Matt Yglesias

Mods vs Cons in GOP Extends Beyond Culture Wars

Olympia Snowe’s op-ed on how the increasingly narrow and dogmatic conservatism of the Republican Party drove Arlen Specter from the fold is worth a read. But I think it’s noteworthy that she seems more interested in a rote recitation of the plight of socially moderate northeastern Republicans than she is in actually looking at the particulars of Specter’s situation. It’s true that Specter was nominally pro-choice. But for the past 15 years, he’s assembled a voting record that’s pretty orthodox. He led the charge on behalf of Clarence Thomas, he worked mightily for all of Bush’s judicial appointments, and he still says he’s eager to filibuster Dawn Johnson.

Indeed, what’s notable about the Toomey-Specter grudge match is that it’s not primarily about cultural issues, it’s primarily about Specter’s alleged deviations on economic policy.

More broadly in the intellectual arena, the orthodox conservative position has started to include controversial—and, frankly, false—claims about which things are problems. To be a conservative in good standing, for example, you’re supposed to join with Alan Reynolds in denying that inequality is increasing. You’re supposed to join with George Will and David Boaz in denying that climate change is happening. Basically, if you say that there are any problems in the United States other than high taxes, you’re out of the tent. That, much more so than the continued prominence of conservative social issues, constitutes a radical narrowing of the definition of “conservatism” from where it was 25-30 years ago.

Making a Good Health Care Plan Great For Maine

Steve Benen linked over the weekend to a Bangor Daily News account of an Olympia Snowe health care forum in which the Senator sounded very open to potentially far-reaching reforms:

“We have a totally dysfunctional system now,” she said. While like most Republicans she would prefer to see the private sector collaborate on an effective change, a government-run health care system may be the only way to get the job done, she said.

Ezra Klein observes that Snowe is a little bit lacking in the coherence department:

Snowe’s position is a bit of an odd one: She holds that we may require a single-payer system but probably should have a public insurance option. The next step, she says, is to fix the market. And Snowe argues that it’s not clear that you can do that with a public insurance option. She’s raised the possibility that the public plan is actually too easy on private insurers. It’s a government plan, she says, and every lobby and advocacy group will exert pressure for it to cover every ill, ailment, and treatment. As such, the plan will quickly prove a better deal for the sick than the well, and it will end up being the equivalent of a “bad bank” for health risks. The private insurance market will simply skim off the healthy. In other words, the public plan wouldn’t compete with the private market so much as subtly subsidize it.

I would say that the main thing in this sort of situation is to stop thinking about the big issues, and start thinking about little ones. How can you structure a health care program so as to be very beneficial to the state of Maine? It’s not genuinely the case that inadequate levels of subsidies to sparsely populated rural states are an important failing of the current American health care system. But with the two “most likely to swing” Republicans coming from Maine, the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee coming from Montana, and the head of the Senate Budget Committee coming from North Dakota this is probably the shortest route between the status quo and major reform. The major question becomes whether or not significant, broad changes like a meaningful public option can be structured in such a way as to be appealing to these constituencies. Maine’s a weird state, maybe it needs blueberry subsidies or provisions that take into account the special needs of states with large seasonal swings in population.

Organizing for America Kicks into Action

Chris Cillizza reports that Organizing for America, the successor-organization to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, is going to kick into gear for the first time to try to mobilize support for the president’s budget. That seems like a good idea to me. Ordinarily, you think of a brand-new president’s main initiatives as being able to attract a fair amount of support from opposition party legislators whose constituencies he carried in the election. After all, an Obama platform of letting the Bush tax cuts expiring and auctioning carbon permits in order to pay for health care and a tax cut for working people carried the day in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maine, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, and Iowa so you might think that Richard Burr, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, George Voinovich, Dick Lugar, Mel Martinez, and Chuck Grassley would be a bit leery of opposing a budget framework that just lays out those campaign promises. But instead Obama’s seemed to have trouble getting Democrats on his side—including Democrats in whose states he’s popular.

Organizing, roughly speaking, is the difference. The top two percent and the pollution lobby don’t really care who won the election, aren’t impressed by slogans about how elections have consequences, and don’t care if people have health care or if the working class gets a tax cut. They just go to work every day to press for their agenda, and they’ll get their way unless people are pressing back.