"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
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"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Thursday, November 04, 2010

If the Democrats tack to the right, they're even dumber than we thought
Posted by Jill | 6:05 PM
After Tuesday's election, pundits and other morons (see also: Evan Bayh) have been insisting that the key to Democratic electoral success is to tack even further to the right. As this graphic from Great Orange Satan shows, that would be the DUMBEST thing to do:

Party coalitions, 2010

The "moderates" that the pundits seem to think left the Democrats in fact voted for Democrats by a 16 percentage point margin. Yes, this is down from a 60%/38% split in 2006, but it still belies the notion that moderates support teabagger policies. I suspect that the moderates who stayed home said "A pox on both your houses" -- not because the Democrats were too liberal, but because the Democrats don't seem to stand for anything and can't even sell their own policies -- perhaps because by the time they get done capitulating to Republicans, ther's nothing to sell. Yes, there are moderates who respond to "Look! Shiny!". But there are those who simply don't have time to dig into the minutiae of a healthcare bill with giveways to the insurance industry -- even if it DOES turn out to be a boon to them in 2014 (which yet remains to be seen). They call themselves moderate for a reason -- they aren't doctrinaire on either side of the spectrum. Whoever convinces them gets their vote. By selling out to the looney right, the Republicans didn't get their votes, and by appearing weak and spineless, Democrats didn't give them reason to vote.

The answer isn't for Democrats to be more like what Republicans used to be. The answer is for Democrats to be proud of being Democrats -- instead of hiding under the table and hiring Alan Simpson to destroy Social Security so you can call yourself "fiscally responsible" and "bipartisan."

(UPDATE: Krugman does a nice job of smacking Evan Bayh around here.)

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Friday, November 30, 2007

And this is the problem with Barack Obama
Posted by Jill | 6:20 AM
I'll defend Barack Obama against those who are trying to brand him as some sort of terrorist mole because his father was Muslim. I won't, however, defend him against what's increasingly evident -- his alarming tendency to adopt "bipartisanship" by framing policy in right-wing talking point terms. We've seen what "reaching across the aisle" does when dealing with an intractable, rigid Republican party with a sense of entitlement. I've been concerned about Obama's alarming tendency towards conciliation-by-capitulation ever since his mentorship by Joe Lieberman during the first months of his terms. And now, after buying the Republican frame that Social Security is in crisis, he's now buying their frame on universal health care.

I'm not crazy about the idea of mandatory purchase of health insurance either -- at least not as insurance is currently structured, where insurance is provided by for-profit entities with a greater responsiblity to keep costs in check and provide profits for stockholders than to provide coverage for medical expenses. Americans who receive insurance coverage as an employment benefit are largely insulated from the actual cost of such insurance -- until they lose their jobs and get stuck with the entire premium under COBRA. My own excellent plan, which has a sizable network of quality physicians and an 80% out-of-network reimbursement after a reasonable deductible of $350 per year per person, costs my employer over $13,000/year, of which I pay about a third. Premiums are on a sliding scale based on salary -- a method which caused much hue and cry when first implemented this year, but which I think is eminently fair. If I lose my job, however, then we go to Mr. Brilliant's plan, which uses the HMO "primary care doctor" model in which you must have a referral to see a specialist. But if we had to spend five figures for health coverage, we, like most Americans, would balk.

The mandate is troublesome in both the Clinton and Edwards plans, but the Edwards plan's nonprofit Health Care Markets (assuming the concept works) at least has a built-in element of risk-sharing, which is of course how insurance is supposed to work; along with a "public plan", which is a first step towards universal, single-payer health care coverage. The one question mark, of course, is just how much this health coverage will cost, and how families with little money left over after paying for rent/mortgage, car insurance, food, clothing, and spiralling utility costs, will be able to pay for such coverage.

But Barack Obama insists on playing nice with Republicans by adopting their framing, as Paul Krugman notes today:

The central question is whether there should be a health insurance “mandate” — a requirement that everyone sign up for health insurance, even if they don’t think they need it. The Edwards and Clinton plans have mandates; the Obama plan has one for children, but not for adults.

Why have a mandate? The whole point of a universal health insurance system is that everyone pays in, even if they’re currently healthy, and in return everyone has insurance coverage if and when they need it.

And it’s not just a matter of principle. As a practical matter, letting people opt out if they don’t feel like buying insurance would make insurance substantially more expensive for everyone else.

Here’s why: under the Obama plan, as it now stands, healthy people could choose not to buy insurance — then sign up for it if they developed health problems later. Insurance companies couldn’t turn them away, because Mr. Obama’s plan, like those of his rivals, requires that insurers offer the same policy to everyone.

As a result, people who did the right thing and bought insurance when they were healthy would end up subsidizing those who didn’t sign up for insurance until or unless they needed medical care.

In other words, when Mr. Obama declares that “the reason people don’t have health insurance isn’t because they don’t want it, it’s because they can’t afford it,” he’s saying something that is mostly true now — but wouldn’t be true under his plan.

Mr. Obama, then, is wrong on policy. Worse yet, the words he uses to defend his position make him sound like Rudy Giuliani inveighing against “socialized medicine”: he doesn’t want the government to “force” people to have insurance, to “penalize” people who don’t participate.

[snip]

I recently castigated Mr. Obama for adopting right-wing talking points about a Social Security “crisis.” Now he’s echoing right-wing talking points on health care.

What seems to have happened is that Mr. Obama’s caution, his reluctance to stake out a clearly partisan position, led him to propose a relatively weak, incomplete health care plan. Although he declared, in his speech announcing the plan, that “my plan begins by covering every American,” it didn’t — and he shied away from doing what was necessary to make his claim true.

Now, in the effort to defend his plan’s weakness, he’s attacking his Democratic opponents from the right — and in so doing giving aid and comfort to the enemies of reform.


Obama may regard this adoption of right-wing framing as a gesture of "conciliation". But he's mistaken if he doesn't think the opposition will use this as a cudgel with which to beat him senseless if he is the eventual nominee.

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Thursday, April 05, 2007

The myth of the centrist voter
Posted by Jill | 7:11 AM
Buried in Sidney Blumenthal's article in Salon about Matthew Dowd's defection from the ranks of the Bushista is the little tidbit highlighted in bold type below:


Dowd has given a couple of accounts of this painless conversion, attributing it variously to the shining impression made by Bush and the persuasive skills of Rove, whom he came to know well in the hothouse atmosphere of Austin. McKinnon told his friends he wasn't a Republican, but a "Bush guy," while Dowd, for his part, simply left it at that he had become a "Bush Republican." Had they not jumped at the main chance that materialized, they would have been mired as provincial losers. Instead, they chose fame and fortune. Observers viewed their leap as symbolic of Bush's unusual capacity for bipartisanship.

Bush's loss of the popular majority by 543,895 votes in the 2000 election was a shock to his political advisors and prompted an internal rethinking of his strategy. During the Florida contest and before the Supreme Court delivered the presidency to Bush, Dowd wrote a confidential memo to Rove that analyzed data from the recent vote and argued that there was no significant center in the electorate. "Dowd's analysis destroyed the rationale for Bush to govern as 'a uniter, not a divider,'" wrote Thomas Edsall in his book "Building Red America." Bush's confected campaign persona as a "compassionate conservative" was suddenly discarded. The "architect," as Bush called Rove, had an architect. Bush's brain had an outsourced brain. Rove's and Bush's radical imperatives derived from Dowd's conclusions.

With Bush as president, Dowd was put on the Republican National Committee payroll and became an intimate participant in White House strategy sessions. Bush and the Republicans now exploited divisive wedge issues and tactics with a vengeance. After Sept. 11, 2001, fear was bundled with loathing, the terrorist threat from abroad conflated with the gay menace within. By 2004, relying on Dowd's numbers, Republicans made gay marriage the most salient social issue, exceeding abortion and gun control in its inflammatory potential to mobilize conservatives. Dowd prescribed the strategy for targeting of Republican base voters' "anger points," as GOP consultants called them, for maximum turnout.


The myth of the centrist voter that must be courted is a recurring theme in mainstream media discussions of the 2008 race, specifically, the DEMOCRATIC 2008 race. Night after night, Joe Scarborough hammers the point that the Democratic nominee is going to have to appeal to "centrist voters"; the myth that elections are decided "in the middle." If Dowd was correct in 2000, then that center is a myth, and George W. Bush ran the early months of his administration just for the people who voted for him -- and no one else.

It's interesting that as we see all the major Republican candidates racing to see how far to the right they can run, the talking heads of the media are all repeating the meme that Democrats must run to the center in order to win. The Republicans are falling all over each other to see which one can be the most supportive of gun rights, the most anti-abortion, the most disgusted by gay marriage. Republicans embrace their base, and Democrats are told to run away from theirs as hard as they can.

Contrary to what conservatives believe, the Democratic base is NOT the A.N.S.W.E.R. left. It's not about identity politics and freeing Mumia. The Democratic base isn't just the netroots, though the netroots isn't nearly as far left as conservatives and the talking heads in the media think we are. The Democratic base is about a strong defense that's used wisely and not for pre-emptive war based on ginned-up intelligence to serve corporate interests. The Democratic base is about the ability to earn a decent living in this country. It's about workers being treated like human beings by employers. It's about being able to get health care when you need it and not having to lie awake at night because you don't have insurance. It's about being able to keep a roof over your head and food on your table and send your kids to college. Howard Dean said in 2004 that Democratic values are American values, and that's true. Republican values are about eviscerating the middle class, shoveling more money into the pockets of the wealthy, looking the other way at corporate crime and snooping into people's bedrooms.

The Democratic candidate that plays to the Democratic base is the one that will win the election. Ever since Ronald Reagan, Democrats have allowed Republicans to define what they stand for -- and define it inaccurately. This really isn't rocket science. Those middle-class, so-called "centrist" voters have the same concerns now that their lower-income and working class fellow citizens have, and it's not gay marriage. It's time for Democrats to stop playing to this insignificant center and start embracing what the party is supposed to stand for.

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