” Parties remake themselves constantly in our system.

blackwater is relevant to the crony capitalism remark.

KT here–

wvng: That kind of poll means nothing at this point, which I’m sure you realize. Maybe they will find a way out of the wilderness; maybe they won’t. But I’m betting that, eventually, they will.

Anyway, I need to go run errands. Signing off.

Speaking of Palin, I was devastated not to see Tina Fey and a Thanksgiving turkey on SNL last night. That is a skit that will have to live in my mind (surprisingly easy and satisfying to imagine, however).

I think everybody is partly right. There are some GOP govs out there who are interested in health care. I find no sincerity in the GOP congressional caucus. I don’t see much of it changing either. The party, especially the house is basically a southern racially xenophobic lot.
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Those members who got voted in in the Appalachians and the Ozarks along with much higher votes for McCain than even Bush received have the luxury of peeing on their constituents economic interests. The only thing they need do is oppose Obama and they are safely ensconced in their seats.

KT
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Do you think Bill Kristol played a major role in Sarah Palin being selected as the VP pick for John McCain. I am asking that because if you think he did (and I am SURE he did), that shows that this man has the power to help control potentially who might be the second most powerful person in the world and in 4 or 8 years had the potential to move up to the top spot. And while it sounds “conspiracy theoryish” at first blush, I just really don’t think you are even considering the possiblilty that Kristol’s memo made a difference. Kritol and guys like him were the drum bangers for the war in Iraq and are currently the drum bangers for war with Iran. They in point of fact DO wield tremendous sway in the Republican party. Thats not to say they control every republican but they don’t necesarily have to. Lets say Kristol influenced as few as 10 Republicans with his memo. Then those 10 Republicans are convinced that he is right and that passage of universal healthcare will destroy the core principles of the republican party. Are you really THAT sure that those Republicans wouldn’t fight tooth and nail to prevent it from ever happening? I just don’t see how you can be that sure. Again it reminds me of Ronald Reagan’s over the top rhetoric about Medicare. Why exactly do you think HE feared Medicare so much? The truth is as you look around the Republicans have been able to successfully convince a large swath of America that the government is horrible at prividing services for Americans. This inspite of the fact that we have medicare and medicaid as well as Social Security that all serve the public good, are in fact BIG GOVERNMENT, and that the overwhelming majority of people agree with. How exactly do the Republicans pull that slight of hand and more importantly WHY are they still pulling it? You don’t think that MAYBE its because if people actually took their blinders off and saw that big government solutions could help solve a lot of the country’s problems that the Republican party would go belly up???
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To put it in the most stark terms how about this
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1. The Republicans are the party of small government
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2. Universal Health Care will be a big government solution
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3. People will LOVE Universal Health Care
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4. The Republican party will be absolete.
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Are we really to believe that they would hasten their slide into irrelevance? I am sorry but I am not buying it. Now I will reiterate what I said earlier that it will be great if the Congress comes up with a bipartisan bill for Universal Health Care and I endorse the Dems reaching across the aisle to get it done. But I am more than skeptical about the Republicans supporting such a bill and I will predict right now that in fact Mitch McConnell and John Boehner will not support a Universal Health Care bill even if some of the rank and file Republicans will.

KT, I hope they will because we need a robust two party system. But my fear is that they will through some innovative new twist on their fear and division strategy. My hope is that Obama will be the President that people hope he will be, and the no-nothings will see that having a smart, competent guy as our national leader is a good thing.
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“A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll found that 75 percent of Americans think Obama will be a good, even great president, far more than the 53 percent who voted for him. Those citizens may be responding in part to Obama’s election-night victory speech quoting Abraham Lincoln: “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break the bonds of our affection.” ”
http://www.newsweek.com/id/170188

jay: How can you possibly make such a pronouncement that the Republican Party is dead? It’s such an outrageous statement, I’m rather astonished if you are saying it with sincerity.
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You know, I’m not a Republican, and certainly the Republican Party right now has a dearth of leaders, but some of their central tenets appeal to people. How can you deny that? Back in 94, the Contract with America was a huge deal, filled with ideas that energized a large swath of people (even if many of those ideas were anathema to progressives). The pendulum swung that way then and now the pendulum is swinging our way.
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A party is only as good as the people, especially the leaders, in it. As KT points out, the Dems have not been free of some stinkers (Rostenkowski then, William Jefferson and his ilk now). We just happen to have a really great guy right now in Obama. I’m rooting for him; the stakes are such that I will even spill a little blood for him, but there is no guarantee of success. And who knows, four years down the line, the Repubs could come up with their own Obama who have a bit of competence and ability of his own. Don’t count them out. It would be a huge mistake.

what sgw said (typos intact ): “The truth is as you look around the Republicans have been able to successfully convince a large swath of America that the government is horrible at prividing services for Americans. This inspite of the fact that we have medicare and medicaid as well as Social Security that all serve the public good, are in fact BIG GOVERNMENT, and that the overwhelming majority of people agree with. How exactly do the Republicans pull that slight of hand and more importantly WHY are they still pulling it? You don’t think that MAYBE its because if people actually took their blinders off and saw that big government solutions could help solve a lot of the country’s problems that the Republican party would go belly up???”

sgw: Based on your logic, there is only one path for the Republicans: claim some ownership of the healthcare issue and take equal credit for it. Obama’s recent personnel choices signal a strong move towards real healthcare reform. If the Lieberman and McCain dog-and-pony show this past week is to get those extra votes to prevent a play by Repubs to stop it, then the Repubs really have no choice. Join in or be left out in the cold.

And just wtf? After 2 decades of poisonous attacks, divisive, destructive, dishonest, it’s up to us to build a bridge? It’s hat in hand, and “whatever you want sir” time.
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Do you see John Kyl doing that? Imhofe? They’re in a death spiral. All they have left is Collins Snowe and Specter. It’s time for Reid to offer them each one key committee, to the one who is first to jump.
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You’re equating Rostenkowski and Wright with the last eight years? That just knocks Cunningham and Young off the list. there’s lots more there. And the court cases haven’t started yet wrt the administration.
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We’ve just seen two consecutive wave elections, which is unique in my recollection. We’re looking at a third set of gains in the Senate in 2010. Then there’s the census, and the gerrymanders are at risk.
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We’re looking at a lame duck period that will be the worst since Hoover’s. People are starting to mutter about hurrying the thing up already.
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It’s true that we haven’t had a new party since the Republicans were formed. And it’s true the institutional barriers are greater now. But the most successful Republicans out there are far to the left of the Republican mainstream. And the party membership is bleeding moderates, more every year.
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Be interested to hear what Mike M thinks.

The Post does good today. 5 Myths About Our Ailing Health-Care System – washingtonpost.com
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But it is on page B03, not A1 where it belongs. So, buried, just like their pre-war articles casting doubt on the case for war.

nibbly
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I guess you are sure that Dems will win BOTH the recount in MN and the runoff in GA. I am not nearly as assured of that. And Mitch McConnell has already said the Senate Republicans will work in unison to block any legislation they don’t think is done “from the center” which really means “with our blessing”. So they actually DO have another option. They can label Universal Health Care as a worthy goal but something “just too expensive” for these perilous economic times. There are so many ways they can demonize universal health care and you can best believe they will do it. The problem nibbly is that there IS NO conservative values that can be incorporated into universal health care. UHC is just about as close to the antithesis of conservative thought as you can possibly get. And so for them to endorse it will be to admit that their whole small government platform is just a bunch of bullsh!t. I personally don’t see that happening. Mind you I will allow for a few defections but the Republican party by and in large will oppose UHC whenever it comes to the floor IMHO

One point that the WaPost American health care myths article entirely missed: a major component of cost is the complexity of interactions between health care providers and insurance companies. Sara Robinson wrote a fascinating article Mythbusting Canadian Health Care in which she said:
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Doctors in Canada do make less than their US counterparts. But they also have lower overhead, and usually much better working conditions. A few reasons for this:
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First, as noted, they don’t have to charge higher fees to cover the salary of a full-time staffer to deal with over a hundred different insurers, all of whom are bent on denying care whenever possible. In fact, most Canadian doctors get by quite nicely with just one assistant, who cheerfully handles the phones, mail, scheduling, patient reception, stocking, filing, and billing all by herself in the course of a standard workday.
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Second, they don’t have to spend several hours every day on the phone cajoling insurance company bean counters into doing the right thing by their patients. My doctor in California worked a 70-hour week: 35 hours seeing patients, and another 35 hours on the phone arguing with insurance companies. My Canadian doctor, on the other hand, works a 35-hour week, period. She files her invoices online, and the vast majority are simply paid — quietly, quickly, and without hassle. There is no runaround. There are no fights. Appointments aren’t interrupted by vexing phone calls. Care is seldom denied (because everybody knows the rules). She gets her checks on time, sees her patients on schedule, takes Thursdays off, and gets home in time for dinner.
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One unsurprising side effect of all this is that the doctors I see here are, to a person, more focused, more relaxed, more generous with their time, more up-to-date in their specialties, and overall much less distracted from the real work of doctoring. You don’t realize how much stress the American doctor-insurer fights put on the day-to-day quality of care until you see doctors who don’t operate under that stress, because they never have to fight those battles at all. Amazingly: they seem to enjoy their jobs.

jay: How can you possibly make such a pronouncement that the Republican Party is dead? It’s such an outrageous statement, I’m rather astonished if you are saying it with sincerity.
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I am being hyperbolic, yes. But look at their situation. Their entire program, small government, individual liberty, fiscal responsibility has all been exposed as a lie. They’re barely more than a regional party at this point, and that status rests on an electoral base that is dying off. The gerrymandering that gave them safe seats in the House leaves them vulnerable to primaries from the right, so they can’t move to the center.
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Look what they put their presidential candidate through? The one guy who could plausibly distance himself from the party id, and what did they do? They made him spend the entire campaign establishing his bona fides for that party id.
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One reason he was so incoherent is there is no coherent republican position at this point.
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They have no bench, and Sarah effin’ Palin is soaking up the oxygen.
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If it reconstitutes, it will be around the moneyed interests who had always run the party which, as KT said, would indeed be Arnold and Romney. But the base has no love for those guys. I don’t see a path out. I really don’t.
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Okay, examples of “big government” being able to actually run something well that benefits the public:
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1. Military
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2. Medicare and Medicaid
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3. Social Security (isn’t this a tad problematic in terms of being underfunded, etc.?)
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4. Justice Department (when it is NOT used as a political tool as in the past 4, if not 8, years)
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What say ye on this list? What would you add to it? I ask because over Thanksgiving break I’ll see some relatives who are members of the woe-is-us brand of the Billfold Party–not social conservatives, really, but economic conservatives who argue that liberal big gov’t is evil. I’d like some talking points, is what I’m saying.

As with health care. Their choices are obstruct, or give the Dems the equivalent of another Social Security win. If they obstruct, they lose more seats in 2010, because that’s all the race will be about if they do. If they fold, then they’ll have lost the long-term battle that Kristol’s memo was about.

No, I’m not sure they will win both those seats at all; that’s why Obama was willing to keep Lieberman while refusing to take his phone calls. My guess was that was his concession for McCain and Graham too.
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As far as the small government platform — come on, sgw, the Repubs will spin it however they want. Creating Homeland Security was not exactly small government. Doubling the debt was not exactly fiscally conservative either. McConnell can squawk all he wants, but if he sees that he doesn’t have the votes and then looks at the polling and it’s popular, he’ll act accordingly. They’re politicians, ffs.

Now this is really something. The NRSC and Freedom’s Watch are now airing ads in the Georgia Senate runoff accusing Democratic candidate Jim Martin of being against cracking down on people who abuse and prey on children.
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The problem: Martin’s own daughter was abducted when she was eight years old. Fortunately, she was returned safely. When asked for comment by Election Central, the NRSC declined to comment on this little wrinkle in the story.
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http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/11/national_gop_groups_accuse_cri.php
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Max Cleland Part Deux

jay: I will only remind you that there was only 6 years between Nixon and Reagan. Don’t count them out.

And I use the phrase “run something well” relatively speaking (i.e., not a disaster like Hillary’s health care proposal in the ’90s).

nibbly, their demographic problem is the big issue. How do you appeal to african-american, latino, and asian populations that are growing without ticking off your xenophobic base?
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They haven’t answered that one yet. The problem will get worse each election. They need to figure out how to not be a southern white protestant married man party. That is not an effective electoral strategy nationwide.

Shakespeare–
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Focus on infrastructure things. Point out that the internet was a government project. That satellites were necessarily a government project. Highways. Postal service. Public education. Point out that universal health care is cheaper, and better, in Europe, and that it encourages small business formation.
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SS is not underfunded, at all. SS is fine. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.
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And ask them which party has done a better job in this regard. Bush raised spending more than Clinton, and destroyed a surplus in the process.
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SHAKES, AN EXCELLENT PROJECT!!!!!! Here are a few more, with the proviso that it is true only under democratic leadership and with adequate funding:
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FEMA
Infrastructure – of the type Obama seeks to fund in his stimulus package – roads, bridges, water and sewer
Scientific research generally
Biomedical research
CDC
The VA medical system actually has (well, had) a very good rep for medical information systems that dramatically reduced medical errors (again, something Obama is proposign to be a component of any health care reform)
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Your turn – and comments please.

Not that I want to get sgw started again, but Lieberman refuses to apologize: ‘You can take from the word “regret” what you will.’
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My work is done.

trifecta: You do it by sticking Michael Steele out there, by sticking Mel Martinez out there, and you change your stance on immigration without admitting that you are changing it. You find someone like Bush, who speaks Spanish and claims to offer “compassionate conservatism” and panders to the demographic they are seeking, if it allows them to cater to the power base — the social conservatives and fiscal conservatives.
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The recent Prop 8 vote will serve as a template: divide and conquer. Religious blacks and latinos vs. the gays and social liberals.
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Frankly, I don’t know the full answer myself. Will they stick Bobby Jindal out there to broaden their ethnic tent? Maybe. They have 4 years to dig someone up.

Al Gore on Fareed Zakaria right now. CNN. Always a great show.

i don’t see it working nibbly. Blacks know who the Limbaugh crowd is. Many are culturally conservative, yet they will be unreachable until Limbaugh is not singing “Puff the Magic Negro” from coast to coast.

Trifecta: The NRSC and Freedom’s Watch are now airing ads in the Georgia Senate runoff accusing Democratic candidate Jim Martin of being against cracking down on people who abuse and prey on children. Classic Rove. I remember that one of the few instances where Rove’s fingerprints could actually be found on a smear were of a southern Supreme Court Justice whose special focus was child abuse – and the Rove whisper campaign, started at law schools in the state, was that he was a serial child abuser.
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This is who they are. As jay said: And just wtf? After 2 decades of poisonous attacks, divisive, destructive, dishonest, it’s up to us to build a bridge? It’s hat in hand, and “whatever you want sir” time.
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Remember that repugs get points among their base for smearing Dems. It is sport. Their base has been raised on “feminazis” and “treehuggers” and “liberals” used as a pejorative. That is why they rallied so strongly to Palin.
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It is in their DNA.

trifecta: You are counting the suburban and ex-burban vote too much. They swing, and they will continue to swing. Four years can take a candidate from 90% approval rating to 26%; things change quickly. Obama is full of promise, but if he can’t deliver, the pendulum swings the other direction.

Don’t give Arnie so much credit. The California Republican Party is a shambles — a marginalized group of extremist ideologues who were finally kicked to the curb in the 1990′s when they went one too far with their racism and radical social extremism. Arnie was elected in the recall based solely on his celebrity, and he brought in a cadre of bushies that first year and the first thing he did was start pushing through a series of 4 rightwing initiatives for the rightwing ideologues — Read about them here in the Los Angeles Times.
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Cali is in many ways the leading edge of population trends in the US; Latinos comprise almost 40% of the population. and the Asian population exceeds 10%, as does the African-American population. Arnie finally learned his lesson and sent the bushies packing, but only out of his need to raise his approval ratings, which he did by collaborating with the Dem majority.
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Yes, he did attempt to expand health care for children ONLY, a far cry from universal health coverage. But that appears to be dead now that arnie, who is required to balance the state budget, is faced with retaining the expanded health care coverage or revoking the tax cuts he extended to yacht owners and others in 2007.
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Now he proposes to balance the budget like this:

Eliminating services in Medi-Cal, including adult dental, chiropractic, speech therapy, podiatric, psychology, and optical.
Cutting eligibility for parents in Medi-Cal from 100% of poverty to 72%.
Cutting parents from Medi-Cal who are working more than 100 hours.
Eliminating full scope Medi-Cal for lawfully present immigrants in California who do not qualify for federal Medicaid.
Shifting 10% of the funds in the Safety Net Care Pool away from public hospitals.
Eliminating the Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI) and the California Food Assistance Program (CFAP).
Making cuts to CalWORKS and SSI/SSP.
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God forbid that those yacht owners have to pay sales tax.

jay: I will only remind you that there was only 6 years between Nixon and Reagan. Don’t count them out.
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Nixon was a reasonably competent, essentially centrist president. He’d be a liberal today. The trouble is that his campaign strategies were toxic, and they are what is destroying the party.
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Rove knew this. That’s why he wanted immigration reform. McCain knew this; that’s why he dissed the confederate flag. There is a sorceror’s apprentice thing going on here.
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The party was founded over slavery. It may end over it.

wvng
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Look up thread, I was live blogging Lieberman on MTP and he was classic as usual. The only thing about him not offering an apology to me is that Rachel Maddow should be taking Sen Evan Bayh to task for saying that the only way Lieberman could keep his gavel would be if he apologized for what he did. I would send her a million emails about that contradiction but I can’t seem to find her email address online. Oh well
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But that part of the interview was secondary to Lieberman again asserting that Harry Reid did NOTHING to him AND he basically thumbed his nose at the Senate Democrats by responding with this nugget to Brokaw
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“people may have voted for it THINKING some what differently and thats ok”
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Priceless!

kathy
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NFL is on but feel free to recap Fareed for us

James
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Didn’t the governator just go to Washington with his hand out also? Some how I don’t think we should be looking to him for any solutions

sgw, Maddow’s email: rachel@msnbc.com. It’s on her home page at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/
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I did see you note up thread, but it seemed important to both rile you again and let the folks here know that the could see him in all his not apologizing glory.

jay: I can’t believe you just turned into a Nixon apologist in order to make your argument work. lol.
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The Repubs only need one person who can galvanize the center while still appealing to the base. It almost doesn’t matter if the rest of the party is a mess. They just need a charismatic leader that the rest can rally around. That’s what Reagan was. That’s what Obama is. We are lucky to have him this year. Otherwise, McCain would be President.

sg,
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Yep, he did. I cannot understand, or maybe I do, why DC Villagers look to Arnie as the hope of the Republican Party. I think that social pressure forbids them to look upon the Republicans as a failed party, because Republicans are too imbedded in DC culture. It’s socially unacceptable to think the Republican Party is catastrophically corrupt, so they buy into the complete fantasy that someone like Arnold effin’ Schwartzenegger is going to lead the Republicans out of the wilderness.
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That’s how completely out of touch with the real world that Karen and her DC denizens are.
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This is incredible. The Coleman campaign is now challenging ballots that are perfectly bubbled in but where the voter voted for McCain as president and Franken as Senator. Yeah the Democrats are JUST as bad as the Republicans. RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/11/23/11419/809/708/665429

jayackroyd Says:
“.. one accomplishment of this administration that was in the public interest. Other than ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan. ..”

I presented that argument in a conversation some months ago. THE response came fast: Would it be an accomplishment to oust any individual or any regime that funds, accommodates, provide succor and comfort to, or otherwise pals around with murderous, terror-spewing groups like the KKK or Aryan brotherhood?
—
wvng Says:
” .. “A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll found that 75 percent of Americans think Obama will be a good, even great president .. “
Who is afraid of Hillary Clinton?
ObamaLand is not. We mounted a pretty admirable effort to cut her vaunted inevitability in 2008 to a worthless size. She said that our flagbearer is unelectable. So bring her on in 2012 or 2016 … or 2044.
[Right now those limelight-seeking Clintons need BO more than he needs them.]

Should Obama appoint Hillary to ANY cabinet position, this voter will withdraw his political support and that percentage of goodwill will decrease by the power of one. The activist machete in the CHANGE movement will be out again. Scorned, we will be in search for a raison d’etre and a new flag-bearer.

And the race will be on to oust the movement’s double-crossing BO and his Hillary/Bill in 2012.

I am not a Nixon apologist. He would be a liberal today. Yes, he would be an evil paranoid liberal. But he would be more comfortable in the democratic party. Look at his domestic agenda.

If the economy recovers and enough people self-identify as confident and doing well, the Republican party will have a shot at revival. Republicanism is about consolidating the haves against the have-nots. Right now, the have-nots are a mighty Army, with growing ranks. Things change, however. I see no reason to believe that human nature will irrevocably shift when a new generation of have-nots successfully complete the journey of upward mobility. Obama is not going to succeed at what God has not.

nibbly
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There is one thing wrong with your premiss. The country today is not the country that Reagan had. He could run on lowering taxes because the top tax rate was in the 70s when he was campaigning for office. He could marginalize minorities because they weren’t needed in order to win a national election. And lets be honest here, Jimmy Carter was low hanging fruit. A card board cut out would have smashed Jimmy Carter in 1980.
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You can go get a movie star to run for the Republican party right now and they will get smashed because their policies don’t work anymore. Ronald Reagan had the power of the right policies at least in theory to go along with his movie star charisma. Now after Obama passes Universal Health Care you explain to me how the Republicans will ever be able to run against “big government” again. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying they will NEVER be relevant again in a presidential race. But what I will say is it will have to be more because a Democrat phucks up royally than because a Republican has charisma

James in LA
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What I have found is that ANY republican that is pro choice is automatically labelled a moderate by the MSM. They will bend over backwards to sell those cats as the new standard bearers of the Republican party based on nothing they have done of note. The State of California can go bankrupt and there will be people in the Media saying Arnold should be Secretary of Commerce.

sgw: The country today may not be what Reagan inherited, but none of us know what the country will look like 4 years from now either. That’s why you can’t make such pronouncements like, The Republican Party is dead.
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When it comes right down to it, the election is about the choice between two people rather than platforms. Based on platforms, Gore should have won in 2000 (prosperity of the previous 8 years) and Kerry should have won in 2004 (dissatisfaction with an unpopular war). But the deciding votes, the swing votes, don’t vote on platforms like the base does. They vote on the person. That’s what happened this year too. We had a great guy, and theirs was flawed.

trifecta: I’m sorry, are you and danackroyd the same person?
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And two, it doesn’t really matter what Nixon’s domestic policy was. The point is that he was in such disgrace in 74 that the Repub party was decimated. And 6 short years later, even though the rest of the party was still a mess, they were able to rally around a charismatic leader like Reagan and take back control of the executive branch. You count them out at your peril.

Oops, I meant jayackroyd, not danackroyd. lol.

It was fun talking to such smart passionate people, but I gotta go to IKEA now.
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BTW did people see that on This Week, James Baker, the eminence gris of the Repub Party, called for Bush to step down early, echoing both Tom Friedman(that lefty!!) and Gail Collins? Whoa. Nobody is standing up for Bush anymore.

sg,
You are right about that. The Village People are so desperate to hang on to their Republican Party (and bipartisanship!) that competence and rational policy are not requirements that Republicans need to be admired in DC. I don’t know so much about Crist from Florida, maybe you can inform us. I can’t think of a single Republican that is fit to hold public office.

Baker called for Bush to step down? Seriously?

nibbly
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Neither 2000 nor 2004 were a situation where the superior platform was clear cut to the swing voters. Remember that George Bush didnt run as a right wing conservative, he ran as a “compassionate” conservative. He acknowledged that some big government ideas might work. What he never implemented was the money to help those ideas work. I won’t relive the 2000 election because I think we all pretty much know he actually lost that election. In 2004 we were in the middle of a war that was still backed by the great majority of Americans so policy positions by and in large took a back seat although the case could be made again that Kerry actually won Ohio in 2004. And remember, the new Republican meme is that Bush had it all wrong. He shouldn’t have every done ANY spending on NCLB. He should have been small government all the way. And even though McCain campaigned on the notion of across the board spending freeze and vetoeing all bills that have earmarks they say he wasn’t conservative ENOUGH! Thats the direction they are headed in and its going to get ugly. Again I didnt say the Republican party was dead but they are dying and if Universal Health Care gets passed they will officially be put on life support and the only way to revive them will be from Democrats phucking up royally.

Baker also worked behind the scenes, a la Scowcroft, to try to prevent the Iraq War. I have little doubt that Bush I foreign policy realists/pragmatists were delighted to see Obama win. I actually think that pragmatists in the military such as TMCP will also do better without ideological handcuffs binding them.

Neither 2000 nor 2004 were a situation where the superior platform was clear cut to the swing voters. Remember that George Bush didnt run as a right wing conservative, he ran as a “compassionate” conservative. Also remember that the msm refused to substantively challenge the Bush “CC” frame while echoing every smear against Gore and Kerry.

jayackroyd and wvng: thanks for the list. I’d hold off on the VA system, though. My wife worked for them several years ago and found the system hobbled by funding problems AND by how vets get money based on how disabled they are, so lots of vets my wife worked with were completely focused on gaming the system. And recent vets from Iraq and Afghanistan–and Desert Storm–might argue over the effectiveness of the VA. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad we have a VA, but it isn’t my first choice for shoring up an argument in favor of a more powerful federal gov’t.

Remarkable what fear will do to RW sycophants who actually know something. Here’s Ben Stein, fercrissakes, arguing for a very robust stimulus package:
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Stein: We go in for as much Federal stimulus as it takes keep us out of a great depression. That is basic common sense … We need to bail out the auto companies, we need to have a massive stimulus package. This economy is about to fall off a cliff. We need major stimulus.

Shakes, I agree, and put the VA on the list with some trepidation. But so many of governments problems now flow directly from intentional mismanagement from the top, seemingly designed to proove the point that Gov’t doesn’t work.
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But your point that there needs to be a list, and we all need to have it at our fingertips at a moments notice, is a great one. Stop being apologetic about government.

OH MY GAWD! Could ever have imagined this was happening? SCOOP: McCain and Obama Camps Coordinated on Building Staff Rosters for Next Government Starting in July. Wow. Like grownups.
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I am thinking better thoughts about McCain now than I have in quite some time.

The point is that he was in such disgrace in 74 that the Repub party was decimated.
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No, the point is that he was removed from office. The key players in removing him from office included republicans like Howard Baker and William Cohen.
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In this case, the republicans strapped themselves to Bush, as he drove the country over a cliff. If they had cooperated in impeachment hearings in 2005, after the illegal wiretapping came out, then they’d be in the same position.
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You also don’t seem to understand how bellicose the Republicans have become. Nixon went to China without preconditions, routinely negotiated with Brezhnev, with Russian tanks much closer to American soldiers that the Russian island Sarah Palin can see.

To add to the list of big government programs that work I think you guys have over looked an easy one
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The post office

wvng
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Before you start getting happy feelings about McCain remember that this all went down during a point where McCain was saying Obama was “measuring the drapes” to the White House. Just another illustration of how he is a backstabbing asshole

Jay – If Nixon were alive the Republican Party might have different policies, but he set in motion the Republican fear/smear machine, and I can’t see him ever becoming a Democrat.

Ironically, the Republican Party now resembles Nixon in personality more than it resembles the Republicans who helped oust him.

Fox last night ran the first part of a series on Television and the Presidency (It wasn’t bad, but if you didn’t know that they had pasted it together from interviews with deceased characters- Nixon, Salinger, narrated by Theodore White even, you wouldn’t have figured it out from anything Fox told you) There was a piece from the Nixon-Kennedy debate that was right out of the Reagan/Bush talking points playbook – Nixon did concede that some government programs are good (which for him meant they create “growth”) but then he said “[I don't want to see one dollar go to a government program when the people could spend that dollar better than the government]” Didn’t sound very liberal to me (though I think he’d be appalled by the Republicans’ approach to the environment, and a number of other things)

sg: isn’t the post office partially privatized? And didn’t that happen because it wasn’t working well as a 100% government-run entity?

Shakespeare
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Actually I hadn’t heard about it being privatized. But I do know that the mail system is probably the oldest federal system in the country. And I still get stuff in my mail box every day. Of course 90% of the stuff is ads though

KT here–

J,LA argues:

Yes, he did attempt to expand health care for children ONLY, a far cry from universal health coverage.
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And then, predictably, he turns it into an attack on yours truly:
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That’s how completely out of touch with the real world that Karen and her DC denizens are.
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James, Arnie tried to do far, far more than you suggest. Perhaps this will refresh your memory:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1576845,00.html

(Also, please note the praise for his plan in that article from Hillary Clinton.)

KT here–

James, Los Angeles also completely distorts the fate of the plan. Here’s how we wrote about it in real time, as the “underplayed story of the day.”:

http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2008/01/29/underplayed_story_of_the_day_11/

KT here–

So let’s recap the Schwarzenegger plan: It had BOTH an employer mandate AND an individual mandate. Which made it MORE far-reaching than the Obama plan.

A photo essay of the Bush legacy by a kos diarist
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KT
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I think Arnold exemplifies EXACTLY what I talked about earlier in that HE wants to be the one to solve universaal health care in California but he vetoes liberal or progressive plans like a single payer plan.
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http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/1278412.html
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http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/2007/05/why_schwarzeneg_1.html
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http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/09/12/california-health-care-reform-bill-faces-schwarzenegger-veto/
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http://www.seiu399.org/mediacenter/pressreleases/page.jsp?itemID=27910897

KT
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I think Arnold exemplifies EXACTLY what I talked about earlier in that HE wants to be the one to solve universaal health care in California but he vetoes liberal or progressive plans like a single payer plan.
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http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/1278412.html
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http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/2007/05/why_schwarzeneg_1.html

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http://www.seiu399.org/mediacenter/pressreleases/page.jsp?itemID=27910897

sg: isn’t the post office partially privatized? And didn’t that happen because it wasn’t working well as a 100% government-run entity?
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No. There was some claptrap, for a while, about it being supposed to run on a positive revenue basis. But there is no way for that operation to be profitable.
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The NE corridor of Amtrak could be run that way, but that’s also not in the cards-that the NE corridor would be set aside as a separate business.
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We pay a high price for the senate half of the bicameral legislature.
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Hard to say whether it is too high. IMO, it has been, but that’s because I can look back and see what an impediment it has been to progress. If we’d let faction run wild, well, maybe it woulda been like the French Revolution. No way to know.

This is the kind of info I dimly recalled and which made the whole gov’t-run/private corp issue confusing:

The USPS is often mistaken for a government-owned corporation (e.g., Amtrak), but as noted above is legally defined as an “independent establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States,” (39 U.S.C. § 201) as it is wholly owned by the government and controlled by the Presidential appointees and the Postmaster General. As a quasi-governmental agency, it has many special privileges, including sovereign immunity, eminent domain powers, powers to negotiate postal treaties with foreign nations, and an exclusive legal right to deliver first-class and third-class mail. Indeed in 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the USPS was not a government-owned corporation and therefore could not be sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act.[8] The U.S. Supreme Court has also upheld the USPS’s statutory monopoly on access to letterboxes against a First Amendment freedom of speech challenge; it thus remains illegal in the U.S. for anyone other than the employees and agents of the USPS to deliver mailpieces to letterboxes marked “U.S. Mail.”[9]
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(link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service)

KT here–

(WARNING: Old war stories coming your way!!! Hope you guys won’t give up on elderly bloggers…)

One of the things that people were worried about when Newt shut down the govt in 1995 was that they wouldn’t get their mail. Didn’t happen, because it’s not part of the govt in that sense.

SG: The fact that Schwarzenegger wouldn’t sign a single-payer bill at a time of financial crisis for the State of Calif does not convince me that he is not serious about health care reform. None of the national Democratic presidential candidates, other than Dennis Kucinich, put forward a single-payer plan. I think there’s a lot of merit to it, but the political will is not there. Which goes back to my basic point about making health care reform work this time. You can’t get too far in front of where the public is, which is lightyears ahead of where it was in 93-94, but not that far ahead. Umm…I think.

Found this Wikipedia entry, which explains the status of the USPS (and why I was confused, because, well, it’s confusing):
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The Board of Governors of the United States Postal Service sets policy, procedure, and postal rates for services rendered, and has a similar role to a corporate board of directors. Of the eleven members of the Board, nine are appointed by the President and confirmed by the United States Senate (see 39 U.S.C. § 202). The nine appointed members then select the United States Postmaster General, who serves as the board’s tenth member, and who oversees the day to day activities of the service as Chief Executive Officer (see 39 U.S.C. § 202–203). The ten-member board then nominates a Deputy Postmaster General, who acts as Chief Operating Officer, to the eleventh and last remaining open seat.

The USPS is often mistaken for a government-owned corporation (e.g., Amtrak), but as noted above is legally defined as an “independent establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States,” (39 U.S.C. § 201) as it is wholly owned by the government and controlled by the Presidential appointees and the Postmaster General. As a quasi-governmental agency, it has many special privileges, including sovereign immunity, eminent domain powers, powers to negotiate postal treaties with foreign nations, and an exclusive legal right to deliver first-class and third-class mail. Indeed in 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the USPS was not a government-owned corporation and therefore could not be sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The U.S. Supreme Court has also upheld the USPS’s statutory monopoly on access to letterboxes against a First Amendment freedom of speech challenge; it thus remains illegal in the U.S. for anyone other than the employees and agents of the USPS to deliver mailpieces to letterboxes marked “U.S. Mail.”
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service

KT says
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SG: The fact that Schwarzenegger wouldn’t sign a single-payer bill at a time of financial crisis for the State of Calif does not convince me that he is not serious about health care reform.
………………………………………….
But wasn’t HIS health care bill which arguably would have been as or more costly introduced during the SAME financial crisis? Mind you the single payer bill I believe was first introduced BEFORE his health care bill and then reintroduced a couple of months ago and passed in the state Congress before he vetoed it.
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http://www.guaranteedhealthcare.org/legislation/sb-840-kuehl/california-health-insurance-reliability-act
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It strikes me that you can’t have it both ways. If he was serious when he introduced his universal health care bill which ultimately didnt make it through the state house then he was NOT serious when he vetoed a universal health care bill just nine months later.
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For the second time in three years, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday vetoed legislation that would have established a government-run universal health care system.
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Senate Bill 840 by Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, would have set up a single-payer system in which the state would assume the role that private insurance companies now play.
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In his veto message, the governor said he could not support “a bill that places an annual shortfall of over $40 billion to our state’s economy.”
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“According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the bill is estimated to cost $210 billion in its first full year of implementation and cause annual shortfalls of $42 billion,” Schwarzenegger said.
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The veto came nine months after Kuehl, the chair of the Senate Health Committee, and other Democrats joined Republicans in voting against the governor’s health care expansion program, which would have required most employees and employers to contribute to the cost of their health care.

Jonathon Martin at Politico is reporting that Obama hasn’t attended church yet since he won.
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I feel a Vincent Foster in Macy Park flashback getting ready to start soon.

President-elect Barack Obama has yet to attend church services since winning the White House earlier this month, a departure from the example of his two immediate predecessors.
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On the three Sundays since his election, Obama has instead used his free time to get in workouts at a Chicago gym.
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Asked about the president-elect’s decision to not attend church, a transition aide noted that the Obamas valued their faith experience in Chicago but were concerned about the impact their large retinue may have on other parishioners.
….
Please make them stop.

KT here–

SG: We’ll have to disagree on this. And James, LA, will tell you it’s yet another example of why I’m an evil, out-of-touch person.

KT
.
I am not demonizing you. But I do get the impression that you are not open minded about the conversation. I could definitely be wrong but it seems as if because you have already reported on it, you don’t believe there could have been other things at work that you weren’t aware of at the time. I refer back to the Kristol memo which it would seem you had never even heard of until yesterday but has been floating around for quite some time. If you had heard that there was such a memo back in 1993 wouldnt you have investigated it thoroughly before you dismissed it? And now all these years later wouldnt it make sense to at least check into it even though it flies in the face of what you believe the history of this subject to be? Now for all I know you might very well have vetted the memo story since yesterday. But it surely doesn’t come off that way here. And you definitely are not considering the fact that Arnold may have been trying to implement universal health care to put a feather in his own cap and not because he really cares about the issue. The mere fact that he vetoed a bill just a couple months ago that had the backing of his state congress would give anyone pause UNLESS they had already made up their mind about it.

KT here–

SG: My point being, I think single-payer is a good system, which works well in a lot of parts of the world. I personally would not be unhappy to live in that system. Obama is right that if we were designing a system from scratch, that’s what it probably would be. But the political will is not there for it in this country, which is why none of the presidential candidates, other than Kucinich, was willing to endorse it.

I think they refused to endorse it KT not because “the people” aren’t ready for it, but the donor class isn’t ready for it. There is a slight difference. They are right btw. Before Obama set up the internet haul, he would have been dead in the water with the bundler crowd if he went the full monty. I think if you sat down and explained it in a long form debate of several hours to the american people, they would be for it.
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Tis not our system though.

KT
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Then how do you explain the State Assembly of the State of California voting FOR single payer by 12 votes?
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/08/29/state/n193654D41.DTL
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It would seem the will is there for all but ONE guy.

KT: “I think single-payer is a good system, which works well in a lot of parts of the world. I personally would not be unhappy to live in that system. Obama is right that if we were designing a system from scratch, that’s what it probably would be. But the political will is not there for it in this country, which is why none of the presidential candidates, other than Kucinich, was willing to endorse it.”
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trifecta: “I think if you sat down and explained it in a long form debate of several hours to the american people, they would be for it.”
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KT a few weeks ago, way down in a thread – paraphrased “I wish we could have a serious national discussion about health care.”
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The reason we can’t have a serious national discussion on health care, and why there is not the political will for single payer is that, whenever we try, the republicans throw out a bunch of inflamatory frames _”it’s socialism I tell ya, socialism”, “Canadians hate their system”, they run these through Limbaugh and Drudge and Fox, they whip up their emailers and letter writers, now it’s “a story” and the msm picks it up, the talking heads propagate the myths out of “respect for balance” and we get nowhere.
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If the media generally just decided to approach their craft as Maddow said she would run her show: “I’m not going to put a flat earther on to provide balance” we could have that discussion.
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Instead we have a major media exemplified by this: Mark Halperin just gave notice that the honeymoon is over and the media must redeem itself by turning on Obama: And Rush Limbaugh is used as filler by CNN as they waited for President-elect Obama to come out for his first press conference on the economic crisis.

Obama is right that if we were designing a system from scratch, that’s what it probably would be. But the political will is not there for it in this country
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Look, what people (the source of “political will”) want is that they can go get their physical every year, get any followup stuff their doctor says they need (the mamogram, the colonoscopy), and to be able to get treated if something bad happens (auto accident, cancer). They don’t care about the details of how that happens, but the less hassle and the less it costs the better. Well, I should say they would like the red tape to be minimal, as would their providers.
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When you speak of the “political will” not being there, you are not talking about what people (or providers) want, or how it can be done so that the people can get what they want, nor how it can be done affordably. What you are talking about is how people who are currently making money failing to accomplish the above aims can continue to be rewarded, and how the difficulty of rewarding those people is a possibly insurmountable impediment.
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What a great thread. I’m sorry I couldn’t read and participate in real time! Disagreeing with jayackroyd, SG, wvng and William Kristol is probably a once in a lifetime thing.

KT –
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Please show me where I ever said you were evil. On the contrary, I generally admire your journalism. You are one of the best generalists in the national media. PLUS! You worked for the Los Angeles Times, so you are a homie!
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I do think, however, that people in DC, the journo/politico/lobby classes at least, are largely not affected by the policies put in place by people you are supposed to cover *for us rubes.* As largely upper middle class, educated and fairly insulated from the rest of us, I don’t see that you face the same challenges that have been posed, for example, by the Bush policies we’ve lived with for the past 8 years. Maybe now that the economy is collapsing, and I don’t wish this on you at all, you will feel the same pain that the restuvus have felt beginning with the Reagan Administration, alleviated quite a bit with Clinton, but exacerbated by Republican policys throughout this decade. So when you talk about what voters think and what citizens think, well it just doesn’t compute with me. You say the ‘political will’ isn’t there for universal coverage and that’s an example right there. PEOPLE want that, okay? The Republican Party doesn’t want that. That’s where you get the “political will isn’t there.” Because my friends and colleagues all want that.
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If I seem too harsh for you, I apologize. It’s because it is very frustrating that you guys in DC have such a completely different standard for Republicans.
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By the way, Karen. I see here: AFP: Bush plans to start library, Freedom Institute: wife that bush is going to start a library. I’m curious, who are his investors? Can you please get a list of people and their backgrounds who are going to be investing in his library? And I also see, in the piece, that he is going to give speeches. Can you please get some information about where he is going to be giving his speeches, and how much he will be charging for them? Because we don’t want anything questionable going on, now do we. And while you are at it, when are you going to get a list of donors to Bush I’s library?
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Also, please see my debunking of your assertion that Arnie tried to implement universal health coverage in Cali. Not so. He tried to expand health coverage for children, okay? Children at less than 300% poverty level. There is no political will with the Republicans to expand that coverage to adults. So you have that wrong.
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In addition, (going back to your link to the “undercovered story of the day”) you are probably forgetting that budgets in Cal must be passed by a two-thirds majority. The Republicans, a pathetic minority party in California, every year jam up the budget works and scuttle any attempt to expand coverage, citing their absolute terror that an undocumented child might possibly slip through the cracks and receive medical care, God forbid! Now it’s true that Arnie isn’t into that kind of overt racism and xenophobia, but he certainly did extol the actions of the fascist Minutemen down by the border, so there’s that.
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So yeah, the California Legislature scuttled some of those plans, but it was the minority Republicans doing it. Predictably.

James, LA: Did you read my links? Schwarzenegger proposed a universal health care plan that included both an employer and individual mandate, and he fought for it hard. He lost.

You are simply ignorant on this, and it is really hard to engage. Especially since you add a lot of personal insults to your arguments. I’ve really, really tried to have a dialogue with you, but I’m not feeling there’s any point.

I read your links, Karen, and I am familiar with the story, since children’s health care is what I do for a living. It is you that is misinformed.

Arnold came into office as a right-winger and tried to push through a rightwing agenda. It was summarily rejected by California voters and his ratings were way, way down. So he fired his advisers, took his wife’s advice, hired a Democratic advisor, and started putting through some proposals favored by normal people. His rating increased after that. There was never any chance that his “universal” health care was going anywhere and everyone knew it. He didn’t “fight hard” for it, on the contrary. In the 2006 election cycle he started allocating big money left and right, to huge headlines. Many of those health coverage programs were summarily eliminated in the 2007 budget.

Do you consider “out of touch” a personal insult? If so, I apologize and won’t use it any more. I don’t know how else to describe the people in your circles. You might think of “personal insults” when you write what you do about Democrats, specifically the Clintons. You, and you are not alone, have different standards for writing about the Republicans. It’s the DC culture and you probably don’t even realize it. But you hold Democrats, and especially the Clintons, to completely different standards than you do Republicans. It drives me nutty.
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I am truly and sincerely sorry if I said anything hurtful to you in a fit of temper.

KT
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Not to jump in the middle of your and James in LA’s arguement. Well actually thats exactly what I intend on doing. I would ask you to do this. And I know it will take some time. Try to go through this thread and reread all of your comments. Now I have read mines yours jayacks and James in LA’s. Right off the back the one thing that hit me is that me you and jayack are talking about a subject from afar that James in LA undoubtedly has actually gone through. But of all of us Karen, you seem to be the only one who is inflexible on this arguement. When I pointed out to you that Arnold has vetoed a bill twice that would have instituted single payer in the State of California and had already passed the assembly you dismissed it out of hand. Your ONLY justification for saying Arnold is an innovator seems to be the mandates he put into his Universal Health Care bill without ever examining if his bill was ever viable at all or was it in fact a stunt to get the attention that he obviously ended up getting. The truth is James in LA from what I have read is both right and wrong in my opinion because Arnold’s bill was killed because the Republicans in the Assembly were SOOOOOOOOOO worried that the undocumented illegal alien kids would get covered by the plan and have it subsidized by legal citizens. NRO has an article that you can google where they raked him over the coals for this and said it was a “shake down”. Now the only thing he is wrong on again in my opinion is that in theory Arnold’s plan would have mandated coverage to all Californians. But in the little bit of time that I had to research it yesterday I found that the mandates made no difference because there was nothing in the bill to make the mandates realistic. Nothing in the bills would lower premiums or make coverage more accessible and thats why the Democrats didnt support it.
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Now again I ask you Karen and I hope I get a response this time that isn’t so inflexible and one that in which you allow for the fact that you might be wrong or mistaken on this one. If Arnold is REALLY serious about universal health care coverage in California, why did he veto a single payer bill that passed the Assembly twice?

Okay, I think I see where the point of contention that sg notes.
From the LA Times link:
The $14.9-billion plan would require nearly all Californians to obtain insurance and would subsidize the premiums of those too poor to afford it.
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See, no one I know considers requiring nearly all Californians to obtain insurance as a “universal health care” measure. I suppose technically it might be. Like “universal auto insurance.” No one that I know took this ridiculous proposal seriously aas a “universal health care” proposal and you can’t really substitute a mandate to buy insurance as any kind of enlightened policy proposal. If Arnold were serious, he would have worked on expanding the California SCHIP program named Healthy Families to include adults, for example, or to extend the coverage for children under 300% poverty, or for all children.

KT here–

SG: Let’s back up to what this thread was originally about. You cited a 15-year-old memo by Bill Kristol as evidence that the Republican Party as a whole wanted to sink health care–not on the merits of it, but rather, because it would deprive the Dems of credit that would help them politically. I argued (and still believe) that this memo was not a major reason why the effort failed. I also argued that there are Republicans in this country who are serious about health care reform.
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I cited Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I think Schwarzenegger deserves credit for what he tried to do. (Hillary Clinton thinks so too, as you can see in my interview with her on this subject, and in my quotes from her in that story about the California plan.) The fact that Schwarzenegger wouldn’t go for single-payer may have been a good move or it may not. (Note that he vetoed the bill in a far different fiscal environment than the state was in when he proposed universal coverage). But that does not negate the fact that he has taken a leading role in the fight for health care reform, and deserves credit for that, despite whatever beefs you have with him on other grounds.
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I am sure that we will continue to disagree on this. Which is fine with me, and I hope, fine with you. But what I have really struggled with in this blog is where to draw the line with commenters. I really enjoy the engagement, as I think I have shown. But when commenters such as James, LA, get shrill and abusive, and start questioning my character and my intelligence and my motives (as he has in several of my posts over the last few days), I think I am justified in deciding not to engage.

Not to break into the James, sgw and KT battle royale, but Boehner is calling for capital gains taxes to boost the economy. He reminded Paul of something: This brings back a memory: on Sept. 13, 2001, I got frantic calls from staffers on Capitol Hill. They informed me that Republican leaders in the House were trying to use the terrorist attack to ram through, you guessed it, a cut in the capital gains tax.
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Also, it’s really interesting to watch discussions in KT threads because KT has the politically connected insiders view and we mostly have the interested observer view (often well informed, but still outside the process). But I vividly remember when all the insiders thought Iraq was a great idea (at least publicly), and a bunch of folks like me watched in horror and were moved to try to protest in every way they could -with absolutely no doubt that we were being lied to. We were right. Trust in the media was rightly shattered.
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And now we have Halperin comparing that debacle, in which the media reliably transmitted administration propaganda, to positive coverage of Obama that was based on actual facts on the ground: "It’s the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage." And of course he was echoing Lil Debbie. So how do we trust a media that seems bent on delivering “balance” more than facts?
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Rambling I know. But this excellent thread is pretty much gone anyway.

Actually, he vetoed the bill because of Republican pressure and because he *is* a Republican. He was never in favor of single payer health care insurance. He was in favor of imposing the mandated purchase of private health insurance, much the same as mandated auto insurance for drivers. It was going to be a windfall for health insurers in the state. Let’s be clear about that.

wv,

I remember that so well, I have always wondered why I, a nobody out here in the hinterlands 3000 miles away with nothing (at the time) but newspapers to rely upon, could so clearly clearly see how this was all a huge lie, clearly saw what liars these people, Condi, Rummy, Cheney, Bush, were, and almost everyone in DC just so blithely went along with these lies and pretended they didn’t know. And still pretend they didn’t know. How can that be? How can that have happened? How could they *not* have known?

Here’s how “committed” arnie is to “health care reform. He is going to balance our budget as such:
Eliminating services in Medi-Cal, including adult dental, chiropractic, speech therapy, podiatric, psychology, and optical.
Cutting eligibility for parents in Medi-Cal from 100% of poverty to 72%.
Cutting parents from Medi-Cal who are working more than 100 hours.
Eliminating full scope Medi-Cal for lawfully present immigrants in California who do not qualify for federal Medicaid.
Shifting 10% of the funds in the Safety Net Care Pool away from public hospitals.
Eliminating the Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI) and the California Food Assistance Program (CFAP).
Making cuts to CalWORKS and SSI/SSP.
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This in order to save the tax cuts he extended to yacht owners and other wealthy people, and to prevent raising the car registration fees to their previous levels. So no, I really don’t give him “credit” for his efforts at “health care reform.”

KT here–
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SG: Let’s back up to what this thread was originally about. You cited a 15-year-old memo by Bill Kristol as evidence that the Republican Party as a whole wanted to sink health care–not on the merits of it, but rather, because it would deprive the Dems of credit that would help them politically. I argued (and still believe) that this memo was not a major reason why the effort failed. I also argued that there are Republicans in this country who are serious about health care reform.
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I take issue with your characterization and I can use it to illustrate what I meant about your inflexibility. Here is how the exchange actually started.
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sgwhiteinfla Says:
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KT
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So you aren’t buying the story about Bill Kristol’s memo which directed all members of the Republican party to vote against the health care reform?
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Now that was a legitimate question not a justification and initially you didn’t even know what I was referring to. So I sent you the link to the story. Now keeping in mind that this story has been out for a long time but still you hadn’t heard about it one might expect that you would at least research it a bit. Instead it appeared that you went right into defensive mode when you posted this.
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KT here–

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SG and Jayack: I tried to post this comment and it didn’t go through. So I apologize if you get a similar comment twice:
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The importance of that memo–or any such conspiracy theory–is vastly, vastly, vastly overstated. I was there for the train wreck of 1993-1994. The reasons that effort failed were complicated and much bigger than that. Haynes Johnson and David Broder wrote a very good book that subject. But since I know that commenters here would not accept David Broder’s word, here’s Brad DeLong’s, looking at the Broder/Johnson book from his own perspective of having been there:
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http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/system.html
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Now that is what I would call dismissing something out of hand. And even when I pointed out to you that your link was focused not on what the Republicans did, but instead with the problems democrats had with the legislation you never addressed that point. Later on you described the memo which you hadn’t heard of until minutes earlier as both silly and not meaningful but you didn’t quantify your characterizations. Again it might not be the case but it certainly SEEMS like you aren’t willing to rethink your perspective at all on this subject. And I even pointed out that Bill Kristol was integral in giving us Sarah Palin this year and thats why it SHOULDN’T be dismissed without at least some investigating but all I got back was crickets.

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I cited Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I think Schwarzenegger deserves credit for what he tried to do. (Hillary Clinton thinks so too, as you can see in my interview with her on this subject, and in my quotes from her in that story about the California plan.) The fact that Schwarzenegger wouldn’t go for single-payer may have been a good move or it may not. (Note that he vetoed the bill in a far different fiscal environment than the state was in when he proposed universal coverage). But that does not negate the fact that he has taken a leading role in the fight for health care reform, and deserves credit for that, despite whatever beefs you have with him on other grounds.
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Now I don’t know if maybe you posted the wrong link or what Karen but in this link you provided there isnt ANY praise of Scharzenegger’s plan. If there is I would love for you to point it out to me
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http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1576845,00.html
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Now here the rest of your comment is EXACTLY why someone like James in LA might be shrill towards you. I am not saying its right but you dismiss his concerns out of hand even though he actually lives in California and therefore probably knows a lot more than you about the subject. You don’t even allow at all for the fact that you might be wrong. I will point something else out to you that you still arent acknowledging. You keep saying Arnold worked hard on his bill but every california newspaper source you will find online will refute you on this. The only sources I found that agreed with you that he worked hard on his univeral health care plan to get it passed were all national publications surprise surprise. But the killer part of yoru comment is that you keep trying to dismiss the fact that just 9 short months after HIS bill tanked on both sides of the aisle he vetoed a single payer bill that passed by 12 votes. And you say its a totally different financial climate now. I totally disagree but even granting you that, I have pointed out now at least 3 times that the bill he vetoed had already been passed prior to his bill ever coming up and he vetoed it back in 2006 as well. Was the only point of California’s fiscal prosperity during that short window when Arnold was pushing his plan? Bigger than that examine this. When Arnold vetoed the single payer plans did you or ANYBODY at TIME do a write up on it? No you say? But you acknowledge that you DID do big write ups on HIS plan right? So explain to me why the single payer bill which passed the Assembly of California TWICE is less an important of a story that Arnolds plan which is an abject failure because it only gives mandates with no considerations of increasing accessibility and decreasing premiums and therefore would ONLY be a windfall for the health insurance companies? You are avoiding getting into the nuts and bolts of this which is surprising because you are usually very wonky about health care. So to an objective observer it will in fact come off that you are simply defending the story you have already written rather than keeping an open mind and allowing for the fact that either you didn’t have all the information or that you were wrong. Trust me I am a stubborn SOB so I get it, but I also recognize that if a person isn’t ready to allow for themselves possibly being wrong then also aren’t ready to engage in an honest debate because everything they say will be centered around justifying the premiss they already come into the argument with rather than getting to the truth.
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So KT can you allow for the fact that MAYBE this was just a PR stunt by Scharzenegger (and a successful one at that) or will you continue to not even examine that angle?

sg,
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Karen is rightfully p!ssed about my tantrum in a previous thread when I let her have it over her comments about Bill Clinton’s “foreign policy free-lancing” and her comments about who(ever) has been contributing to the Clinton Presidential Library. That’s my comment about the different standards that DC journos, including herself, has for Republicans versus Dems. You can see that here in the health care thread as well: Arnie gets huge kudos for his lame attempts to expand coverage while Hillary Clinton’s attempt was a “train wreck.” A painfully detailed train wreck. There is no attempt to look at the flaws in Arnie’s trainwreck and how he went about it, just glowing admiration for the little he did. But few DC journos that I know of will ever concede that difference in standard.

James in LA
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I get that but my point is since KT is the journo who engages us the most on this blog BY FAR I think this is the perfect opportunity to try to explain to her why people feel like the MSM aren’t doing their jobs and in fact are being biased in their coverage. Trust me I throw those kinds of tantrums all the time but I think maybe we have an opportunity this time to engage in a substantive conversation on both sides as to why there is this animus towards the press and maybe actually at least come to some common ground on it. Thats my ultimate goal in all this. I know its wishful thinking but from what I have seen of KT I think if its pointed out in a way that isn’t seen as a personal attack she will probably actually absorb what is being said and attempt to do some self examination.

There is no attempt to look at the flaws in Arnie’s trainwreck and how he went about it, just glowing admiration for the little he did. But few DC journos that I know of will ever concede that difference in standard.

That’s just the difference between dog bites man and man bites dog. A Democrat pushing for health care reform is just another day at the office. A Republican doing so is a National Event.

If Arnold is REALLY serious about universal health care coverage in California, why did he veto a single payer bill that passed the Assembly twice?
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SG, maybe he just doesn’t like single-payer – he is a Republican, and his program is more conservative than single-payer. I may disagree with him on the merits of single-payer, but I’m not going to suspect his motives. Or maybe the new fiscal situation concerned him – spending on a federal level during a downturn isn’t the same as spending on a state level. Or maybe he thinks it’s politically unfeasible. (Does anyone have links to polls on this issue? People keep declaring that popular opinion is in favor of it, or opposed to it. I haven’t seen actual evidence.)
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There’s absolutely no contradiction between wanting universal health care based on employer and individual mandates, and vetoing single-payer. Nothing needs to be explained. Honestly, if I were the Governor of California I would veto single-payer. And I love single-payer! But can it be implemented effectively in a state like California? I’m very skeptical. It would also encounter more opposition from insurance companies, and I’m really skeptical that can effectively be fought at a state level. Governors would be smarter to follow a more proven path, like Romney’s.
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Also, it’s just a fact that he was advocating universal coverage, unlike Obama. If you’re focusing on this micro issue of a single-payer bill during a bad fiscal situation, you’re trying to disagree with Republicans. Isn’t that what Obama is saying we should stop doing? The truth is good news: Some Republican governors are exploring the issue of universal health care, approaching the issue from the perspective of universal mandates. I’m not going to try to find a way to demonize Republicans (many of them do a good enough job without my help) and reject the possibility of bipartisan consensus.
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James, LA
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I’m kind of with KT on the “out of touch” thing. First, Ted Kennedy cares about health care and I’m guessing he’s far more “out of touch” than KT. Second, she talks about health care all the time, and she obviously follows the issue closely. She gets why this is so important – children, adults and businesses all need better health care. The ONLY difference between you and KT is that she’s not trying to see this as an issue of Bad Republicans and some Good Democrats. That’s not enough to accuse her of being unaware of the gravity of the health care crisis.

rose83
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Maybe you don’t understand this bu the Governer like the president should be reflecting the will of the people. The Assembly passed the bill twice and you can’t use the fiscal situation as an excuse for vetoing both times. You yourself said he is vetoing JUST BECAUSE ITS SINGLE PAYERS which in fact means he doesn’t give a sh1t if it works he just doesn’t like the way its set up and thats the absoulte antithesis of what Obama was advocating. Its funny the kind of stuff Obama is being used as cover for now a days. Next thing you know we won’t be getting out of Iraq because the Republicans don’t wanna and Obama said we need to stop being so partisan. Give me a frikkin break.

As a person who is following along the conversation, James and sgw, you guys have to dial it down a notch. It’s one thing to be passionate and vocal about your opinions, but being intransigent when KT offers a differing one and telling her she’s wrong (I don’t think she is) when she’s obviously done her homework is going a bit too far. I, for one, appreciate that KT takes the time to respond to questions and comments. Please don’t piss her off by being an a-hole about one topic, no matter how strongly you feel. It’s ok to present your argument and still disagree.

nibbly
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Where did I say she was wrong? PLEASE point out where I said she was wrong. I dare you, nay I DOUBLE DARE you. But I CAN point out several times when KT said we were wrong. I am arguing about allowing for the fact that she might be wrong. And if you can articulate to me how a person can engage in honest debate if they go in saying they can’t be wrong I would love to hear it. I enjoy engaging KT on a variety of issues but that if that means that I can’t disagree with her nor point out when she isn’t allowing for the fact that she might be wrong then really there is no use for this blog or any interaction in the first place in my opinion.

Karen said:
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The key is doing precisely what Hillary spelled out in my interview with her:
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1. Devising a good plan.
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2. Making sure you have all the stakeholders on board.
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3. Making sure you explain it to the American people and bring them along.
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None of those things happened in 1993 and 1994. If that had happened, the Republicans couldn’t have afforded to oppose it. And there were plenty of Democrats–in important positions–who hated her plan as well. Pat Moynihan, then-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, used to bring a pen that JFK had used to sign the law that deinstitutionalized the mentally ill to every Senate Finance Committee hearing on the HRC plan. He would wave that pen and warn about “unintended consequences.”
//
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Then she went on:

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KT here–
And finally, finally:
It’s probably worth pointing out that Arnold Schwarzenegger tried awfully hard to get universal coverage in California, and even Newt has some interesting ideas on the subject these days that he has worked on with–gasp!–Hillary Clinton.
//
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I pointed out that Arnold didn’t do ANY of those things that Karen dissed Clinton for not doing, either, yet he, and NEWT GINGRICH get glowing kudos from Karen. I pointed out the different standards. She told me I was uninformed, and I stated that I wasn’t.
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I also said TO SG, unfortunately as it turns out,
” I cannot understand, or maybe I do, why DC Villagers look to Arnie as the hope of the Republican Party. I think that social pressure forbids them to look upon the Republicans as a failed party, because Republicans are too imbedded in DC culture. It’s socially unacceptable to think the Republican Party is catastrophically corrupt, so they buy into the complete fantasy that someone like Arnold effin’ Schwartzenegger is going to lead the Republicans out of the wilderness.
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That’s how completely out of touch with the real world that Karen and her DC denizens are.”
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Karen took offense at that, probably rightly so, and I apologized.
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But you can hardly fault me for pointing out the different treatment she gave Hillary’s attempt at health care reform than she did Arnold’s.

sgw: I didn’t say you were wrong. You are a very good debater. You present lots of facts to back up what you say. I don’t agree with you some of the time — you are far more left than I — but you generally present a cogent argument.
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That said, sometimes it’s not enough for some to present their side. Sometimes they need the other side to concede, and maybe the other side doesn’t, for honest reasons.
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I think you do enjoy engaging KT, but towards the end of this thread she doesn’t sound so happy with people who only accept their facts and not hers. At that point, you’re at an impasse and it’s best to let people make up their own minds about the arguments.
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Don’t scare KT away. Her insights are valuable and welcome. That’s all I’m saying.
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Let’s not get into the Kristol meme, because I think you are a little obsessed, like you are with Lieberman. Difference of opinion, and that’s ok.

sgw: You ask when you called KT wrong. You called her close-minded. It’s essentially the same thing. That could be construed as an insult.

nibbly
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I said she is COMING OFF as closeminded or she SEEMED TO BE close minded but I also allowed for the fact that I might be wrong even about that. Hell I have to say that I have tried mightily to NOT make a pronouncement about KT and her motivations or failings. But again I feel I have every right to point out why something she says might be percieved as being closeminded. Here is an excerpt of my most recent post directed at KT.
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So to an objective observer it will in fact come off that you are simply defending the story you have already written rather than keeping an open mind and allowing for the fact that either you didn’t have all the information or that you were wrong.
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Again thats not a pronouncement that she is closeminded. Thats a pronouncement that her posts can definitely be taken that she is closeminded. I honestly don’t think thats the same thing.
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By the way what do you feel like I am far to the left about? I would bet I would surprise you on my personal policy stances

sgw: Fine, you said she is COMING OFF as closeminded or SEEMED TO BE closeminded. That’s not anywhere near as insulting as actually being called closedminded. I stand corrected.
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Also, I didn’t call you far left. I said you are left of me, which is relative, and is strictly from my perception of what you’ve written that I’ve read. If that’s not true, I actually would not be surprised, because I think people are very complicated in their beliefs, and that’s great. I have friends on all points of the political spectrum, and generally they can argue their viewpoints quite eloquently. I don’t agree with all of them either.

gotcha

james: It was big of you to recognize that you may have given offense and apologized for it. I don’t fault you at all for offering a different POV.

Maybe you don’t understand this bu the Governer like the president should be reflecting the will of the people.
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SG, Actually no that’s not the Governor’s job. The will of the people is expressed in elections, and speech, but if a President or Governor disagrees they can pursue a different path, albeit restrained by other checks and balances. Popular opinion has been wrong in many cases throughout history.
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The Assembly passed the bill twice and you can’t use the fiscal situation as an excuse for vetoing both times.
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Why?
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You yourself said he is vetoing JUST BECAUSE ITS SINGLE PAYERS which in fact means he doesn’t give a sh1t if it works he just doesn’t like the way its set up and thats the absoulte antithesis of what Obama was advocating.
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No, that’s not what I said. I said MAYBE he vetoed because he doesn’t think single-payer is the best approach. You and I may like single-payer, but it’s possible for someone to support individual mandates and oppose single-payer. Single-payer does expand government’s reach more, and some conservatives SINCERELY think that’s a bad idea. Remember, we’re supposed to be in the reality-based community. That involves acknowledging that people can disagree with us not just because they are corrupt, or selfish, or lying.
Its funny the kind of stuff Obama is being used as cover for now a days. Next thing you know we won’t be getting out of Iraq because the Republicans don’t wanna and Obama said we need to stop being so partisan. Give me a frikkin break.
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Not getting that at all. Partisanship is fine. But distorting the other side’s point of view so you can run away from the possibility of bipartisan consensus is just weird. Don’t you want a solution?

rose83 says
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No, that’s not what I said. I said MAYBE he vetoed because he doesn’t think single-payer is the best approach.
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Earlier she said
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There’s absolutely no contradiction between wanting universal health care based on employer and individual mandates, and vetoing single-payer. Nothing needs to be explained
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Now according to you nothing needs to be explained simply because their PHILOSPHY rejects single payer. Thats again the antithesis of Obama’s view that action should be about solutions now about philosophy. And if the good majority of the Assembly voted for the bill TWICE then he is not in fact reflecting the will of the people. By the way presidents shouldn’t govern based on opinon polls but if they keep over looking the will of the people and doing what THEY want to do they won’t be in office very long…wait for it….wait for it…because they aren’t representing the will of the people.

SG, this is the relevant paragraph: SG, maybe he just doesn’t like single-payer – he is a Republican, and his program is more conservative than single-payer. I may disagree with him on the merits of single-payer, but I’m not going to suspect his motives. Or maybe the new fiscal situation concerned him – spending on a federal level during a downturn isn’t the same as spending on a state level. Or maybe he thinks it’s politically unfeasible. (Does anyone have links to polls on this issue? People keep declaring that popular opinion is in favor of it, or opposed to it. I haven’t seen actual evidence.)
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My point with the “nothing needs to be explained,” comment is that there are clearly multiple, completely understandable explanations for his actions. Which is actually very clear from my original comment.
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Now according to you nothing needs to be explained simply because their PHILOSPHY rejects single payer.
Well as I’ve shown, that’s not what I said. But why do you think their philosophy rejects single-payer? They don’t like the word? They think it will give them bad karma? No. They think it won’t work as well as individual mandates. They’re not saying, “Wow, single-payer would work amazingly well, and save lives and money, but I’m going to oppose it because my philosophy says so.”

By the way presidents shouldn’t govern based on opinon polls but if they keep over looking the will of the people and doing what THEY want to do they won’t be in office very long…wait for it….wait for it…because they aren’t representing the will of the people.
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Well, of course. Is anyone disagreeing with that?

rose83 says
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By the way presidents shouldn’t govern based on opinon polls but if they keep over looking the will of the people and doing what THEY want to do they won’t be in office very long…wait for it….wait for it…because they aren’t representing the will of the people.
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Well, of course. Is anyone disagreeing with that?

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Earlier she said.

Maybe you don’t understand this bu the Governer like the president should be reflecting the will of the people.
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SG, Actually no that’s not the Governor’s job. The will of the people is expressed in elections, and speech, but if a President or Governor disagrees they can pursue a different path, albeit restrained by other checks and balances.

I know this is an old thread, but there are few things more irritating than intentional misunderstandings.
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I said “the will of the people is expressed in elections, and speech.” So just to recap, the executive’s job is NOT to execute the will of the people but if the people feel that their will is insufficiently reflected in the executive’s actions, they can vote him or her out. Seriously, this is just Politics 101. Checks and balances are the heart of government. For example, the will of the people is not for marriage equality. But it would be perfectly appropriate for a President to do everything they constitutionally can do to advance marriage equality. And if the voters don’t like it, they can vote for someone else.

Actually rose83 its politics practicum. If elected officials job is NOT to represent the will of the people then we would not have campaigns nor debates. The reason why we DO have campaigns and debates is so people can asses which candidate most exhibits the values and proclaims the policies that come closest to each voters personal philosophy. They vote for them because they want that particular candidate to follow through on all of the campaign promises that the voter agreed with them on. In any given situation they also want the elected official to govern and or legislate in the manner that is most consistent with the will of the majority. Thats why elections are won by majority vote. If candidates are not elected to execute the will of the people then they would have no worries about governing how ever they want to. But the fact is every elected official has to run for reelection at some point and thats what makes our system so ingenius because we don’t have to be stuck with an azzhole who arbitrarily decides to do his own thing. Elected officials ignore the will of the people at their own peril and thats why by in large elected officials govern according to the will of the majority of people. Now you can speak text book politics all you want. But you have already acknowledged that elected officials will get voted out if they do not reflect the will of the people. Thats why we have a “representative democracy” because each elected official is supposed to represent the will of their constituency.