REAL SOLUTIONS, REAL SAVINGS. Over at The Angry Bear, Kash, the blogosphere's second most prolific provider of health care wonkery, writes about the likely costs incurred (or saved) in a switch to single-payer:

another useful data point we can examine the case of Taiwan, a country that replaced a collection of different insurance schemes with a National Health Insurance program in 1995. The percent of Taiwanese with health insurance rose from about 60% in 1994 to 96% a few years later. It turns out that in Taiwan's case, the forces that would increase costs roughly balanced the forces that would decrease costs.[...]

the evidence suggests that single-payer systems are cheaper than the US's system. While this is not conclusive evidence for what might happen if the US were to adopt a single-payer plan, it does seem to place the burden of proof on those who would argue that such a plan would increase medical spending in the US.

This tracks with past GAO and CBO reports, the experiences of all other relevant countries, and pure common sense. In a single-payer system, there will be some increased costs -- namely, full insurance for 60-70 million folks who are either under- or uninsured -- but many more savings, mainly through lower service and pharmaceutical expenses, efficiencies of scale, increased preventive medicine, and administrative efficiencies. I should also mention that everyone will have health coverage, even though that's not one of those values that the media tends to judge important. Apparently, the time Jesus spent providing free health care across the Galilean countryside wasn't brought up when the evangelicals set their legislative priorities.

Tonight, the president will offer some tweaks in the tax deductibility of health insurance and the contribution limits of HSA's. It's not enough. It will not give the 46 million uninsured Americans health insurance, it will not slow the rapid growth of health costs, and it will not save our health system. Bush has, in the past, gotten a lot of mileage out of his reputation for Big Ideas and Transformative Thinking. Tonight, his ideas will be small and regressive, as useless as they are objectionable. Bush's job will be convincing a compliant media otherwise.

--Ezra Klein

CHINA VERSUS INDIA. MIT professor Hasheng Huang mounts a convincing argument that India is actually better positioned than China for strong economic growth over the medium term. I would only add that India is unquestionably better positioned for the medium-term political stability that's a prerequisite for sustained economic growth.

--Matthew Yglesias

BLUNT'S TEST. The Hill's article about how this week's House vote on the truly vile budget reconciliation bill relates to Roy Blunt's prospects as the favored candidate for Majority Leader is actually quite interesting. This bill (on which Democrats used a clever procedural gambit to force one last, inconveniently timed vote in the House) has always commanded razor-thin margins of majority support. The Hill mentions a few of the Republican moderates who may defect and switch their vote from yea to nay (Rob Simmons is the only one who has explicitly announced his plan to do so); on top of political calculations related to the bill itself, horse race considerations pertaining to the leadership race may play a part here. Certain lawmakers may be calculating that foiling the bill's passage could undermine Blunt's authority as a whip counter and effective conference leader -- and thus undermine the appeal of his candidacy for Majority Leader. It is an extreme longshot that such a dynamic might actually result in the bill's failure to pass, but it will nevertheless be worth watching closely how Blunt manages to whip this vote at the same time he's locked in such a hotly contested leadership race.

As a side note, the most significant organizational opposition to this bill has come from the Emergency Campaign for America's Priorities (ECAP), which was created using much of the infrastructure and personnel of the liberal coalition Americans United to Protect Social Security (AUPSS). Even while ECAP is functioning as its own temporary offshoot, however, AUPSS is itself relaunching as a broader-focused liberal advocacy outfit called simply Americans United, which is currently initiating a campaign to highlight GOP ethics scandals. When it comes to political advocacy work, organizational stability and brand clarity certainly have their virtues, but I must admit I've been rather intrigued by this chameleonlike liberal outfit lurking in the shadows and changing its name and focus as different issues pop up. It's like the Keyser Soze of left-wing political opposition.

UPDATE: Mike Fitzpatrick and Chris Shays are two other moderates who are publicly mulling switching their votes from yea to nay. I should be clear that those two as well as Simmons are all public Blunt supporters, so the dynamic I'm speculating about -- wherein folks think about foiling the bill so as to foil Blunt's candidacy -- doesn't apply to them. And this dynamic is, I stress, entirely speculative.

UPDATE II: Okay, Simmons is not a public Blunt supporter. Lordy!

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHEN THINK TANKS GO BAD. Over at Think Tank Town, the Washington Post blog focusing on the D.C. ideas industry, Ron Nessen is shocked -- shocked! -- to see the Center for American Progress (full disclosure: I've occasionally written for their subsidiary, Campus Progress) prejudging George Bush's State of the Union. He sniffs:

Think tanks are supposed to contribute new and original ideas, insights, and recommendations for solving America’s most pressing challenges.

Whatever its sophomoric reply-before-the-speech is supposed to achieve, the Center for American Progress is not offering new and original ideas, insights, and recommendations.

Yeesh. That prebuttal must have really ruined tea time. Unfortunately, Nessen's at a disadvantage from the beginning: this isn't a think tank town; it's a Republican one. And until the right cures its allergy to bipartisanship or the left starts winning some elections, not a single idea that CAP could stomach will make a smidge of difference. Banging his spoon over their childish involvement in the political sphere, then, is intentionally naive.

Of course, it takes a truly mediacentric perspective to believe that a think tank oversteps its bounds and diminishes its integrity if it dares to contextualize a coming speech. Sections on Bush's substantive record on energy policy, the actual distributive impacts of his tax cuts, and the mechanics of Health Savings Accounts are the sort of things SOTU coverage could use more, not less, of. Instead, every year, this newborn babe named Bush toddles to the podium, everyone ooh's and aah's over his prodigious performance, and last year's speech, not to mention the last term's record, vanishes down the memory hole.

If you want ideas, The Center for American Progress has a worthy set in their progressive priorities series. In fact, their homepage is anchored by a massive button on the top right that blares "15 NEW IDEAS!" You can't miss it. Nessen, somehow, did. But then, while I've found the Center's health, tax, and energy plans particularly appealing, I've not noticed them netting much coverage in The Washington Post. I blame my poor reading comprehension (a product of public schools, for which CAP also has a comprehensive set of ideas on); I don't really know what his excuse is.

--Ezra Klein

GAMBLING WITH THE PUNDITS. After several years of screwing up Iran policy, the Bush administration finally seems to have settled on a fairly prudent course of semi-effective diplomacy and is so far rejecting the lie-like-crazy strategy preferred by conservative pundits. For that reason, my judgment is that the Iranian nuclear program probably won't come up in the State of the Union speech. What the White House is doing right now is too similar to the much-derided (by the White House) John Kerry policy to want to huff and puff about, but I don't think the crazy faction inside the administration is going to take control this week. My colleague Mark Goldberg disagrees and we have $10 riding on the question. If commenters want to get in on the action, we can consider transitioning this site away from boring, old political commentary into the web's premiere gambling outlet.

--Matthew Yglesias

GOOGLING IN CHINESE. There's a bit of a controversy afoot about Google's decision to launch a semi-censored version of their search engine for China. I think it's a good sign for the world that people are a bit discomfited with what Google's doing here, but at the end of the day it's hard to see how they're making the wrong call. Even the censored Google is going to provide China's population with more access to information than no Google at all would have.

This, it seems to me, is how the general issue of "engagement" with China plays out. It involves distasteful compromises, but at the end of the day, even a dictatorship as small and weak as Cuba hasn't cracked under 40 years of hardball tactics and there's every reason to think China is going to be much less vulnerable to that sort of thing. Thanks to the increasing sophistication of authoritarian regimes and their ability to pressure private companies, economic integration and technological progress don't turn out to undermine dictatorships to nearly the extent that one might have hoped they would ten years ago. But, still, at least some of the hoped-for effect is present and, obviously, if history teaches us anything, it's that access to a fully enabled native language version of Google is not a fundamental prerequisite for democracy. Despite all the problems, a Chinese person in 2005 has much more ability to acquire accurate information than did a resident of any of your traditional 20th century dictatorships.

--Matthew Yglesias

A FOOLISH CONSISTENCY. The prize for most wrongheaded Iran commentary of the week goes to Jeffrey Bell, who seems to think we ought to go to war purely because to do otherwise would be to prove that the administration isn't seriously committed to the so-called "Bush doctrine." But of course the administration isn't seriously committed to the Bush doctrine. This has come in several different forms, but depending on which formulation you prefer, it implies that we ought to go to war not only with Iran, but also with Pakistan and China (or maybe both) which is crazy. You need to judge our policy options on their merits, not by comparison with overheated years-old rhetoric.

Note also Bell's description of Iran's president as "a man who says the Jewish Holocaust never happened and muses about the possibility of correcting that Nazi failure by dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel." The Holocaust denial is real enough, but this musing about an unprovoked nuclear first strike on Israel simply never happened.

--Matthew Yglesias

WHEN THE CONTRAS STRIKE BACK. Here’s an A10 story that should have been on A1: A little noticed provision of the 2006 Defense Authorization act lets the Pentagon distribute foreign military aid in the service of “counter-terrorism" and "stability operations” without any of those pesky conditions, like human rights guarantees, that are typically tied to foreign military assistance. According to The Post, some $200 million in the Pentagon’s budget can now go directly to foreign armies without having to weave its way through the series of regulations that generally accompany these kinds of transactions. Further, the direct Pentagon-to-foreign-military line diminishes the State Department’s role in foreign policy formation. Generals and Pentagon civilians, not diplomats, can set their own terms for foreign military assistance.

Knowing the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, it’s not too much of a stretch to think that some unsavory regime on the horn of Africa or elsewhere can use the historic rivalries between the State Department and the Pentagon to their advantage, forgoing State’s human rights and big-picture foreign policy concerns while securing Pentagon cash. Further, orders to disburse the funds must come directly from the president, making this stash his own discretionary fund for financing armies here and there across the world -- their commitment to democracy and human rights be damned.

I suppose (to coin a neologism) this “Pentagonization” of American foreign policy is to be expected when we live in an era of endless war. And I suppose too that circumventing traditional military aid assistance conventions is to be expected from the Iran Contra alums in our foreign policy establishment. But what’s truly intriguing about this measure is how it mirrors the way that China now approaches the developing world; they have the single priority of securing the unfettered flow of natural resources from Africa, and to that end shower certain unsavory regimes, like Sudan and Zimbabwe, with their largesse. Now, if the Pentagon decides (and the president concurs), we too can eliminate human rights and democratization concerns as a factor when deciding what small scale wars others can wage in the name of counter-terrorism. Hurray for progress!

--Mark Leon Goldberg

CHANGE YOUR MIND, HUH? AARP is apparently seeking redemption for their shameful support of the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit bill by demanding inclusion of all the critical elements originally left out: government authority to negotiate prices, legal reimportation of Canadian drugs, less stringent asset-inclusion when determining subsidization levels, and so forth. All good ideas, though the level of the pander is really revealed by the fact that two of them, both popular, contradict: if the government could bargain drug prices, Canadian reimportation would be redundant. Nevertheless, these would be fundamental changes in the right direction, and if AARP could obtain them in advance of the 2006 election, it would be to their credit.

But good as it is to see AARP returning to the light, their complicity in the bill's creation and passage shouldn't be forgotten. The best recounting of their betrayal came from Barbara Dreyfuss who detailed the Republican seduction of AARP for The American Prospect's June 2004 issue. It was understood then, as now, that AARP had hoped their support would lead to increased influence in the Republican Party. But as Bush' Social Security push proved, that wasn't quite the case. Now, as AARP returns to lobby on the benefit they helped pass, we'll see if their strategy bears any more fruit, and eventually creates a decent prescription drug benefit for their members. Somehow, I'm not optimistic.

Update: It's probably worth linking here to my Devil in the Details on AARP's attempts to profit off the confusion of their own bill. It's one thing to grudgingly accept a private health provider structure, it's fully another to help pass it then participate in the market -- that's the role of the insurance industry, not a supposedly nonpartial advocacy group. Click here and scroll down to "Drug Beneficiary" for the sordid little tale. Happily, the day I called AARP for comment, they killed the Google ads. See? Journamalism can change the world.

--Ezra Klein

SPENDING CUTS: NOT ACTUALLY POPULAR. Subscription-only CQ alerts us to the GOP's secret plan to win the midterms:

Lawmakers still haven’t finished fighting last year’s budget battles but are preparing this week for the fiscal 2007 budget process, which is expected to include further belt-tightening even in the charged atmosphere of election-year politicking.

With President Bush pledging to again hold the line on non-security domestic discretionary spending in the plan he will deliver Feb. 6, lawmakers are bracing for another year of tight appropriations and the prospect of another savings package aimed at entitlement programs including Medicare and Medicaid…

[Senate Budget Committee Chairman] Gregg maintains that Republicans should make cutting the budget their “cause celebre” and view it as a positive, not a negative factor for their election campaigns.

That's some ace political advice from the New Hampshire senator! I hardly think anyone should be holding their breath for major budget-cutting boldness this year. But to the extent that the recent bout of introspective GOP soul-searching has focused attention on the party's abandonment of core conservative small-government principles, liberals and Democrats have all the reason in the world to hope that Republicans do decide to actually put in an effort to redeem themselves and revive some of the old time religion.

Reading some of the conservative paeans to John Shadegg's candidacy in this week's House leadership race, you'd get the impression that Tom DeLay and George W. Bush and other Republican leaders somehow neglected to cut government spending in the last five years by mistake, or merely as a result of personal perfidy and corruption. That's quite silly. Spending hasn't been cut because spending cuts are unpopular. The modern Republican Party's well-oiled political machinery took the shape it did partly as a result of the very unpopularity of the party's small-government ideological mission. The agenda of the Republican Study Committee -- the band of House Republican ultras before whom all three Majority Leader candidates are auditioning today in Baltimore -- would be grossly unpopular if implemented, and Democrats could only be so lucky as to watch a Majority Leader Shadegg put in a good-faith effort to steer conference policy in the RSC's direction.

On a similar note, a Republican Hill staffer hinted excitedly to me a few weeks ago about the explosive budget and spending-related initiatives Bush would be unveiling in his State of the Union address (initiatives that would go beyond holding the line on discretionary spending). The staffer's tone indicated that he thought the political salability of such budget-cutting proposals was self-evident. I strongly suspect that the political operation inside the White House hasn't in fact gone sufficiently haywire for the president's political strategists actually to deem a renewed commitment to serious spending cuts a stellar idea in an election year -- but one can always hope.

--Sam Rosenfeld

GET ANGRY, GUYS. Over at Huffington Post, Arianna imagines what would happen if Tim Russert grilled members of the Bush administration with the kind of heat Oprah used to fricassee James Frey. She quotes Oprah as follows:

WINFREY: I really feel duped. I feel duped. ... I feel that you betrayed millions...I feel that you conned us all...

FREY: I've struggled with the idea of it, and...

WINFREY: No, the lie of it. That's a lie. It's not an idea, James, that's a lie.

Arianna's obviously being fanciful, and Lord knows Oprah shouldn't be the press corps's role model, but in a funny way Arianna's onto something. Oprah's reaction to being lied to was to get angry. In recent months, Bush administration officials have used the major networks or newspapers -- whether in speeches or in interviews -- to broadcast an extraordinary array of lies, the most visible being the assertion that Congress had access to the same intelligence they did before Iraq, and the immense falsehood that Democrats oppose the wiretapping of terrorists. There's little question that most members of the media view their role with some seriousness and see themselves as serving their audiences by holding public officials accountable to the truth. But these officials have demonstrated nothing but contempt for them as professionals, nothing but contempt for their mission, and nothing but contempt for their audiences. When are these media mavens -- David Gregory aside -- going to get angry?

In All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein describe a press conference where Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register angrily confronts Nixon campaign official Clark MacGregor at a moment of extreme stonewalling during Watergate:

MacGregor and Mollenhoff looked like two giants getting ready to lay clubs on each other. "What credibility do you have?" Mollenhoff shouted..."What documents have you seen?" Mollenhoff demanded. "Because if you can't gell us, you have no right to stand there." ... Others were shouting at him now, though none as vigorously as Mollenhoff. "Why should we sit here and listen to you, why should we print a word you say?" he insisted.

No question -- there were plenty of failings during that supposed golden age of journalism, and in some ways the craft of reporting has never been better. But still, you have to wonder -- when are Russert and the gang going to decide that enough is enough and really, seriously get angry about being lied to all the time?

-- Greg Sargent

WHAT THE QDR SHOULD SAY. I've been despairing a bit lately about the Democratic national security establishment in this town, but I'm fairly impressed by the Center for American Progress' in-house Quadrennial Defense Review. The real QDR is something the Pentagon does every four years and it's enormously important for setting budgetary priorities which, in turn, help determine the strategic priorities of the future. It's also the sort of thing that liberal institutions haven't traditionally focused on because it doesn't have any obvious short-term political implications and doesn't especially impact any of the most important liberal interest groups in the country. But those habits of neglect wind up creating crippling political problems in the long run.

Not only is it good to see attention being paid to the topic, but the CAP QDR seems substantively smart to me as well. Hopefully some Democratic politicians are paying attention.

--Matthew Yglesias

BEYOND GERRYMANDERING. Here's a weird but important source of Republican electoral strength -- the census counts prisoners as residents of wherever their prison is located. At the same time, prisoners can't vote and prisons are usually located in sparsely-populated conservative areas. The upshot of this is to pad a lot of Republican legislative districts with phantom constituents. The impact on congressional districts is smallish, but the impact on state legislature districts is often quite big.

--Matthew Yglesias

SEDUCTIONS OF THE MERITOCRACY. There's some real insight in David Ignatius's column from Davos, but this really cheeses me off:

"We want the brilliant mathematician whose mother is a chambermaid in Romania," says [Harvard President Larry] Summers. That's the most attractive face of globalization -- the idea that the great universities are creating a colorblind meritocracy that doesn't care where you're from as long as you did well on the SAT.

People need to think harder before holding this up as a worthy ideal. Suppose we were creating "an intelligence-blind pigmentocracy that doesn't care how well you did on the SAT, as long as you were born with pale skin." That would be bad, right? Since people shouldn't have crappy lives just because they have dark skin. So why should people have crappy lives just because they're in the bottom 30 percent of the intelligence distribution curve? Granted, unlike with skin color, it's good to have some inequality determined by "merit," because if you didn't allow any, it would be hard to generate any kind of economic activity and absolute living standards everywhere would be very low. But there are real limits to how far that rationale can take you. People should read Michael Young's book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, in which the term was coined -- meritocracy was supposed to be a bad thing.

Worst of all, in some ways, is that a social/economic system that affords unjustly high levels of reward to the clever is likely to attract a huge number of extremely clever defenders. It further invites these people to confuse "merit" -- the possession of skills that happen to be demanded at a high level by people who can afford to buy them -- with the intuitive idea of merit as meaning something like "goodness." In the famous dream where people would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” standardized test scores didn't enter into the picture.

--Matthew Yglesias

MORE ON THE PORK DODGE. We obviously don't see eye to eye on the big-picture questions here, but it is nice to see some Cornerites noting that much more is being made of brave, "principled" calls for earmark reform than is really deserved.

This recent, incessant conflation of opposition to domestic discretionary pork with a serious, thoroughgoing commitment to fiscal responsibility or true small-government conservatism is getting mighty annoying. While it's true that lobbyist-fuelled earmarking has metastasized under GOP rule, it is only one element (and not a central one) in the systemic and quite novel machinery of corruption that Republicans instituted on Capitol Hill in the last decade and that underlies the array of scandal stories now dominating the news. And efforts to cast "porkbusting" as central to a serious small government vision are even more absurd. Like harping on government waste to justify massive tax cuts, obsessing over pork helps conservatives to obscure and evade basic choices about revenue and outlays as they actually exist in the real world.

The Heritage Foundation's budget policy guru, Brian Riedl, has a new six-part proposal to "restrain lobbyists and special interests" that illustrates the point. Items one through four consist of small-bore reforms pertaining to earmarking and appropriations. Then, suddenly, in the fifth and sixth items you get some real small-government red meat -- suggestions for structural entitlement caps and a federal version of Colorado's disastrous Taxpayer's Bill of Rights that, if implemented, would result in truly massive, cruel, and almost comically unpopular spending cuts. (John Shadegg's close ally Jeb Hensarling has proposed these kinds of spending cap reforms for years; here's a 2004 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities assessment of the damage they would wreak.) Earmarks are a red herring.

--Sam Rosenfeld

TASTY, TASTY SOCIALISM. EPI says we're all on the dole:

Based on Defense Department estimates of the number of private-sector jobs created by its own spending, we project that additional defense spending will account for a 1.495 million gain in private sector jobs between FY2001 and FY2006. Furthermore, increases in non-defense discretionary spending since 2001 will have added yet another 1.325 million jobs in the private sector, for a total of 2.82 million jobs created by increased government spending. Increased mandatory government spending—which is not even included in these estimates or the accompanying chart—would account for even more job creation. The mere fact that the projected job growth resulting from increased defense and other government spending exceeds the actual number of jobs projected to be added to the economy through 2006 clearly indicates that the tax cuts hardly seem plausible as the engine of the modest job growth in the economy since 2001.

Intriguing. Meanwhile, the Joint Economic Council attributes today's bad growth numbers to "an unexpected 7.0 percent drop in government spending (lead largely by decreased defense spending)."

CORRECTION: Reader B.B. notes that it's the Joint Economic Committee, an arm of congress. Apologies for the error.

--Matthew Yglesias

DEMOCRACY SPRINGS, ATTACKS. I think Andrew Sullivan makes a relevant point about Palestine here, although he doesn't quite mention that it applies primarily to the writings of Andrew Sullivan. The neoconservatives' rapturous musings on the virtues of democracy have tended to conflate the ability to vote with the propensity to choose liberal, pluralistic governments. One problem: that's not the case.

In unstable or frustrated societies, democracy is actually the most dangerous of all systems, as reckless demagogues who would normally be repelled by the institutionalized defenders of the status quo need merely whip up a sufficient mass of the populace to take office, which is exactly the sort of thing reckless demagogues are good at doing. Moreover, during this period of widespread, deep-seated anti-Americanism, even more acceptable candidates and contenders will feel electoral pressure to out-anti-American their competitors, as demonizing us emerges as an easy, costless method of attracting support. Face it: we're now the gay marriage of the Muslim world, so waxing lyrical over the benefits Arab democracy will bring us is a little silly.

--Ezra Klein

POLITICIZE AWAY! The Hill ran a piece yesterday about how House Democrats still, at this late date, are maintaining the ethics truce and refraining from filing complaints against Republican members. There's a political strategy of a sort underlying this, though I don't find it very persuasive:

“The Justice Department is moving, and there’s no reason to interfere and give the Republicans a tool to say the investigation is being politicized,” the Democratic lawmaker said. “That’s not in their rhetoric, and right now they have to answer the Justice Department’s charges. Once it looks like it’s political, they don’t have to answer that.”

Democrats also said that they would not move forward because the panel remains shuttered after a months-long partisan disagreement over how to staff the committee and that the committee would not pursue an investigation in tandem with the Justice Department.

The full piece offers further details on how the Democrats might actually benefit from keeping the ethics panel in continual limbo, since they can make accusations without filing official complaints and still express outrage about the stalemate that's preventing investigations from going forward.

As I've written before, I think this delicate thread-the-needle strategy on ethics, wherein Democrats try to reap political rewards from the issue without appearing to "politicize" it too explicitly (and, of course, without risking losing any of their own incumbents as collateral damage), is fairly dubious; nine months away from a critical election is surely the time for some go-for-broke recklessness on this front if Democrats actually want to shake things up. And the Justice Department investigation excuse is a red herring; there are endless non-Abramoff-related scandals or potential scandals that Democrats could be working to spotlight. CREW just drafted a complaint against Roy Blunt for sleazy lobbying-related malfeasance that has nothing to do with anything currently under federal investigation. If Democrats wanted to stir the pot a bit more aggressively on ethics, they could.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WHO HATES THE DEMOCRATS? Yet another poll shows that yet again, disgruntlement with the GOP doesn't necessarily mean approval of the Democrats. But this made me wonder:

Just 36% expressed a favorable opinion of congressional Democrats, whereas 45% viewed them unfavorably. That's statistically the same as the showing for congressional Republicans, who were viewed favorably by 38% and unfavorably by 44%.

"I was watching the news … and I heard nothing from the Democrats," said Dez Jackson, 20, a cashier in Greenville, S.C., who was sharply critical of the president in the survey. "What are they, afraid to speak up?"

Jackson's just expressing a kind of typical liberal bitchiness here that I think we can all sympathize with. There's a big difference between this sentiment and the sort of genuine doubts about the Democrats' capacity to lead that proved to be their undoing in 2004. It would be good to see some kind of breakout that distinguished between liberal disapproval of the Democrats à la Jackson, and moderate disapproval -- the two have rather different electoral implications.

--Matthew Yglesias

CHRISTMAS FOR THE CREDIT INDUSTRY. It's looking like HSAs, much like Social Security privatization, contain a not-so-surprising point of convergence between national policy and massive giveaways to Wall Street:

Banks and others are drawn by the promise of lucrative fees they can generate by offering consumers mutual funds and other investment vehicles as their account balances grow. Most also charge $50 to $75 to set up a health savings account, and they collect perhaps $40 or more each year in maintenance charges and service fees.

Not since the creation of the individual retirement account in the mid-1970's has such a potentially huge mountain of money landed in the lap of the financial services industry.

I'm sure the $14.1 million raised by the financial services industry for the Bush reelection campaign didn't hurt matters. But wait, it gets even more awesome. As The New American Foundation's Cindy Zeldin noticed, HSAs are going to be putting the credit card industry's children through school while massively raising the real costs of health care for ordinary Americans. This is really as regressive as policy gets.

Here's how it works: About half of HSA holders don't put any money in their accounts. Many of the others sock away only paltry funds. And the national savings rate is at -- wait for it -- zero. So when health emergencies hit, HSA users, faced with massive deductibles and no stored wealth to combat it, charge them. Hospitals, ERs, and doctors now take credit cards, allowing health care costs to become interest-gathering debt. Indeed, in an effort to take maximum advantage of the trend, banks and health care companies are offering health credit cards with interest rates of up to 23 percent. So, for many, health costs won't merely be the original expense, but the years of accumulated interest payments afterwards. In real terms, operation X could, over time, end up costing the poor double, triple, or quadruple what the well-off can pay upfront.

For the lower middle class, to say nothing of the genuinely poor, that's what HSAs will look like: periods of financial calm interrupted by medical catastrophe that rapidly transforms itself into crushing, long-term debt. Currently, more than half of bankruptcies are traceable to medical costs. Let's just say I wouldn't expect that number to go down under a system of HSAs. I do, however, expect the financial industry to post record profits. Silver linings and all that.

--Ezra Klein

AN IMPORTANT POST ABOUT CENTRAL ASIA. The human rights situation in Uzbekistan has continued to deteriorate as local authorities ban fur-lined underwear, citing the risk of "unbridled fantasies."

--Matthew Yglesias

DEPARTMENT OF THE OBVIOUS. Thank God for The New York Times's crack public opinion research bringing us polls whose "results suggest that Americans' view of the program depends in large part on whether they perceive it as a bulwark in the fight against terrorism, as Mr. Bush has sought to cast it, or as an unnecessary and unwarranted infringement on civil liberties, as critics have said." Who could have guessed? Were they expecting strong support for unnecessary, unwarranted infringements of civil liberties and massive public skepticism of counterterrorist bulwarks?

At any rate, public opinion on this seems sensitive to question wording, and it's noteworthy that neither of the questions the Times asked mentioned the small matter that the program is in direct contravention of a clearly worded, duly passed law.

--Matthew Yglesias

"SOME HAVE EVEN CALLED IT ILLEGAL." The "officials say X while their critics say Y" convention of political journalism is obviously well-entrenched, but the NSA spying program debate -- specifically the debate over its legality -- illustrates once more how awkward and distorted that convention can sometimes render news coverage. The president's press conference this morning showed how weirdly difficult it is for journalists to discuss the wiretapping issue with administration officials using plain English. That's because the debate over whether the program is illegal isn't actually a debate at all.

George W. Bush answers every question on the matter by asserting that the NSA program is absolutely legal -- and then explains why he needed to violate the FISA statute to implement it. Forget for a minute that the administration refused to revise FISA when legislative action was proposed; instead, just consider his explanation (elaborated by Al Gonzales) on its own terms. There simply isn't an actual dispute between the administration and its critics about the legality of the spying program. The president himself says, in so many words, that FISA was inadequate to the task at hand, so they broke that law. To be sure, he then hammers the podium and yells out a meaningless "This program is legal!" But the substance of what he's saying doesn't even dispute that the program is, in fact, technically illegal. It's a bit odd. The only possible way to construe the logic of the administration's argument for the legality of the NSA program is to interpret it as an argument that the original FISA statute, still on the books, is simply unconstitutional. Either FISA is illegal or the NSA program is. As Richard Posner puts it succinctly in his otherwise problematic TNR article, "The administration and its defenders have responded that the program is perfectly legal; if it does violate FISA (the administration denies that it does), then, to that extent, the law is unconstitutional." (See more on this in Jacob Weissberg's shrill-to-the-max piece in Slate.)

But of course, Bush never actually says that. In so many words, his argument is that the NSA program may be illegal, but it's the right thing to do, and as the president he has an obligation to do it. And yet, invariably, what you read in the press is that "some critics have even questioned the program's legality."

--Sam Rosenfeld

ON THE OTHER HAND. Mark takes the approved optimist line on the Hamas election win. The other side of the story, however, is this: Hamas winning provides Israeli politicians who've never believed in the utility of negotiating with the Palestinians just the cover they've historically lacked in the international arena. After all, the Palestinian people have spoken and they've chosen Hamas, so what's to bargain about? Cliff May can be relied upon to relay the thinking of Israeli hawks, and he takes that line here as does Efraim Karsh here in The New Republic.

I think it's a bit hard to argue with the logic of the May/Karsh position on this. Israel refusing to negotiate with the Palestinians is, I think, bad for America but it seems to me like a reasonable posture for Israel to take. Insofar as the Hamas win can be used to shake off whatever international pressure exists for Israeli concessions, it makes perfect sense for the Israeli government to seize the opportunity. I think this is just one of those instances where American and Israeli interests diverge.

--Matthew Yglesias

HOW TO DEFEAT TERRORISTS… …Let them win elections.

To the extent that voters backed Hamas not because of their hard line politics, but because of their demonstrated ability to deliver key services on the local level, the Hamas victory ought not be seen as a popular expression for the support of terrorism. Indeed, the Hamas victory might even portend a great shift towards moderation in Palestinian politics; now that Hamas is the Palestinian government, they become beholden to the largesse of the EU and to a lesser extent the United States.

Hamas has a choice they have never faced before: renounce terrorism and receive foreign development assistance, or keep up the rhetoric and loose the confidence of foreign donors. Until they renounce terror, every dollar of development assistance given to the Palestinian authority ought to be thought of as investments in suicide belts. And if donors make that clear to Hamas, we might just see a huge breakthrough in the peace process.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE MOUSTACHE OF MISUNDERSTANDING. Oy. It sure would be nice if Robert Samuelson, the domestic policy columnist at The Washington Post, knew what he was talking about:

Now, some say that because the "market" has failed, greater government control is the answer. Private insurance has high overhead costs and generates too much paperwork. True. Still, there's not much evidence that over long periods government controls health spending any better. From 1970 to 2003, Medicare spending rose an average of 9 percent annually, reports the Kaiser Family Foundation. In the same years, private insurance costs rose 10.1 percent annually. Part of the gap reflected private insurance's greater generosity. It covered drugs while Medicare didn't.

Okay, one time, but slowly: Medicare is government-funded insurance, not government health care. Sheesh. Here’s some context: there is a standard Samuelson column moaning about health care's intractable dilemmas, namely that care costs money and folks don't like to spend it. Fair enough. And yet, care in other countries costs a whole lot less money and creates outcomes that are a whole lot better. I've even got a table:

Bemoan Medicare if you want, but don't mix up government-paid insurance operating within a private medical industrial complex with an actual government-run health system. We pay more and get less than other countries, a state of affairs that quite swiftly disproves Samuelson's concerned mustache-stroking over the impossible tradeoffs between care and cost. Our costs are artificially high and our care artificially low as compared to most every country with a nationalized system. Generally, when everyone else does X and gets better results than when you do Y, normal people conclude that the differences between X and Y are creating inefficiencies and needless costs. Robert Samuelson, unfortunately, sees things differently, and instead concludes Y to be an immutable state of affairs. I guess out-of-the-box thinking like that is why he gets paid the big bucks.

Update: It also occurs to me that he should read up on the Veteran's Health Administration, the only actual example of socialized health care in the country. It's also, it turns out, the best health care available in America.

You know, for a very reasonable hourly fee, I'm happy to tutor on this stuff.

--Ezra Klein.

BLOGOSPHERE: ACTUALLY ACCOMPLISHING SOMETHING! Bloggers often adopt a pose of self-importance that's all out of proportion to reality, but Glenn Greenwald's word on the NSA issue is actually making a difference. See this from The Washington Post, this from the LA Times, and this from Knight-Ridder. Good work!

To make a long story short, some gumshoe research by Greenwald has produced the goods demonstrating that the Bush administration was not, in fact, blind to the basic reality that violating (or "bypassing" as they say nowadays) the law is illegal. They just wanted to break the law, and so they did.

--Matthew Yglesias

THE WIDE NET. I'm not super-familiar with his work, but when I was in college I read a certain amount of Tariq Ramadan's writing and couldn't say I was a huge admirer of his way of thinking. That said, this business of barring him from entering the country for, in essence, having unpopular views of American foreign policy while being Muslim is a raw deal.

It's worth noting that this broad-brush approach to who is and is not a terrorist or a terrorist supporter (or, in NSA terms, an "associate" of an al-Qaeda "affiliate") is not merely unfair to individuals, but potentially counterproductive on a massive scale. One major reason the United States has not, as many feared, been plagued with post-9/11 terrorist attacks is that the American Muslim community doesn't contain lots of terror-loving radicals or people eager to blow themselves up in the name of jihad. Maintaining that status quo is of paramount importance to America's security, and painting too many people as terrorists is the easiest way to create a situation where every Muslim with out-of-the-mainstream opinions about this or that really does become a terrorist sympathizer. That would be a disaster.

--Matthew Yglesias

ENOUGH, BRODER. David Broder has done it again. In this morning’s Washington Post, Broder has written what must be his hundredth column bemoaning increasing partisan divisiveness in Washington as the main ill afflicting the republic. As evidence, he refers to several recent roll-call votes where the House or Senate tended to split along partisan lines, and concludes, yet again, that this outbreak of intense partisanship is ruining the country. He refers to the good old days of greater bi-partisanship and concludes that the present pattern is “likely to continue -- at least until the American public really rebels against this extreme partisanship and finds a way to demand a different approach to governing.”

But Broder, the genial dean of Washington pundits, gets it spectacularly wrong. He suggests, as he always does in this recurring column, that the evil is symmetrical. What has really happened in recent years, however, is a shift by tightly disciplined Republicans to the hard right, while Democrats have become more moderate and centrist. With the exception of old-line Dixiecrats, now largely replaced by southern Republicans, the congressional Democratic Party used to be a largely progressive party. Now, it’s divided between liberals and New Dems. And in case Broder missed it, dozens of Democrats actually voted with Bush on the president’s top priorities -- the Iraq War, the tax cuts, the Medicare Drug bill, and confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts.

The most important political science book in a decade, Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker’s Off Center, demolishes Broder and others who espoused the idea that symmetrical partisanship is wrecking democracy. Hacker and Pierson use voting data going back several decades to demonstrate what really happened.

Bi-partisanship flourished in the early Nixon era, when Nixon worked with both parties (and a Democratic Congress) to get environmental and consumer legislation, and in the Carter and Clinton presidencies, when the Democratic White House was more centrist, and reached out to Republicans. Under LBJ, however, Democrats were united and a passel of landmark progressive legislation was enacted, from Medicare to the great Civil Rights acts. The issue is less partisanship than whether the governing party is delivering good or bad policy. Whether or not you think bi-partisanship is a good thing, what’s killing partisan cooperation and solutions to national ills is not both parties becoming more cohesive, but one party becoming more extreme. Broder should get this disabling cliché out of his computer, and address America’s real political crisis.

--Robert Kuttner

THE HEALTH CARE MIX-UP. The New York Times has an excellent article on how the right's cherished health savings accounts have fared in the real world. The answer? Not as awesomely as Newt Gingrich hoped:

But in many cases, people have evidently signed up not because they are eager to direct their own medical spending but because the plan looked cheap or they had no other insurance option. And at least half of those enrolled have not put money in their health savings accounts. So there will be no money building up for next year's out-of-pocket expenses — a big selling point for these health plans.

And of the 50 percent who did sock away a couple bucks, odds are a large portion of them deposited very little. So let's be clear here: Health savings accounts do not work if people do not save. The equivalent concept would be a system of 401(k)s with no Social Security. A rightwing dreamland, I know, but one in which overwhelming numbers of Americans would find they've reached retirement with no way to pay for it. Similarly, HSAs, which ask a culture adverse to saving to start hiding their cash beneath a tax-exempt mattress, will end up a fine choice for a few healthy, prudent folks but a financial disaster for the majority. It's a grasshopper and the ant problem; HSA's only work for studious, forward-thinking ants. Unfortunately, they primarily attract grasshoppers.

The fatal flaw comes at step one: adoption. As the article notes and every health expert knows, the attraction of HSAs are lower monthly premiums. The tradeoff? Far less comprehensive coverage. The plans attract the cheap and the reckless, those who can't pay for standard health care or don't expect to utilize it. It then expects them to act like the risk alert and save large amounts of money for an eventuality they, by definition, don't believe to be likely. The segment of the population that does worry about their health and would've saved conscientiously already decided, in large part, to sacrifice more of their paychecks to purchase comprehensive, standard coverage. And that's the weird mix-up at the heart of HSAs: they expect the healthy to act like the sick and the unconcerned to become neurotic. It doesn't work like that. Most of those who would correctly utilize HSAs don't want them, and the group adopting the accounts is exactly the demographic you'd want in traditional insurance. It's a brave new world we're about to be living in.

--Ezra Klein

MATCHUP MATTERS. In today's New York Sun, reporter Josh Gerstein throws a big chunk of meat to those arguing against Hillary's electability, interviewing various Dems around the country who are panicked about her chances in 2008. But Gerstein also spoke to Dem strategist Chris Lehane, who brought up a factor that, inexplicably to my mind, is frequently absent from can-Hillary-win musings.

Specifically, Lehane made the rather obvious point that her viability depends partly on the small detail of who her opponent is. The Sun article didn't give him room to elaborate on that, so I dropped Lehane a line to hear more of his thoughts. He said he thought that in particular, Hillary would have a very good shot at beating Bill Frist or George Allen.

”They'd be very easy for her to define as Bush lite," Lehane said. He added that against them, she might have particular luck portraying herself as a kind of Democratic Margaret Thatcher. "She can credibly take a tough line on Iran, North Korea and Bin Laden in ways that other Dems can't. And every time she's challenged by the left it only enhances that viability."

Counterintuitively, Lehane said he even thought she might have a chance against John McCain. "McCain will be a very different person in 2008 than he is now. If he does the types of things you need to do to win a Republican primary in places like South Carolina, it will be very hard for him to portray himself as the straight talker that he's seen as now." It's a lot easier to agree with Lehane about Frist than about McCain, to be sure, but his remarks are nothing if not intriguing.

Relatedly, over at The Plank, Noam Scheiber writes in an interesting post that moderate GOP women could hold the key to her viability:

[Moderate Republican women are the group to watch in Hillary's case...it was precisely this demographic of affluent, moderate, Republican-leaning women who pulled her across the finish line thanks to abortion and various gender-related concerns. It's not crazy to think it could happen again.

On that score, I wanted to pass on a personal anecdote. Last spring, after watching Hillary speak to a Chamber of Commerce in a small town north of Albany, I spoke to a few such GOP women outside. They all said they'd gone in there expecting to see the fire-breathing Hillary of Dick Morris's nightmares. But they'd been stunned by what they'd seen. Hillary had spoken to them simply and directly, they said, and above all, Hillary hadn't condescended to them.

Before the tomatoes start flying, let me quickly say that I tend to fall in the Hillary's-unelectable camp -- yes, there are enormous differences between upstate and red- or swing-state America, and yes, it's true that retail politics matters far less in presidential races than TV, a medium, to put it charitably, in which Hillary doesn't exactly shine. Still, what was striking about these women was that they were persuadable -- they were prepared to abandon the profound dislike and suspicion ingrained in them by years of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the like, and replace it with the image Hillary herself had given them. Just tossing this out there for discussion.

-- Greg Sargent

CHIMPEACHMENT. Yesterday, The Carpetbagger Report noted the continued oddity of Washington Times-offshoot Insight magazine's publication of hyperbolic "insider" accounts of doom and disaster in the Bush administration; the latest example is this report of White House preparations for an impending congressional push for impeachment. The article is likely not to be taken seriously, but percolating impeachment talk on the left is not, in fact, a made-up phenomenon. Our Prospect colleague/superior Harold Meyerson's Washington Post column today offers a particularly aggressive Bush critique, and he reports that the response it has already garnered includes a remarkable amount of pro-impeachment sentiments.

There's been quite a lot of non-discussion discussion among liberals about impeachable offenses and so forth, but now that we have comments on Tapped, I'd like to hear a bit more from folks about what, if anything, they'd like to see people actually do on this front. The office consensus here seems to be that the substantive merits of an impeachment case are real enough, but that an actual push to impeach the president is, um, a spectacularly misguided idea on many levels. Level 1 can surely be summarized in three words: "President Dick Cheney." Then you get into a lot of slightly subtler questions about political strategy and backlash and what lessons ought to be learned from the Clinton impeachment, etc. This certainly seems like an idea that ought to be nipped in the bud early. At any rate, what do people think? Is an impeachment push something liberals are or should be seriously considering?

--Sam Rosenfeld

ONE OTHER POINT. This just came up in conversation with my colleague Matt, but it occurs to me that many folks may not realize it, so here we go: About 50 million low-income taxpayers pay no federal income taxes (poke around here for interesting breakdowns on that). They pay a lot of payroll, state, and local taxes, and tend to end up with similar overall burdens to folks in higher income brackets, but they pay no federal income taxes. Making health costs deductible thus does them no good. In that way, Bush's proposal, shockingly, is overwhelmingly regressive. Now, if it could be coupled with a tax credit scheme, that'd be a bit more interesting. On the other hand, we're sort of in a zero-sum game here where depriving the federal government of tax revenue is going to eventually mean cuts in Medicare and Medicaid benefits or massive, broad-based tax hikes, but that's a different issue.

Update: Commentor TW is right. By "different issue", I actually mean "exactly the same issue, but I don't feel like talking about the country's looming fiscal destruction right now." Sorry for the confusion.

--Ezra Klein

ONE MORE BUZZWORD. To riff off Matt's points a bit, it's poorly understood how much of conservative rhetoric on health care is, quite self-consciously, nothing more than conservative rhetoric on health care. The modern crop of Republicans approach the issue much like a loudmouth cocktail attendee with nothing to say, only they talk ceaselessly so no one else can say anything.

There's little doubt that the country is moving towards a government-run, fairly universal system. The trick for ideologues and interests opposed to that future is to fight a rearguard, stalling action, continually responding to concerns about cost inflation and access with ever more complicated, buzzwordy solutions that'll buy the system a few more years. Managed care was the most recent of these; HSA's are the next. Neat tricks like tax deductibility are party pleasers that Republicans hope will diffuse the issue in the near term by filling the media with complicated, competing solutions the general public isn't qualified to choose between.

But considering the driving force behind health care as a political issue is cost of services, proposals that push more of the burden onto individuals while reducing their ability to bargain down costs (as happens in large pools or government systems) simply ensures the problem's continued resonance. These ideas might buy conservatives a year or two and give them "new ideas" to flaunt in the 2006 midterms, but the essential dynamics pushing towards a new system will only be strengthened. Consumers are surprisingly sensitive to perceived insecurity on the health costs front, so any "fix" that lowers premiums generally but ensures a critical mass of horror stories will actually leave more, rather than less, dissatisfaction in its wake. Separating the sick from the healthy, as happens in Bush's current ideas, is exactly the sort of segregational solution that lends itself to Reader's Digest sob stories and long, Pulitzer-baiting, anecdote-based articles. For Republicans attempting to head off a structural overhaul, this is precisely the wrong strategy.

--Ezra Klein

PANDA HUGGING BACK IN FASHION. At a forward-looking American Enterprise Institute foreign policy event following President Bush’s re-election, AEI’s military expert and PNAC Senior Fellow Thomas Donnelly cited the “Panda Huggers” within the State Department as an insidious group that ought to be purged in the second Bush administration. It was a memorable statement, and was chronicled on TAPPED at the time. It would appear, however, that Condoleezza Rice didn’t heed his advice, for since then, the former US trade representative Robert Zoellick was promoted to the number two spot at State -- and he’s taken to cuddling with the creatures. Says the caption to this delightful picture:

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick cuddles a 5-month-old panda cub during a trip to a research center in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan province, Wednesday, Jan 25. 2006. The trip highlighted a sentimental U.S.-Chinese tie amid strains over trade, human rights and other issues."For more than 30 years, pandas have been a very practical symbol of the conservation relationship between the United States and China," Zoellick told reporters later, standing beside an outdoor pen as two adult pandas wrestled inside. (AP Photo/Elizabeth Dalziel)

Now if only he showed the same empathy for genocide victims in western Sudan…

--Mark Leon Goldberg

THE LONG GAME. Ezra's doing other things, so I'll offer my thoughts on health care policy in lieu of his insights. As I see it, the way this issue works is that there are only two genuinely possible outcomes in the long-run -- either the country will adopt a system of universal, government-funded health care or else we need to adopt a system wherein people are left to die in hospital waiting rooms when they run out of money. Since we're not going to move to option number two, every substantial policy shift actually has the impact of moving us in the long-run toward option one, even when the shifts are initiated by politicians who don't mean to do that. For example, "President Bush will propose that Americans be allowed to take tax deductions on more of their out-of pocket medical expenses, as part of an initiative the White House believes will rein in soaring health costs by shifting responsibility toward individuals." As libertarian economist Tyler Cowen remarks:

This idea is slightly funny. The premise is that people don't pay enough of their medical bills when they have private insurance. The way to get them out of insurance is to...um...pick up part of their medical bill. Admittedly the percentage of third-party payment would fall, at least if this works as planned. But note we are making the government the new insurer. I also predict the tax deduction will evolve into a credit which will evolve into...Yikes!

But not yikes . . . hooray! Here's the thing of it. Policy matters. But big, abstract ideas also matter. Liberals' idea is that the federal government has a responsibility to ensure that all Americans receive an adequate level of health care, regardless of income. That idea drives policy -- inexorably -- in the direction of a government-run health care system. The only way for conservatives to get us off the path of slow-but-steady drift toward socialized medicine is to mount a successful public challenge to that idea. But they won't even try, so they're doomed to fail.

--Matthew Yglesias

TO DATA MINE OR NOT TO DATA MINE? Wondering how to reconcile early reports that the illegal domestic spying program involved data mining with more recent reports that it's just standard-issue oversight-free illegal wiretapping? I think Sifu Tweety has the answer:

People have been talking about “data mining” like it’s a be-all-end-all surveillance technique. It’s not. All data mining (or pattern analysis, or whatever) is going to give you is a list of potential targets. As others have noted, this isn’t the same thing as eavesdropping, and is arguably less invasive of privacy. It does seem as if the NSA was passing some of these results directly to the FBI, without any follow-up wiretapping, because the FBI agents quoted in the weekend’s NYT story talked about getting “thousands” of bunk leads, which is pretty much what data mining would give you (as others have pointed out, look at the stunning accuracy of, e.g. Wal-Mart’s recommendation engine for a clue as to how accurate these automated techniques are). What seems most likely to me, and what was seemingly confirmed by General Hayden (and certainly has been strongly hinted at by James Risen), is that the results of this data mining were being used, without DOJ or judicial intervention, to make decisions about who to eavesdrop on.

Sounds right to me. Meanwhile, I would add that talk of changing the burden of proof from "probable cause" to "reasonable basis" is largely a red herring. The important thing that changed was that the NSA shifted from a position where they needed to convince a judge that they had probable cause to one where they had to decide for themselves that they had a reasonable basis for initiating some wiretapping. There's a world of difference between a self-enforced standard and an externally-enforced one.

--Matthew Yglesias

TNR THROWS DOWN. Well, they started it.

--Ezra Klein

ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART GROW FONDER. On the plus side for Hillary, the White House is really barking up the wrong tree here. From The Hotline (subscription-only):

Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) began a "busy campaign-like week" 1/23 with a new attack on the Bush admin, this time over health care, during a stop at Rochester's Strong Memorial Hospital. She accused the WH of "botching" the new Medicare prescription drug program, "driving up" medical costs and leaving 45M Americans uninsured. She also "launched a preemptive strike" at Bush over any health care plans he may present in his SOTU address. HRC: "I would sum up his message to American families in three words: 'On your own.'"

WH spokesperson Trent Duffy reacted saying that the U.S. doesn't want a "Hillary-run health care plan that has led to rationing and the other things we've seen in Canada." He noted that "the American people and the Congress rejected her proposal [12 years ago] because it's the wrong prescription for America" (McAuliff, New York Daily News, 1/24).

Earlier this year, Democracy Corps asked:

(As you may remember, Bill Clinton proposed a national health care reform plan in 1993 that was never passed by Congress. Given what we have seen with health care, do you feel our country would be better off or worse off today if we had passed the Clinton health care plan?) (If Better/Worse, ask:) Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat

Fifty-three percent of Americans thought they'd be better off, 37 percent thought so strongly. Of the doubters, 15 percent had no opinion and 29 percent thought passing the Clinton plan would've made them worse off. So in fact, Duffy, a majority of Americans regret the defeat of Hillary's plan. Given that, the real question isn't why Duffy is smearing Clinton, but why Clinton isn't resurrecting a modernized form of her proposal and using it to preempt Bush and ensure herself a leading role in the post-SOTU health care conversation.

--Ezra Klein

DIONNE NAILS IT. In a passage that Marshall Wittman and Joe Lieberman should cut out, laminate and attach to their chests right next to their Democratic donkey lapel pins, E.J. Dionne writes this in today's Washington Post:

Rove has always counted on Bush's capacity to intimidate some Democrats into breaking with their party and saying something like: "Oh, no, I'm not like those weak Democrats over there. I'm a tough Democrat." The Republicans use such Democrats to bash the rest of the party.

Dionne continues:

Moreover, these early Rove speeches turn Democratic strategists into defeatists. The typical Democratic consultant says: "Hey, national security is a Republican issue. We shouldn't engage on that. We should change the subject. By not engaging the national security debate, Democrats cede to Rove the power to frame it... What Democrats should have learned is that they cannot evade the security debate. They must challenge the terms under which Rove and Bush would conduct it. Imagine, for example, directly taking on that line about Sept. 11. Does having a "post-9/11 worldview" mean allowing Bush to do absolutely anything he wants, any time he wants, without having to answer to the courts, Congress or the public? Most Americans -- including a lot of libertarian-leaning Republicans -- reject such an anti-constitutional view of presidential power. If Democrats aren't willing to take on this issue, what's the point of being an opposition party?

Howard Dean's response to Karl Rove, while welcome for its go-for-the-jugular effort to undercutting Rove's credibility, fell well short of Dionne's imperative.

So, a few questions: Isn't Dionne right? Yes, Dems have been arguing that Bush is unlawfully allowing himself unbridled executive power, but have they really risen to Dionne's challenge? Do Dems even agree with Dionne's approach? If so, are there any signs that they're serious about developing a coordinated strategy to engage the debate with the vigor he calls for? If not, does anyone have any better ideas? These are not rhetorical questions. There are ten months to go until Election Day, and Bush and Rove have their strategy more or less in place. Heck, they've even been so kind as to share it with the rest of us.

So Dems, what's the plan? Howard? Rahm? Chuck? Hillary? Bill?

-- Greg Sargent

HILLARY GETS A D ON PART D. Arianna Huffington hops up to the anti-Hillary plate today, providing a quick rundown of recent articles detailing the rapid erosion in her myth of inevitability and popularity among the base. We here at Tapped, in an effort to destroy any possible working relationship with the coming Clinton administration, have been writing about Hillary a lot, arguing that her prominent gestures towards the middle need to be coupled with serious leadership on the left. And today's New York Times article on her criticisms of the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit proves the point.

Clinton, like all Democrats, is enthusiastically swinging at George Bush's Part D piñata, comparing the program's disastrous implementation to Katrina and demanding accountability. And I'm happy to see her join with Rep. John Dingell to protest the closed-door giveaway to insurance companies I wrote about earlier today. But Clinton's criticisms and complaints never take that crucial step past functional and into forward-thinking.

Clinton, with her star power, history on the issue, and press coverage, is just the pol to descend on the Sunday morning shows and kickstart a conversation on full repeal of the bill. Democrats agree on both the necessity and desirability of that position, but Clinton, who could score points with the base and raise her own profile by suggesting a simplified Medicare Drug Benefit, has not seen fit to lead on the issue. The dissonance between her willingness to break ranks on abortion, flag-burning, and obscenity but reluctance to break away from the pack on as fundamental and politically-advantageous an issue as Medicare is worrying, and almost fully to blame for the dynamic described by Arianna. Now, make no mistake, 2008 is a long ways away, and Hillary could surely repair all intra-left rifts long before the primaries. But with each major opportunity missed, her chances to restore confidence and prove herself a leader, rather than merely a star, dwindle.

--Ezra Klein

OPPOSITION PARTY. As an addendum to Ezra's post, see here and here for more examples of conference committee shenanigans that the GOP employed late last year during the fight over the same spending reconciliation bill. It's worth noting, since it's sometimes easy to overlook, that precisely because of such tactics in the service of such odious policies, Democrats were unanimous in opposing this budget bill; not a single Democrat voted for it. Moreover, Senate and House Dems maneuvered to force the House to vote for the bill once more when lawmakers reconvene early next month, just prior to consideration of the regressive tax-cutting reconciliation measure that Republicans have tried manfully to keep separate from the spending cuts in the public eye. With this Post article on the insurance industry swindle, Democrats have another issue to highlight when the bill comes back up for a vote.

--Sam Rosenfeld

THE 36 PERCENT MANDATE. The Weekly Standard's blog has a kind of astounding track record of wrongness that, in my opinion, far exceeds the standards set by other conservative blogs. Take this:

"Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party defeated the long entrenched Liberal Party in Canadian elections on Monday," the New York Times reports. "A Conservative victory is a striking turn in the country's politics and is likely to improve Canada's strained relations with the Bush administration."

But it wasn't supposed to be this way. Remember after the March 14, 2004 Spanish election when voters replaced Prime Minister José María Aznar with the Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero? Liberal editorialists and politicians claimed that other pro-Bush leaders were likely to follow Aznar's fate.

But look here -- Steven Harper's Conservatives got . . . 36 percent of the vote against four other "anti-American" political parties. That was good enough to win about 40 percent of the seats in parliament, which is good enough for Harper to form a minority government as prime minister. But this is hardly a ringing Canadian endorsement of the Bush administration. Instead, voters fed up with Liberal corruption split their votes between two left-of-center parties (the combined Liberal-NDP vote total and seat-count exceeds the Conservatives'), allowing Harper to slip into office.

--Matthew Yglesias

K STREET IN ACTION. For those of you routinely depressed by mealy-mouthed, cowardly reporting on important stories, The Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman has a blistering expose on industry machinations to reverse cuts in Medicare reimbursements. If you're looking to see congressional corruption in action, the shell-game of reconciliation committees, the spinelessness of the "moderates,” the dominance of industry, and all the other moving parts of the K Street Project operating as a coherent whole, you could do no better than to follow Weisman's story.

The tale begins, actually, back in October, when Chuck Grassley managed to eke some savings out of Medicare without penalizing beneficiaries. At the time, I lauded his proposals, which, through some technical adjustments to the way HMO's were reimbursed, would've stopped them from making their patients appear sicker than they really were. The HMO's, predictably, argued that they would never even think of doing such a thing, but nevertheless went to war against the regulatory change.

They decided to focus their assault in the conference committee, the closed door meeting where House and Senate negotiators convene to hash out differences between their legislation. Generally, the Senate passes more moderate proposals, the House more extreme bills, and the two "compromise" by passing the House's version. It's a sweet deal: Senators get to pass quasi-centrist legislation when the issue is hot and the cameras are recording, and then, when attention has died down, greenlight industry wishlists that stimulate interest-group erogenous zones. The strategy erases the tension between netting good coverage from a media infatuated with moderation and ensuring steady campaign contributions from corporate backers interested in their own bottom line.

It was no different here. Behind the conference committee's double doors, lobbyists demanded and received a slight change in the bill's rules on HMO reimbursements, cutting projected savings from $26 billion to $4 billion -- money, obviously, that neither taxpayers nor government coffers had any use for. Grassley, predictably, quickly adopted a tone of studied ignorance, pretending the original legislation relied on a simple accounting quirk, as if the difference between his original and the final bill was a rounding error. House Republicans, shameless as always, are happy to have another win for corporate backers. But when Republican health care lobbyists are providing blind quotes on the opacity and corruption of the process and a perfectly sound bit of legislation just lost $22 billion of its savings, chuckling comments on the CBO's inability to do math simply don't convince. Weisman's piece is a devastating tour through the process, and anyone interested in tracing the real life path of corruption should give it a read.

--Ezra Klein

EERILY FAMILIAR. E.J. Dionne's column today on Karl Rove's pre-announced campaign strategy of national security demagoguery is worth a read. His key point: "What Democrats should have learned is that they cannot evade the security debate." I've long been on record advocating that Democrats need to unleash a relentless, reckless, maximalist scorched-earth Gingrichian campaign on ethics and corruption if they hope to spark a national electoral wave sufficient to win them control of the House or Senate. Clearly the party is now committed to a coordinated ethics campaign, even if it remains a bit more hedged and circumscribed than I'd like. But it's increasingly clear that they have put in close to zero thinking about a plan B strategy for dealing with security questions -- particularly Iran -- in any kind of coherent or coordinated matter during the election, even as it's become trivially obvious that Republicans are gearing up to run on the issue. Dionne advocates connecting the corruption narrative with security questions, but that's hardly going to suffice.

The way the Iran non-debate debate has been unfolding in the last month or so is so reminiscent of the run-up to the Iraq war it's positively spooky. Right-wing writers and outfits steadily beat the war drums, mostly without coming out and saying that's what they're advocating. Center-left foreign policy experts and journalists devote a rather excessive amount of time and energy to shooting down dovish arguments to their left, while some Democrats position themselves to attack the Bush administration from the right on the question, and the rest offer deafening silence and painfully obvious evasion. Corruption is great, and the prescription drug debacle really does provide a gigantic opportunity for Democrats. And, needless to say, the atmosphere and context for national-security demagoguery are genuinely different and less favorable for Republicans in 2006 than in 2002. But surely there's still something valuable to be learned from Democrats' strategy of ignoring national security issues at all costs and running on prescription drugs during the last mid-term elections. If you'll recall, that didn't really work.

UPDATE: Lordy it's annoying doing Tapped with these quick-draw multi-bloggers.

--Sam Rosenfeld

WATCH WHAT YOU WISH FOR. A friend in Washington's deeply marginalized dove community likes to say that the good thing about the neoconservative obsession with conquering the Middle East is that it's distracted attention from the neoconservative obsession with attacking China. Justin Logan, another dovish pal, reads about the forthcoming Quadrennial Defense Review and observes that the good thing about the Defense Department's obsession with attacking China is that it's undermining neoconservative efforts to conquer the Middle East.

Personally, if you were to put a gun to my head, I'd say invading Syria and Iran is a less-bad idea than invading China. That these are the choices we're facing, however, says a lot about how screwed-up the thinking about security priorities is in this country. Faced with the demise of the Soviet threat, we're reacting not by taking advantage of America's newfound and unprecedented lack of vulnerability to foreign adversaries, but instead by dreaming up new ones in order to counteract the threat that a sober view of the situation would pose to the defense budget.

--Matthew Yglesias

DEMS NEED TO WIN THE ARGUMENT. In response to this post below, a number of folks have written in to protest that Howard Dean was right to respond to Karl Rove's speech the way he did. Let me quickly clear something up. If I suggested that Dems shouldn't hammer away at the messenger and try to discredit him, I didn't mean to. I was simply saying that that's not enough -- Dems also need to aggressively and forcefully rebut the substance of the attack. They need a coordinated argument that not only casts doubt on their attackers but also is substantively true and defeats the GOP argument on the facts by revealing it to be false. Dems can do both.

Dems shouldn't convince themselves that voters will dismiss the White House's latest pushback or that Dems shouldn't engage it substantively lest they legitimize it. Anyone remember the Swift Boat vets? Karl Rove's salvo is just the beginning. Soon enough we'll be hearing from many other GOP worthies that Dems don't want Bush to use all the tools at his disposal to fight terrorism. Meanwhile, the GOP's surrogates in the media will all shout in unison that Republicans believe in wiretapping terrorists and Dems believe in protecting the civil liberties of terrorists. Why not knock this argument down before it takes hold, particularly since it's 100 percent false? Why let an enormous falsehood which is the very foundation of the GOP's case against the Dems go unchallenged? Can't Dems do that and undercut the White House's credibility by pointing out the GOP's many national security failings at the same time?

-- Greg Sargent

HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB. One thing that should be said as we plunge toward confrontation with Iran, is that one important school of thought in the international relations literature holds that nuclear proliferation is a good thing. I don't find that super-persuasive at the end of the day, but insofar as the theory has any truth to it (and I think it has some) that ought to change our calculus about these matters. Fred Kaplan, who's really too good for this, offers a glib dismissal of the theory:

Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has openly expansive ambitions across the Middle East, not least to "wipe Israel off the face of the map." Some political scientists have argued that the spread of nuclear weapons is a good thing, that it makes countries more responsible. Could anyone still argue that the theory, dubious enough in general, applies to Iran?

Um . . . but:

1. Ahmadinejad doesn't run Iranian foreign policy.
2. Nobody ever said nuclear weapons would stop countries from engaging in irresponsible rhetoric.
3. Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons.

Point three is especially important! The argument is that if Iran does get nuclear weapons, then Iran will become more responsible, not that Iran's likely future acquisition of nuclear weapons makes it more responsible today. The case in point here would be the India-Pakistan conflict, which has gotten less tense since the two adversaries went nuclear, even though India elected a stridently nationalistic government for a while and even though the Pakistani regime has all kinds of historic links to madmen and murderous fanatics.

I liked the rest of Kaplan's column, though.

--Matthew Yglesias

HILLARY: LURCHING LEFT? Over at The Politicker, Ben Smith has a small crack at partially challenging Marisa Katz's much-discussed New Republic piece on Hillary. Ben notes:

National elections aren't fought by sweeping whole states; they're won and lost on the margins, and Hillary's narrow defeat upstate was -- in that sense -- quite a victory. And since then, she's defused some of the suspicion and dislike.

The same point applies to the argument that Upstate is more liberal than America. Sure it's more liberal than Alabama; but the central question of "electibility" is whether Hillary can pull a few more votes in Ohio than John Kerry.

Ben's objections aren't huge ones, but I think they're worth noting. Those making the case for Hillary's electability usually point to her upstate successes as proof that she can be competitive in swing states, not bright red ones. This is not at all to argue for Hillary's electability, but it would be interesting to hear what public opinion experts -- and anyone else, for that matter -- have to say about the similarities and differences between, on the one hand, upstate traditional Dems and moderate Republicans, and on the other, swing voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida (home to not a few transplanted New Yorkers, after all), not to mention in the upper Midwest.

In other, related Hillary news, The New York Post writes up a Congressional Quarterly study saying that Hillary votes with Senate Dem leaders 96 percent of the time, second only to John Kerry among prospective 2008 candidates. The Post predictably spins this as a sign that she's more liberal than her moderate feints show. Easy party-line votes that don't require risk or political sacrifice are of course hardly a substitute for venturing big progressive ideas of her own, and I agree with Matt's point that liberals are getting little on that score in exchange for tolerating all her positioning. Still, the fact that liberal groups tend to give her voting very high liberal ratings deserves at least an occasional mention as part of this ongoing dialogue.

-- Greg Sargent

RIPON AND MODERATE REPUBLICANS. We've mentioned the Ripon Society before -- the hollowed-out "moderate Republican" policy outfit that now serves as a laundering operation for lobbyists to fund lavish trips for lawmakers. The indispensable Thomas Edsall takes a look at the operation in today's Washington Post. Beyond its relevance to the current lobbying scandals, Ripon's relatively unheralded evolution over the last decade offers an insight into moderate Republicanism, something that was a subtext of both Elizabeth Drew's 2005 piece on corruption and Mark and Matt's article on the Fraud Caucus: High-profile (if largely ineffectual) liberal positions on social issues are usually enough to win GOP lawmakers reputations as moderates. Meanwhile, they've been free to cash in to corporate interests as thoroughly as their most "extremist" colleagues without losing their reputations for thoughtful moderation.

--Sam Rosenfeld

VACUOUS AFRICAN SOLUTIONS. Throughout the crisis in Darfur, American and international officials have often called for “African solutions for African problems.” As a motto, that sounds nice. But in Darfur, this refrain has all too often served to absolve the international community from its responsibility to protect Darfuris being slaughtered at the hands of their own government.

This week, the premier regional organization in Africa, the African Union (AU), is poised to hand its chairmanship to Omar al-Bashir, the head of the ruling National Islamic Front of Sudan that planned the genocide in Darfur. For those keeping score, the AU has a small force in Darfur with a mandate that does not adequately provide for civilian protection. These troops, after all, are only in Sudan at the invitation of Bashir. As a result, they are resigned to be feckless monitors of a non-existent cease fire. Nonetheless, despite opposition by some African leaders who point to the absurdity of Sudan leading the African Union, petty regional political rivalries may yet propel Khartoum to the AU presidency.

For the sake of the victims of the genocide in Darfur, I actually hope that the AU selects Bashir. Maybe then, members of the international community and the Bush administration alike will be forced to abandon their preference for African solutions to the crisis in Darfur. Maybe then, the optics of Sudan leading an AU force intended to prevent the Sudanese government from attacking its own civilians will be too hard to ignore. And maybe then, the Security Council will summon the resolve to authorize a robust blue-helmeted peace-keeping force with a mandate to protect civilians. In the meantime, however, I won’t hold my breath.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

MEMO TO DEAN: NEXT TIME, REBUT ROVE'S ARGUMENT. So how should Democrats respond to the GOP's decision to make national security a key issue in the midterm elections? Here's a starting point: Whenever Republicans misrepresent Democratic positions on security issues, Dems shouldn't let the falsehoods go unchallenged. Instead, Democrats should forcefully rebut them.

You'd think that would be a no-brainer. But consider Howard Dean's response to Karl Rove's speech on Friday. Discussing the warantless wiretapping program, Rove said:

Let me be as clear as I can be. President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why. Some important Democrats clearly disagree.

This statement is simply false. Can anyone name a single Democrat who's on record opposing the wiretapping of calls from Al Qaeda to America? In reality, Dems don't oppose wiretapping. They simply think Bush should get a warrant first -- and think it's illegal if he doesn't. This misrepresentation is a key piece of the foundation of the GOP's argument against Dems on the wiretapping scandal. If voters aren't convinced of this lie, Republicans are no longer defending a hard-core approach to terror. They're simply left defending presidential lawbreaking.

Yet here was Howard Dean's response on Friday:

Karl Rove only has a White House job and a security clearance because President Bush has refused to keep his promise to fire anyone involved in revealing the identity of an undercover CIA operative. Rove's political standing gets him an invitation to address Republicans in Washington, DC today, but it doesn't give him the credibility to question Democrats' commitment to national security. The truth is, Karl Rove breached our national security for partisan gain and that is both unpatriotic and wrong.

That's not good enough. It doesn't really counter Rove's attack in any way. In his effort to damage the messenger, Dean is leaving Rove's message untouched. Instead, Dems also need to forcefully challenge -- and rebut -- the argument itself. To his credit, John Kerry has started arguing that Rove and the White House are willfully distorting the Dem position. More Dems might consider heeding Kerry's approach, and -- God forbid -- even might consider developing it as part of a centralized message, especially at a time when Bush's "trustworthy" numbers are low. Because if Republicans do succeed in convincing the electorate that Dems oppose all wiretapping -- and hence are opposed to an aggressive war on terror -- they stand a decent chance of winning the entire argument.

-- Greg Sargent

A PRE-STATE OF THE UNION PRIMER. Another day, another detailed preview of George W. Bush's State of the Union health care proposals. This morning's iteration comes from the LA Times’ Peter Gosselin, one of the best social policy reporters in the country. But even the best reporters are hamstrung and hogtied by demands for objectivity and spacial constraints, so though Gosselin's tour through the proposals is sure-footed and clearly-written, it doesn't offer much in the way of context or analysis. So we'll do that here.

Setting aside the miscellanea of medical malpractice and various portability tweaks, Bush's major proposals encourage the spread of Health Savings Accounts and render most out-of-pocket spending tax deductible (attentive news junkies will note the dissonance with the November recommendations of Bush's tax commission, which sought to limit health care deductions). This is a rethink of the entire health care system: no more risk pooling; instead, you sock away cash in tax-advantaged accounts, spending it only when you get sick. So no (or very low) premiums. But when you fall ill, there'll be no insurance company defraying the costs, not until you've spent $10,000 or so.

The idea here is simple. Conservatives believe Americans have too much health insurance, that they spend heedlessly and wastefully on care, procedures, and medications they would simply forego if insurance plans didn't pick up the tab. Ergo, HSA's, which end risk pooling, forcing care to come directly from pockets. Newly responsible for their medical bills, consumers will be spurred by the Magic of the Market to make smarter decisions, show more prudence, lead healthier lifestyles, smile more often, and smell springtime fresh. It's gonna be awesome.

At least if you're healthy. Because what HSA's really do is separate the young from the old, the well from the sick. Currently, insurance operates off of the concept of risk pooling. Since health costs tend to be unpredictable and illness isn't thought a moral failing, we all pay a bit more than we expect to use in order to subsidize those who end up needing much more than they ever thought possible. The well subsidize the sick, the young subsidize the old, and we all accept the arrangement because one day we will be old, and one day we will be sick, and no one wants to shoulder that alone.

But HSA's slice