Communication Problems?

As picked up by Sully, Mark Halperin on Meet The Press has a counter-intuitive analysis of Obama's first year as President.

The country took a risk on Barack Obama, he was untested. And if you look at what Hillary Clinton and John McCain both said about him, they said, "He's just words. He doesn't know how to run the government." I think, ironically, it's just the opposite. He's done, I think, an extraordinary job running the government, as John said, under difficult circumstances.

He managed the economic crisis and kept the world from going into a depression. He staffed the government with very quality, quality people. He showed he could be commander-in-chief and manage these two difficult wars. What I think, ironically, the problem has been is he's not inspired the country to feel a sense of optimism and renewal and to be unified in a bipartisan way. Those are the things I think people thought he would excel at. Those are, I think, are the problems. He's making progress in governance, not necessarily in that bully pulpit leadership.

Voting for Coakley

Sully explains why the rational choice is to hold your nose and vote for Coakley for Senate in MA even if you are dissatisfied with her as a candidate.

First off, there's no compromise with the current GOP. They make Gingrich look like Pope John XXIII. If they got back majorities in the Congress, there will be no debt reduction; there will simply be nihilism until they can try to beat Obama in 2012.

Secondly, there's a lie masquerading as analysis going around. And that is that the health insurance bill is some sort of radical idea, fomented by "radical leftists", etc etc. This is propaganda. In fact, the final bill is exactly where a sane compromise is to be found: near-universal coverage; no single payer; no public option; reforms for pre-existing conditions and other injustices; cost control mechanisms; Medicare cuts; deficit reduction. 16 years after the Clintons tried, it's a more moderate bill. It was widely debated in the campaign. It isn't perfect. It needs work. But it's a start.

The blame for the delay lies fundamentally with a GOP that is still intent on putting power before country, and decided the day Obama took office that he was such a threat to their beleaguered brand that they would oppose everything he proposed, demonize him as much as possible, forgo any cooperation, and then try to blame him for the recession, the wars, the unemployment, and the debt he inherited ... while never actually proposing any serious alternative on any of them.

It is a nihilist, populist, primal scream. And if the Massachusetts result is interpreted as a vindication of that strategy, we will have thrown away a very rare constructive moment for targeted government action to tackle the deep problems - healthcare access and cost, too much reliance on carbon energy, an empire bogged down in two quagmires, a debt that will soon threaten this country's currency - in favor of news cycle, tactical Rovian bullshit.

Out of Focus?

Kevin Drum pushes back on the sudden spate of arguments that Obama did not focus intensely enough on the economy over the past year, instead getting distracted by health care reform.

I don't really understand this. Is it a purely political argument that, regardless of the merits, Obama should have been viewed as spending 24/7 hunkered down in the West Wing helping create jobs for American workers? Or is it a substantive argument that governments have limited bandwidth and Obama should have spent more of his on reducing the unemployment rate?
 
The former is puerile and the latter is mysterious. What exactly should he have done? He passed a big stimulus bill, and it's plain that there's no political will in Congress to pass another one of any size. He extended unemployment benefits. He tried to take action on mortgage foreclosures, and perhaps he could have done more along those lines. But the financial lobby fought him, Congress wouldn't support cramdown legislation, and banks have resisted taking part in his program. The Consumer Financial Protection Agency would be a nice pro-worker feather in his cap, but it wouldn't help anyone find a job and probably wouldn't have gotten through Congress any quicker even if they weren't busy with healthcare.

So exactly what would his "pivot" back to jobs¹ have looked like? Nobody ever really says. But aside from giving rousing speeches, the big levers available to fix the economy are monetary, which is in the hands of the Fed; fiscal, which he's done; and meliorative, which he's largely done too. The rest is mostly window dressing.

¹Assuming that this mythical "more modest" healthcare bill really could have passed any faster than the current one in the first place. Frankly, given the Republican Party's dedication to "What part of NO! don't you understand" as its political strategy, I doubt it.

The Logic Behind Health Care Reform

Paul Krugman neatly summarizes the logic that drove the drafting of the version of health care reform that is nearing passage in Congress.

Start with the proposition that we don’t want our fellow citizens denied coverage because of preexisting conditions — which is a very popular position, so much so that even conservatives generally share it, or at least pretend to.
 
So why not just impose community rating — no discrimination based on medical history?

Well, the answer, backed up by lots of real-world experience, is that this leads to an adverse-selection death spiral: healthy people choose to go uninsured until they get sick, leading to a poor risk pool, leading to high premiums, leading even more healthy people dropping out.

So you have to back community rating up with an individual mandate: people must be required to purchase insurance even if they don’t currently think they need it.

But what if they can’t afford insurance? Well, you have to have subsidies that cover part of premiums for lower-income Americans.

In short, you end up with the health care bill that’s about to get enacted. There’s hardly anything arbitrary about the structure: once the decision was made to rely on private insurers rather than a single-payer system — and look, single-payer wasn’t going to happen — it had to be more or less what we’re getting. It wasn’t about ideology, or greediness, it was about making the thing work.

Broder Hits Bottom

Adam Serwer on TAPPED serves up perhaps the ultimate in Broderian illogic.

David Broder, high priest of false equivalencies, outdoes himself in his column today:

Was Christmas Day 2009 the same kind of wake-up call for Barack Obama that Sept. 11, 2001, had been for George W. Bush?
The near-miss by a passenger plotting to blow up an American airliner as it flew into Detroit seems to have shocked this president as much as the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon did the last.

If we are to understand Broderism as the casual equivalence of catastrophic Republican failures with trivial Democratic ones, then this -- the comparison of an terrorist attack in which nearly 3000 Americans died with one in which some loser with a bomb in his underpants set himself on fire and was put down by unarmed civilians -- is Peak Broder, the most Broderesque statement that has ever been made.

It Came From The West (Coast)

Steve Benen joins the discussion on the creeping Californification of America as the minority in Congress seeks to do nothing other than obstruct.

A congressional minority would, in theory, have three possible motivations for cooperating with the majority in tackling policy problems. The first would be a modicum of patriotism -- the country has problems that need fixing, and patriots who care about the nation's future would feel the urge to do the right thing. That doesn't apply to the modern GOP -- it's not that they hate the United States, it's that they believe some problems are imaginary (global warming) and other problems can be addressed just as soon they're done destroying Democrats.

The second is fear. If the minority believes the public will be outraged by blind obstructionism and a deliberate effort to make national conditions worse, the minority would fear electoral punishment and, as such, be more responsible. That that doesn't apply to the modern GOP, either -- Republicans assume (probably correctly) that most voters aren't paying enough attention to current events to notice their tactics. And if recent prognostications are accurate, the GOP will be rewarded in the midterms for their misconduct, creating an even stronger incentive to reject and block problem-solving.

The third is the desire to produce better policy results. As Bruce Bartlett, among others, has written of late, if Republicans were less reckless, they could work with Democrats and move policy proposals to the right, which presumably would be a party goal. But the modern GOP prefers to take its chances, and hope that its obstructionist tactics are enough to stop progressive legislation from passing anyway.

Of course, the problem isn't limited to motivations. As Ezra put it, "What happens when one of the two major parties does not see a political upside in solving problems and has the power to keep those problems from being solved?"

We now have a political system in which a majority of the House, a majority of the Senate, a majority of the electorate, and the president can all agree on a specific policy proposal, but it still can't become law due to obstructionist tactics from the minority. Ours is the only major democracy on the planet that gives the minority the tools to stop the majority from governing.

He concludes:

In other words, in our 21st-century political system, Republicans, after having failed and been discredited, can still block the majority's agenda, still have an incentive to undermine American public policy, and still complain if Democrats don't do enough to satisfy their misguided demands.

Lessons of the Last Decade

Barry Ritholtz picks up on an interesting piece by economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Economics Nobel laureate and Columbia University professor Joseph E. Stiglitz has what very well be the best year end piece I have seen to date;

“The best that can be said for 2009 is that it could have been worse, that we pulled back from the precipice on which we seemed to be perched in late 2008, and that 2010 will almost surely be better for most countries around the world. The world has also learned some valuable lessons, though at great cost both to current and future prosperity – costs that were unnecessarily high given that we should already have learned them.”

What were those 6 “harsh” lessons?

1. Markets are not self-correcting, and without adequate regulation, they are prone to excess.

2. There are many reasons for market failures. Too-big-to-fail financial institutions had perverse incentives: Privatized gains, socialized losses. .

3. When information is imperfect, markets often do not work well – and information imperfections are central in finance.

4. Keynesian policies do work. Countries, like Australia, that implemented large, well-designed stimulus programs early emerged from the crisis faster

5. There is more to monetary policy than just fighting inflation. Excessive focus on inflation meant that some central banks ignored what was happening to their financial markets. The costs of mild inflation are miniscule compared to the costs imposed on economies when central banks allow asset bubbles to grow unchecked.

6. Not all innovation leads to a more efficient and productive economy – let alone a better society. Private incentives matter, and if they are not properly aligned, the result can be excessive risk taking, excessively shortsighted behavior, and distorted innovation.

Why this was published in the China Daily, and not in the US is beyond my understanding

But What Do You Really Think Of Cheney?

Steve Benen quotes James Fallows as he eviscerates Dick Cheney, contrasting how the Democrats reacted after the failed shoe bomber to the latest binge and purge from the former Veep.

Democrats, at the time, didn't launch an assault against the Bush administration, and we didn't see Al Gore condemning the White House. It simply didn't occur to Democrats in 2001 to use the attempted mass murder of hundreds of Americans to undermine the presidency.
 
Eight years later, Dick Cheney believes his principal responsibility is to destroy President Obama -- the man Americans chose to clean up the messes Cheney left as a parting gift after eight years of abject failure.

This recent piece from James Fallows continues to ring true: "The former vice president, Dick Cheney, has brought dishonor to himself, his office, and his country. I am not aware of a case of a former President or Vice President behaving as despicably as Cheney has done in the ten months since leaving power.... Cheney has acted as if utterly unconcerned with the welfare of his country, its armed forces, or the people now trying to make difficult decisions. He has put narrow score-settling interest far, far above national interest."

Dick Cheney is a coward and a disgrace.

Modern Conservatism

Kevin Drum summarizes the basic arguments of conservatives over the past several weeks.

Conservative response to a guy setting his underwear on fire on an airplane: It's Obama's fault! We should declare war on Yemen! We should stop allowing Muslims on our airplanes! We need to connect the dots! We're all going to die!

Conservative response to providing healthcare to 30 million Americans: It's socialism! It's going to bankrupt America! It's Chicago thug politics! It's going to kill grandma! It's going to turn our healthcare system into an abattoir!

Conservative response to regulating the financial industry that almost destroyed America's banking system: It's Marxism! It's going to cause hyperinflation! It's Uncle Sam's jackboot on the commerce of the country! It's the end of innovation! Buy gold!
 
Conservative response to catastrophic climate change: It's a hoax from the liberal media. Pay no attention to it.

Christmas Air Attack Reactions

Heather Hurlburt on Democracy Arsenal posts a couple of wonderful quotes picked up from the Detroit Free Press coverage of the failed Christmas airline bombing.

But you might want to check out the Detroit Free Press/News' coverage -- on Christmas Day, by a newspaper that's so hard up it only delivers three days a week -- for these gems:

the child of a passenger who said hearing about how other passengers foiled the attacker made him "proud to be an American." Typically for Detroit, he was a Muslim whose dad was returning from visiting family in the Middle East.

Within hours of the attack, a metro Detroit Muslim leader had taken time out of his day -- a joint Muslim-Jewish Christmas Day service project in needy parts of the city -- to make a statement:

 We want to do everything we can to make sure this doesn't happen," said Victor Begg, of Bloomfield Hills, head of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Michigan. "We want to be on the front lines to help law enforcement."

Begg added that the Muslim community should partner with law enforcement "to stop these maniacs -- who in the name of religion -- pursue these political goals."

Begg said that he and family members have taken Northwest flights from Amsterdam to Detroit.  "We could have been on that flight," Begg said. "These guys kill indiscriminately."

I think this is a great statement.  I wish it neither seemed necessary for him to take time on a national holiday to make it, nor useful for me to take time on a national holiday to blog about it.