Matt Yglesias

Long-Term Implication of the Public Option Fight

Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Raul Grijalva

Josh Marshall ponders: “What if the version of the public option that emerged in the House (which has to be seen as the maximal version of what’s possible) is so constrained and anemic that it wouldn’t really accomplish anything anyway?”

I think this is something that policy-minded progressives understand pretty well and it’s causing a lot of folks in DC to be puzzled about why so many folks want to make their stand on this issue. To help understand, I think it’s useful to read past the sarcastic opening to this Chris Bowers post and read him lay out the strategic thinking in detail. I think what you’ll see is that while the movement on behalf of the public option certainly wants a public option and believes the public option is important, the larger goal is to “to try and make the federal government more responsive to progressives in the long-term” by engaging in a form of inside-outside organizing and legislative brinksmanship that’s aimed at enhancing the level of clout small-p progressives in general and the big-p Progressive Caucus in particular enjoy on Capitol Hill.

That requires, arguably, some tactical extremism. If you become known as the guys who are always willing to be reasonable and fold while the Blue Dogs are the guys who are happy to let the world burn unless someone kisses your ring, then in the short-term your reasonableness will let some things get done but over the long-term you’ll get squeezed out. And it also requires you to pick winnable fights, which may mean blowing the specific stakes in the fight a bit out of proportion in the service of the larger goal.

Michael Bennett Supports a Public Option

Senator Michael Bennett’s blog has a post up opening with the observation that “There has recently been some confusion on Michael Bennet’s support for a public option” and offering the following new video in which he articulates strong support for such an option:

David Sirota observes that what introduced the “confusion” seems to have been genuine lukewarmness on Bennett’s part about fighting for a public option:

Bennet said that he favored a so-called public option, which would provide an alternative insurance source for those who can’t get private insurance. “But as I stand here today, I think it’s very unlikely that the public option part of this will pass.”

As Sirota says, one possible difference-maker here is rumors of a primary challenge from former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff. As I’ve observed in the past the prospect of primary challenges also seems to have helped ensure that Kristen Gillibrand and Arlen Specter have stayed onside in major policy fights. Primaries are a pretty clunky and expensive way of fostering party discipline, especially in the Senate, but there aren’t a lot of other tools in the box. It’d probably be smarter and better for everyone to rely more on control over committee chairmanships.

The Psychology of Health Reform

James Suroweicki takes an interesting look at the politics of health reform through the lens of the literature on loss aversion from psychology and behavioral economics. The lesson: People fear change. His advice:

Still, just because you can’t change human nature doesn’t mean you can’t change health care. The key may be to work with, rather than against, people’s desire for security. That’s surely one reason that Obama has consistently promised people that if they like the health insurance they currently have they can keep it. This promise will make whatever reform we get more inefficient and less comprehensive, but it also assuages people’s anxieties. It might even be possible to use the endowment effect and the status-quo bias in the argument for change. After all, although people tend to feel that they own their health insurance, their entitlement is distinctly tenuous. Because it’s hard for individuals to get affordable health insurance, and most people are insured through work, keeping your insurance means keeping your job. But in today’s economy there’s obviously no guarantee that you can do that. On top of that, even if you have insurance there’s a small but meaningful chance that when you actually get sick you’ll find out that your insurance doesn’t cover what you thought it did (in the case of what’s called “rescission”). In other words, the endowment that insured people want to hold on to is much shakier than it appears. Changing the system so that individuals can get affordable health care, while banning bad behavior on the part of insurance companies, will actually make it more likely, not less, that people will get to preserve their current level of coverage. The message, in other words, should be: if we want to protect the status quo, we need to reform it.

This seems sensible. However, two problems remain.

One is that along the same lines as the research Surowiecki is talking about, people find the experience of contemplating potential future loss to be intensely unpleasant. Insofar as people are already walking around filled with anxiety about loss of employer-provided coverage or rescission, then this kind of message will appeal to them. But if you run around trying to tell people they don’t have things as good as they think you do, will they embrace your policies or just decide you’re an unpleasant jerk? Nobody likes the bearer of bad news.

The other is that in politics you not only need a message but also messengers. Not just a plan for change, a constituency for it. And the main constituency for health reform consists of people who don’t think the present system is fundamentally sound. That’s a big part of the reason the public plan element of Obama’s proposals has become such an emotional touchstone for the left. The public plan is a fairly modest part of a fairly modest package of reforms, but it’s the slice of the package that holds out the prospect of eventual transformation of the system into something quite different and less driven by corporate profits.

The Fierce Cynicism of Naiveté

(white house photo)

Ta-Nehisi Coates is losing patience with Barack Obama’s patience:

But it really hit me yesterday when Obama claimed that health care reform “shouldn’t be a political issue.” Really? Then why did he hand it off to a gaggle of politicians? Why is he even talking about it? Then Obama shouted out Chuck Grassley, who has aided the spread of death panel rumors, as an example of a Republican whose been “working very constructively.” Grassley returned the favor by calling Obama “intellectually dishonest.”

I have no idea what will happen, ultimately. Moreover, I’m not sure that most voters are bothered by any of this. still, it this whole escapade smacks of Obama being too clever by half–of an Obama who can’t get over his own high-mindedness and holds out the bipartisan spirit as a kind of fetish, a gimmick. It’s all so unserious.

He’s obviously right about the “shouldn’t be a political issue” business. This is one of the most annoying ticks of political rhetoric out there. The implication is, I guess, that whatever we’re talking about is too important for mere politics, but coping with the big issues is actually exactly what politics is for. That said, the claim that something or other “shouldn’t be a political issue” is actually a classic of political rhetoric. There’s just no way that Obama and the rest of his team have somehow failed to notice that fact. In general, it’s probably best to assume that Team Obama is not full of stupid people who can’t grasp the obvious fact that health care politics is inherently political and the GOP leadership has no intention of cooperating with him. What we’re watching isn’t a blunder, it’s a strategy.

Eric Alterman has a smart piece on this that the Daily Beast gave an inflammatory title “Obama’s Fake Bipartisanship.” The point, however, isn’t that Obama is “fake”—which implies he’s lying—but that Obama’s political strategy involves a very studied self-presentation as a non-political figure. As Alterman says, this worked well for Obama during the campaign.

My worry would be that it strikes me as very plausible that a political strategist could overlearn the lessons of his own success. The fact of the matter is that Obama’s margin of victory was more-or-less exactly what you would expect based on fundamentals-driven models of presidential elections. We know that the strategy Obama employed “worked” (he won, after all) but there’s no clear evidence that it was particularly brilliant. But you can easily imagine Obama and David Axelrod and other key players becoming overconvinced by their own success.

The Demographic Shift

An interesting observation about demographics from Nate Silver:

Consider this remarkable statistic. In 1980, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Democrats (or at least white Carter voters) — likewise, in 2008, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Obama voters. But whereas, in 1980, just 9 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Carter voters, 21 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Obama voters last year. Thus, Carter went down to a landslide defeat, whereas Obama defeated John McCain by a healthy margin.

And that, in a nutshell, is the changing face of the American electorate. This is one way to understand what’s wrong with conservatives who are urging the Republican Party to somehow return to their Reaganite roots. It’s a different world.

Blaming Bush Retains Its Efficacy

Former Congressman Rob Portman is running for Senate in Ohio. Previously, he was George W. Bush’s OMB chief and his US Trade Representatives. Since everyone hates Bush, linking Portman to Bush seems like a natural strategy. But Chris Cillizza appears to have some doubts that these kind of old news attacks will resonate. And I assume that at some point the situation will change and Cillizza will be right. But for now, I think the evidence suggests that people still have sour memories of the Bush years. Consider this from Rasmussen:

President Obama contends he inherited the nation’s ongoing economic problems and that his actions since taking office are not to blame. Sixty-two percent (62%) of U.S. voters agree with the president that the problems are due to the recession that began under the Bush administration. Just 27% of voters say the problems are being caused more by the policies Obama has put in place since taking office, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Ten percent (10%) are not sure which president is more to blame.

Given that the economic situation is extremely bad—much worse than it was at any point while Bush was actually in office—keeping this argument in front of people seems like an absolutely critical piece of context. Even once the economy starts to turn around, the unemployment rate will continue to be at a bad level for a very long time even if the trend is in the right direction. It’ll be important to keep reminding people that a whole terrible sequence of events was basically baked into the cake as soon as the Bush-era bubble burst.

Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose

Andrew Gelman runs the numbers and comes up with a new reason why Republicans may not care about alienating Hispanic voters by having their members of congress compare NCLR to the Ku Klux Klan. He takes a look at what the 2008 electoral college would look like if we transferred half of John McCain’s Hispanic votes in each state to Barack Obama:

Basically . . . not much happens. Missouri might tip to Obama.

That said, a presidential election is a zero-sum game. Given that McCain lost, in a sense any counterfactual scenario in which he gets fewer votes isn’t very different from a scenario in which he loses. I think the real question about alienating Hispanic voters is what kind of scenario can we envision in which the GOP captures the White House without retaking Florida, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. Nate Silver has the answer and dubs his map “Operation Gringo.”

Long story short, it can be done, but Republicans would have to start doing much better in the Rust Belt.

Risk, Uncertainty, and Political Prognostication

Tim Fernholtz makes a great point here that I want to rescue from association with Donald Rumsfeld:

Anyway, I did want to draw attention to this commentary by Christian Brose, which does a good job of laying out what Huntsman’s probable assumptions are about his political future and that of his party. But readers, remember: No one has any idea how the politics of 2012 will shake out, and any political calculation based on current assumptions is just a mistake. Looking at Brose’s conventional wisdom handicapping of the 2012 GOP, I don’t see much to disagree with, but now we have to get into Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns territory. Remember when everyone thought George Allen was a front-runner for the 2008 GOP nomination? Hillary Clinton for the Democrats? The permanent Republican majority of 2004? The never-ending Democratic majority in Congress for most of the latter half of the prior century? You get my point. Whatever Huntsman’s calculus is, I hope it isn’t entirely predicated on the political climate three years from now.

Rather than “unknown unknowns,” I think the issue here is the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk is the odds you know you face. If a flip a coin and bet on heads, it might turn up tails instead. Uncertainty is the fact that other kinds of chance intrude on the real world. If a flip a coin and bet on heads, someone might come running through the halls and knock me down while I’m in the act of tossing.

Political prognostication tends to fall prey to a failure to adequately appreciate how much uncertainty there is in politics. Nobody knows, ex ante, the odds that any given politicians’ re-election bid will be derailed by a weird blowup at a rally. And less abnormally, political outcomes are heavily shaped by events in the real world. But people aren’t very good at predicting events in the real world. The politics of 2012 will have a lot to do with the state of the global economy in 2012. But while people can make some informed judgments about the likely future, nobody really knows what will be happening and nobody knows what policymakers will be doing in response. Nobody knows what foreign crises will emerge over the next 2-3 years and nobody knows how they’ll be resolved. The future, in other words, is pretty inherently murky.

Win By Losing?

Via Ed Kilgore, Ed Rogers from the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations makes the point that it’s basically never good to lose a Senator:

Notice to Republicans: Arlen Specter changing parties is good for the Democrats and President Obama and bad for us. If you think otherwise, put down the Ann Coulter book and go get some fresh air. There’s always a delusional element within the GOP that thinks if we lose badly enough the Democrats will gain so much power they will implement all their crazy plans, the people will revolt and purest Republicans will then be swept back into power. Even if this were true, it doesn’t take into account the damage done while our opponents are in control.

I do think it’s always worth considering an alternative. I think it’s very possible that Democrats could “gain so much power” that they implement at least some of their “crazy plans” and that the people, rather than revolting, will just turn their attention to other issues. For example, many Americans feels anxiety about their health insurance status. And the majority of these people vote for Democrats. But if Democrats deliver a health care reform plan that assuages those fears, those voters may start voting more on their hatred of abortion or love of torture and bring Republicans back into power.

You can think of Dwight Eisenhower succeeding as a politician not despite the New Deal, but in large part because the New Deal’s successes eventually built a country that no longer had a strong desire for progressive economic policy. Or how today’s tax cut jihad has trouble attracting votes in part because marginal tax rates are much lower than where they were before Reagan cut them—the issue just doesn’t matter as much to people as it used to.

The Cheney Phase

In his debut column, Ross Douthat laments that Dick Cheney didn’t throw his hat into the 2008 ring, because a Cheney candidacy would have left conservative reformers a stronger hand today:

We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.

“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: >a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

This is precisely the sort of conservatism that’s ascendant in today’s much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party’s grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability.

I think this is a clever thought experiment, but I doubt that it’s literally true. I think the reality is that governing necessarily involves compromises. But fans don’t like to see the politicians they support compromising. However, as long as the politicians in question are winning it all seems forgivable and you focus on the aspects of the agenda that you support. But when a strategy that entails some compromise leads you to defeat, you necessarily see a backlash from the base which insists that greater purity could have carried the day. I’m fairly certain this impulse would have existed no matter who the Republican standard-bearer had been in 2008.

A further observation would be that while I don’t cherish the thought of conservative purism, one complicating factor for the reform camp is that it’s not true that moderation is always the path to political victory. The Democratic Party’s basic 2008 positioning was considerably to the left of its 2004 positioning on most issues—foreign policy, health care, climate change, civil liberties, you name it—but times had changed and it worked. Meanwhile, though “the base” is always very important in primary elections, the specific electoral system in use in GOP presidential primaries makes it very possible for a candidate who’s not-so-popular with the base to win the nomination.

The noteworthy thing about 2008 is that even though two mavericky candidates (McCain and Huckabee) did well, as did one guy with a moderate record (Mitt Romney), the three of them together came up with about zero interesting, innovative, or sound policy ideas. I think this paucity of real ideas—as opposed to ideas about the need for ideas—is, rather than historical bad luck in not having a Cheney ‘08 campaign to point to as a cautionary tale—the bigger problem for reform conservatism.